Stop the Slop

A friend called, asking for advice on his investor memo.

I told him: “It’s dense, jargon-y, and obvious that ChatGPT wrote it”

The line went silent.

“This is bad, man, really bad. I wrote the memo… my brain is turning into an LLM”

His pitch kills, the demo kills, but investors would read his memo, think “this is dumb” and try to get out of the meeting.

That night, we sat down at my favorite tea shop to salvage the memo.

Maybe we could go line by line, and delete anything we didn’t like. But by the time we got through it, there were only two sentences left.

“Let’s zoom out.” I told him. “What are you trying to get across?”

He blurted out “cross channel marketing partnerships” and “Ambient AI” as he rocked back and forth in his chair.

It felt like watching someone put on a straitjacket and thrash around.

Instead of telling him to burn it down, ChatGPT was telling him to rearrange the words until he lost all perspective.

When you pitch this live, what makes people lean in? I asked him.

He perked up: “I’ve got this line that works like a secret password”

Investors will stop in their tracks, and say “huh…you’re right.”

And for the next 10 minutes, they hang on his every word.

For the rest of the session, we stacked more sentences he used in meetings, as the story crystallized.

My grandma loved to describe residents at her nursing home as “muddled up.”

Thoughts tangling, going nowhere, saying nothing.

My friend sent me a final draft of his memo last week.

When I read it, I didn’t think about ChatGPT, or cringe at the jargon.

It sounded like him. And captured what he’s building.