00:07:22 · Rahul Vohra
[00:07:22] S7: 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. If you wanna 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 and then send, 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, 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.
00:08:49 · Hannah Lee
[00:08:49] S8: 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 with Superhuman as well. How do you see all these 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 Superhuman sort of moving the next steps forward?
00:09:21 · Rahul Vohra
[00:09:21] S7: 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, you know, 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 I think the 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 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. But that is what we're building towards.
00:10:52 · Hannah Lee, S0, S1, S9
[00:10:52] S8: 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 are willing to pay for for that productivity? What edge did you have at the very beginning and that made it successful for you? Ad[00:11:23] S0: This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. They can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks, Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, compatibility, availability varies 18 plus. Ad[00:11:49] S1: How do you guarantee your Jagermeister is always ice cold? Well, you could move to Antarctica. Sure, frostbite is a thing. Your dating apps won't let you set your radius to 3,000 miles. And your neighbor is an emperor penguin who honks outside your igloo. Or you could just keep your Jagermeister in the freezer. Ad[00:12:06] S9: Drink it cold or don't drink
00:12:06 · S9, S1, S2, S3, S5, S6
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00:13:03 · Rahul Vohra
[00:13:03] S7: 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 accounts executives, account managers, customer success, business development, talent, recruiting, business owners, realtors, leaders, managers of every kind that you can imagine. They all do email for a living. And a clear 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 clear to the job, that's why people are willing to pay. So how do 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... That 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 products market fit engine, which is a completely different kind of survey that is designed to get you to products 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 save both bottoms up and top down, and that's how we get to that four hours or more every single week answered. 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.