32 - Rahul Vohra, Founder & CEO at Superhuman

Thanks so much for joining me on the Slice of Technology podcast. How are you today?

Doing good. Thank you for having me.

I'm super excited. I was, I was telling you a little bit before we started the call. Very much looking forward to this episode because I've been an active user of Superhuman before, before we're meeting here. So it kind of gives me a, I think, a unique perspective when we're going through this interview because I've used it for a little over a year now. First off, kudos to what you and your team have built. It's fantastic. I love it. It's made my life easier. And you didn't tell me to say that, so that is the truth. Everyone hearing that.

Well, thank you and all credit to the team. It really does take a surprisingly large number of people working very hard to make Superhuman work.

Now, I would be shocked if someone didn't know about Superhuman at this point. But let's first kind of, if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit about your background leading into Superhuman, and then give us a general overview of what the company is up to today.

Of course. So my name is Rahul. I'm an entrepreneur. As you might be able to tell from my accent, I grew up in England, but now I live in California. I've been an entrepreneur my entire life. I actually previously also had an email startup, you might call it an AI startup these days. Rapportive, which was the first Gmail plugin to scale to millions of users. Basically on the right hand side of Gmail, we showed you what people look like, where they live, where they were based, their recent tweets, links to their social profiles, and I sold that to LinkedIn back in 2012. That then led to me founding Superhuman, where I am the founder and CEO today. And Superhuman is the most productive email app ever made. So, as you know, because you're a customer, imagine getting through your inbox twice as fast as before, responding faster to the things that matter, and saving four hours or more every single week. Now, I know that can sound like a big claim. So imagine splitting your inbox into the streams of work that matter the most, so you can immediately focus on what most needs your attention. And as you've probably also seen as a customer, we are inventing the future of productivity with AI. You can imagine waking up to an inbox where every email already has a draft reply. You would simply edit and then send. And sometimes you wouldn't even need to edit.

And just to clarify, because I'm sure you hear this a lot. Right. It won't send. It'll draft a response that then you decide if you want to send that. Right. It won't assume that's what you want to say and then send it automatically. Right, exactly.

The technology isn't quite there, but if we were to talk about vision, I think that's definitely the direction that we're headed. It's reasonable to extrapolate from where we are today and say, yeah, you know, maybe in four, perhaps five years, maybe even sooner than that. For certain categories of email, you'd be comfortable with the AI sending it on your behalf. And we actually already kind of do this. If you've ever used an AI to schedule email, schedule meetings for you, or relied on another person to do that for you, it's possible to imagine certain very specific, very rote things being done by an AI.

Yeah, I think you nailed it though. You said certain, like, categories, certain parts of your email. Right. You wouldn't want it necessarily negotiating on your behalf and then signing a deal at below market. So like, I think it's important for it to continue to learn. Right. And then, okay, this is, this type of email. I'm okay with AI maybe doing my responses on Autopilot and then this side of things, maybe I want to review a little bit before, but I do think we're going to get there. Like you said when I was kind of researching you before we had you come on, I wanted to talk a little bit about, you know, there's been other email companies, but, like, why does it feel like over the years email has been so, like, neglected as an area, even though we all use it all of the time? This is obviously, you've. You've already been in this space with your last company and now with, with Superhuman. This has obviously been a big problem that you continue to want to address, and you are. But why does it seem like, you know, there's the Googles of this world and outlooks that it kind of always stayed the same and they didn't go ahead and make something better? Is it, is it the psychology that we talked about where, like, you know, people expect email to be free, but if you're saving time, like, I'll let you. I won't put words in your mouth, but would love to hear from you.

I think the long and short of it is that it was too hard and too scary. It required a crazy person to jam on it for 10 years with a bunch of other crazy people. And honestly, we just convicted this company into existing and succeeding. It exists through sheer force of will. So to break some of those things down, let's say you roll the clock back 10, 15, 20 years ago, it would have been too hard and too scary to genuinely go up against Microsoft Outlook or Gmail. And in fact, the only company that was able to do it successfully was Google. And that's because they had infinite resources to put into that endeavor. Now, some of the things that have changed since then are that in general, it's become cheaper to build technology. And you and I know the reasons why. We're talking about APIs, we're talking about open source, we're talking about software as a service to run the company in general, we're talking about platforms and infrastructure as a service to build the products that people use. And the most recent and relevant example of that is, of course, AI. Large language models, generative AI. All of these things have come together over the last 10 years. And superhuman is 10 years old, basically, as of today, which is kind of exciting. Have come together to make it much more feasible to build something as insane as, yeah, we'll take on Gmail, or, yeah, we'll take on outlook in Office365. The other thing is, it takes a long amount of time. Superhuman is famous, or perhaps infamous for our products market fit engine for building in private for a long time before we launched anything publicly. I think it was many years, two or three years before we even had users using Superhuman. And that's because the bar of feature parity is also really high. And so you have to have a lot of patience in order to take on a project like Superhuman. It's no accident, therefore, I think that I'd previously sold a company because that gave me the personal Runway, which turns into personal patience and fortitude to actually go off and spend the amount of time required to make this successful. I think it also gives investors the confidence that we know what we're doing, we have the wherewithal to do it. We've done it at least once before, so we can do it again. And then the final twist is, and we were also talking about this before the call, it's something that people pay for. We set the bar so high and the quality of the product had to deliver value so meaningful that people would happily pay $30 a month for Superhuman. And you might think, wow, email is free. Why would I ever pay $30 for it? And I would say, well, imagine the value of getting through your inbox twice as fast as before, or saving three to four hours every single week, which is the average amount of time that our users save per week, that's what is it, 12, 16 hours a month? Isn't that worth $30 per month of your time or $30 per month of your company's time to save you those hours and to get that back to do something else? It was really that observation that other folks hadn't got to yet, excuse me, that allowed us to re segment the email market in a way that hadn't been done before.

It's interesting something you said early on and I think it was on Harry Stebbings podcast recently too where we talk about how in the venture world how you know, put something out there and test and get some feedback and that works for some spaces. But you said something right, that really stood out and I've been hearing it more and more from founders. Is is in some industries like you, putting out a half baked new type of email was not going to get people to want to pay or maybe continue to engage. You had to find what you needed to do to raise the bar. And like you said, you spent a lot of time building it in private before you released it. So I want to go back to that and say we keep preaching to people a one size fits all approach to building a company. Like be scrappy, put out something, get some feedback and build it. But I just want to be clear that that is not the case all the time. Right? So like how did you know in this particular space that you couldn't just do that that was not going to work?

I think there are many truisms that go around the entrepreneurship advice space that they simply aren't true. And I recently had done an interview with another great CEO and he asked me to come up with a few of them. I can share them here.

So.

So this is popular startup advice that I fundamentally disagree with. And the first one is fail fast. I strongly believe that if you think you're going to fail fast, you will. You will fail quickly and hard. And then what are you going to do? Fail again? Another thing I don't believe in is launch early and iterate often. Because in some industries, and this definitely applies to ours, you actually need to launch with a reasonably fully baked product. Now it doesn't need to have all the bells and whistles. And when Superhuman launched, it didn't do everything that Gmail and Outlook can do, but it did enough. It did enough to convince early adopters to switch over from Gmail and Outlook. It did enough of the basics and also had enough that was special. And then the other thing I disagree with is this idea that you need free users in order to grow. In some markets, yes, you should have free users, especially if it's a greenfield market. You know, a great example would be something like Uber and Lyft, and perhaps not the best example because you do pay for those products, but they were heavily, heavily subsidized by venture capital, so as close to free as you could reasonably get. And the reason was those markets were completely brand new, so it was a race to grab all the users. But email doesn't work like that. Everyone has an email account, everybody has an email client. Everyone is either using Gmail or Office365today. And so this idea that you need free users just simply does not apply to this. The idea that we had to launch early would have broken the company because people would have tried the product and given us feedback. We would have been overwhelmed by the feedback, unable to iterate on, and they would have moved on. And by the way, if you look at every single other email startup, that's exactly what has happened. And failing fast is just something I completely disagree with. I think if you get a. You've probably experienced this yourself. You get a set of people around the table to debate a new product idea or a new feature or a new startup. It is so easy to come up with a thousand reasons not to do any one of those things. It's actually really, really hard to will something into existence on the other side. And so I think there's room for the kind of strategy where you just say, you know what, this is hard. There's a million reasons why we shouldn't do this, but we're going to make it work anyway.

I love it. Yeah, it's. And I mean, I love the approach that you took with Superhuman. One of the things I really look forward to is when I log in and I see that little red dot in the top right of. There's always something. I know you said like, you know, in the early days, you took a long time to roll out these things, but you have been so great. Now it seems like every few weeks I'm getting some new cool feature that I'm most likely using right away too. Right. And one of those cool features I want to highlight today, because it's really cool, is your instant event feature. So we'd love to hear more about that and kind of what went into the thought process to say this is something our users need.

Yeah. So it's no surprise that a lot of email, it's actually more than 30% of all email is related to scheduling. I ping you, you're like, hey, do you want to schedule our podcast for Monday or Tuesday? And you ping me back. And then we go back and forth and we're trying to align calendars. And it's not just a calendar alignment problem, it's all of the other stuff that's also going on in our lives. Like I'm seeing my chiropractor today. I'm sure you have your stuff that you need to do today. And it's just a lot, it's a lot of correspondence. Once you've actually finally gotten to agreement, the work doesn't end there. One of us then has to flip to our calendar, click to drag, make an event, copy and paste the title in, maybe put in a description, definitely put in a location. We're recording this on Riverside. It's really important that you get that URL correct. Add the attendees, etc, etc. This is menial rote work that takes a lot of time and is exactly the kind of thing that AI can replace perfectly. So the idea with Instant Event is that you can schedule at the speed of thought and with just one tap, Instant Event will take the conversation that you're looking at and will create an event complete with a title, a description, location, attendees, as well as the best date and time that you've agreed on, all from your email. So there's no more back and forth, there's no more copy and paste. And if you're scheduling, let's say, with your team, someone whose calendar you actually have access to via your email system, whether it's gmail or office, 365 instant events will actually look up your availability and their availability and find a great time when you're all free. So if you've ever had the experience of scheduling on your team, scanning through days and then hours trying to see, wait, I'm free here, but Bob isn't and Carl is, and how do we make this work? Instant Event can do that fully, automatically. So it's been a really great feature. We launched this just a week or two ago and there's actually an interesting metric that we track for AI, which is the percentage of weekly active users who use AI features, a pretty reasonable metric. I think a lot of companies would track something similar. Now this is a very hard metric to move when you have a lot of AI features and we have four or five flagship AI features. It's a very hard metric to move because for any new feature that you build, it either has to be something that people use very frequently, multiple times per week or something that a lot of people use somewhat frequently. And either of those is pushing the envelope in a pretty hard direction. So with Instant Event, we were actually able to shift that metric by a full 10%, which I think is shocking. My jaw dropped. It's just amazing how this seemingly small example of AI was, which is take a conversation where you've already agreed the salient details to a meeting and then turn it into a meeting. Turns out to be so popular, so handy and such a time saver.

Another feature, and I love it. I've been using it a lot so far already and it just, it recently came out. Right. This was a very recent launch. I want to highlight. We talked about this a little bit earlier, but actually let's shift focus because you did already talk about the Ask AI feature. Well, actually, no, we didn't talk about Ask AI. We talked about the Instant Reply. Let's talk about the Ask AI feature now too, because this is pretty cool. One of the things I always struggled with, and I'm sure everyone struggles with, is searching through email. How can a company like Google, that is a search company, it seems you can never find what you're looking for when you're looking through your email. So you release this feature, tell us what it is, and I mean, I think everyone's going to instantly think it's important once you say it, but tell us more.

So Ask AI may be my favorite AI feature that we've built. Even more favorites than instant events because as you pointed out, email is a treasure trove of critical information. Think about project statuses, customer communication, meeting updates, deal execution. So much more. You name it, email has it. And for over 40 years, we've had to rely on what we hilariously call search by. But what is search? That means you have to remember senders, you have to guess keywords, you have to scan subject lines. With Ask AI, you can now just ask, where is the Q1 off site? Or what are my flight details? Or really any question that you have in mind. Now, on the back end, what we've done is we have indexed, embedded and stored your emails in an AI search database so that you can retrieve them, even run generation and queries over them without having to get the words right. And by maybe asking sideways questions or using language that is completely different to what's actually in the email. And there's this really great example, actually my favorite example that I'd love to share here, because in this example you can see how it takes a task that was previously 20 to 30 minutes long and does it in 5 to 10 seconds. So after the Ask AI launch, I wanted to do what many CEOs would do, which is celebrate and cheerlead the successful launch of the feature. And I've always done this the now old fashioned way, which is I would go into my email and I would look at all of the customer responses to the launch announcements. And for context, we usually get several thousand. I'd quickly skim through them as quickly as you can skim through several thousand emails. And I'd copy and paste the most positive quotes into a Google Doc or a Google Slide so I can then later on present it to the company. Pretty standard stuff that takes about 20 to 30 minutes. And that's if I'm on it, right? I'm going through it, I'm not taking a break, I'm just like buzzing through these emails. It's very draining, very challenging, wrote work and it's exactly the kind of thing that AI can excel at. And so I had this truly magical moment the other week where I went to ask AI and I said, find me the 10 most positive quotes about the Ask AI launch. And it thought for about half a second, it retrieved emails for another 250 milliseconds and then it immediately started generating the answer. It was like one, this person, this quote, two, this person this quote, three, this person this quote, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Until we had the 10 most positive, most fun, juiciest quotes that I could then just copy and paste into a Google Slide that I could then present to the company two minutes later without having to have spent 20 to 30 minutes, which is what I was previously always doing. Sam Altman at OpenAI often talks about how one way to measure the efficacy of the progress of AI is the length of the task that it is replacing. And initially GPT was replacing 10 second tasks and then 1 minute tasks and 2 minute tasks. And you could argue that SearchGPT or Perplexity Pro is replacing pretty lengthy 1015 minute research tasks. And what I saw here in Superhuman was legitimately a 20 to 30 minute task that, by the way, I hate doing, anyone would hate doing this and got it done in five to 10 seconds. And the cherry on the icing on the cake here is we now have plenty of users who actually use Ask AI more than traditional search.

I love it. Yeah, it's. I will say, before we wrap up here too, I want to ask two more quick questions from you. But yeah, I mean, Perplexity and even Search GPT I find myself since those launches, I think I've maybe gone to Google five times since then because and most of us were never going past page one anyhow. Right. Like that's kind of where we stayed. So you're right, it did replace these and that's what Ski feature is going to do. You also, you kind of alluded to it, but also you said it saves you all this time in searching through your email. You also feel better. There's not that stress and that like the slight anger when you can't find what you're looking for in your email. So that's really cool. I want to shift last two quick things. Kind of a new segment that I'm doing. Like show them some love. So outside of Superhuman, what are a few companies that are leveraging AI that you are particularly like bullish on, excited about? Give them a shout out, that can be people, that can be companies. And then last question is, we'll say what excites you about Humanx conference coming up and that's it.

Great. So some apps that I'm using that have just become core to my daily workflow. I'll start with one that I think a lot of our listeners will know and if they don't, they should definitely get on it because it is life changing. And then one that is a little bit newer. So the one that's very well known, but I'm still surprised how few people actually use this properly is is Loom's AI feature. So Loom, as you know, is a screen recorder. If you work in I think actually most technology work, it's just life changing. I'm a very product and design oriented CEO. I'm the kind of person who'll be able to spot a single pixel out of place or the font weight isn't quite right. And as a designer they jump out at me. And so a lot of my work is actually helping the team build a product that is achieving a remarkable bar of quality. It is very, very time consuming to do that with screenshots. It's really time consuming to do that simply by writing down what you see. It is so easy to just hit record, move the mouse around, reproduce the issue, show them the problem, record your voice and then send it to somebody else. Now historically that's great for the sender, right? I didn't have to type anything. I'm not stressing my fingers out and I can rely on my brain's just in time compilation of language to get it done quickly. But it kind of sucked for the recipients. Right. I mean, I used to hate receiving voicemails. In fact, my. My phone voicemail inbox has been full for about 10 years because I just refused to listen to them. And I think the same used to be true of receiving a recorded video message. I was like, really? Really? I now have to like sit down and watch this video message. But the amazing thing about Loom AI, of course, is that it is fully transcribed, summarized and titled and chaptered. So if you want, you can read the transcript and I can read way faster than I can listen to information. You get a title, you get chapters, you get a summary, you can click to the things that matter. So as a recipient, it's now also fast as well. And I think that's a wonderful example of the equalizing nature of AI as a technology. That taking something in this transaction you've got two people or, or it could actually be one to many. So n people, but you have the sender and the recipients. And in the before times it was only fast for the sender, and in the after times with AI, it's now fast for the sender and every single recipient. That's amazing. Another example, and this is also a voice example that I think fewer people know about, is voice dictation has in the last month or two, I think crossed from being something that people would use if they had to. For example, they needed dictation, perhaps due to disability on their laptop or they were on the go. So you'd put up with Siri voice dictation. If you've used Siri voice dictation, you know, it's not good, but it's. And you have to like say comma here, semicolon, full stop, new line. Once you get used to it, you can kind of drive it slowly. Today's voice dictation blows all of that out of the water. So I've been using this new app called Whisper that's W, I S, P R. So Whisper without the E and I suppose without the H by a company called Flow. Actually, other way around, Flow by Whisper. The app is called Flow. And it's incredible. You just hold down a shortcut on your keyboard. You talk, you let go, and it dictates the whole thing. Now you might be wondering, how is that different to Siri, how is that different to other voice dictation? Well, you don't have to dictate punctuation. And also it knows about you. So part of the secret source here is it has context about you. It's looking at the screen like Many of these apps do at around the time when you're doing the dictation. So if there's a particularly hard word to spell or someone's name that might be relatively unusual or an internal problem, project name, or some keyword that you've said, it almost always gets it right because that was part of the context when you did the dictation. And then of course it looks to see if you edit what you dictated before you sent it and it can use that to improve over time. And if you're using this to dictate in an email application like Superhuman, well it knows you're in an email application like Superhuman. And so if I said hi Alice, so great to meet you, looking forward to continuing our discussion next week. Speak soon Rahul which is obviously not a great email, but you get the idea it knows how to put that into a standard email format with the line breaks and the paragraph breaks in the right place and so on. So that has been truly a life changing application. In fact, I would go so far as to say it's been the biggest improvement in my productivity since I started using ChatGPT or Perplexity or Loom or any of those other more well known apps.

Interesting. I, I haven't heard actually I have heard of Whisper, I haven't tried it yet. Or Flow. I'm try it. I downloaded like four on my phone for like the, the ones that link up to your Apple watch too because I, I was having kind of interest in just like doing a quick I think it's voice notes is one. I've tried a few of them. I'm going to try your the one that you just said though. Last question before we wrap up here. What are you most looking forward to about the Human X event?

Well, I don't think I'm not preaching to the choir here when I say that I think AI is changing everything. It's transforming the way that we all work and I think email has a huge role to play in that. The, the thing I find most valuable about conferences, and I think this will be especially true about Humanx, is being for a brief period of time in an elevated headspace as it were outside of the virtual office and the firefighting and the pixel pushing and recording looms and dictating my ideas to be for a few days living in the future, like genuinely living not six months from now, not one year from now, but multiple years from now and talking with like minded peers who also believe we're going to get there on what does that world look like and what are the steps that we need to go through in order to get there, and how can we shorten that sequence, that steps? And strategically, as a CEO, how does my company fit into that world? I think we have a huge role to play because email is so big. One of the things people don't realize about email is there's roughly a billion professionals in the world, and on average, we spend three hours a day reading and writing email. So if you think about that easy math, that's 3 billion hours every single day, or north of a trillion hours every single year that just go into email. And that's just the time on average, we each read, read and write hundreds of thousands of words per year. In fact, many of us write several novels worth of email every single year. So between the time we spend and how much we read and how much we write, I think that email is one of the perfect places for AI to add massive value to people's lives. And at Humanx, I'm hoping to push the envelope in terms of my thinking for how we're going to do that.

I'm so excited for the event. It'll be great to meet you up in person, too, and so many others. Very much looking forward to it. And once again, I want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This was great. Lots of insights. Again, huge fan of what you've built and what you continue to be releasing. Everyone, if you're not trying out Superhuman again. He did not tell me to say this. I'm telling you this. Go use it. It's a game changer.

Well, thank you for saying that and take care.