How I Use GPT to Skim-Read 150+ Newsletters a Month

The Augmented Venture Capitalist.

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Despite appearances, VCs are not technology experts. They are technology generalists. This is no bad thing either. After all, it’s impractical for an investor to attempt the domain specialisation of a founder. 

What VCs bring to the table, though, is a breadth-first view of technology and markets. They are passionate spectators of innovation, and their multidisciplinary curiosity can be valuable to founders. 

What does it take to accumulate knowledge widely while cutting through the jargon and hype of tech? I have a hack that helps: I skim-read over 150 newsletters a month using simple automation. 

Thanks to OpenAI’s GPT and Zapier, I’ve been able to 10x my ability to get signals quickly from a variety of specialist tech and generalist business newsletters. Here’s what my setup looks like.

Step 1: A Catch-all Newsletter Inbox

I use a dedicated Gmail account to subscribe to a variety of newsletters. I prune and add content occasionally, but I’m generally liberal about content volume. I rarely log into this inbox since I have GPT reading and summarising its content on my behalf.

Step 2: The GPT Summariser

I use Zapier and a custom GPT app to summarise every newsletter that lands in my catch-all inbox. To make this work, I got an API key from OpenAI and created a custom integration with Zapier’s developer platform. 

Note that Zapier has a pre-built ChatGPT app you can use here if you don’t need significant customisation. I preferred something more tailored, though, and created the integration myself. Below, you can see how information flows from the catch-all inbox to GPT and finally to a destination mailbox.

My Zapier automation

Step 3: The Summary Inbox

After a newsletter is processed and summarised by GPT, the output goes to another account — my summary inbox. You can see a screenshot of this below. This is where I consume newsletter content.

My summary inbox

A GPT summary of a newsletter

 If I wish to read further, Zapier always attaches a copy of the entire newsletter at the end of each summary. Usually, I just skim-read the bullet points and move to the next summary unless there’s an item I’d like to investigate further.

The Augmented Venture Capitalist

I’ve been using this GPT summariser for around nine months now, and it’s more reliable than I expected. I get a quick glance at what’s going on in tech without endlessly scrolling through Twitter. In some ways, this small tool augments my knowledge work and is a hint of what’s to come as AI assistants proliferate our personal and professional lives.