Brett Goldstein - How Micro is reinventing email and making it great again!

I think a lot of founders think they have to discover things. They think they have to invent something brand new in order to start a company. And it's actually not only easier, but it can be extremely rewarding to take an existing market or even a newish market and, and take it to the next level. Because the reality is people are going to use email clients forever. People are going to use task managers and ticket management systems forever. People are going to use video calling, messaging. Like, all of this stuff is just going to be there, and a billion people are using it every single day. And so the longer one of these products has been in existence, the more of an opportunity there is to improve it.

Welcome to the Undefeated Underdogs Podcast, where I unpack and narrate stories of ambitious people who turn obstacles into opportunities. My goal for this podcast is to create a platform to narrate underdog stories and maybe play a small, teeny tiny role in inspiring you. I intend to highlight the underdog mentality and make authentic conversations with people who play the long game, take action with a chip on their shoulder, and convert obstacles into opportunities. Buckle up as I'll be bringing some authentic founders, VCs, community builders, and content creators who got underestimated their whole lives. And yet they beat all the odds to become insanely successful. Now today, I want to tell you a little bit about our awesome sponsor, acquire.com. Selling a business is as tough as building a business. As someone who went through this process once selling my own startup, I know the pain it takes to get to the end zone. This is where our sponsor shines. Imagine this. You're a founder who's built a solid SaaS product. Acquired customers and generating consistent monthly revenue. The problem is you're not growing for, for whatever reason— lack of focus, lack of skill, or just plain lack of interest— and you feel stuck. What should you do? The story I'd like to hear is you buckle down, somehow reignited the fire, get past yourself and the clichés, and start working on your business rather than just in the business. You start building an audience, move out of your comfort zone to do sales and marketing, and in 6 months you triple your revenue. The reality isn't as simple. Situations may be different for every founder facing this crossroads, but too many times the story ends up being one of inaction and stagnation until the become business— the business becomes less valuable or worse. Worthless. If you find yourself here or your story is likely headed down a similar road, I offer you a third option. Consider selling your business on acquire.com. Capitalizing on the value of your time is a smart move. Acquire.com is free to list and they've helped hundreds of founders already. Go to try.acquire.com/sharath and see for yourself if this is the right option for you. Now let's get into today's episode. My next guest is a founder, investor, writer, and an artist, kind of like, like the jack of all trades. He's currently building Micro, and the goal for that startup is really simple: make email great again. He writes one of my favorite tech newsletters out there called Homescreen, which covers all things happening in AI startups, VC firms, like investing, everything. He invested over 50+ startups through Launch House. It's a fund who invests in New Silicon Valley. That's something I'm really fascinated about. I'm a big fan of Launch House. Many people I know work there and they've built a solid, solid community of founders over the years. There are a lot of topics I want to dive in and let's get into it. I'm excited to bring Brett Goldstein to the podcast today. Brett, welcome to the show. How are you feeling?

Feeling great. Love that intro. Super excited. Lots to talk about.

Lots to talk about. I think this has been like, kind of like, you've been on my radar for a long time and I'm so glad we're doing this because you recently launched, came out of stealth, a new startup called Micro. Yeah, I want to talk in depth about it, but just want to say, congratulate you and like, you know, I'm rooting for you and email's been like a mess for a long, long, long time. So I'm excited for you, but right off the bat, I have this question. What's, where did you find the passion for startups? Because I think you did computational engineering, if I'm not wrong, in UC Berkeley. So you had like a million career paths to pick, but why startups? And you were a PM at Google, Clearbit, then you went to VC. So yeah, I want to understand. I want to go back to the root. Yeah. Of everything that you're doing right now, why startups?

Like all things, I would say it started when I was very young. I was reflecting on this recently. When I was a kid, I was just obsessed with creating things. I just loved creating things. I remember there was a school project where we had to create a leprechaun trap. I don't know if you know what a leprechaun is. It's like a magical creature.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like Irish culture.

That's like Celtic's logo.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So in, in like elementary school, we had to create our own leprechaun traps for St. Patrick's Day. And it was, it was the coolest thing because you get, you have this shoebox, you have these strings, these weights, and like you put some food in, like everybody's trap was different. And I was obsessed with this. I loved seeing everybody's different approaches to the same problem. I loved creating my own thing. And that just kind of like bled over into everything else that I did. Like I— took a year of piano and then I quit. And then as soon as I joined a rock band, I started teaching myself piano so that I could play in the rock band. And what's interesting is like, it's, it's, it's, it's the, the love of music wasn't there if I wasn't creating. The love of music for sure was there when I was creating. And I would go on to become like, be producing music literally since high school. Like, You know, on Spotify, all that stuff. But it really stems from this passion for creation. And what I love about startups is it's all about creation. It's all about challenging the status quo and saying, all right, like it's been this way for this many years, this many decades, this many hundreds of years, maybe. What if we did it differently? What if we reimagined something? What if we had a new perspective? And what's also interesting about that is it's an inherently optimistic field. Yeah. Like, if you think about the job of a venture capitalist, a venture capitalist's job is to be optimistic.

So as founder, right? Like you build something hoping that it'll help someone, yourself, your family, your friends, it'll do some good in the society.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So my dad was a lawyer and he always said that I could be a good lawyer, but the reality is law is like a pessimistic profession. Right? It's like, it's all about telling you what you can't do or telling you what you can do, but here's how you avoid legal issues and stuff like that. And it's not very creative. It's operating within the bounds of these structures and things like that. And so it's very clear why that was never exciting for me. And it's also very clear why large companies were not exciting because, you know, the, while the impact of every thing you create at a large company like Google is huge. You have billions of users. The pace in which you create stuff and the degrees of freedom of your creation, AKA like changing the color of button versus launching a whole product suite.

Sure.

It's much smaller in big companies. And so startups are really optimistic, all about creation, and you have insane control over your destiny and the impact of what you do.

I love what you said about it's an optimistic field. It's like field of doctors, right? They try to save. It's like field of engineers. They try to build something. They try to create something which will last forever. And what you said is also interesting about lawyers. And there are certain areas where you try to do something that's destructive and like weapons and, you know, such things like that. It is so fascinating at the age of like childhood. Where did you get that kind of like an inspiration from? I'm curious on— there should be some sort of a seed planted in your mind. You must have inspired, I don't know, like, you know, watching Star Wars. Look, this is so fascinating. I want to do something like that. Or take music. Like, were you— when you're learning about piano and such, I don't know, like you have like some reference that you were chasing?

Yeah, I think, look, like everybody wants to, everybody gets into things because they're inspired by other things. And the only difference between a maker and a non-maker is the maker thinks that they can build something just as good. Right? A non-maker says, I like music. I'm just, I want to, I want to be a tour manager because I could never make music as good as these artists. A musician gets into music because, who is a creator, they say, I'm inspired by these artists and I think I can create something even better or that's my own. So I really can't pinpoint any sort of particular inspiration for startups or, I mean, there are a lot of bands that I really liked in high school and middle school and stuff, but yeah, I can't. Maybe it's like family upbringing, innate nature versus nurture. I don't really know, but it was always in me.

That's, that's so— I think it's the surprise factor itself is the cluelessness itself is like kind of good because you're kind of still chasing that, right? In a way. So I love that. Well, why then did you build something before working at Google and these places? Were you— what were your first startups look like?

Like, so in high school, it was my band. That was what I was creating. In college, I did a website. I helped some student organizations I was part of. I took a little entrepreneurship class. I was part of a design club where we were doing some design work. I had wanted to start a company in college, but I didn't really know how, and I didn't really have the kick in the pants to learn how. I was busy with college. There's a bunch of stuff happening.

Mm-hmm.

Parties and classes and all that stuff. So it really wasn't until after college that I, so I joined Accenture in the research and development group.

And

that was, that's kind of like the, it's like the internal think tank and, you know, lab of Accenture, which is, as they were in the news recently for all their AI work, they've been blowing up because they have a giant services company that does tech integrations and stuff like that. Mm-hmm. So my job was to like look at the future of tech, design and build prototypes for new ideas. in specifically collaboration software. And then I even got a chance to help build this thing called, that became Accenture Ventures, which is their venture fund. So a lot of, spent a lot of that time kind of building stuff from scratch. But on the weekends, I would just go to hackathons. I would work in cafes and I would just constantly be doing 2 things like writing, writing this blog on Medium back in the day. Mm-hmm. And then going to hackathons and And building stuff with friends. And so, yeah.

So I think venture is always under your radar, right? Like it's something that's been on your mind for a long time and you've done all that. And there is a musician brat inside you. There is an entrepreneur brat inside you. Why didn't you pick pursuing music like as a career? Oh, is that like a career inflection point?

Yeah, I actually did some thinking on this several times in my life. So the first time was kind of throughout college slash after, immediately after college, I was like thinking, okay, what would it be like if I did this full time? Like while I was at Google, I was able to do a lot of music production. Most of the stuff I have on Spotify is from that period. Right after I graduated and when I was working at Google. And I even took a year, like 9 months off, traveled around the world, produced a bunch of music. Both during these times, I was thinking, okay, like, what if I went into music full-time and did this? And so I decided against it for a few reasons and came up with like a plan. So number one, the music industry is just frankly not as lucrative as the tech industry. Yeah. And so if I wanted to live a great life, I didn't have certain things I needed, but like if I wanted to live a luxurious, bountiful, abundant life, I needed to be in an industry with a lot of— it was more lucrative. Number 2 is the tech industry is more meritocratic than the music industry. So it doesn't really matter how much money you came from, who you know. In the tech industry, if you build a great product, you build a great product. If you build a bad product, you're not going to go anywhere. This is why you don't see tons of trust fund kids Like tons of like, even like repeat founders, like second, third time legendary founders starting the most successful companies in the world all the time. You know, it's, it's luck of the draw. It really has to do with skill. It has to do with timing. It has to do with all this stuff. And so if you're truly a meritocratic person, aka you really believe in yourself and you believe in your abilities, then you are going— you should choose the tech industry over everything else if you're truly good. Music industry is the opposite. It's who you know. It's what's cool, right? There are a lot of songs you're like, how is this pop— how is this popular? This doesn't make any sense. And there are a lot of songs that are just like, you know, were bought by somebody and it's not even written by the person who is singing it. And like, There's a bunch of this backroom stuff. Like LA is very much a B2B ecosystem. It's a who you know ecosystem. And so what that means is it's a little bit more toxic than the tech industry. It's a little bit less deterministic. I mean, it's more deterministic in certain ways where like it's, if you have the connection, you have the connection, but it's less because it's, if you are really amazing, you aren't necessarily going to be successful. And so I, and I guess I would say the last thing is like, tech is, tech industry is just my people. You know, I'm like a nerd. I care about talking about weird stuff, like thinking about the world in a deeper way. Like music industry people are not so much like that. There are a lot of them that are, but they're a little bit more distributed. So overall, yeah. Not the majority. So overall it was just a no-brainer. But the thing I decided was, well, I could keep making music into my age. It's common for people in their 20s to really have their success in music, but that's changing. And I literally had this thought 10 years ago, AI will make it so I can continue to make music into my 60s, 70s, because I can masquerade as some sort of cartoon character. Instead of like a 60-year-old.

Yeah, I think the world is going to be a different place. We will definitely talk about the, you know, how the future is going to be and everything. But what you said about music industry is so fascinating. I didn't know that. Like, I think a lot many people who are outsiders, they don't know the inside job. Maybe you should write a blog post on it, like the intricacies of, you know, being in a music industry. But You've, you know, Launch House. Let's talk about Launch House. It's kind of like a radical idea. It's like kind of like a blend of reality show, the concept of reality show and the concept of accelerators that are in tech. So it's so weird in the first place, like bringing founders under one mansion to build something for 30 days. And then you have a like demo day and then investors invest. So not tech. So it's so new. So where did that idea come from? How did you kind of— what was the problem that you tried to solve and which eventually kind of like went on a different spectrum? You were in Web3, you were in crypto, like different things you did. So yeah, talk to me about the inception days of Launch House.

Yeah, it really wasn't supposed to be a thing. Basically started out like me and A handful of founders were on kind of like an online founder program during the pandemic. And like everybody else in the pandemic, we all wanted to hang out in person and not on Zoom. And my co-founder or would-be co-founder, Michael Houck, decided to rent an Airbnb in Tulum and invited a bunch of people. And then on the flight over, I blasted a tweet out. With a random idea, I thought and pretended it was a reality show. I said, introducing Launch House, a reality show where 14 founders live together in Tulum and try to launch something or something. That was the tweet, right? Goes viral. Goes viral, obviously, because you said, like you said, it's a weird thing. And we had a captive audience. Like everybody wanted out during the pandemic and we were the ones kind of getting out. So It, you know, it blew up a little bit. We had people asking to come down. We decided to do a second house. We flew in a videographer to like, okay, what if we, like, what if we really leaned into this reality show thing? We were very convinced we were going to make a reality show and not a startup. We even moved the whole thing to LA because we're like, that's, that's closer to showbiz. It'll be, it'll be easier to show momentum. Yeah.

So you made moves.

Yeah, we made some moves, but yeah, reality, it just, the big aha moment is that we realized early on, but especially in LA, that number one, the people we were attracting to this program were amazing. Like you look at some of the accomplishments of these folks, even when they started the program, but especially now, years later, it's insane. Like these people are the This is the future of the tech industry for sure. And we felt like it was stupid to waste that on a reality show. The other thing we realized is everybody was becoming extremely close friends, which is very hard to do after you graduated college and you formed your friend groups. And so it's like success, happiness. This is like the—

The serendipity.

Yeah, it was an amazing combination of those two. And for the few years that we were operating it afterwards, it was The most, it was the best feeling to be able to walk into every cohort and say, 2 things are going to happen this month. You're going to meet best friends for life. Many of these people you're going to live with as roommates. You're going to start companies with, you'll go to their weddings. You'll go to like, these are your people for the rest of your life. Guarantee that. And then number 2 is your career trajectory is going to dramatically change because of your relationships with all these people. And the work that you do here. It was so great to say that because at the end of every cohort they would say, yes, that's, that was true.

Wow. In building that community, let's talk about community building. And first of all, building, bringing a set of people itself is so hard regardless of how much network you have and making them stick for a long time. It's also hard. And you've built Launch House during COVID time, which when everything is Kind of shut down. So talk to me about that experience going from, you know, this little idea you tweeted on the plane to actually building a solid network of founders who are still in touch, doing great things, you know, post— in the transition of COVID post-COVID. Now it's like everybody's, you know, normal. So what is that like to build a community of solid founders?

Yeah, I mean, community building is, it's easier than they— it's easier and harder than it seems.

The

easy side, it's like, really all you have to do is have a reason for people to gather, right? Give people a reason for people to show up, which is, hey, live in this cool mansion in the middle of COVID because what else are you doing? Great. With other cool founders, obviously. Right. Number 2 is the shared identity and shared struggle. It's like, it's way easier to bond with people when you're dealing with the same crap, right? This is, I'm Jewish. This is why the Jewish community is incredibly strong because our whole religion is about remembering how much of a struggle it's been, you know? And we have a common identity. We're, we're all Jewish, right? Right. Same thing with, with these founders is like, they're all founders. They're all kind of young. They're all trying to make something of themselves. They all took this leap in COVID. They're all struggling with the founder thing that every founder struggles with. So that little recipe right there, those, even those 2 things is enough to— oh, and then the last thing is time. You need time and attention.

Hmm.

You need to give people time and attention. This is why college festivals like Burning Man or Retreats where there's nothing to do except hang out and be with each other. These are the best places to build friendships because friendship is built on giving people's attention, giving people your attention, giving people your time. And so when you just have, you have unlimited time to give because there's nothing going on, there's no work or anything, it's easy to build friendships. So these 3 things are like what creates community. Right? Like everything else you can layer on top, but those are the goals.

In that community of bringing founders together, what is like, where did you kind of keep— so it gets funnier business when you bring personal life into professional life. And some people, of course, like I do believe in that there is no professional personal life in startups. Everything is the same, right? Like we live in, you know, in the world in both worlds collide with each other. So, but there should be some sort of seriousness, right? So what were your kind of, I don't know, like incentives to push these founders to their limit? You can do this. Like, you know, how did you kind of do that for over this set of cohorts? Not just one.

Like how?

Yeah. How did you push them to like, you can be great at doing things, building things, don't just come here for relationships, which is awesome. Let's get to work. Let's get shit done. Right. What is something that motivated them and that you've used, at least in your experience?

Yeah, I mean, I think the evolution of the program is important to note. In the beginning, it was a bunch of founders hanging out together in a house in Tulum. There was no real program. Really, it was literally us like building stuff, hanging out, eating some food. It was primarily social, but because we were all founders, because we didn't have jobs, and because our, like, all of our objectives for the next few months were to figure out an idea to start a company with, we all were very self-motivated to go and do that. And over time, the program kind of spoke for itself. Like, if you have big famous investors and CEOs coming in to give talks, You're not going to, you're not going to like squander that. And then when you have thousands of people applying, it's easier to get people who are taking stuff seriously. But the flip side is you do need this, you do need kind of unstructured bonding time outside of the actual program. So when you compare us to a traditional accelerator, like Launch House was not a— rigorous, intense, like go crazy, you know, type thing. It was really a launchpad for the rest of your career.

Go have fun.

It wasn't, it wasn't so much go. There was a lot of fun to be had, but it was more like, you know, like let's use this time to build the connections that you need to both survive emotionally and professionally.

Yeah. And you kind of are also, you tapped on the Web3 crypto wave. So talk to me about— I want to definitely touch upon the AI wave. We can get into micro as well, for sure. But yeah, you saw this wave and it's going down. So talk to me about the transition. Why do you think the wave died? And do you think Web3 is coming back given Bitcoin is on the rise again? People are like, so many companies are investing in Bitcoin right now.

Yeah.

Politically, it's like another thing that's happening right now. So yeah, talk to me about the whole up and down.

Yeah, I mean, at Launch House, we just followed where the talent was going. We didn't have particular opinions about people should be building in this or that.

I

did encourage a few founders in certain directions. You know, there was a few, there were a few folks who were thinking about their next move and the crypto cycle was starting. And one of my biggest, one of my biggest kind of points for this guy was like, if you believe that Web3, crypto, whatever we're calling it these days, is going to be a thing in the long term, doing something with it now, whether or not it's successful or fails, is helpful. Right. It gives you context and credibility and makes it so you have a starting point. And this is the thing. A lot of people who start companies or become founders for the first time don't realize this, but being a founder is a path, career path, you know what I mean? And each company is almost like a job that you have. Yeah. And so if you look at it like a career path, of course you want every company to be successful, but if the first one's not successful, you can keep going. So crypto follows a very standard cycle, like tied to economic trends, Bitcoin halving, what have you. So there's always bear markets, there's always bull markets.

Of course.

It's going up as long as inflation's really bad and the US keeps accumulating debt. There's a very bright future for crypto. So, and the other thing is it's just a superior technology for a handful of use cases. And, you know, it's hard to bet against that.

Yeah, I think the world, you know, It's not ready yet. Maybe in the next 10, 15 years, the decentralization concept itself will become more normal. You're talking about, you're giving advice to founders. Let's talk a little bit on that. You've talked to many founders, invested in many founders. What is something that do you see, it's like a common data point that you keep on getting the same either question or like a topic that you can't repeating themselves that people generally miss. It's like something that's so obvious to you, but it's not obvious for others. Basically the founders that come to you for advice. Is that something that, that you identified in the last few years of you being investing in so many companies?

Yeah, there's a handful of common mistakes and stuff. I would say

I think I was more— I was more not even like asking about mistakes founders will make, but it's like some things that are very obvious to you, right? Like you just said.

Yeah.

That is so obvious. Like regardless of the wave, you being part of that wave itself will teach you something that is so obvious to you, but that's so unintuitive to others. Like that to me is like That's so intuitive. Like, you see what I'm saying? Like, as a founder. So I'm talking about those particular, either thoughts or like some philosophy that you carry as an investor to founder.

Yeah, I would say, I guess one that's been on my mind recently is like the type of company to start. So I believe that like, we're not just floating around in open ocean when we're coming up with startup ideas. There are patterns and frameworks to use that actually do work that are very simple and straightforward. One that is clearly, I guess there are 2 parts of this. One is like to discuss paradigm shifts, what types of companies start during paradigm shifts like AI. Even more simple one is looking at, in my opinion, there are 2 types of companies, startups you can start. One is one where you are creating a new market or creating something for an extremely small market that hopefully may be bigger. All of the risk is like, will the market take it? Like you're, you're a true inventor. You're discovering stuff. You're discovering new land, right? That's what you're doing. You're saying like, you're discovering a new behavior. You're discovering something. So this is kind of like, you know, it's funny. A lot of the biggest companies that we think about actually weren't these companies. Google was not the first search engine. Facebook was not the first social network.

Right.

So what types of companies are those? Those are companies where there's a clearly defined market opportunity and all you have to do is make something better. You don't have to discover. There's no discovery. In fact, what you can do, you can do some discovery in terms of novel approaches to make things better. But if you literally looked at You know, Google's, you know, what was better about Google than Yahoo? Simplicity. Okay, that's UX. And then the algorithm, which was like just a better algorithm, but it was really UX innovation. Facebook is a similar thing. I'd say their growth and their go-to-market was better than MySpace's and others. And so I think a lot of founders think they have to discover things. They think they have to invent something brand new in order to— Yeah. Start a company. And it's actually not only easier, but it can be extremely rewarding to take an existing market, or even a newish market and, and take it to the next level. Because the reality is, this is related to what we're building. People are going to use email clients forever, people are going to use task managers and ticket management systems forever, people are going to use video calling, messaging, like all of this stuff is just going to be there. and a billion people are using it every single day. And so the longer one of these products has been in existence, the more of an opportunity there is to improve it. Linear is my favorite new example.

So true.

Engineering ticket management, like Trello, Jira, all these companies are so old and they're so ugly and people don't like them. And Linear's entire innovation is Let's just make this beautiful. Let's just make this really delightful to use because you're in it all day. Not a new market, not a— didn't discover any new behavior, didn't invent a category. One of the biggest, hottest companies today.

That is so fascinating. That one data point, which you said is many founders think about Or at least they have an expectation of doing something new, novel. They want to try something new. And I think there are people, there are some founders who are doing like, you know, Friend.com, these folks, they're building something radically new, Humane AI pin, or like whatever it is, the new hardware. But I think it's so rewarding. That's like the key there. That's what I think. And it's so refreshing to hear. Is that why you picked email out of every, everything else? Like, let's talk about Micro.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, Micro is a new kind of email client, but it's a lot more than that. We think about it like an all-in-one tool. Think about all of the core productivity tools that you use, any sort of workflow tool, all jammed into one product that is automatically updated and Organized for you with AI, and it really came from a personal experience more so than a strategic one. But all the strategy lined up after afterwards. The personal experience was you know my old co-founder was one of these like automations integrations like inbox zero guru guys, right? Like responds to a Slack message in ten seconds any hour any hour of the night. Like absolutely amazing. Like literally I was in, we were, everybody on the team was in awe of him all every day.

Wow.

And so he was always setting up all these crazy Zapier and Airtable and like Notion, all this crazy stuff, like really, really elaborate, complex systems that only he knew how to use, but worked really well. And I was kind of the Apple Notes guy. I was the guy who was—

The simple guy.

I was the simple guy, never got to inbox zero. All my Notion documents were just in a list of documents. Didn't do any of that stuff. And I always felt bad because what my co-founder did was very impressive and everybody acknowledged how impressive it was and useful it was. And I always felt bad about myself as like, if co-founder of a company couldn't really stay on top of emails. I realized that the way we've architected both culture and technology,

Hmm.

Emphasizes this feeling of feeling bad where like Superhuman says you should get to inbox zero, right? Like, you know, notions like you should build your second brain, you know, like there's all these like talking points in the productivity space that are all about pushing people towards this like productivity maximalist perspective. It makes you feel bad if you're not one of those people.

Yeah, I think only very few can pull off. What about the rest?

Yeah, very few can pull off. And, you know, interestingly, I thought it was like, okay, if you're a highly successful person, you're absolutely going to be one of these maxis. And I went and talked to a bunch of startup founders, really successful ones. They said they were, some of them said they'd had to take Adderall to stay on top of stuff.

Whoa.

And, and, and the others basically said they don't stay on top of stuff.

They just let it go.

They just let it go because they can't. And so we are in this weird situation in society where all our tools and culture are basically gaslighting us into thinking we suck at our jobs because we can't, we can't do this thing that everybody's trying to help us do. But the reality is it's not a skill issue, it's a tool issue. And so that was my big, that was my big takeaway is that like there's this big gigantic problem. And society is not set up for it. The other big takeaway is that we've been solving the problem wrong for the last 20 years, which is— Right. Superhuman is arguably the best product in the market right now. Their perspective is, let's make things really fast so you can take an action on every single email extremely fast. You can mark emails done really quickly. Whatever. So basically believes that email is a task. Paul Graham even says emails are tasks that you have to action on. And the reality is that's not what emails are. Email is home to like hundreds of different workflows, hundreds, hiring, sales, you know, podcast management, like a bunch of different things, shopping, Black Friday shopping, like whatever. And they're all jumbled up into the same interface. And each of these workflows has a different behavior. with the message or with the content in the message, right? Like, I don't want to mark my flight done because it's tomorrow, right? I don't want to act on it. So we—

Yeah, that is so true. That's a great point, actually, that we keep some of these emails unread because the timing is not right. You don't want to read them today or like reply them today because we want to reply them tomorrow. That's a— yeah, that's a good insight. Yeah, go ahead. I didn't mean to stop you.

So, so Chris Dixon has this idea of like, I think it's Chris Dixon, a weak solution and a strong solution. So weak solution is something that kind of solves it, but like actually doesn't get at the underlying behavior. Strong solution is something that actually revolves around the underlying behavior. Like it's like, it's like treating the disease itself versus treating the symptoms. And so a lot of productivity, like especially in email up to this point has been A weak solution. You get a lot of emails, you should mark them done so you can move on with your life. The strong solution is looking— is what we're doing, which is saying email is a database. It's not a list of tasks. It's a giant database. It's super unstructured, but it's a giant database. And if we just structure that database, you can actually configure the proper interfaces for the workflows that you're trying to do. So instead of Managing your startup fundraise in a bunch of emails, why wouldn't you see it in a pipeline view?

Right.

Instead of reading your newsletters in a list of emails, why wouldn't you see them in a beautiful gallery view? Instead of searching for the 6 emails from United about your flight, why wouldn't you just see the flight? So—

Wow. Okay.

The idea is email is home to the most important information about you or your company. And all we have to do is structure it in a coherent way. And we immediately solve a lot of these problems of email overload because you're not going to be worrying about missing your flight information if you have a flight app inside of Micro.

I love that. When are you going to ship it? I mean, I'm excited to try. I'm excited to give it a try because so far it's been Emails has been like one of the clumsiest things that we live with. You know, I think some of the people who has OCD still have clumsy email inboxes. I'm for sure I can say that. Before I want to dive in a lot about like the semantics and the way you took the idea from really like a thought to like real life, but I want to ask one quick question about entering into like crowded markets, which we covered before, right? So we talked about the upsides. There is a proven market. You go there, build a better solution, offer a better UX, build a better system for the users, and they adapt quickly. And we've seen Linear do it, Arc the browser do it, like so many other companies do it, you know, Beehive do it with newsletters, so many other examples. So what is like the downside, do you think? of entering into a crowded market and how do you think founders should avoid?

Yeah, I mean, the obvious thing is when you're the only player, you're the only game in town, you just kind of like, if it's working, it's growing like crazy, right? It's, this is like all these stories of strong PMF and stuff like that from these early companies comes from that. Like if you're really the only game in town, you're growing like crazy. It's much easier to sell because nobody else is competing with you. So in extremely competitive markets like email, like CRM, which we're in, you have to do a lot more work. There's a lot higher expectations. So a good example is, and this is something I learned in LA. And so why is it that LA and direct-to-consumer brands like food and beverage or clothing, even why do they have really, really nice brands and compared to tech? companies? And the answer is competition. So the idea is that in any market, when you don't have a lot of product differentiation, you have to differentiate on other things, content, brand, distribution, all of that stuff. And so in tech, we are not used to a world where there's a lot of competition because the industry is pretty new. There were only so many of XYZ type of company at a certain point. So YouTube didn't need a fancy brand when it started. Instagram didn't need a fancy brand when it started, right? Because

it

was the only one. So, or one of very few. So when we approach this market that we're in, email and CRM and all this other stuff, yes, our approach is very new. It's very interesting. I think our product is like At least 10 times as good as the competition. Like it's going to be, going to be wildly apparent when we're out showing off the product early next year. But because it's so competitive, we do need to invest in brand. So we hired one of the best brand design agencies in the industry and are putting a lot of work into that right now.

Wow. That is, that's a refreshing take because I think the way you, you know, of course, Jeff Bezos says, is like, take care of your users. You don't have to You don't have to worry about competitors, right? But this is something new. I think you've brought like a new flavor of D2C brands, how they approach, or even like these fashion brands, right? They all, at the end of the day, make clothes or bags. That's like the utility, but the way they differentiate is through brand, right? I think that's what Jaguar tried. I don't know if they succeeded,

but— Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, totally.

That's so good. And I think, yeah, let's, if we, if you want to get, get into the details of Micro, right? So one, reinventing email itself is a big, bold claim. On top of it, you're trying to sell email as a CRM, which is completely new. So where did this blend came from? Like why CRM? Why can't email be like a chat? Another chat, or where can email be in a different form? Did you imagine in different, different forms and you ended up with CRM, or what was like the journey like?

Yeah. So, so again, the original feeling was, okay, email sucks. Like we need to fix this. And then GPT-4 had come out around the same time and I said, okay, maybe this is the solution. AI plus email. That's kind of, that was the starting point. A lot of companies started at that point, right? A lot of companies right now are looking into that. And it makes sense. AI is great at structuring unstructured information. It's like having like a personal assistant sitting in your inbox doing things for you. But the problem with starting an email client, if you look at the history of email clients, there's a long, long, long list of either totally stagnated or dead companies, right?

Mm-hmm.

I think Superhuman may be the most highest valued one, like almost a billion or less, a little less than a billion right now. It's pretty rare. It's very, very rare. Most email clients Stagnate. And the reason for that, the reason for that is this. Who are the people who want a new email client? It's my old co-founder. It's not me. It's the productivity maxis who can't, who want, are squeezing just a little bit more out of Gmail and they can't, they want to squeeze a little bit more out, right?

They're not satisfied.

They're not satisfied. They have some really weird tastes and stuff like that. Those are the, those are your early adopters. Those are the people who have the pain point with, with email. And so what happens if you, so you're a startup founder, the common knowledge is you have to serve, you find these early adopters with the strongest pain point. Okay. So now you're building for these people, right? Every single email client, they wind up building for these people who want to try new email clients.

They

have all these feature requests. Tons of feature requests because that's who they are. And so it takes you 2 years, 3 years to get to feature parity. And at the end of the day, these people don't want a new email client. They want a better Gmail. They want a faster Gmail. They want a prettier Gmail. They want like a Gmail with 1 or 2 more features. And at the end of those few years, that's literally what you've built, unfortunately. And email is such an entrenched product. You have billions of people who've been using it for hours a day for decades. Like you can't take too many changes on the actual UI. So there's this trap I call this is the email client startup trap. So they all fall into it. Anybody starting an email client today will fall into it. Why are we building a CRM then? Number one, I used to work at Clearbit, which is a data enrichment company. And I've worked with CRMs before in other— Mm-hmm. companies I've worked with, and they're all trash. They're really trash. And if you ask people what the biggest, most important integration or the biggest opportunity is in email, it's just better email integration. That's what people want. Better, better email integration. And so basically realized that since email is, as we said, this kind of system of record for business, for your life or your business, which is kind of where we started, email is a database. It knows a lot more than just the people you've been talking to. It knows the flights you've taken, the hotels you've been in. CRM is actually the perfect initial app for Micro. Micro stands for micro apps. It's going to be more than just CRM.

That's nice.

Yeah.

Okay.

So CRM was the first, it's basically the lowest hanging fruit that we could tackle on our path to building Frankly, like it's, it's closer to kind of like a WeChat type platform because—

Interesting. Is it like something, if I have a CRM and I want to hook it, hook up to the email, is that something that Micro can do?

Micro is an email client and a CRM. So it's the only one.

So you, you offer both solutions. You don't have to like bring other, like, I don't want to bring HubSpot to hook my email. It's not like that.

Yeah, you sign in, you sign in with Gmail and you use Micro the same way you would use Gmail, right? But the nice thing is you also have a very modern, beautiful CRM system within it. By the time this podcast comes out, I guess it'll be soon, but like, yeah, yeah,

it'll be soon.

If you're listening, if you listen, if you're listening later, we will have engineering ticket management system. in it. You'll have document management, like full Notion-style documents. You'll have—

I love that.

File management, like your own mini Dropbox inside of it and all this stuff. Yeah,

I think media, that's another thing, right? Like there are so many photos we exchange through emails and a lot, many times you just have to download and then move device to device. That is so fascinating, Brett. I think it's something that I'm looking forward to use, and I'm sure many wanted to reimagine email. That's truly like kind of rethinking email. Did you use certain frameworks to, like, as a founder's problem-solving frameworks that you've used to build Micro? Is that something, certain set of foundational frameworks that you use generally? Yeah. As a team?

Yeah, I would say so. I think one framework, I wouldn't say I learned this anywhere, it just more like is, was an observation. And I see a lot of people making this mistake with AI startups is that you need to meet users where they are. So people don't understand chatbots because they don't use chatbots all the time to do their actual work. So if you're going to build an— a CRM product or an email product, it needs to look and work like a CRM or an email product. We tried, we actually started out Micro as TikTok for email. So we had like a mobile app swiping through little summaries of the emails. People thought it was cool, but didn't use it. And it's because it's not, it doesn't, it's not close to what they have understood or used their whole lives. So,

right.

The reason for that, and going back to music is the same thing. Like it's impossible to write a song that doesn't sound like, doesn't have elements of existing stuff because people's brains, people can only conceptualize of things or how to use things based on what they've seen already. So if you're trying to build the future of something, you need to be using an existing interface or something close to an existing interface. You can't take— you can't take—

I love that. That is a great soundbite right there.

Yeah.

I love it so much. Yeah. Before we wrap up, you know, we're kind of ending on the time. I want to like ask about a couple of other things which are You know, off topics, like, do you have a criteria that you've used to find co-founders? Like, is there something that you, you know, for first-time founders who are building something on their own, they want to collaborate with others? I think in general, like collaboration, like, do you have tips that you can offer founders to like, hey, these are the things that you need to look for? Yeah. It can also be like hiring. So this can be like, these are the things, the qualities that you look You know, in people that you collaborate?

Yeah. So I'm a solo founder with Micro. So this is, and I had 2 co-founders at Launch House. So I would say for co-founders, you want, I think Naval had some great points about this where you want somebody who's high integrity, high output, and highly intelligent. Most important thing to remember is that like, depending on the role, but most of the, you know, 90% of the time, this person is going to be a leader on your team. And any sort of behaviors that they have are going to be magnified by the rest of the team, particularly if they're the CEO. But if they're the CTO, it'll be magnified on the engineering team. And they will, this is the person who's going to set the pace. And that's number one. Number 2 is you just need to be in the same mindset as them in terms of The effort and energy and intelligence and all that stuff. The number one thing that destroys co-founder relationships is losing respect for each other. So you need to work with— and this is, in relationships you have love, in business relationships you have respect. Hmm. This is the fundamental building block of relationships. And so if you fall, If you don't love your partner anymore, you get a divorce or get, you know, break up. If you lose respect for your co-founder, absolutely you break up. Like there's no moving forward because that's what screws stuff up. So you need to deeply respect them for what they do and you need to make sure that your skills are complementary or there's a clear division of who does what and who reports to who.

I love that. I think, you know, again, Relationships have love. Founders in business have respect. That's a great point. And I think we should kind of crave for that by being authentic and doing, you know, push each other, right? That's one thing I want to add on top of what you said. Do you have a cheat sheet to build a solid network in tech?

Yeah, get on Twitter. I'd say I probably met more people in the San Francisco, even San Francisco tech industry, but especially the broader tech industry on Twitter during the pandemic than I did for my like 6, 7 years living in the Bay Area. Or I mean, living in San Francisco, but I even lived, I went to Berkeley and I am from the East Bay. So I probably, I probably met more people on Twitter than I did in, in person my whole life outside of that. And so what that means is if you live in It doesn't matter where you live, as long as you're interacting with people. You know, number one is find people that you like or that you resonate with, interact with them on the internet, reply to them, DM them, email them, set up podcasts with them.

Just like how we did.

Yeah. And then meet up with them when you're there in person. Number one thing also is talk about amazing things you're doing. If you're shipping stuff, Tweet about it. If you are writing stuff, tweet about it. If you're doing anything, tweet about it. Again, the tech industry is an industry of makers, and in order to advance your career, you should be meeting people, making things, and telling those people what you made.

I love that. It's all about— I think Twitter is— I don't know how we can talk about Twitter now, but it used to be a place of serendipity. You tweet something. I still believe there is a part of it. That's why this podcast is happening, right? You know, I randomly DM'd you, you're like, yeah, let's do it. And we're talking now. But yeah, I think putting yourself out is much more important in tech than doing something in closed doors. Last thing I want to ask is, where do you see the role of AI or the role of AI being in startups or building, like especially creating, right? With the rise of Cursor, there are like so many things, Notebook LLM, like you basically, you can be a developer even though you don't know how to code. So on that front, as well as like creating stuff artistically, like, you know, you can create videos using Sora. There are like, there are a million things that are happening right now. Again, we're all overwhelmed. So where do you think, or at least your predictions of, you know, AI in startups?

Yeah. So technology is just a force of democratization through abstraction. So what do I mean by that? Let's take music. If you wanted to create some music 1,000 years ago, you'd have to go and find some musicians, right? Maybe not 1,000 years, a couple hundred years ago. Yeah. Find some musicians, pay them, write some notes and stuff for them to play. And then you'd have your music and it wasn't even recorded and like all that stuff. Very few people could do that. Very, very few people had the money to do that, the time to do that and all that stuff. Then you have, you know, the rise of MIDI, like digital instruments and digital workstations. And now like kids in their bedrooms can produce music, right? Like Billie Eilish, bedroom producers, like they made most of their album in their bedroom. And what does that mean? It's like, you don't have to pay all those people, those musicians to create music because it's been abstracted. Music has been abstracted. You can have a synthesizer or like a string sound in your song without having to pay somebody because, you know, it's an abstraction of that actual musician. When you abstract things that much, it makes them easier. When you make things easier, it democratizes access to them. Instagram with photography, right? CapCut, all of these things, same thing. Riverside with podcasting. All this, all technology does is makes things Simpler and easy to do, and as a result, unlocks more people to do it. And what also that means is that also means individuals can do more things. So artificial intelligence is the ultimate abstraction tool because instead of writing every line of code, you tell Cursor to create an app and it creates the app. For you, right? Instead of having, you know, writing a whole essay, you have ChatGPT write the essay for you. And so what this means is that people will be able to do more on their own. So a— and it's going to be the dawning of a new era in entrepreneurship because suddenly, like, literally millions more people, maybe a billion more people can create apps. Okay. create software products. So what does that mean? Going back to what we were talking about, competition.

Yeah.

Competition means distribution, brand matters way more than it has ever mattered because guess what? Like a lot of people can create email clients and CRMs. It's a little more complicated than a normal app, but like eventually a lot of people will be able to do this. And so You really need to own the brand, the mindshare on all this stuff, which is part of why people say, okay, like the future of apps or startups is going to creators. Yeah. But the reality is, I think it's just going to be an amazing period for a lot of people to be able to finally make their dreams kind of a reality.

I think it's a great time to build. Right. I think the internet age enabled that. I think after that, the AI age is going to enable it. Last curious question, now that you're talking so passionately about building, right? If you were not to build Micro and if you were to build something else, what would you choose? In other words, where do you see the gaps still exist that you are like, I don't have time right now with Micro, but someone should go after, build this?

Maybe too tactical answer, but one of the ideas we tried before building Micro was called Aster. And it was basically an events product. So if you go to a conference, most conferences, especially crypto conferences, you'll get like a giant spreadsheet of side events.

Mm-hmm.

All, and also the other thing is like, and these are a pain to look at. The other thing is like, you go to a conference to meet people and it's actually annoying to figure out who's at the conference. All that stuff. This is why people tweet out and all this stuff. Yeah.

I said like, yeah, I'm here. Come meet me. Yeah.

Yeah.

That's true.

So Aster basically is kind of a location-based events app where it ingests all of the side events for any conference that you're at and shows you a list of all the other people who are on the, who are on the app slash at the conference and lets you DM them, set up time to meet up, see what events are around you. All that stuff.

Yeah, I think nobody's done that. Like, I think, you know, there's still— I think now people are coming back, so there's more opportunity there. But this has been a great conversation. I, you know, there are a couple of nuggets I really liked, uh, you know, what you said. And hopefully, like, you know, listeners have the same insight or took the same insight. But any closing thoughts before we wrap up?

Nothing, nothing I can think of.

Yeah, I think, yeah, we'll put all the links in the show notes. We'll put people to, you know, towards Micro's website so that they can join the waitlist. I'm part of the waitlist. I'm excited to try Micro early next year. But stay tuned, folks. You know, hope you loved this conversation, gained some insight, and go build. You know, that's what we founders want you to do. Cheers.

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