Team
Max Kolysh, founder and CEO
Max is a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator. He spent seven years building Dover, a recruiting platform used by Stripe and Scale to make 2,000+ hard hires — so he has seen cold outreach from every angle.
AI broke cold email.
Cold outreach used to require real effort. A thoughtful email took real research to prove you actually thought about who you were writing to. That effort was important: it signaled to the recipient whether you were worth their time.
ChatGPT made that effort meaningless. Today, anyone can send 10,000 emails that read like a real person wrote them, essentially free.
Buyers can’t tell the real emails from the AI ones, so they just ignore all of them — including the ones they might have wanted to say yes to.
We believe that there’s one signal that’s hard to fake: money. Companies already spend tens of billions of dollars a year on bus ads, Meta/Google/LinkedIn marketing, lead databases, and outreach tools. But none of that money reaches the person you’re actually trying to reach. It just pays middlemen.
We think that money should go to the person whose attention you want. Pay them their rate for a real reply, and they keep the money or donate it. Outreach finally stops being a tax on the recipient and starts being a paycheck.