I am looking to join a startup whose needs overlap in a particular area (in my case, NLP for information retrieval).

I am not sure if applying on LinkedIn is the way to go, it seems mostly for mid and bigger sized companies, or startups which are more in a rapidly expanding phase, which I wouldn’t mind.

I am in the Silicon Valley bay area, which has a ton of startups. I am looking to see if any of their needs align with my focus, so that even if they haven’t explicitly posted a job posting, I would still be able to send my portfolio for them to checkout and see if they could use a person like me.