Founders - stop using AI to write your investor emails.

TLDR - Its an automatic turn off and I won't read it.

I wanted to share some thoughts on something I’ve been seeing more and more: founders using AI to write their investor emails. Founders think that it makes their response more punchy, more detailed, more sophisticated… but in reality, it makes me just want to write you off completely.

Here’s why it’s a terrible idea.

Investors can tell—and it kills trust immediately.

When you’re raising capital, authenticity is everything. Investors aren’t just evaluating your product or market—they’re evaluating you. They want to know how you think, how you communicate under pressure, and whether you’re the kind of person who can navigate the chaos of building a company.

AI-generated emails are polished, sure. But they’re also generic, sanitized, and soulless. They lack the rough edges, the personality quirks, and the genuine voice that make an email memorable. When an investor reads something that feels like it came from ChatGPT, they can no longer understand what is really your level of competence vs. what you prompted the algorithm to say. One of the things we look for at 1517 is hyper-fluency. This means a founder is able to move up and down the knowledge stack and be able to communicate often times technical details and product features in a way that anyone can understand. This level of communication mastery is extremely important for building a business. With emails that are AI generated, we can no longer track for this trait and often end up getting a load off slop we have to sift through. There's a lot of things behind the scenes that we're looking for. Not just information and the answer to our question.

Your writing reveals your thinking.

The way you structure an email, the details you choose to emphasize, the questions you ask us or how you answer ours —all tell an investor how you think. Are you concise or do you ramble? Do you lead with the answer or bury it in the third paragraph? Can you distill complexity into clarity?

These are signals about how you think, act and ultimately run your company, how you’ll communicate with your team, and how you’ll make decisions when things get hard. AI can’t replicate that. It can mimic structure, but it can’t show your judgment.

Fundraising is about building relationships, not optimizing conversion rates.

Too many founders treat investor outreach like a marketing funnel. They think if they just A/B test the subject line or use the “right” language, they’ll get more meetings. But that’s not how this works.

The best investor relationships are built on real conversations—not perfectly crafted pitches. When you use AI to write your emails, you’re optimizing for the wrong thing. You’re trying to sound impressive instead of being real. And investors see right through it. I see over 100 new pitches every month. If I need to spend cycles trying to figure out what is “real” vs. what is AI slop, then I’m more than likely just going to skip to the next email in the stack. The antidote to this is authenticity. If I can sense real human context it give me something to connect with. At the end of the day, as investors, we are with you for the long haul. Which means that we will be working with you for years - through the good and bad. WHICH MEANS → We are looking for the people we WANT to work with. The only way to know this is by getting to know you and who you are.

It’s lazy—and investors notice.

Here’s the hard truth: if you can’t be bothered to write your own investor emails, why should an investor believe you’ll do the hard work required to build a company?

Fundraising is grinding. It’s hundreds of emails, dozens of calls, countless rejections. If you’re outsourcing the communication part to AI, it signals that you’re looking for shortcuts. And investors don’t back people who take shortcuts—they back people who are willing to do whatever it takes. Understand the game, figure out how to optimize what you can, but don’t sacrifice speed for soul.

Your story is your edge—don’t let AI flatten it.

Every founder has a unique story. Maybe you dropped out of school to build this. Maybe you’ve been obsessed with this problem for years. Maybe you have a contrarian insight that no one else sees.

That story is your competitive advantage in fundraising. It’s what makes an investor lean in and want to learn more. Its about the journey of learning more, about the founders story, their personal “WHY”, and about why they are the perfect person to solve this problem. AI can’t tell your story—it can only approximate it at best. And approximations don’t inspire people to write checks.

Bottom line: Write your own damn emails.

If you want investors to believe in you, show them who you really are. Be direct. Be honest. Be yourself—even if that means your emails aren’t perfectly polished. As a ex-founder that ran 4 separate fundraising processes - fundraising is a process where the cost of doing business is TIME. Thats what you pay in. The shortcut is authenticity and real connections. Don’t forget it.

Investors aren’t betting on your ability to prompt an AI. They’re betting on you.