How to Overcome Distractions as an Entrepreneur | Superhuman Founder & CEO, Rahul Vohra

This is The Playbook. This is Dave Meltzer with Entrepreneurs: The Playbook here at Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. And I have another superhuman with me. In fact, he's the founder and CEO of Superhuman, Rahul Vohra. Thanks for joining me here on The Playbook.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Amazing. Alright. So I love superhumans, but you and I share a passion. Now you've raised tons of money off of this passion, but I believe still that email is the top of my funnel. Email's the most important way to communicate for the long term in business. It gathers the most data and information to give you the best depiction on how we're connected. Um, and I think everyone should use email as their top of funnel. Uh, but a lot of people don't like it cuz it's slow. And it takes them a long time to figure out what's relevant and what's not, how to file, how to utilize Reply, et cetera. And yet they're missing out. I'm probably one of the fastest inbox— my box is always clean. I don't know if that's nice to say, but it is. I go to bed on empty. Let's just put it that way. And I've created and figured out every system that I could. And then I started studying Superhuman What are some of the facets of how Superhuman allows us to utilize the most powerful top-of-funnel communication tool, email, in the most efficient, effective, and statistically successful way?

So Superhuman, we designed from the ground up to be the fastest email experience in the world. And there's all kinds of ways we do that. But first, the punchline. Here's what people are able to get. They're able to get through their inbox twice as as fast as before. They're able to save 3 hours or more every single week, and many of them see inbox zero for the first time in years. Well, you see every day. Yeah, you're living the dream. Okay, so how does it work? What does it do? Well, first of all, we created a foundation that is blazingly fast. Every single thing that you do in Superhuman, even search, happens instantaneously. It's so fast that the brain can't even perceive it. That's the core underlying thesis behind the infrastructure. Then on top of that, we've built next-generation workflows. So you're an entrepreneur. You are now, you have been. You probably receive a fair number of introductions. I imagine you're familiar with doing the BCC dance. You reply, you're like, thanks, Alice. Bob, nice to meet you. Alice moving you to BCC, blah, blah, blah. It takes time. And in Gmail, that takes like 10, 15 different clicks, and Outlook is actually even worse. In Superhuman, it's one keyboard shortcut. We have a shortcut for that as well as everything else you might want to do. So when people are saying, hey, I'm getting through my inbox twice as fast as before, they really do mean it. It's because they've— they're using these shortcuts, they're learning these commands, they've set up their templates. We also help with triaging your email. We're able to separate things into categories that actually really make sense to you. They go far beyond the categories that are in Gmail and Outlook, and that's how people are saving that time.

Now I'm going to take it to another superhuman level because I think there's an area of email that people don't experience. Why I have a zero inbox is that I started to find that as I was going through my emails, that it was extremely frustrating because of the lack of speed, waiting. And one of the things I've noticed about superhuman is there's no way to move faster than even a mind that I believe is fairly quick. Mine, I exercise it, I discipline it, I meditate. I do all these things to practice having a superhuman mind, and I can't keep up with superhuman. But how much do you feel people's productivity goes down beyond the 3 hours of quantitative time? There's the fact that most people fall asleep when they're doing their emails or trying to catch up on their emails because it's so bleeding, it's so draining because of the slowness of it and the cumbersome functionality of it. You guys relieve all of that. Have you done any analysis of the emotional ease and the value of the emotional ease?

We have actually. Yeah. So we've started selling to enterprises, to companies over the course of the last year and a half. Year and a half ago, it was individuals buying Superhuman. Today it's that as well as companies. And a big part of why they're buying, especially in this post-pandemic world, is because email is getting so bad without the help of tools like Superhuman that it is negatively impacting employee well-being. People are thinking, is it worth it waking up and going to this job that they're not really going to anymore and then suffering through all of the work that they have to do? And the answer is they need better tools. So we're talking about the speed and, you know, sometimes In the early days when I was pitching an engineer to come join me at Superhuman, they'd be like, "Okay, so you're telling me you're rendering emails in 36 milliseconds," which is, for anyone technical listening, that's like 2 or 3 frames of Chrome, the browser. "Why does that matter?" And I said, "Well, your brain can't really perceive much less than 100 milliseconds. Most software takes seconds, thousands of milliseconds to react." And, you know, the time may not seem like very much, but here's what happens. Your mind drifts. The next thing you know, you're checking Twitter or maybe you're on Instagram. The moment you're doing that, you're now distracted. And many, many human-computer interaction studies have proven this time and time again. You do a distraction like that, your brain is compromised for the next 21 minutes. Even if you switch back within 30 seconds for the next 21 minutes on average, your brain is still thinking about, am I really going to pay $8 a month to be verified on Twitter or whatever the topic du jour is? It is distracted. And we've designed Superhuman to 100% prevent that distraction.

Amazing. Now, you and I come from a similar background, and I'm making a guess here. A mantra in my home was doctor, lawyer, or failure. Not a very entrepreneurial family, very academic family. You know, and for me, I had to go to law school just to please my mom. And then I could do whatever I wanted. You know, the fetus wasn't fully developed till after graduate school. And I'm always amazed when someone comes from that type of family. Your parents are both doctors. I'm sure there was pressure to do well in school, to go to school. And yet, I mean, you're a true entrepreneur. You have raised money from the biggest and the best. You've raised a lot of money. You've done it remotely. Your company is entrepreneurial. It's a, hey, I found a problem and I'm going to solve it beyond belief. You know, where does that entrepreneurial spirit come from when you were surrounded by genetic and energetic interference to entrepreneurism?

It's such a fascinating question. I think honestly, it comes from watching my father who is, was, he's now retired, a doctor, but he was so entrepreneurial at being a doctor. And I think in America we kind of take this for granted. Doctors here are entrepreneurs. In India where he grew up and in England where I grew up, it's really unusual though for doctors to be entrepreneurs. And I remember him, he was fortunate enough to work at a teaching hospital, so he always had 4 or 5 PhD students he was mentoring, which meant that he was raising funding for that. So I got to see what raising funding looks like even before being an entrepreneur. The hospital he was at was also a military hospital. So we had a lieutenant that was sort of his counterpart. In that world. He was doing all kinds of research studies with Gore-Tex and a bunch of other different companies. It was fascinating to watch. And I realized that, you know, this approach to life where you have a portfolio of activities, it's not just one thing like that, just seems so fulfilling to be able to do all of these different things. It seems like that's, that's key to being fulfilled. And so it's really by watching him, what I realized is He was a repressed entrepreneur. In India, I think you said doctor, lawyer, or failure.

Yeah.

So I think in India at the time it was doctor, engineer, or failure.

Correct.

And his father was an engineer and he chose doctor, but he really wanted to be an entrepreneur. So when I said, I think I was at the age of 12, hey, Dad, I want to be an entrepreneur. My mom was like, no, no, no, you should go to med school, you know, do the normal thing.

You have a good mom.

I mean, she's fairly risk-averse. My dad was like, no, let him be an entrepreneur. Like, let's see what happens. What's the worst that's going to happen here?

We'll send him back to med school, right?

Exactly.

Yeah. That's what I decided after law school. I told my mom, look, if this internet thing's a fad like you think it's going to be and I'm not a good business person or entrepreneur, look, I already went to law school. I'll take the bar now. You know, I can always go be a lawyer. I can't always be an entrepreneur and innovator in the internet in 1992. It's not available anymore.

What's funny about that, and I think only entrepreneurs watching or listening will get, will understand, in theory it's true, but in practice it's not because once you become an entrepreneur, you're dead. We're unemployable. Like, we're done.

We're worse than actors, right? You might as well just wait tables. I get it.

We're founders from here on out.

Now there, there's one aspect, as I look through your bio, that I believe superhuman about being able to build a business like you have, raise money like you have, and still keep a mindset that you have, and it's the enemy of all entrepreneurs, patience. I look at your bio and your track record and what it reams and reeks of is patience. Because when you're developing something like human, superhuman with all that potential, when you have that skills, the knowledge and desire to do and execute on it, when you have to raise so much money because you have so much potential that you need fuel in the engine to make sure you get to Mars, not just the moon. Patience sucks, right? Because you're the only one that truly knows that you can do it. You know, Bezos was the only one as he's selling books in his garage that knew he could be the richest man on Earth and make a trillion dollars. He was the only one. You're the only one that knew Superhuman And you have to put your time in to get to where you are even today, where you will be as a Bezos and some of the other greatest entrepreneurs that I know. How have you developed the counterintuitive, counter being that you are, the counter superhuman patience? Because you have to have a lot of patience to be as successful as you've been.

Absolutely. Gosh, okay. To that, I'll say two things. Number one, I think it's really important to find the business that is your call of duty. So after leaving LinkedIn, I sold my last company to LinkedIn. After leaving LinkedIn, I think everyone expected me to just jump into the next thing.

Oh, nice.

And I didn't. I took almost a year off and I was partying and I was having fun every day. And people who didn't know me that well I bought a Lamborghini. It was, it was a lot of fun, you know, retail therapy.

Retail therapy. I'm stealing that. Rahul taught me retail therapy.

A lot of people who saw me were like, is this dude ever going to work again or is he just going to like fly off the rails?

I flew off the rails, by the way, after my first exit.

I mean, everyone should. It's very important to fly off the rails.

I almost lost my wife.

Okay, maybe not that much. Do a limit.

5:30 in the morning with Lil Jon partying was too much. All right, go ahead.

Okay, well, we'll talk about that in a bit.

Yeah.

Point being, I was thinking about lots of different potential business ideas and I kept on coming back to this one. And I think there's a litmus test. You know, you've got to have 4 or 5 different business ideas. But if in the shower this one keeps on coming back and you can't put it down after 3 months, if after working on it for 3 months you're not like, oh, I'm done with this, I want to keep on working on it, then you've probably found your call of duty. And I found that with this product to the— and this is going to sound perhaps like hubris, but this is true. If I didn't start Superhuman, no one else in the world was going to. I was in the right place at the right time. I'd made a bunch of bank from selling my last company. I knew the people, I knew the VCs, I knew the engineers, I knew the domain. I, in my head, I could see the solution. I knew it would take 10 years, but I also knew that no one else could build this company. And what are we on this planet to do, right? Like, we're here to do something. And this is the thing that I uniquely can do. And that's what I mean by call of duty. I said there were two things. That's the first thing. Second thing, and I kind of already hinted at it, it really helps to bank a small exit along the path. Yes. So this was my second company and I'm like, 7, 8 years in, and I'm not going to lie, it feels like a long time. That's okay. Part of what makes it okay is I already sold a company in my mid-20s, sold like $15 million to LinkedIn. And I tell you, those first several million dollars in your bank account will buy you the patience for the next 10 years. You're not worried anymore.

I'm so glad you're honest about that. You know, when I lost— I lost over $100 million in 2008, went bankrupt. But Bob Proctor who was my mentor, who has passed away this January. And I'll never forget Bob Proctor said, I've never met someone that has a more extraordinary ability of making money, but David, you need to keep it.

Yeah.

And I want to help you have the mindset, lose the scarce energy that you have of not enough that would allow you to go through that much money. And he's— I said, what's the first thing I need to do, Bob? He said, I need to see how fast you can save $2 million. He said, if I get you to save $2 million and know that that's your basement, you'll be a whole different David Meltzer. This is the— and he said, plus, a guy like you, I don't think it's going to take you very long to get there. Other people, it's really hard because it'll take them 10 years and they're not willing to do it. You've already learned how to do it. You've got out of the gates running. You made over $100 million in your 20s. You can do this. And so within 2 weeks, I got my first $2 million and my wife wanted to spend. And I said, no, I'm at zero. She said, what do you mean? I said, Bob Proctor told me this is my new zero. And one of the things I told my wife that it bought me in retrospect was patience and security, which go hand in hand. And I really would say that it has helped me to be that middle-aged mutant turtle, superhuman, and a mutant turtle. Um, last question: where do you exit now? Because you've been through the small exit, and this is that life, passion, purpose, but it's also profitability. And I can't imagine a superhuman mind like yours stopping with superhuman. I know for me, I always build company like I'm never going to exit, but there always comes a time —when I'm ready to exit and go on to my next. Do you have any idea, as you have such great success, that number one, are you going to stick with this one forever, or is it a possibility of exiting? If so, do you have a time frame or an amount or some type of outcome?

So there's a great philosophical thinker in Silicon Valley, probably known as Val Ravikant, and he has this rule of thumb, which is Exit is always failure. It's like the most Indian dad thing you can possibly say. But in a sense, he's right.

You live two deaths when you exit. It's like an athlete, right? When they retire. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh my gosh.

But when you exit, there's two deaths in your life. You exit twice, there's three.

See, you're making it very unpalatable. So his point was, look, exit is— it's almost never your first choice. Like, even as I think of— Personally, even as I think of, you know, what's a recent big one? Dylan with Figma to Adobe, $22 billion. Was that his first choice? I mean, maybe it was enough money that it was, but I'm sure there's a part of him where he was like, this was my baby, past tense. And I know that that's— I know Adobe is saying all the right things, but it's past tense eventually. So what do you— what do we do as entrepreneurs? Look, I think the only thing we can do is, like you said, build the company, have a new baby, as if you can build a new company, but the company that you're building right now, build it as if there is no exit, right? Keep those options on the table. Don't get silly. No, don't raise half a billion dollars with no real means of paying it back. But always have in mind that there's a higher form of success than exiting, which is to build a continually growing business. And actually, maybe better than exiting is succession planning. That's something I'm starting to think about. I'm not planning to do this anytime soon, but as I enter my 7th, 8th year, it's now my responsibility as the founder, as the CEO, to say, well, okay, maybe in 3, 4, 5 years' time, we'll figure out when the right time is. Is somebody else going to be better suited to that scale of company, the thousands of employees that will be at that point running the show than I am? The answer is probably yes. And let's start having that conversation now. So it's not a weird surprise when that time comes.

That's so interesting because I've been through a few exits and been blessed in my life and also learned a lot of big lessons with some big dummy tax. But I'm building my business, a legacy business with my brand tied to it. And my youngest will go to college in 6 years. And people say, what do you want? Those 6 years because you'll have a transformation. And I said, I'm building a business and I don't know any other entrepreneur that thought about it this way, that I can step in and out of at whatever capacity daily. Meaning I want to build a business with such internal leadership, but yet flexibility that I can show up on a Tuesday and say, I'm ready to give 100%. Yep. And on Wednesday say, I'm ready to give 10%. And on Thursday say, I'm ready to give 0% for the next 2 weeks, and then come back and say, you know what, I got 3 months in me, I want another 100%. And so I'm literally in my mind for a 6-year period trying to figure out, I think, a system that no one's ever really thought of, which is a dream of most entrepreneurs to be able to hold on to their baby and be a weekend dad.

Yeah. I mean, that is the dream. If you're pulling that off, congratulations.

I'm letting my mission be known right now. And I think, I hope you're someone, as I share it, that you may at least have some sort of influence on your succession plan as well, because I see that in your heart, in your mind, in your soul. And I'm so impressed. I gotta get more people implemented on Superhuman. Consider the middle-aged mutant turtle one of your ambassadors for life. What a great solution. I don't think anything will make you more productive, accessible, and gracious in your activity you get paid for than being superhuman with your email. Make sure you check out Superhuman. Rahul, thank you so much for joining me. This is David Meltzer with Entrepreneurs: The Playbook. Thank you.

So good, man. This was fun.