This Week in Startups - Superhuman 2.0: The AI edge, top productivity hacks, and the future of email | E2002

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… NetSuite. The number one cloud financial system that unifies accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into a single platform. Giving you ONE source of truth. Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning today! Visit https://www.netsuite.com/twist Lemon.io - Hire pre-vetted remote developers, get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://lemon.io/twist AssemblyAI. Get maximum value from voice data with AssemblyAI. Build powerful products and features for your end users on the industry’s leading speech-to-text models. Get 100 free hours to start building at https://www.assemblyai.com/twist * Todays show: Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra joins Jason to discuss the evolution of Superhuman. They delve into Superhuman's onboarding strategy (11:17), live demos of Superhuman's AI features (27:37), explore AI's impact on team management (52:07), and more! * Timestamps: (0:00) Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra joins Jason (2:02) Rahul Vohra's background and Superhuman's pitch (6:33) Evolution and early challenges of Superhuman (9:59) NetSuite - Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning today! Visit https://netsuite.com/twist (11:17) Superhuman's onboarding strategy and customer feedback importance (20:55) New features in Superhuman 2.0 and multiplayer email (26:00) AI's impact on podcast production (26:16) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (27:37) Live demo of Superhuman 2.0 (38:38) AssemblyAI - Get 100 free hours to start building at https://www.assemblyai.com/twist (40:08) Importance of documenting conversations and Superhuman for Sales (44:17) Live demo of Superhuman's “Ask AI” feature (52:07) AI's impact on productivity and team management (58:27) AI tools for productivity (1:07:26) AI's future as a chief of staff and email management * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Follow Rahul: X: https://x.com/rahulvohra LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulvohra Check out: https://superhuman.com * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (9:59) NetSuite - Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning today! Visit https://netsuite.com/twist (26:16) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (38:38) AssemblyAI - Get 100 free hours to start building at https://www.assemblyai.com/twist * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

I'm just going to go ahead and hit question mark, and I'm going to say, find me the top 10 most positive customer responses to the S-A-I launch. Make sure each one is at least two sentences. Think about the craziness at this point. It's going through millions of emails I've received over the last year. It's synthesizing information. This is true needle in a haystack combination information synthesis stuff. All I now have to do is hit copy, come here, hit paste.

The formatting's perfect. It is done. It is done. This week in startups is brought to you by NetSuite. The number one cloud financial system that unifies accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into a single platform, giving you one source of truth. Download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning today. Visit netsuite.com slash twist. Lemon.io.

Hire pre-vetted remote developers. Get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io slash twist. And assembly AI. Get maximum value from voice data with assembly AI. Build powerful products and features for your end users on the industry's speeding speech to text models. Get 100 free hours to start building at assemblyaI.com slash twist. Hey, everybody.

Welcome back to this week in startups. One of the great joys of my life, having been an angel investor and now a seed investor, is that I get to meet entrepreneurs at the start of their careers. And one of the great entrepreneurs I've been lucky enough to work with over two startups is Raul Vora. He started a company called Reportive. and I was a fan of this little toolbar that helped people using their Gmail figure out who's emailing them by clicking on a link

and seeing their Twitter and their LinkedIn profiles. Easy Peasy Limits Squeezy was the simplest, most elegant piece of software I had used at the time. But man, was it a time saver and it grew like a wildfire? Was sold to LinkedIn? And I told my pal, Raul, I'm absolutely in favor of you selling this. I think maybe he wanted to keep going. His founders didn't. A lot of stories there.

I say, just promise me when you leave LinkedIn, I get to be the first investor in your next startup. And I think I'm one of the first. I don't think he's, it's a little controversial because there's another super fan of Raoul's who also likes to be considered the first and he's a friend of mine, Darmesh from HubSpot. Welcome back to this week in startups, Roe Ovorah from Superhuman. How are you doing, pal? Doing great. Excited to be back. I think this is my third time. Third time on the show. When you hit five, we give you.

a jacket. But people don't know that you've also done at least, I don't know, five or ten times for me talks with our founders. And we're also very thankful for that. The reason I wanted to have on the pod is, you know, I'm a super fan of Superhuman, which is an email product that you pitched to me on a Sunday at my house over bagels. And I always recount the story to people to, you know, when I talk about Uber and Robin Hood and Com amongst, you know, the greatest hits we've had, and I think Superhuman will be right there with it in terms of returns for RLPs, but also in terms of just greatness of a product, your pitch made no sense. And when a pitch makes no sense, that's when I get excited.

When I'm confused after having invested in 400 companies and taken 10,000 founders, I know there's something there. Do you remember the original pitch and that Sunday? I probably said something along lines of, Jason, I'm going to build the fastest email experience in the world, and then we're going to charge people $30 a month for it. And you probably did a spit take with your bagel and were like, Rahul, that's not going to work. No one's going to pay for this thing that historically has been free.

And I probably said something brash along the lines of Jason, trust me, they will. Yeah. And it was exactly like that. And the heat check I gave you was, okay, so you want to take on Gmail, which is free. and you want to make it faster than the company who makes Gmail, Google, which has an obsession with speed and the largest at that time,

computer network in the world, and the largest number of engineers focused on speed in the world, and you think you can beat them. And you were like, yeah. And then you explained to me what, and it was a really good explanation, which is Gmail is servicing billions of users.

They need to build it to the average user. And because it's free, like, they're not going to, you know, hemorrhage money making it faster, and that you only needed to get 1% of email users who care about, and this is where ideal customer profile comes in, you know, for anybody, like Darmesh from HubSpot, who I think just recently tweeted a, you know,

a great testimonial of superhuman, anybody who's in their email box from more than an hour or two a day, which would be a power user, which is probably the top 10% of users, and whose time is worth more, worth a lot of money on a per hour basis, would pay any amount of money to get through that goddamn inbox faster.

That was the key insight. And that's why a dollar a day is farcical to a CEO, a management team, anybody making over $100,000 a year, a dollar a day is nothing. If they can gain back but 10 minutes per day, and that's when I fell in love with your concept, But when you deployed that concept into the real world and you had this concept about the Ido customer profile, and we'll talk about Superhuman 2.0 and all these new features powered by AI.

But I just want to go back in history, when you brought it to market, what did you learn? And how did your vision manifest itself when it faced the reality of users? Yeah. Gosh, well, that's kind of quite an evolution. I think like most founders, I started with a gut sense that something was wrong with Gmail. And I lived it myself. I mean, you mentioned Reportive at the top of the show. I was a CEO back then before I was selling the company to LinkedIn.

And I remember managing my email with Reportive, but also with Boomerang, with other similar browser extensions that we had at the time. And bizarrely, Gmail was just getting worse every single year. It was becoming slower, more cluttered. It still wasn't working properly offline. It turns out that at the time, this is probably still the case, that Gmail inside of Chrome was the single biggest reason you're lap. top would run out of battery. It's so energy inefficient. And on top of this, people were installing plugins. And I thought, how ridiculous, but also in a weird way, how fortuitous we'd created the perfect conditions to go and build an even bigger company. That's because reported was the first

Gmail extension to scale to millions of users. Before then, it was insane. I mean, nowadays we take it for granted, with Grammally and Honey, two major browser extension success stories. But back then, this is 2010, no one believed you could build a business with a browser extension. So we showed people that you put, and there were lots of products, and the whole ecosystem was falling apart. So I thought to myself, okay, there has to be a better way. What would email look like if it was, in a sense, vertically integrated, like if Apple were to build it? If you didn't have to add a bunch of browser extensions, if it was blazingly fast, searches were instantaneous, everything happened immediately and if all of that just worked offline. So that was the original idea for

superhuman and it was really a gut sense that I had. But then I did something that I think too few founders do, which I know you'll appreciate. In that first year, I spoke to about 700 people. That's roughly two per day. And you might think, well, that's kind of a lot. How did you do that efficiently? Actually very easily. I put up superhuman.com. It sucked like a bit of blur, really not great design, whatever, just stating the vision. and whenever anybody emailed in, they got an automated response back from me. Now, it didn't look automatic,

but it went something along the lines of, thank you for signing up, we're busy building the best email experience we can possibly imagine. Two questions. What do you use for email today? And what do you hate about it? Two very powerful questions.

I think you can use this for any product, any service, any market. And invariably, people would get back and say, I use Gmail, some of them were using third-party products, but they would all say email takes too long. And when I would dig in, they'd be like, it takes too long, it's too slow, I'm frustrated, I don't like how long I spend in it.

So there was like this mix of ideas here. At the same time, I read this amazing book, I think it's called Positioning the Battle for your Mind. And I realized that because this is a market dominated by incumbents, I needed to find a positioning that everyone would remember. It might be weird, it might be cookie, but speed is something that everybody can remember. And that was the first time where I was like, okay, there might be something here.

And then finally, I knew we had it when I did the cocktail party test. You may have heard of this Ed Sim, a dear friend of ours at both start, shared the name with me. The idea is go to a cocktail party, kind of look, watch people pitching your product to other people, and see what they say. and time after time again, I'd hear people, founders and managers, but also salespeople and folks in BD and whatnot, say, superhuman, it's really fucking fast. And at that point, I knew I had it. It'd become like this viral idea. It was so easy to remember, so hard to dislodge, so easy to own, because no other product was owning that space, that we just ran straight after it. Okay, are you worried that your startup is the only company out there that's not building with AI

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your customers, head to assemblyaI.com slash twist and get 100 hours for free and join over 200,000 developers who are building amazing apps with voice data. Go to assemblyaI.com slash twist today. It is amazing how this focus on a certain set of users, not all users, but a certain set of users can unlock features that maybe the masses just don't care about and are unwilling to pay for, but that a certain group of people covet. And so, you know, when you get the product out there, it's gorgeous. I think two things, you know, led me to believe that this would be a fantastic investment. And in fact, the fund you're in, I think we invested $500,000. The biggest bet we had made to date in that fund, this was a $10 million fund. And you have your own fund and you understand like when you have a $10 million fund, like 5% of the fund going into one startup is a big bet.

And, you know, I just, two things occurred to me, you know, watching your story over the years. One, people have copied your design and your concept. So I have been pitched. no less than 50 times on we're superhuman for calendar, superhuman for CRM, superhuman for Slack, whatever it is. And it's actually what they mean by that when you say superhuman for

in a human's mind, what that means is, or in our industry, it's going to be elegant, powerful, and for power users. It's actually like an aesthetic now, which I think is like a very big,

compliment. Now, that alone doesn't mean you're going to be successful, but it does mean something that the founding community is so enamored by what you built. The second piece that I thought is very interesting is when I talk to founders. And again, we have 20,000 people apply for funding from launch now, and we do 100 per year. So since we invested in you 10 years ago or so, I don't know, maybe nine years ago, I think it was like, yeah, 2015 or something. 2015, yeah. Yeah. You know, since then, many folks have come to us and said, I say, okay, yeah, you know, what's your go-to-market tragedy?

They say, oh, we're going to do super, we're going to superhuman. And we're just going to do what superhuman does. We're going to do what Raoul does, his playbook. And what they mean by that is, we're only going to onboard people with a 30-minute interview. So let's pause there and talk about that innovation. How did you come up with that? And then how have you altered, evolved, or not that strategy? And founders who are listening, this is a super profound one.

Right. So this was way back when, I believe we started onboarding people in 20, let me see, I get this right, probably the end of 2017, maybe the end of 2018, more likely 17. In fact, I think the very first paying customer might be our good friend of both of us, Austin, Peter Smith. He was, yes. Austin Smith, now Peter Smith, was your first interview, correct? Yeah, yeah.

So why did we do it in person? Okay. There is this rule of thumb. And I read this first in a really great book, Traction by Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mez, where they say that as a startup, you should aim to spend roughly 50% of your resources on product, but 50% of your resources on growth. And I think in general that's pretty good advice. because most founders forget the latter, and they just obsess about product all day long.

However, the size of the problem that we were taking on was too large to do that. Today, it's relatively easy for us to hire excellent engineers. We have a phenomenal team. But back then, in the sort of 2014-2017 era, I mean, Jason, it was tough. People were like, wait, you're building what? Okay, you have all these great investors, but you're building what? That kind of doesn't make sense. There was some skepticism, as one might expect.

So it was difficult to build a large engineering team, and in any case, we didn't want to spend too much money. I therefore always have to choose for each marginal engineering hour, do I put that into making the product better and into unlocking products market fits more, or do I put that into things like activation and building a first-time user experience? And I just remember thinking to myself, well, what if the product is wrong? What if we have to change something? Every engineering hour we spend on growth, we're not spending. on products and boy do we have a lot of product to build. Now, of course, this was a pretty Zerpy era, so it was relatively easy to raise dollars, but it was hard to get engineering hours. What does a good entrepreneur do?

They spot an arbitrage. And I was like, okay, I'm going to raise dollars, going to hire an onboarding team, and I'm going to put the meager engineering hours I have into improving the product. What we're going to do is we're going to substitute the software onboarding with a human onboarding. So that's where the idea initially came out of. Now, when we started doing it, of course, we look at the metrics, we are not data driven, but we're data-informed, and we were looking at things like bug rate and virality and net promoters score and the product market fitz score, which I've spoken about a lot. And all of those were through the route. And initially

I was like, okay, is it just because I'm doing the onboarding or is it because my brother then head of growth car was doing the onboarding? Or is it because the onboarders are super charismatic and we started disproving these negative theories one by one until we were just like, wow, the onboarding really does work. Now, the other aspect of why founders might want to consider this, perhaps the most important aspect, is you get rid of the tire kickers, especially if your product is something like superhuman where, you know, it's designed to make you more productive, it's designed to save you time. There's a very real ROI. Most of our customers say four hours or more every single week.

They're applying to emails 12 hours sooner. They're getting through their inbox price is fast. What you don't want are people who don't value that thing. And it's very, very easy with email to just get like tens of thousands of people signing up. Because everybody has an email address. So the pool of potential customers is everybody. But the ideal customer profile is somebody who is going to learn the product who knows quick keys and who's going to leverage it. And if you're a casual email user, you know, my mom uses email, she gets a couple a day. She's not taking the time in all likelihood to learn the quick keys. Once you're getting 100 emails a day, you're learning the quick keys.

You want to get through stuff fast. And this was, I think, you know, a very big unlock for me in evaluating products as an investor, which is like, who is this for exactly? And does the founder understand who their actual customer is? And I think this was just such a great unlock for you in terms of your career trajectory. Again, you know, we are so lucky to have invested in some great founders across two companies. I was the first investor in Thumbtack and I'm the first investor in Athena. Like, wow.

First investor in LinkedIn. I'm sorry, purportive. First, I'm going to say I'm first, but I know Darmesh going to get upset. but, you know, amongst the first, in the first group that got into a superhuman. And what the founder learns across companies is so critical. Reportive was, you know, ostensibly for everybody, but the people who actually got value from it were salespeople or executives or hiring people. Like those two or three people who are going to look up the LinkedIn, look up the Twitter handle of 100% of people who email them, right? Like, that's not everybody, am I correct?

I'll share something that's going to blow your mind. And we should have sold this company for a lot more. It's been so long. I don't think anyone will care. It turns out... Which is what I told you. I was so heartbroken. I tell everybody when you made me four times my money or five times my money,

it was the worst day. Well, okay. It was a precarious situation as the classic example of, you know, leaning on one API, which could go away at any point in time. We had 10% of... of LinkedIn's daily active users on reported. Imagine that. A billion dollar company that had just gone,

multi-billion dollar company that had just gone public, we had 10% of their daily active users, and I had no idea. It's crazy. Here's the thing. People tell me also, like, I sold Weblogs, Inc, which we sold for $30 million, 18, 20 months after we started.

Oh my God, you're an idiot. You sold it to her earlier. People don't remember. The industry was very different. At that time, 20 years, maybe, yeah, almost 20 years ago when we sold, which was, you know, there was no such thing as secondary. I was negative $20,000 when Brian Alvey and I sold and Ryan and Peter from Engadgett,

like when we sold that company. Like, I was broke, broke. There was no secondary opportunity. When you sold, you know, this idea that like, there was a sword that's going to come down on your head and just kill the business because an API is going to go, bink. And then there's, it's not like you had a war chest like you do now. and the reputation so and you had co-founders

you know people want to get off the train you know so many different things but that's such a great it's such a great fire it's such a great regret to put in a founder's head because then when you do the next one you're like you know what this time we're going for gold we're not taking the bronze we're not taking a silver

we're going to go for the gold now if we happen to go for the gold that hits silver bronze it's not the end of the world but you know and back in that day you know sometimes somebody who offers you a bronze metal, a silver medal, and you're like, I got to take it for my family, et cetera. Let's talk about Superhuman 2.0. You've been at this for a long time. People don't know the numbers I do, but let's just say this is a significant business now. It's got real revenue, real customer base, and there were a couple of things I kept hounding you on, and you are

methodical. I'm not going to say slow, but methodical in releasing products. So you really try to get it right the first time. I very much appreciate you. appreciate that. But I was just like, I need multiplayer mode. I need team snippets. I'm like, gosh, almighty, you know, I got these, you know, people on my team. I'm writing snippets for people don't know. I have to send the same email over and over and over again, which is, thanks for emailing me. We don't take pitches from the podcast. Thanks for emailing me. I wish you great success in your startup. However, we don't invest in your category. We wish you tremendous success. Here's some resources for you. And then I need to give those snippets and I want crystal clear

communication from our organization as it grew to 21 people that they use the same language because, you know, you don't want to say things. You want to say things consistently. So I really need to group snippets. And then I was like, you know, I'm taking screenshots of superhuman, putting it into Slack and having conversations around threads. And then some person on my team responds, I literally just had this happen. Somebody responded and said, hey, you know, I think think this founder has ugly baby syndrome. Oh, gosh. I mean, this happened to me this month, bro.

And I was like, left the founder on the CC list. And, you know, I really like this founder. Oh, my God. They were referring to ugly. And I was like, this is like, this is literally a researcher in their first year. And by ugly baby, he meant his product. Right. And so I get it still.

I had asked like one question or two questions that were, you know, a little challenging on the call, hey, how do you think about this? How do you think about the design? You know, and then this researcher works for me in year one. And I'm like, do I have to fire this guy or not? And he was so smart of my researcher. He called the founder on the phone. He said, I'm probably going to get five percent email. I just want to let you. I'm incredibly sorry. That was a terrible way to phrase it. I know that it's year one for your startup. I respect you. And I know that design was maybe something you're working. So he smoothed it over with the founder. And then it got to me. And he's I just need

know I called the final room. But this could have easily been avoided had this person been on superhuman who had not yet installed it or not yet used it and that might have been on my team's fault with the new features. So can we go over those multiplayer mode features and then the AI

features and just talk about how you think about launching new features? Absolutely. And I'll do the craziest of things and I'll attempt to live demo. Let's hope. Open AI and

fly, fireworks this after we don't go down. Yeah, so we, you know, it's funny. I was actually just looking at the notes for the first time I was on the pod. This was October 23, 2018. It's kind of insane. And you asked me, what does the future of email look like? And I said three things.

Well, I said a lot of things, but including you'll see a lot more AI and machine learning. You'll see your emails automatically written for you. I'm reading this out now. Number two, you'll see a lot more tooling around collaboration, multiplayer shared conversations, assignment, shared draft, and so on. And number three, you'll see emails themselves get shorter and shorter email clients will themselves turn into messaging apps. That was 2018. And so I had this very happy moment this morning when I was preparing for this call where I was like, oh, wow, that was true. It took a while, but like, that's actually what's happening right now, which is kind of cool.

Okay. I mean, it is. Did you run it through, did you run that episode through an AI to get the summary? but you just listen to it. No, no. As you know, I fastidiously prepare for everything. So I was just looking at the notes from how many years ago that was. It's really interesting.

You know, Claude does a really nice job with summarizing, I think, YouTube videos or videos. So I've gotten my, you just start thinking about the power of AI. One of the great powers of AI, if you look at podcast production, we have a company we invested in podcast AI. And the founder, Edward, reminds me a lot of you because he's customer obsessed. He figured out a way to. not only like do transcripts, which is kind of table stakes now, but it understands the context of the conversation and then writes show notes for us

of like all the moments in the show. And then you can highlight it and make a clip and make an audio or video clip, put that all aside. He then was like, you know what would be good for us to know what's happening in the news and then write a docket, which is, you know, what I call our, you know, our prepared document for what we're going to talk about. If you could actually have it, tell it what sources of news, cover, you know, if you're a biotech company, here's a 10 biotex, and it actually suggested

stories and made the docket. Essentially, AI is taking what producers do in podcasting and basically starting them on second base, maybe even third base, so you just have to run home, steal home. And it just means either you can make better production or lower your cost by having less. So it's really actually happening in text, audio, and knowledge work. It's actually happening now. Right now, startups have to do more with less. We all know that.

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So yeah, let's do the live demo. I love a good demo. Let's have a back and forth discussion here. A show don't tell. one of my favorite rules of podcasting. If you can't, if you're listening right now, go to YouTube.com and just search for this weekend startups and you can find the video. Or you spot-by, which has video.

The context here is we had a major inflection over the course of the last year. And as you know, as an investor, we are being pulled upmarket into the enterprise. We recently closed a very large tier one strategy consulting firm. I can't say which one. our largest deployments have grown from small startups to teams of several thousand and we're now serving industries that go well beyond just technology which is the largest number of users or ballpark users with one installation one domain name you know as it were one organization have you gotten past a thousand in anybody yeah in the region of two to three thousand oh i had no idea that's so extraordinary to be that far up i didn't i thought you were going to be sub one thousand for wow that's great we were just until a few months ago, but over the last year, enterprises really just started clicking, and we've more than doubled the rate at which we welcome these new users. Now, as we grew and as we've grown to

serve these larger companies, we noticed this fundamental problem with email, the one that you just outlined, which is that basically every other piece of software that we use, think Slack, Figma, notion, loom, that's now all collaborative by default. And even though more people use email than any other tool. For folks who don't know, a billion professionals use email for three hours every single day. Email is not yet collaborative. And the problem is so ingrained that we take it for granted. So, for example, if you want to share that email with your team, you could have a meeting, but your team probably isn't free. You could paste a screenshot into Slack or Microsoft Teams, but now the conversation is in two separate places, and you put forward or BCC, but now you have to remember

to do that for every single email that you send or receive, and there's always the risk that somebody does what your analyst did and says something regrettable externally. So what do we do? Well, three things. We imagined the core email experience to be multiplied by default. Number one, you can now share a live view of any email conversation with your team. There's no need to ask for meetings. There's no need to pay screenshots. There's no need to repeatedly forward in BCC. Number two, your team can then follow along either in superhuman or via a link. They don't even need to be using superhuman. I'll share an example of this with you in a minute. And number three, you and your team can then comment directly on the conversation,

and there's no risk that those conversations actually leak. Let's take a look. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Okay, so here we are, Ravato plus Superhuman for sales, and you're having a conversation here. I see that. And I love this new feature, by the way.

Under the subject line, there is a little summary in bullet points. This, I didn't know you were going to do this, but this has saved me when I have to catch up on some crazy thread. And here, in the summary, it says Sahel and Superhuman discuss podcast details and scheduling. Sao Hill offers 20% discount on sponsorship, superhuman requests further reeducation, reduction, superhuman science and return sponsorship paperwork, podcast recording set for 723 10 a.m. Sao requests expedited paperwork return.

And it has a thumbs up, thumbs down. These summaries are pretty accurate, huh? Super accurate. And I love these. And you'll notice that I'm just going to quickly scroll up and down. this is a long ass email. There is a lot going on here. About 20 emails back and forth.

Yeah. Imagine you suddenly got added to this and boom, that's all you need to know. So genius. Should point out, we love Sahel. I checked with him this morning. I have his full permission and his blessing to share this. If you haven't seen Provado, they're an amazing community of salespeople. Go check them out.

We recently launched Superhuman for sales. Let me just show you what that is. It's a version of Superhuman that is designed for sales. salespeople. It does all kinds of incredible things. And we need to design. Do I have to pay extra for that? Or is it just included in my dollar a month? It is let's, we also just launched new pricing plans. So if you're paying monthly, it's $40 a month. This comes with super human for sales. Yearly, it's still very similar to $3 a month. So $400 a year. And if I save one hour per person per month on an average salary, you know, that would be $40 an hour times $2,000 a year,

80,000. So anybody making above $80,000 a year who saves one hour, your break even already. And less mistakes, costly mistakes. So, you know, on a team of $20, $400 a year, you start doing the math, $8,000. No brain for our organization, but, you know, you have to do your own back of the envelope math for your organization. Or what many of our customers do is we help you do the math, right? Like, it is a very classic motion. What will come in will help you figure out the ROI calculation. Most customers are actually saving four hours per user per week or more. So the ROI of buying Superhuman is well north of 20x per year. Okay, back to this example. We had to come up with a go-to-market for Superhuman for sales. I thought a bravado as an

amazing community that we could advertise to, Swiping Sahil, and we start to get the conversation going. Now, this is just between me and Sayon, or Say, who is our head of marketing. We've got some back and forth going on here. And you can see here, he's like, okay, we have 80,000 people, which plenty of VP, CROs, 300,000 account executives, like such a great opportunity. And he says, $50,000. Okay, now it's the time where we have to have the conversation internally. What you might do historically at this point is paste it into Slack.

That's what I would do. Now, no one else can, yeah, which has its problems, right? Like people can't see previous emails, they won't be able to see future emails, the conversation is now in two separate places, or what many organizations do is they start repeatedly forwarding and BCC. But what we do here is Say starts sharing the thread, this shares all the previous emails and all future emails with the people he is going to share it with. He says, is this something you'd be up for?

It seems like a good idea. It's going to drive MQL. and he adds my EA, Megan, he adds the head of products marketing for Superman for sales, Spencer, and the head of products management for Superman for sales, Chris, which is amazing, because they now get to see not only all the previous emails, as opposed to one weird, forwarded, reverse chronological mail, but also all future emails as well. Sahill bless his heart then pings, because, you know, we sort of sat on this for two days, we buy some more time, and now we start having an internal conversation about scheduling.

It's like, okay, you know, Rahal's going to be pretty busy, he's going to be out of country. I opine, I'm like, look, this is the first time I'm talking about this. Let's get this really, really great. How are we thinking about ROI? How are we thinking about timing? Should we do one big launch? Or should we do two multiple launches? Spencer

recommends we do it. I'm still pushing on the ROI. So, Hill's like, yo, what's going on? Let's get this done. So there's like these two parallel conversations here. There's the internal conversation. There's the external one. It's really nice on a design basis, for those of you not, watching is, it visually looks different. The email looks like one thread. And then the square boxes, although I'd like to see them with a little

background color maybe, like if you tinted them a little yellow or something. I don't, you know, this is a very 1.0 product here. But even for me visually, I'm so concerned. It's like this little fear going on is there's two threads and never the two shall meet because we might say something like, hey, this founder just doesn't seem driven enough or whatever. If somebody says, hey, I don't think this founder is going to figure it out, or I don't think they can compete with, you know, superhuman or something. Oh, my God, this could be a disaster. So how do you think about the design there when you were designing this?

It was exactly that. This is a different, I know not everyone can see, but the comments are a different width to the emails. They look very different. And that is to drive home the point that, unfortunately, the very honest mistake that your analyst made is not going to be made again. Happens every day.

Happens every day. It's so embarrassing and people shouldn't, we should not be let down by our software in that way. So that was a core part behind this. And you can see here, there's a very happy ending. We get the schedule. We get the discounts or we get it done. It then turns into a classic scheduling email.

We want to spare our good friend, Sahil, all of the nonsense with my out of office and going to Europe and back and forth. And it just gets done. And this is something that now is in the hands of our customers. We're getting feedback like we're closing deals that we want to close before. We're closing deals faster than we've closed them before. Everyone is way more comfortable. And here's something really cool.

You don't even have to be in superhuman. So I could click up here or I hit Command S. This is the share conversation dialogue. I'm just going to hit Copylink. And then come over to a text message that Jason, this is our text message back and called. I'm just going to text this to you. You can now tap this on your phone if you were so inclined. and you would get that whole full conversation.

You'd see what are emails, see what a comments. You could then input on the conversation. Yeah. And that would then appear here. And if I'm not on your team, it would not do it. So if somebody got that URL and they're not part of the team space doesn't work, right? No, it actually does. So this is designed for the use case where you maybe want to collaborate with your first investor like yourself,

or you want to collaborate with a vendor or you want to collaborate with a vendor or you want to collaborate. break with your PR agency or whatever it may be. And then in the future, we're going to be building controls on turning off those links, turning on those links and so on. Got it. Yeah. That's, you know, it's kind of like when you share a document in Google Docs, you could make a public link, you could make an organization link, et cetera.

I do think, just to punch up here, so investor giving unsolicited feedback, you can throw it in the garbage. Making it a different font or slightly different background color would make this. really interesting. And then the next piece I'm trying to figure out, and I'm sure you have this on the roadmap, is I want to be able to pull up all the internal conversation. So I have an inbox, but I want an internal inbox, which would be just show me all the threads that are going on in the organization, you know, outside of my inbox.

Does that make sense? I don't know what it does. We actually, we do have something very close to that already. Oh, okay. you want to do is hit command K split inbox settings and you can go here. The split, I've got loads as you can see here. The one that you want is team. So go ahead and turn on team.

That'll be from launch.com to me or whatever URL you're using it on. And it's not all the email internally because that turns out to be way too much, but it's all the email internally addressed to you, which as a leader you want to respond to very quickly because ultimately we're the folks who hold our organizations back when we don't reply quickly. So it's tough to us to reply fast. All right, what is the future whole for your business? If you ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers.

Full market, bearer market, rates are going to rise, rates are going to fall, inflation this, inflation, that. Can someone please invent a crystal ball for me? Until then, over 38,000 businesses have future-proof their operations with NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite isn't the number one cloud ERP bringing accounting financial management, inventory, and human resources into one single platform. giving you one source of truth. With NetSuite, you have the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions.

With real-time insights of forecasting, you're peering into the future based on all this amazing data with actionable insights based on that data. It's really simple. When you're closing the books in days, not weeks, everything's going to get better for your company. You're going to be spending less time looking backwards and more time looking at what's next. So, listen, everybody loves the product. you hear that from all of our startups.

Here's your call to action. Don't have that crystal ball? Well, here is the next best thing. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and machine learning at NetSuite.com slash Twist. The guide is free to our listeners. Just visit netseweed.com slash twist. That's netsweet.com slash twist. Yeah, for me, you know, one of the things I've been thinking about a lot is as AI grows,

I need to know where these conversations are, how to address them. So on an API basis, as an example, we have a Slack room for deliberating follow-on investments. We have a Slack room for deliberating primary investments, making that first investment. So the example would be, hey, you know, making that first investment, we have one Slack room for that. Then we have another room for, oh, superhumans doing their next round. Should we take our pro rata? Should we go super pro rata? Should we be selling in secondary or whatever? And I'm obsessed with having on Notion some information and that in Slack having one. And we're just,

it's these conversations are so valuable. Also, we are recording, um, some of our deliberations and discussions on Zoom, taking the transcript, putting the transcript and the original video on to Zoom. Why?

I don't have the original deliberation for, uh, reported Uber, Robin Hood, um, anywhere. It occurred in a conference room with three people when the firm was just two or three people.

Me, Ashley and Jackie, just like, and I'm like, hey, I'm thinking about investing this company and they asked me a couple questions and then it's over. Now, you know, in some ways I hate remote work because, you know, we miss the collisions and the in-person stuff. But having the digital trail of everything, man, I would love to have that conversation, some of those conversations to pull it up and say,

what can we learn here on passing on Twitter and saying yes to Uber, you know, like just, and now we are doing that. And so that was one of the big discussions we had was, how do we get this, these conversation out of superhuman and have them in some repository. So tell me how you think about that, APIs. And I'm sure with enterprises, they're like, I need to know what our employees are talking about. If you're in finance as an example, like we are, we have to tell employees, any conversations

you have, we have access to, we are storing forever. don't ever say anything. You know, in Zoom, Slack, superhuman email anywhere that is inappropriate. It's all, you know, in a finance company, not your content, it's our content for all time. We could be subpoenaed, all that kind of stuff. Whereas other organizations might be like, yeah,

your DMs are not looked at, you know, whatever. We have to look at people's DMs in an organization. We have to look at this side conversation. If they were to say something or, God forbid, you know, share information they're not supposed to, finance organizations held, a much higher standard, obviously. So how do you think about that? Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, just my PSA, you should just assume that when you work for a company, your company communications

belong to the company. Even if the company says, we're not going to look at your DMs, they may not want to, but they may be asked by the government to. And they can't say, well, we don't want it. Like, they then have to do it. So just don't say anything stupid, folks. Like, keep it real. we don't really play in that space. I think this is why Uber deletes everything after, was it, six months, something like that? Oh, is that right? Yeah, I think a lot of organizations are moving to don't keep stuff. Yeah, it's just a liability.

Your data is our liability. We don't want it here. Smart move. Yeah. Yeah, so we don't play in that space. But it is a good segue to the flip side, which is email truly is this treasure trove of information. So how do we get all of the stuff out of email?

And this is the latest feature that we launched. Actually, just last week, this is the thing that Darmesh tweeted about this morning, which is Ask AI. If you think about what's in email, it's things like project statuses, custom-new communication, meeting summaries, deal execution, so much more. You name it, email has it. And for over 40 years, we've had to rely on, I hate to say this, search. You have to remember senders, guest keywords, scan subject lines. But with Superhuman AI and with Ask AI, you can just ask, where is the Q2 offsite or when is my flight and I'd love to show you. Should we do another line? Let's do it. Yeah, no. I mean,

AI on an inbox is just such an unlock, obviously. And I want to be able to do this across the whole organization. So back to like enterprise and CEOs and compliance, man, to be able, this will come up at some point with these thousand plus installs you have. There's a compliance person who will want to do this, not just on their inbox, but for the whole organization, has anybody talked to customer X, you know, blah, blah, blah. But let's put that aside and let's give an example here. Here we are in the search box. And yeah. And I know that there's an upcoming

superhuman offsite, but right now I don't remember the details of it. So I'm just going to type in here, where is the upcoming superhuman off site? Where is the upcoming superhuman off site? Probably don't need to fix this, but let's just go ahead and do that. And you'll notice

I now have this option to Ask AI. If I just typed that in, or if I just do the search, I wouldn't get any search results. What we've done here is we've indexed and put in the vector database the last year's worth of email. We've also indexed all of your calendar. And it says, based on your calendar, the upcoming offsite business, San Diego actually turns out to be next week. I'm very much looking forward to this.

We've also generated follow-up questions, which I might ask. By the way, you know, I'm available for offsets. Dude, you should come. It's going to be amazing. We are going to have some customers there. I'd love to have investors there as well. Let's say, I want to say, what do I want to do to prepare? I can just go ahead and click this.

And what we're doing here is we're simulating a conversation you might have with an input. person or an online assistant who just has all the information for you. Based on your emails, this is what you should consider. I have a session that I need to prepare for. There are all these documents. And if I wanted to learn more, here are sources. This is where we're generating the information from. Now, one of my favorite things about superhuman off-sites are the hack days.

As a fellow entrepreneur, you'll know that hack days are the best days. Yes. When you see all the fun stuff, will there be a hack day? Let's find out. Now, this is so dope. This honestly is life-changing. This is so hard to do with regular search. And of course, there will be a hack day because, of course, it wouldn't be an off-site without one.

And I can open this and click through and just get more information. Okay, now we just have to pause here. For people who are not watching, the elegance of this conversation is just so brilliant because you ask a simple question, then it gave you what it perceives as your next three follow-on questions, but it also cites sources. case the sources are those threads. So this is a problem we all face constantly, which is you have a question, you go to Slack, you ask it. Somebody searches their inbox. They cut and based it back to you and say, hey, dummy, it's in your inbox. And then you say, well, I'm the CEO. I get 400

emails. Sorry, we'll bleep that out, but I am the CEO. I get 400 emails a day. Do you not understand, have any empathy for what my life is like or, you know, anybody who's a super router. And so here, it's just so great that somebody on your team had the presence of mind to say, well, let's just cite the sources. Because then I can jump into that threat and actually comment on it. But, you know, what happens is when you have so much friction to find that answer, to find those email threads because your email box has 100,000 or a million emails in it, you just don't do it.

And then you don't want to bother people in here. It's like you're not bothering anybody. And this is just saves everybody on the organization. if you just do one of these a week, I think each one of these is like a 20-minute thing. Totally. You know, and you take 20 minutes, you know, in 10 weeks, that's 200. You know, every three weeks, it's an hour, basically.

So, you know, you're talking about another 15 hours. And this is I love about your product and your team is so thoughtful because the fact that there's somebody in the world obsessing about saving 20 minutes a week for a large base of users. now, spending 500 developer hours to build something or 5,000, and this is probably 5,000 hours of developer or 10,000 hours of developer, nobody's going to do that. But if you can do that and distribute that cost across, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of users, it's like, well, why wouldn't you do it?

And it's just, this is so dope. Man, what a game changer. It's really fun to build as well. And by the way, I haven't even shown you the most impressive version of this that I found yet. So this is really great. Like this takes the load off my email. it takes the load of the organization in general.

Like, I work weird hours. I don't want to, you know, ping them at two in the morning. Yo, what should I prepare for the offsite? Oh, here it is. Like, they've already put it in email. It's fantastic. Let me show you this, though. Okay.

So we launched this not too long ago. And like any good CEO, I wanted to do a cheerleading moment. What do I mean by that? I mean I wanted to re-through all the responses we got. We probably got like 500,000 responses via a two-hour launch email on this, pick the 10 best quotes, put them in an email, put them in a Google slides, go to the company all hands that week, Friday wins, and present them, right? That's a lot of work. And I did it manual just to see how long it would take, because that's what I've always done. And it took about 20 to

30 minutes to read through all those responses, to do the copy and paste, to the fucks around with all of that. It's just a lot of time. And then, for Schitts and giggles, I was like, okay, let's see how fast it is with superhuman AI with Ask AI. So I'm going to do it over here on the sidebar. You can also click this little item down here. We have used the question mark shortcut. So I'm just going to go ahead and hit question mark. And I'm going to say, find me the top 10 most positive customer responses to the SAI launch.

make sure each one is at least two somethings. I want to get substantial responses here. Think about the craziness at this point. It's going through millions of emails I've received over the last year. It's synthesizing information. This is true needle in a haystack combination information synthesis stuff. All I now have to do is hit copy, come here, hit paste. The formatting's perfect.

It is done. It is junk. Dude, this is so demented. It's half an hour. I mean, come on. You would, this, you know, this could be multiple hours and then you have to let somebody into your inbox to hunt and pack it. And, you know, this is, it goes to the podcasting, you know, you know, anecdotes I was saying

before. There's, there's a lot of things that you just wouldn't do if you had to throw a human at it, right? You're just not going to do it. And, you know, or you'll never get to it. And you know, and then you ask your team. team, hey, can somebody do this and they're like, everybody's too busy. We need to hire a new person who be the director of research of reviews. And you're like, I don't want to add headcount. And when we look,

let's step back here, you and I as both investors and you've done really well as an investor as your side hustle. As investors, you know, and as entrepreneurs, how you run a company has changed so dramatically in our time in this industry. You, you know, 20 years in me 30, like it is insane how different it is to start a company now than 30 years ago, then 20 years ago, than 10, and even two. Maybe you could talk about just what we call on this program static team size, where people are keeping the same number of people, but then investing in tools and technology for those people. Because it's just better to not increase team size and invest, you know, whatever low thousands of dollars into each employee with each product, with each amount of training. And then just keep the team size the same, but get, let's call it 30% out of each person extra per year. If you get but 31% out of each person per year, you're doubling your team size every two years.

That's called the rule of 72. People can look it up in terms of compounding interest if you were to get. but 23% out of every user, I'm sorry, every employee, you would double your team size every three years. So maybe you can talk a little bit about running a company, how you think about team size. And also, you know, as part of this, you were one of the very smart founders who made hay when the sun was shining and raised, you know, I'm going to just say, you know, a war chest at peak Zerp during those eras. and then been very thoughtful about how you're deploying it and sitting on that war chest. Take either of those and dovetel them how you want. Sure. Okay, let's take the second first.

I have a relatively unusual method of managing burn. Let me see if I actually have it. I'm just going to do a quick question to superhuman AI and have it up. I love it. I could do that. I'm actually going to do this. We don't want to go too live in your database. I don't want to weird stuff to come up.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, here we go. So, anyone can look, look this up if you're listening via audio, Google, how to run your startup in a recession. And it's in multiple places. This one is on Angel List. Now, there's all kinds of ways you can do this, right? You can do whatever it takes to get to profitability. There are some obvious problems with that, namely that you start to constrict things.

Marketing is usually the first to go, then sales, and then you start cutting into engineering product and design. And if you're in a market worth fighting for, somebody else will overtake you. Or you can aim to get to a certain amount of runway. Some people aim for 24, which, by the way, why 24? Guys, that's not enough. You need more than 24 months of runway, whether it's a recession or not. But the point is, aiming at any fixed static number doesn't have a margin for error built into it.

So we do something pretty unusual. I've never seen any other company do this. We pick the amount of runway that we want to maintain. in our case, we actually are very conservative, 48 months. And every single period of time, I've written here we do it yearly, we actually do it quarterly. Every single quarter, we make sure that at that moment in time, we have 48 months of runway there. Got it. Which actually makes really fun conversations with investors or potential acquirers or even candidates who are interested in joining the company.

You know, everyone says, how much runway do you have left? And I said, well, Bob, we always have 48 months runway. Like, every single time we have this conversation this time. next year, it'll be 48. So if you're planning to wait me out, that's not going to work. It's always 48 months of runway. Yeah. If you're looking to low ball with four weeks, not going to happen.

You got to pay. Got to pay to play. Love it. And in this article, I go through the details of how you can do this. And I think this is just a really powerful technique that more founders should consider. Okay. So as we think about team size, I totally hear you. And I actually more sort of, what's the word, not experimentally, but sort of, I came across this idea that you just mentioned more in practice.

We got up to about 120 people at sort of Pete Zerped days, so to say. And unfortunately, like many of the companies, we had to do a layoff. We got a little bit ahead of our skis. What I am happy about, if happy is not the right word, what I feel at the very least not terrible about, is back when we did it, we were one of the very first companies to do this. And, you know, I think if the economy is pretty frothy right now, I don't think we're in any imminent danger. But if we were to head into another recession, my advice founders would be, if you are considering

the layoff, do it sooner than later, because you want to release your people into a job market that is still hot, where they can still easily get that next role. And the sooner you do it, the more money you'll save, the more severance you can afford to pay. It's just better off for everybody. So we did this relatively early on the cycle. It was well before most of our contemporaries. And that brought us down from around 120 people down to around 70 or 80 people or so. We've recently climbed back up to the 100 to 110 mark. And to your point, we've actually stayed there for, I think, the last year and a half, maybe even two years. It is a really, really nice size of company to run. There's just something magical about that

sides where communication doesn't break down, you don't have too many silos, you do have some management in the middle of the organization, but it's not so much that things get lost or people start to build kingdoms or victims and, you know, I was about to say the tribalism can't happen because you can bring the leaders to the offsite and you have enough of the people at the offset. I don't know if you're bringing everybody, but we're bringing everybody. What, incredible. And, you know, it's enough that you as the CEO and the founder, is, you know, is, you

Essentially know everybody and you can maintain, I believe as a founder, you kind of get to 20, 30 core people in your team that you can maintain a very deep relationship with, know their families, know where they're at, talk to them every month. And are you seeing gains in productivity each year because of AI internally? So let's put aside superhumans' AI efforts, but just broadly, you're using a lot of different tools. I'm sure you've got tools in sales. I'm sure you've got tools, whether you use Notion or Coda, which are very AI. powered now. You got Slack getting AI. You got developers using co-pilots. So talk to me about how you're thinking when you're running the organization, investing in your people to make them more efficient and what kind of gains do you see from AI, you know, and personal development.

Yeah. In short, we are. I think the most important thing that a founder or a CEO has to do is make it clear to the organization. That's what they expect. Hey, folks, I expect you to get more productive every single year with AI and then the thing that I'm going to do was release the budget to make that happen and also the expectation that not every piece of software is going to work. We've, I don't know, trialed probably 10, 15 different bits of AI software. Maybe a third of them have really stuck and have had a high hit rate. Personally, my favorite outside of Superhuman and outside of ChatGPT is Lume AI. A lot of what I do as a product and design oriented founder is I sweat the tiny little details

and I'm constantly recording looms. I'm like, hey, when I click this thing or I do this thing, this shifts by pixel, this isn't quite right. And here, let me open the console in Chrome. Let me show you what's going on. Let's fix the CSS, whatever it is. You're basically sportscasting with Loom. Exactly.

You know, they say a picture's worth a thousand words, a video is worth a billion pictures. Because when you're watching the product demo and saying, like, hey, you know, this is and this, boom. And what I've gotten now is smart found will, they know I love a good loom, and they will make a custom loom. So just think about that as like an unlock. You're, you got some seed stage company, you're, where you're trying to get into our accelerator or Y Combinator and you just send a little loom to us, two minutes. Hey, J-Cal,

I wanted to show you my product. I know you invested in superhuman. We're superhuman for blah, blah, blah, here's how it works. We got this. We got this. We haven't built this. And I'm hearing from the founder in their own voice, what essentially would be an elevator pitch. at a party where it's too noisy, and now I got visuals. And people would be like, I'm too busy to send that. You're too busy not to send it.

Right. And then for the folks that don't know where Lume AI comes in, and hopefully your founders are doing this when they pitch you, is it will automatically title the video. It will automatically create a transcript. And as I'm thinking about my LUM activity, I probably record 30, 40 a day,

imagine if the recipients had to actually watch the video in detail every single time, even at 1.2 or 1.5x, that's a lot of time. What they can now do, though, is they can preage, they can read the title, they can read the transcripts. No, wait, is Lume AI different than just the standard Lume by Atlassian? Is this two different companies or the same one? It is the same company. I'm just going to throw it up on the screen for our video viewers.

I'm not going to play this because it's me giving feedback on the bug. But I did not create this title. I did not write this summary. I did not make... Chapters. Oh my God, so genius. What a great unlock from our friends at Lume, Atlassian. They're not sponsors of the show, but we both give it five stars. Great product. And what a great punch up here. And look on this right-hand side, three suggested tasks for viewers. You can read through the transcripts if you're an environment where you can't listen audio,

sometimes reading this faster. I mean, this is just such a phenomenally well-executed AI tool. It's just such an incredible moment in time. I was talking to one of the, top 20 most legendary founders, billionaires on the planet. We had dinner the other night and we were just passing things out and talking. He said, have you ever seen anything like this? We've both been in the industry at the same amount of time. He said, no. And it's super motivating to me.

I can't wait to get to work every day. And, you know, I'm taking meetings at 8 o'clock at night, 7 o'clock at night, nine o'clock a night because somebody's got something so amazing. I can't wait to see it. It's just like everything we've worked on in the last 20, 30, 40 years of computing has led to this moment where AI takes what happened in desktop software, cloud computing, storage, bandwidth, machine learning, big data, mobile, video. And then it's like, yeah, you know what?

boom, everything is like these ingredients now to this super dish, which is, human beings are getting, I think the human beings who are embracing this are getting 10, 20% better per month. You know, and I have 21 people in the investment firm now. It's a lot of people for, you know, a $50 million fund. You know, we have very profitable events business and podcast business that you're listening to right now. So I kind of spend that on, you know, increasing. this, but man, the top third of my team that embraces this, they are like, the difference between the top third and the bottom third of people, people who like hard embrace AI and people

who are not embracing it. And then there's everybody in between who are kind of dabbling. If you just break those three cohorts up, I think the difference between group one and two, hard embrace and dabbling in terms of value to a company is like 10x. And then you go, to people who are not embracing it versus dabblers and people who are embracing it, the people who are embracing it, I think, are becoming a hundred times more valuable to an organization. If you were to look at this, what are you seeing in this regard? That's absolutely what I see, what I hear as well. Speaking of Edson, we mentioned him earlier on the episode.

He noted, he's an investor, he noted that when he talks to founders who are in the early 20s, maybe they've just come out to college, the way that they code and the way that they've build is entirely different to people who've been coding for 5, 10 years plus. And it's just a different expectation, a different workflow. Not only is it faster, it's also faster to iterate. And yeah, I mean, is it 100x? I don't know, but certainly in the region of 5 to 10x for certain things. You know, an area that I use AI a lot, apart from just Lume AI, is for writing copy.

And I mean, you're a great marketer as well, but sometimes we just can't think of the headline. And what I do, and this is the simplest use case, but it's so powerful is I just go to chat GPT and go, yo, can you give me 10 more versions of this headline, please? Make it pithier, make it funnier, find a joke, you know, and that's all I need to actually make it pop. Well, what happens when you do it, and you know, we have a company saga that's making a tool for kind of like final draft for writing screenplays, and it also makes storyboards, which I push them hard on, like, for a screenplay writer, and it automatically starts making storyboards for you while you're typing.

holy cow, or if you're a storyboard artist and it makes copy based on what you drew, like, that's kind of wild because those moments happen when the people get together and they share their work. But it requires, uh, I'm a writer. I need a storyboard artist or I'm a storyboard artist. I need a writer. Like the brainstorming process, writing jokes, writing copy, making images, creating characters, creating business plans.

It's, it's like having somebody to just bounce ideas off of. available to you 24-7. And I would say when I do this, same thing, like I do it when I'm branding companies or products. I'd be like, here's what I want in a brand. What do you think? You know, and it kind of starts giving me feedback, whatever. It's sparking in my brain connections that I would not have thought of because if the AI

gives me 90% garbage and 10% good, it might spark. The garbage might spark like, that's garbage. This would be better. Or that's brilliant. How do I punch it out? And so I am not precious about this anymore where I'm like, oh, artists, you know, people writing lyrics. And I think people in Hollywood who are like trying to, I don't know if you saw when they had their strike role, they were like trying to ban AI in the writer's room. I'm like, these people are going to the bathroom and using chat CBDT if you ban it in the thing.

They're going to come back after pretending they're taking a league with new ideas that they brainstorm with chat GPT. Let's not be precious. I mean, people sit there who are writers with a the thesaurus or like they'll go to a website filled with idioms and catchphrases and they'll do their searches there for ideas. Yeah. It's just so powerful for copywriting. I think right now, yeah, I'm feeling like when we get the agent technology going and, you know, the guide on the side who you proactively ask for stuff becomes like, here's what you should focus on. you know, that's going to be the big on luck. And I know that you're probably thinking that as well.

If I'm sitting here in my email box, I really want a sidebar, you know, with Scarlett Johansson or Gwina the Paltrow or, you know, whoever it is, Tom Petty, whatever person I like most, you know, in celebrity world saying, hey, man, have you thought about giving Raoul a call and checking in on your investment? And it's like in a Bob Dylan place. Like, it should be, and I asked you for this feature. Like, tell me who, like, 10 years ago, I was talking to a whole bunch of. but that I'm out of touch with.

And just go find out what the hell they're doing in the world and maybe I should catch up with them. So have you thought about your email box becoming, you know, your chief of staff and feeding you ideas of what to do next? I don't want to spoil the roadmap, but I get the sense that you're thinking about this. Yeah, absolutely. That ASKI feature I demonstrated, we consider as a proto agent. And we have this framework internally that folks may find useful,

the evolution of AI features, three phases, phase one was on demand. And these are features that were only when you ask them to work. All of the write-with-a-I features were like that. They're very cheap to build. They're very cheap to maintain, generally speaking. They're out of the way because they're not always there. That's what we all started with. And superhuman made a big splash for a right-with-AI feature when that came out early last year.

That then gave us the confidence to we on to phase two, which is always on AI. And you noted this in our demo with Autosurorize, which is the one-liner and the bullet points at the top of the email, a lot harder to build. Because for that kind of a future, for every single email you receive, and boy do our users receive a lot of emails, we're resummarizing the entire thread. And we've done that for probably north of 10 billion emails to date. That then gave us the confidence to build Ask AI, which, like I said, is sort of a proto agent. It can do some agent-like things today. For example, it's capable of multi-step conversations.

We had to look at that. It's capable of resolving ambiguity. If I'm like, hey, you know, what did Jason last email me about? It would probably say, do you mean Jason Calacanus or Jason X, Y, Z? And once we've resolved the ambiguity, it's then going to give me the answer. But it's not too long before we can imagine an AI agent that is sitting in your inbox, drafting emails on your behalf, scheduling meetings on your behalf, maybe even sending fully written email. one day on your behalf.

That will happen. Are the auto replies that you're doing now? Because I just used it for the first time. I always look at them, but I consider my voice very unique. And I, you know, I want it in my voice. I'm not kind of the guy who wants to one click, you know, use one of those things. Is it studying my voice yet to give me ones that are different than yours? You might be a little formal English and, you know, blind me or whatever.

And I might be Brooklyn and be like, what the fuck? This is, you know, inappropriate, expletive here. Is it actually using my. replies to craft my auto reply one clicks yet? It is, but not in the way yet that I'd like it to. So we do study the emails that you've sent and we sort of condense that into a voice signature, if you will. We apply that to the emails that we write, but I'm not yet satisfied.

And there's some pretty obvious improvements that we will be making over the course of the next, I think six months or so. I'm pretty hopeful that will get a lot more like you because that is the feedback. that we hear the most, which is, hey, this feature is amazing. And I use it on my personal email where the stakes are fairly low, right? I'm interacting with my dentist or this contractor or whatever it is, whatever. Yeah, boom, who cares. But with a work colleague, you do want it to sound like you, with a founder, you want to

sound like you. So that will happen over the course of the next six months. Yeah, LinkedIn is your alma mater is like doing these at the bottom. And I noticed, you know, we do a little thing with our Athena support staff, go to Athenawow.com, get a free month off or something like that. I have my own domain to track all my referrals as an investor. And we just had, we gave them a list of all of our companies, all of our founders. It's probably of the 400, maybe 250 or still active in the last 12 years.

And they look at yours. And they look at superhumans, corporate stuff. And they will give us every day 20 updates that they think are interesting. We open them up. And then I just asked people on the teams, 21 of us, engage in four a day, but meaningfully engaged, because people were using the LinkedIn thing like, impressive, exclamation point or awesome. And I'm just like, less is more, write something more thoughtful. There should be like a slider of like more verbose. And I love Grammarly.

Do you use Grammarly at all? I'm in and also Grammaly just to see what they're up to. I mean, they remind me of you in terms of their product velocity and thoughtfulness. And as a writer, I think they're doing just a great job. And they have a really cool tool. I force everybody in the team to use it because I'm like, they have like business, clarity, concise, verbose. You know, it really gets granular there.

So built in iOS, Android, whatever, you know, grammar correction will get you, you know, to phase one. But to get to phase two or three where you're really being thoughtful about, is this a concise conversation, verbose one? you know, that's what I need in these auto replies, because right now I'm looking at one on my mobile, and it's like, great potential, any updates, impressive work. And I would like a full sentence, right?

So I could just set that full sentence, shorten, or maybe it just shows me three levels. Concise, verbose, spicy, whatever, you know. But such great potential. Listen, oh, you're amazing. Thank you for letting me invest in your company. I'm so glad that when all the secondary people came and tried to buy me out,

I said no, because I think you're going to build a legendary company. You already have, but I think it's a legendary company that will be here 10, 20 years from now because you're not like, you're really thinking about these problems in a deep way.

And I encourage all founders to watch this episode with your teams so that you can catch up to some of the best practices that we see out there. If you want to make your organization, literally, You know, two, three, four times more efficient. Get them all on Superhumans. The easiest, this is the easiest spend you can do.

Superhuman.com, superhuman.com, superhuman.com. You got to have like your top three or four people on it, learn it, do the training, and then decide for yourself if you want to bring the other 10 people. But, you know, that's your assignment. Everybody, over the next 48 hours, if you're listening to my voice, you got to take it seriously and invest in tools like Superhuman. Anything else I can plug for you, you're hiring, you got a position. you can't, you got some sticky position that's hard to fill that you need?

Nothing that's particularly sticky. We just opened up a product manager role. I know a lot of product for watch the pod. Yeah. If that's interesting, this is going to focus on core products, products for the enterprise, calendar, we just want to share availability feature, which people really love. It is a lot of people's dreams to work on productivity tools. Because usually they're not very good businesses.

Usually it's like, every engineer has built an email client. But we've actually cracked the nuts here. We've found the formula. And so if that's the kind of thing that you want to work on, then come work with us. Hey, listen, if you're an elite product manager, you know, superhuman is one of the great places you could be because you'll be amongst other elite product designers and a great product leader in a product-led organization. And we will see you all next time on this week in startups.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.