How We Captured Silicon Valley in just 4 months | Crush-it Conference, Rahul Vohra

I wanted to be able to get at it really, really quickly. So it was small, it was fast, it was chaotic, it was stressful. We did it really, really quickly. And a few months later, I think it was June of last year, we launched Superhuman AI, the very first version, which lets you write with AI so you can jot down a few notes. And we'll turn it into a fully written email that's in your own voice and tone. We match all the emails you've already sent. This feature that we're now all very familiar with in basically every application that we use. That was the very first thing that we built. I really captured the hearts and minds of our user bas Silicon Valley. It was a really big deal at the time. My name is Rahul. I'm the founder and CEO of Superhuman, where we make the fastest email experience in the world. With Superhuman, you get through your inbox twice as fast as before. Reply 1 to 2 days sooner and say 4 hours or more every single week.

All right, so Rahul, we're going to be talking about productivity tools today, and you're building one. And we're going to start off with the very first question. While you were building Superhuman AI, can you share with us a little bit about when you first started? Okay, let's build this. And can you walk us through some of the steps that you took in order until it was born? What steps did you take to bring Superhuman AI to the world and kind of challenges did you face? How did you incorporate the team? As much as you could tell, that'd be super awesome.

I think we started last year in February, and believe it or not, nobody really knew anything about AI. We didn't have a machine learning engineer on staff. We'd never needed one. It just didn't turn out to be important for what we were building. We hadn't really used large language models ever. We were sort of vaguely aware. I mean, how could you not be aware of what was going on? But it was around January, February, when it became incredibly clear to me, as I think it did all of us, that it's an existential moment. And these moments don't happen particularly often in the history of startups. But it was obvious that it was existential, that everything would change, and that this is something that had to become one of the core pillars. It's like a top three priority. If you. We have three priorities. It's one of them at the company now because we didn't really have anyone on staff who knew what they were doing and we didn't have time to wait and hire for this. And also it was something that was going to be existential to the company. We actually approached it in a very different way than we do most new initiatives. And so for context, we at the time, I think around 100 people, around 110 people even. So we didn't assign this project a products manager, as you might add, a company of that size to run it. We decided that I would actually run it personally. And fortunately I just hired a president. So I was able to hand over day to day operation and management of the company to Paul, our president. And we created a small tiger team, if you will, of myself, a designer and a handful of engineers. And the idea was to essentially run it like a startup devoid of all process. We just get together regularly and build stuff. And with founder Fiat, I think a lot of what a founder has to do sometimes is in the absence of data, just say, this is what we're going to build. Trust me, I will own it if it's wrong. And if it's right, we'll move on and build the next thing. But you need to be able to short circuit the decision paralysis that can sometimes happen, especially as companies get a little bit larger and debating things becomes the way in which decisions are taken. And debating things is great. That's actually how many decisions should be taken. But for something brand new like this, I wanted to be able to get at it really, really quickly. So it was small, it was fast, it was chaotic, it was stressful. We did it really, really quickly. And a few months later, I think it was June of last year, we launched Superhuman AI, the very first version, which lets you write with AI so you can jot down a few notes. And we'll turn it into a fully written email that's in your own voice and tone. We match all the emails you've already sent. This feature that we're now all very familiar with in basically every application that we use, that was the very first thing that we built. It really captured the hearts and minds of our user base of Silicon Valley. It was a really big deal at the time. And that's an example of what we call on demand AI. Relatively easy to run, cheap to run as well, because it's only operating when people actually click the button or when they use the feature. But that gave us the confidence to move on to the next phase of AI, which we call always on AI. So you move from on demand to always on. And this is AI that is just constantly running in the background all the time. Much harder to build, much more expensive to run. And the very first example of that that we built was auto summarize. So imagine when you receive an email, a one line summary that is pre computed and always available on top of that conversation. And when new emails arrive, it instantly updates. And if you want to find out more, you just hit a shortcut. Then you can see some bullet points about the conversation. People really love that. And that then gave us the confidence to build instant reply, which is also an always on feature. Imagine waking up to an inbox where every single email already has a draft reply. You would just hit edit, then sen and sometimes you wouldn't even need to edit. And that then gave us the confidence to build the next thing. So we've been increasingly working up this confidence ladder, I would say taking on more ambitious, more expensive projects. And now I'm not an IC on that team, but for the first six months I was and it was really to kickstart it. Now it's being run like a regular project at Superhuman. Well, this is one of the great things about having a great leadership team. And as I mentioned, I just hired a president, so I was able to leave the explanation and the delegation and the authorization of this idea to Paul. So he explained to everyone what was going on. He figured out who the resourcing. I didn't really have to explain or sort of go through any difficult conversations to make this happen.

There are all these other AI agents that are coming up that doesn't just deal with email. There are these, everybody's building all these AI tools to help you answer emails, book a call book, calendars for you. And there are also other email softwares that are trying to emulate a lot of the features that have been popular in Superhuman as well. How do you see all this AI agents coming along and all this competition coming along and with the AI, how are you seeing this landscape and how do you see Superhumans sort of moving the next steps forward?

So this topic of competition has obviously come up so many times over the years at Superhuman. Every single time there's been a new email client. For example, in the early days, maybe some people in the company would panic and I would talk about it and we'd get on with building great software and delivering value to our customers. And every single time it's just come and gone and come and gone and come and gone. And Paul Graham has a good piece of advice about this, which is don't obsess over the competition. It actually doesn't really matter. Just focus on making your own customers, your own users incredibly happy. So that's what we've always done. And I think the AI wave is no different. I think the agent wave is no different. We see Superhuman as a core part of this evolution of the productivity landscape. We are working really hard towards building AI agentic future. We believe in a world where one day you will have a superhuman AI agent and you can start to see if you use the product today, the beginnings of that with features like Ask AI, you can imagine an AI that can triage your inbox on your behalf, that can schedule meetings on your behalf, that can write and one day even send fully written emails on your behalf. An AI agent that can work not just on tasks, but complex problems, break them down into sub problems and work on them in parallel or in that can resolve ambiguity, ask you clarifying questions, go off and research things, interrogate internal systems, APIs or even other agents. And I think that world isn't tomorrow's world. Obviously I've just described a lot, but over the next year or two, we will actually get that in some places faster than in others. That is what we're building towards.

So let's get into some other questions, which is about building a productivity software, Superhuman. When people say they love productivity tools, there are many. But then when it comes to paying for productivity tools, I feel that people shy away from it. Oh yeah, I love productivity and, oh, it's paid and you kind of don't use it. But for Superhuman, from the very early on, you've had people line up to use your very first product. What do you think makes that difference about a product that people, people are willing to pay for for that productivity? What edge did you have at the very beginning that made it successful for you?

And in terms of why folks have and are and will continue to be willing to pay, let's actually think about who are the people who send and receive a ton of email. Who are the people who do email for a living? So founders, CEOs, obviously most people in this room, if you're not already doing email for a living, as your companies grow, you soon will be. But it goes much deeper than that. It's also account executives, account managers, customer success, business talent recruiting, business owners, realtors, leaders and managers of every kind that you can imagine, they all do email for a living. And a core part of their jobs actually is to be responsive. Because if they're not responsive, then they can block their team, miss opportunities, or in the worst case, even damage their own reputations. So there's both a carrot and a stick there. There's the danger of doing email poorly, which sadly, most people do. And then there's also the benefit of doing it really, really well because it's core to the job. That's why people are willing to pay. So we define productivity. I think most companies start with, and we certainly started this way with the time that we're saving people. And there's two ways to do that. First of all, you can measure it directly. You can measure how long it takes to do a certain activity inside of Superhuman versus, for example, how long it takes to do those activities in Gmail or Outlook. Measure how many of those activities people do, multiply it all out and you'll get kind of bottoms up measure. But you can also do it top down as well. And we do both top down. You would actually survey your users. At Superhuman, we're pretty famous for our product market fit engine, which is a complet different kind of survey that is designed to get you to product market fit. As part of that, we actually ask people, how much time are we saving you? And we get responses back so we can triangulate time saved, both bottoms up and top down. And that's how we get to that four hours or more every single week answer. But that's just the beginning. There's lots of other things that you care about when you're measuring email productivity. So one example is how much email you actually get through. One of the things that's kind of unique about being a founder or one of these high email roles is there is an infinite number of emails to answer. I mean, you may actually be able to get through all of them. So for some of us, inbox zero, at least in total over the entirety of the inbox, may actually just be impossible. So how do we start to measure productivity? Another way of doing it is the rates at which you respond to emails. So let's say you work for an hour. Are you responding to 10, 50, 100, 200 or more? And with Superhuman, what we're able to show is that people in the same amount of Time respond to 2.4x 2.4 times the number of emails they would compare to in Gmail. So that's the second metric. The third would be how rapidly you're responding to emails. So folks may have seen this interview with Sam Altman back when he was the president of Y Combinator. He noticed that there is a big difference between excellent founders and bad founders in terms of how they respond to emails. And he defined excellent Founders as those that went on to build billion dollar companies. Bad founders as those whose companies eventually went on to fail. Unfortunately, and obviously, as you would expect the bad founders days or weeks to respond to an email, good founders, they responded within minutes, literal minutes. The billion dollar company founders that you know today with the product than without the product.

Can you tell us a bit more about how you view email as not just a communication tool, but something more?

If you do, we think it's not just communication, we think it's also fundamentally a collaboration tool and we believe that so much we actually reimagined the entire email experience to be multiplayer. So now inside of Superhuman, what you can do is you can take any email and you can share a live view of that email with your team. You no longer have to repeatedly forward or BTC or take screenshots. And as new emails arrive on that conversation, your team can see what those new emails are. Even if they're not an email recipient directly, they can see that either in Superhuman or they can go to a webpage and then you and your team comment directly on those emails. And those comments aren't email objects, there's no risk that they leak, they're stored entirely separately and you can have a safe conversation about whatever it is you're trying to do. So we believe in this collaborative future of email so much that we actually rethought the entire experience to build these features and it was a huge lift. I mean, it took us well over a year to do so, but that's the kind of thing we've been building.

Can you talk a bit more about what change it has been for you to build email as a collaboration tool and offer it to teams on what's so different about it and what makes it better for your company too?

Just over the course of the last year have scaled from relatively small and mid market startups to teams of several thousand, which is really exciting to see. And that kind of revenue ramps really quickly. Why I would have gone multiplayer sooner is it's much easier to build a strong business when you're selling to teams. When you sell to an individual, it's a double edged sword. The good news is that you only need to convince one person to adopt the tool and that means you can tell a very clear and coherent story about, hey, you do a lot of email, you're the founder, you're the CEO or you're the salesperson. Imagine being able to do it twice as fast or respond more quickly or being able to work more deals or close deals faster. It lets you tell a very clear and pointed, pointed story. However, ultimately it's harder for that person to stick around because at some point someone else may come along and tell an equally clear and as pointed story. And in general, there have been very, very few companies in software that have scaled to be extremely large off the back of single player subscriptions alone. And we could probably name them right here. They're companies like Spotify and Netflix and trying to think what else it might be. Very, very few that have scaled to truly billion dollar single player subscription companies. And the things that make those companies feasible is that they can credibly and reliably, year after year, add tens if not hundreds of millions of new subscribers to the top of the funnel every single year. Because if you look at the retention numbers, they're only retaining 50 to 60% of those subscribers at the end of any given year. And when they stop being able to do that, they just have to start raising prices. And this is what Netflix does and turns out not to be a particularly great business in the very long haul unless you can continuously add those users. So if you're building a subscription business, it is much more robust to build something that you can sell to teams. It's harder in other ways because now you have to convince a team of people to adopt it. But once a team of people does adopt it, it is so much stickier, it is so much harder for them to churn out and to use something else. And at that point you're able to get to what a lot of investors call negative churn. This is when, yes, you're going to lose some seats in a company or even in a cohort of companies, but the seats that you acquire during that period in that same cohort of companies will move and offset those seats that you lose, such that any particular cohort is going to be expanding over time in terms of revenue, even if certain accounts perhaps churn out to zero. And that is actually what most SaaS B2B businesses do. They grow off the back of negative churn off those cohorts expanding. So we did the long hard grind of building it single player first, of making it work with Gmail, with Office 365, on iPhone, on Android, on Mac, on Windows and web. And that took many, many, many years. We did that and made it something that individuals actually wanted to use before finally coming back and making it truly multiplayer. Over the course of the last year, I didn't want to build an email client that your boss forces you to use. I wanted to build a piece of software that you genuinely, really fell in love with and that you wanted to use.

All right, well, thank you, everyone. Thank you, Robin, for the amazing talk. Let's give him a round of applause.