Automating Founder Reach Out
AI Is Judged More Human Than Humans
👋 Hi, I’m Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data-driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data & AI. Every Tuesday, I publish “Insights” to digest the most relevant startup research & reports. Every Thursday, I publish “Essays” that cover hands-on insights about data-driven innovation & AI in VC, and every Sunday, I publish “Picks” to spotlight the hottest Stealth, Early, and Growth Startups. Follow along to understand how startup investing becomes more data-driven, why it matters, and what it means for you.
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Avid readers of this newsletter will be well aware of my deep passion for automation and efficiency. From 10x-ing your productivity with Custom GPTs over top 10 AI agents for investors and automating the investment screening process to deeper due diligence tasks such as automating competitive landscape mapping, there are uncountable steps in the value chain that can easily be automated.
One important and labor intense task, however, has been incredibly difficult to automate: the founder interaction. While sourcing, screening, and due diligence mostly happen behind closed curtains and mostly impact the internal decision making process, founder interaction extends beyond these limits and directly shapes your external perception and reputation.
Getting this wrong might create irreversible harm to your brand, and if you ever received a sequence of template-based cold outreach emails from a random sales rep, you know what founders are likely to remember when thinking of your brand👇
Aiming to automate founder reach out while keeping the downsides in mind, my journey of failed attempts has been long. I started with one generic outreach template in 2018, quickly adjusted to “customized” emails composed of tens of industry and/or technology specific building blocks throughout 2019 and 2020, and continued with early language models in 2021. But the response rate never got close to handcrafted human messages. And yes, I did A/B testing to measure the conversion rates with a sufficient sample size.
After years of disappointing attempts, I discontinued automated outreach completely in 2021 to not risk harming our brand. Reflecting on my extensive trial and listening to feedback from the founders, the problem was that the messages were too mechanic and that the recipients either felt that it was a template or AI generated outreach.
Thankfully, with recent advancements in AI and the power of LLMs, the cards may have been reshuffled. Not only did we resume our efforts of automating founder outreach with stunning results in 2023, but I also stumbled upon an exciting new paper confirming that modern AI is judged more human than humans - an incredibly exciting data point for every investor that I will share with you today.
GPT-4 Is Judged More Human Than Humans
The recently published paper by Ishika Rathi, Sydney Taylor, Benjamin K. Bergen, and Cameron R. Jones from the Department of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego explores how well people and AI systems can differentiate between humans and AI in conversations, using two modified versions of the Turing test: the inverted Turing test and the displaced Turing test.
The study involved GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and human judges analyzing transcripts of previous Turing tests to determine if the speaker was human or AI.
