Rex Salisbury Says Sending Personalized Emails to VCs May Backfire
Rex Salisbury stated that sending highly customized emails to VCs often backfires.
Even if not AI-generated, he often assumes they are AI products, and personalized content reads like "slop" (low-quality content), while concise, direct, and persuasive emails are more effective.
Overly fine-tuning personalization may actually fail; general mentions like "seeing Cambrian focus on Fintech" are sufficient.
In market mechanisms, startup founders are rapidly adjusting cold email strategies, shifting funding and attention from overly personalized emails to concise and efficient communication. VCs who value genuine signals are pressured by startup projects overwhelmed by generic AI content.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Rex Salisbury, as an investor, has long observed founders' fundraising behaviors and has previously shared VC communication experiences, pointing out that with the proliferation of AI tools, the trust cost of highly personalized emails has significantly increased, while generalized but relevant mentions appear more authentic.
In terms of capital pathways, VC funds quickly filter out low-quality personalized content through email screening processes, allocating time resources to concise and direct founders, motivated by the desire to improve due diligence efficiency and discover truly high-signal projects, continuing to rely on face-to-face meetings or product demonstrations for validation rather than email embellishments.
Similar cases include the evolution of cold emails from lengthy stories to brief pitches in the early internet era, and the collapse of trust in recruitment and sales emails in the AI era. The current venture capital field is in a phase of communication paradigm adjustment from AI-assisted personalization to genuine concise signals.
Essentially, this is a technological replacement: AI-generated personalized content replaces real human communication through large-scale production, shifting capital and attention from email noise to founders and projects with clear value propositions, and accelerating the reconstruction of the venture capital industry's screening mechanism towards high-signal efficiency.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
The more effort put into personalization, the quicker VCs assume it's AI; simplicity is the leverage of genuine signals. Over-embellishment is not professionalism but an invisible cost of consuming trust on "slop." A good email is not about customized length but about making the recipient see that you understand the industry rather than just rhetoric.