Good morning 👋
If you’re like me, you’re constantly trying to replace yourself with AI so that you can focus more time on more pressing issues.
Automating work used to require technical ability; now it’s becoming easier and easier for the average person to automate the mundane tasks in their day, and ChatGPT’s latest feature release is helping speed up that process.
We break it down and give examples of things that you can start automating in today’s piece.
Today’s highlights
ChatGPT releases Tasks
Synthesia grabs a $2.1b valuation
Intel spins of its CVC
Climate tech funding drops for a third straight year
TOP
ChatGPT Tasks are released 🤖
ChatGPT just took a step closer to being your personal assistant, rolling out a new feature called “tasks” for its paying users.
This beta feature lets you schedule reminders and recurring requests, making it the AI equivalent of Siri on steroids.
So we started playing around with it to give you an idea of what all you can start automating in your day-to-day.
Examples of tasks you can automate:
Deal flow: “Send me a list of the top 10 Series A rounds announced each week.”
Industry updates: “Every Monday, summarize the key trends in generative AI startups from the past week.”
Founder follow-ups: “Remind me to email the founders of [Startup X] two weeks after our meeting.”
Event prep: “The day before any scheduled pitch meetings, create a one-pager summarizing the company’s key metrics.”
Market tracking: “Every Friday, check Crunchbase for funding updates in the climate tech sector and summarize them.”
Networking: “Remind me on the 1st of each month to connect with three new angel investors on LinkedIn.”
Performance monitoring: “Send me a weekly snapshot of key portfolio metrics like revenue growth and burn rate.”
Research support: “Daily at 8 a.m., search for emerging competitors to our portfolio companies and brief me.”
LP management: “Every quarter, draft a brief update for our limited partners highlighting portfolio wins.”
Term sheet prep: “Two days before a funding close, remind me to review and finalize the term sheet details.”
Trend spotting: “Once a month, browse for reports on emerging VC investment themes like Web3 or sustainability.”
Conference planning: “A month before any conference, remind me to set up meetings with key attendees.”
Reading lists: “Every Sunday, suggest five articles or reports relevant to venture capital trends.”
Hiring help: “Check AngelList once a week for startups looking for operators in fintech.”
Competitive analysis: “Every first Tuesday, look for new features released by our competitors’ portfolio companies.”
Fundraising alerts: “Once a quarter, remind me to assess our fund’s re-up opportunities.”
Why it matters: Time is your most precious resource, and this gives you more of your time back.
Look through the list above and think about how much time you spend doing each of those tasks. We’re willing to bet that collectively this takes up at least 20-30 hours / week for people working in venture.
As ChatGPT and others create more ways to automate work, we see more and more of an opportunity for those who are capable of using this to create more leverage for themselves.
What happens next:
This feature is still in beta, but it is easy to predict future updates to include more advanced capabilities like automatic email responses or ticket purchases.
And like any other LLM, the more you use it, the more complex tasks you can start to offload.
The future belongs to those who create leverage for themselves, and this is just another way to do that.
COMMUNITY
The operating system for private investors 🕹
So you have a choice to make, and every choice has a lists of pros and cons.
Here’s the case for joining the #1 private investor community:
Cons: Pay the annual dues of $400 / year to join the #1 private investor
Pros: Speed up your onboarding curve, get an evergreen playbook that you can use over and over again on the job, meet other co-investors , meet new LPs through your new co-investor connections, expand your deal flow through new introductions from your new investor network
We’re biased, but we think the choice is pretty clear …
LINKS
🦺 Is Your Retention “Too Good”?: Mostly Metrics argues if your retention is too high, it might signal you’re playing it too safe
✍️ Journaling and Accountability for Your Personal Success: BowTiedTiger outlines a sustainable path to success by using journaling to provide clarity and a plan of action
🔧 Ultimate Guide to Startup Equity: Data-Driven VC offers a comprehensive guide on ESOPs (Employee Stock Option Plans) on why they matter, where they fall short, what benchmarks look like, and how founders can turn them into a powerful tool for growth and engagement
😎 Minimum Levels of Stress: Morgan Housel offers a few thoughts in a culture where society as a whole seems to have a minimum level of stress
🚪 Four Reasons People Leave Venture Firms: Venture Reflections lists four core thematic reasons
TWEET
HEADLINES
Synthesia snaps up $180M at a $2.1B valuation for its B2B AI video platform (TechCrunch)
Intel spins off its corporate venture arm, Intel Capital, into a standalone fund (TechCrunch)
Big Rounds Push Cybersecurity Comeback (Crunchbase)
Climate-tech VC deals fell for 3rd straight year (Pitchbook)
LPs weigh VC’s liquidity slump (Pitchbook)
MEME
Sponsor Confluence.VC Weekly
First impressions matter 👀
You have a growing business and a marketing budget - so you have a choice to make:
Where do I put dollars to work to grow my business?
We’re BIG believers that marketing through newsletters and leveraging a trusted voice that people choose to read > platform advertising and interrupting a person’s feed.
So here’s the elevator pitch on marketing through this newsletter:
73% of audience makes over $100k / year
65% of audience between 25-44
90% of audience based in US
(Media kit available upon request)
RECS
Superpower: The most-useful health membership I use with 100 lab tests, health dashboard, a full hour review with their medical team
POLL
Would you starting paying for ChatGPT Plus to get access to Tasks?
Thanks for reading this far and giving us a little bit of your attention this week.
Feel free to unsubscribe whenever this stops becoming valuable to you.
- Clay
RESULTS
Here are the results from our poll question in yesterday’s piece:
What type of funds are more interesting to you?
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Fast-deploying funds that write new checks every month (4)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Slow-deploying funds that only write 2-3 checks a year (3)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Somewhere in between fast and slow (0)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ What does "deployment" mean? (0)
