Email Assistants
Automate the inbox — drafting, triage, follow-ups, and context-aware replies without losing the human touch.
Email is where partners actually live. It is the connective tissue between sourcing, diligence, portfolio work, LPs, and the rest of the world, and it eats hours every day. If you are picking one operational surface to harden with automation first, this is it. Every minute pulled out of the inbox is a minute returned to judgment, conviction, and relationships, and it compounds across the year.
Tooling: keep it simple, do not chase the shiny
We are intentionally not pointing at Superhuman here. It is a fine keyboard-first client, but it is not the leverage point. What we do super recommend, if you live on the Google stack, is Shortwave. It is the only third-party email layer we would unreservedly endorse beyond the native functionality of Gmail or Outlook. It does not really work with Microsoft unless you are willing to bend a lot of corners, so do not force it.
On the Microsoft side, Claude in Outlook actually works quite well, but it needs to be harnessed. There is a real learning curve to using it effectively: knowing when to invoke it, how to feed it the right context from a thread, and how to keep the output in your voice. Once a partner crosses that curve it becomes a daily tool. Until they do, it sits unused.
What we have tried and would not lean on yet
We have spent real time with Fyxer and Serif and had limited positive experience so far. They are early. Classification of emails is the main feature on offer and it is honestly just okay. The automated drafting piece is where the pitch lives, and we found we did not really use it. Generic drafting needs to be tuned hard against your voice and your context, or the output is frankly worthless and creates more cleanup than it saves. If a vendor cannot show you that tuning loop, skip it for now.
The real unlock: AI generated triage and briefing reports
The highest leverage move in this module is not a fancier email client. It is wiring up AI generated reports that read your inbox (and adjacent systems) for you and surface the things that actually need a human: flags, reminders, tasks, follow ups, threads going cold. Delivered to you on your schedule, in the channel you already check.
Two routines we run every morning at 9am over Slack:
- Daily Email Triage — reviews the last 24 hours of email, flags what needs attention, drafts replies where appropriate, and posts a single ranked summary. You approve sends; nothing goes out without you.
- Newsletter Briefing — sweeps your configured newsletters from the last 24 hours, extracts the top insights across them, and delivers a ranked briefing DM so you stay current without reading every edition.
These two reports alone save roughly 30 minutes to an hour every day and frame how the day gets prioritized. That is not a rounding error. Compounded across a year, across a team, it is the difference between a firm that runs on its inbox and a firm that runs on its judgment.