It’s a great time to be the main character in Memento. Back in 2000, Leonard Shelby had a hard time functioning in society because he had no memory of who he was. But if Memento took place today? Hi Leonard! As someone who once was a Coffee Expert at Starbucks for six years — boy, I just love their Pumpkin Spice! — I’d like to talk to you about your SOC 2 compliance!
Leonard, I was so moved reading about your condition. Your resilience really inspired me. That never-give-up attitude is exactly why I think you’d love our outbound sequencing tool!
Hey, Leonard! I love how you said you like jazz bootlegs from the 1950s, a sentence you have only said once on the internet fifteen years ago! 1950s bootleg jazz really makes me think about my company’s revenue accelerator program you might be interested in!
It’s a really fucking weird time. Everyone’s tryna do the cold email approach, but AI has made it so insanely easy to grab a few factoids from your bio in an effort to “tailor” their approach to you.
As someone who gets a lot of cold outreach, I can’t tell you how often I get told who I am. “Hi Zach, as an early employee of GitHub who invests in developer tools…” is a phrase I see almost daily now. No real fucking human being talks like that. In fact, I think that might be the only remaining Turing test we have left. Are you telling someone about their own current job and/or something they did fifteen years ago? TURING TEST DENIED
Real people latch on to real shit. “Hey, I remember meeting you in the bathroom of a Kraków conference during the Obama administration, we were drunk and talked about plants, do you want to invest in my company?” You definitely could have made that up — my hatred of plants is so complete as to prevent me from ever calling you out on it — but it’s such a weird combination that it works.
What’s worse is that the generic AI route usually bombs out spectacularly, too. I’ve had MULTIPLE recruiters send me an email where they first tell me I live in San Francisco (oh cool I didn’t know), that they themselves love San Francisco, and they make sure to sit and get a coffee at Fisherman’s Wharf every time they visit the city for work. Brother, no living soul has sat and gotten a coffee at Fisherman’s Wharf and has enjoyed their time there, much less decreed it such a spectacular experience they’d GO BACK AND DO IT AGAIN.
ahhhhh I’M TOO ANGRY TO FINISH THIS BLOG POST OR EVEN HAVE AN LLM WRITE ME A NICE CONCLUSION FUUUUUUUUUCK GO WRITE SOME REAL HUMAN SHIT TO OTHER HUMANS SOMETIME