Hey y’all — as AI makes everything personalized, it’s getting harder to stand out.

Your perfectly personalized cold email isn’t being read by your targets because they’re getting hundreds of them.

The best way to cut through the noise in this new world is through human relationships. Events, conferences, and warm intros.

I sat down with Ben Gusberg and Kai Zheng, two founders who saw this coming.

They built Cape, an AI tool that helps you turn relationships into revenue by showing you the best paths in your extended network to help you get in touch with your dream prospects.

Here’s why more founders are focusing on events, partnerships, and warm intros:

Traditional, digital growth channels are more oversaturated than ever.

When LLM-based sales tools first came out, everyone was excited.

Suddenly, they’d be able to stand out more in people’s inboxes because their messages would be hyper personalized.

The problem is that so many people understood that so quickly that, now, no one’s reading the emails and they’re getting more of them.

It’s gotten so bad for me that I should probably build an agent just to auto-respond “Unsubscribe” to these types of cold emails.

The evidence is everywhere that the real GTM evolution in the AI era won’t be just better personalization.

The bet that Cape is making, and that I agree with, is that when standing out in inboxes becomes pointless you have to look elsewhere.

And so far, more and more founders are looking to event marketing, partnerships, and warm intros as those new paths forward.

Over three years ago I wrote about how IRL experiences and partnerships would be one of 8 types of moats in an AI-native world.

And that’s proven to be true. My good friend Andrew Yeung has multiple IRL events businesses that are growing rapidly.

There’s an energy at these events right now, where every conversation feels important and potentially business-changing. It’s a reprieve from the constant AI slop we read online. When you meet someone in person, it’s make or break but it’s also very humanizing and relaxing.

This is an inconvenient truth for those of us who are outside of traditional startup hubs like SF or NYC, but there are still ways to get involved.

Ben and Kai were ahead of this trend too, and they’ve built a tool that lets you make the most of it (even if you’re just in town or at a conference temporarily).

They look at events and conferences you’ll be attending and help you have meetings booked and identify people to meet before you’re even there.

But they also help when you’re not “in town” with a more robust founder-led GTM workflow that lets you unlock value (partnerships, investor convos, etc) that’s sitting in your network but you may not know is even there.

They comb through your LinkedIn and inbox to see who your second-degree connections are. The people you don’t know yet, put that people you know already do.

And they let you know who your strongest paths to those folks are and help draft your outreach to get them to make the intro for you.

IRL works.

Often better than you’d expect (since it’s hard to measure the same way something like ad spend or cold email is).

Before I started writing Founding Journey, my own IRL company for founder masterminds and retreats did over $3M in revenue in our first two years in business.

But that isn’t really how I know it works.

When I pop into a new city for a bit, or when I think about who I want their take on a business problem I can’t solve easily, or even when I need a warm intro myself, the relationships I built IRL are the ones that I go to first.

They’re lifelong relationships.

When things matter it’s not about who’s making the best pitch in your inbox from a cold message, it’s about who you feel you can trust already.

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