Superhuman Builds Engine to Manage Email Faster

in the world. Our customers get through their inbox about twice as fast as before, and many of them see in book zero for the first time in years, which, as you can imagine, it's pretty life changing. Yeah, all right, so what's the secret here? How did you actually, let's take a step back, how did you come up with

this idea? Well, back, I interviewed over a thousand people about how they do that email and what they hated about it, and unanimously they all hate it, how long it took, how anxious it made them, and how unbearable the whole experience was. And so that was really the the impetus for Superhuman was to make something that was blazingly fast and dare I say it even fun to be inside of? Right? All right? To take me even an even further step back, because this isn't your first company,

were you? Did you have your own problems with email, your own challenges? I most certainly did, yes. So I had a startup prior to this reportive that I ended up selling to LinkedIn back in, and as the founder and CEO of that startup, my day was my life was email as it is today, and I realized that no one was really building tools for that segment of

the population. And then at LinkedIn, I ran all of our email integrations and I become very familiar with how professionals do that email, and long story short, it's pretty badly and I thought, well, someone needs to solve this problem, so we set out to do that. All right. So, as you were interviewing people, tell me, like, what what they surprised you that you found? I mean, like I'm

just purely like overwhelmed by it. I mean, like all that you can see, you know, all these screens we have going all these things, both the internal external all of that, or people just generally overwhelmed. Do they have bad habits? Like what what's the what did you find. I think what surprised me is the heterogeneity of approach. There's a lot of ways that you can do email. So some people like to archive emails, some people like

to delete them. There's quite a few filers still, you know folks who will drag things into various folders and it's superhuman. We we don't really take a perspective on this except for however you want to do it. We're going to help you do it really, really quickly. Alright, so tell me how it works. How does it work? Well, first let's talk about desktop, then we can talk about mobile. So on desktop, essentially everything is done via keyboard shortcut.

And actually I feel pretty great saying that sitting here and inside the Bloomberg HQ, because everything here is done by keyboard shorcut. And so we've really taken that philosophy and brought it to your email. Imagine if you never had to touch the mouse for absolutely anything, and that's part of how people get through their inbox twice as fast. Now you might be wondering, then, well, what is the equivalent on your phone? On on the phone, the equivalent

is doing everything in one gesture. So we've optimized the app for one handed use. So if you just have a few minutes when you're on the go waiting for a train or what have you, boom, you can get your email done right, all right? So email culture is, did we get addicted to email just because it's an amazing form of communication? Like? How did we get here? Well, I'm not sure. I would say we're addicted to email. I would say that it is essentially the lifeblood of

our companies. It's it's how stuff works. How did we get here? It's just a very resilient technology. It's one of the few technologies in the world that is genuinely decentralized. No one institution or company owns email, and every single company uses it. And that's why it's going to be

here for a very long time to come right. And when you think about email versus you know, other technologies, whether it's messaging or slack or things like that, people have tried to I don't know, like knock off it too geminy at one point or another. What do you make of those efforts? I think that valiant efforts. What we're seeing though, inside of the email space itself, is

that email is actually turning into messaging. So it now turns out that the emails that we send and receive are essentially one line is Hey, I'm running late, or did you receive my document? Or can you please take this decision? And so we're seeing this convergence of messaging and email, right, And so what does email look like in the future. Obviously you're going to help shape that if you have anything to do with it, um, but what does our relationship with it look like if you

have your way? Well, if we have our way, we're going to change how people feel about that email. Instead of feeling anxious, they'll feel relack stan, productive and happy. I think will be in a world where messaging an email combine. I think will also be in a world where machine learning and artificial intelligence help us do it

even faster, perhaps pie pre composing emails. Imagine waking up one day looking at your inbox and all the drafts to all the emails in your inbox are actually pre composed, so all you have to do is go in, make a few edits, and hit sent. Right, So how much do you worry about sort of competition from Gmail or

other the big platforms? Not at all? In short, so Gmail, for example, has one point five billion users and a fun little challenge I like to ask engineering candidates I'll give the secret out on it is how many emails do you think the average Gmail user receives per day that they have to care about? And they'll often say a hundred or two hundred or three hundred emails, but

the answer is actually five. That's the average Gmail using it is right, it's unthinkable for folks like you and me, whereas our users see dred emails per day, some thousands of emails a day, and we are therefore able to focus on the needs of that user. And we only need because we charge thirty dollars a month, we only need a few hundred thousand users paying thirty dollars a

month for us to be a billion dollar company. H I have so many questions that that's it's been off of that, and people are paying for this, and what's the are they paying basically because thirty dollars is worth like it is worth their sanity? Like what's what's the value proposition in that regard? Well, time is the most precious thing we have, and we save our uses considerable

amounts of time. So the average user saves many hours a week and by comparison, thirty dollars a month is totally worth it, right right, Rahel Laura is still with me, founder and CEO of Superhuman. So you're here in New York. What's going on back in San Francisco? What's the feel of the text sing there right now? Still very much a bulliant I'm seeing a plethora of seed deals getting done,

and there's all kinds of exciting things in the work. Uh. You mentioned angel investing for me, three core areas of investment of future of work productivity I companies like Superhuman, business infrastructure, and also health and wellness. Uh, And we're seeing a lot of exciting things happening across all three of those. And the tech lash, as it were, is

it manifesting or now? I think everybody running companies, anyone involved in product or marketing is just a lot more cognizant these days of what they're saying and how they're saying it, and trying to think harder. I wouldn't say that the tech lash has changed things, except for people are a little bit more self aware, right, And does it change what gets funded? Do you think, like as an as someone who's sort of on both sides of this equation. Does it make you think differently about what

you've found? Not at all. I think for stage funding you're always looking for the same set of things. Are really gritty, resilient founder with some kind of unfair advantage, whether it's technology or distribution. Yeah. Interesting, interesting? And so how much? How many deals have you done on the angel side? All right? You just you're just getting started on the Well, I've been angel investing actually for about let's see, since eight years now into it, fully into it.

This is the first time that my partner in the fund and I have actually raised a vehicles. We've raised a seven million dollar funds and out of that fund, we're coming up to nearly ten deals done. Wow. Rahaol Vara is here with me still founder and CEO of Superhuman. All right, so I've got you here, I've got you captive. UM, help me understand some of the tips and tricks that you have discovered in terms of helping people get to that elusive in back zero. So we analyze the data

from and we found three key things. Number one is right for mobile. Number two is schedule your emails for nine am or just before. And number three is split your inbox into multiple streams. Interesting, all right, so let's start with the right for malble. What does that mean? Well, it probably would come as no surprise to hear that we send approximately three times as many emails from our laptops then we do our phones, because we have our

keyboards there, of course. But what make them as a surprise is that we check email on our phones about eight times as frequently as we do on our laptops. And what that means is, if you're writing an email, you're way more likely to have that email read on a phone. And so as a result, I would recommend keeping it extremely short. And personally, I'm a big fan of the three sentence rule. The three okay, so no

more than three sentences. So if you can't say it in three sentences, so when you pick up the phone, you actually pick up the phone and cars battle pretty much. Yeah, you go, context data question. Those are the three sentences, all right. So in the nine AM thing, that's just

about sort of our habits as humans. Well, we looked at when people were hitting inbox zero, and it turns out that the most common time for people to hit in milk zero is just before nine about eight fifty a m. And so in Superhuman we have a feature design specifically to use with this, you can actually schedule an email to arrive later, so you can hit send.

It could be four pm in the afternoon, it could be three am in the morning, and we'll actually hold the email for you until let's say, and that way it's right at the top of the other person's inbox when they start their day, right, And is that just because people's habits are they get in the morning, they sort of want to get through their email and then get on with the rest of their day. It's just that simple, right. We think it's actually something that the

phone has shifted. So peak inbox zero four phone is around nine am. Peak inbox zero for laptops though, is ten am. So we think it's commuting. We think people going into work triaging that email real fast before they get into the office. And it got it all right, And what was the third you reminded me the third thing? But yeah, it was splitting your inbox into multiple streams. So there's this feature and Superhuman called split inbox, and it actually allows you to take the stream and split

it up. So a lot of our most successful users split out their calendar notifications, which as you know, can be quite voluminous, or invitations to collaborate on Google docs or office documents or tasks, and that way they can really stay focused when they're in one mode. They can do their calendar in one go, they can collaborate without getting distracted, and they can work on their tasks without

being pulled away by incoming email. Right, all right, I gotta ask you just in a few minutes we have left what you learn from your first startup to this one. What you take from that experience that you said, I will always do this, or I'll never do this, or I have to do this. Oh boy, there are so much. If I were to pick one, it would be don't

keep changing your strategy. I think this is something that first time founders do all too often, bicker strategy and then perhaps three or four months later, they'll change it up. And so the mistake that I made in my last company was I thought I was going for growth of users, and then I decided, oh, actually, I'd rather want to grow revenue and dollars instead. And you really do have to choose between the two. Yeah, And so remind me that the company that you saw the LinkedIn remind us

what they did. So the company I saw to LinkedIn was called Reportive. We were the first Gmail plug in to scale to millions of users, and essentially on the right hand side of Gmail, when people email you, you could see what they look like, where they're based, what they do recent tweets, obviously their linked in profile. And we've now built that again inside of Superhuman. In fact, my team and I have built that over the last ten years about eight different times. And so is it different?

What's different about building a company today versus you know, ten fifteen years ago. Ten fifteen years ago, things were a lot harder to build and there was a lot less capital available. Today you can build the same thing in half time and with perhaps three or four times the amount of capital available to build it. And so as a result, timelines are vastly compressed. And what we're seeing now is the mean time to becoming let's say, a unicorn company worth over a billion dollars is as

short as it's ever been. Right, And so you raised at fifty million dollars or last year, and so is that enough for you gonna raise another round? Where are you in that cycle. Well, we still have plenty of that money left. Uh, And if things go according to plan, which or or metrics suggest that they're going according to plan? Yeah, I suspect will raise another round of funding, probably our

Series CE next year. And do you feel just only about a minute left, do you feel like the path to sort of exit or sort of that next stage has changed at all in this sort of private first market that that we're living in. I think it's a really exciting time for both early stage investors and management of companies. There's never been more options for secondary liquidity than there exist today. You don't necessarily have to go public, right,

you can always sell to a subsequent round investor. Does it surprise you, as someone who's been doing this now for for a bit, how much that has changed, how robust the private markets have become. Or was that where we were always headed? I think there was songs without a very long time ago. Yeah. All right, rahol Vara, thank you so much, Founder and CEO of Superhuman. He's based out in San Francisco, here with me in New

York City today. The product, it's been called by The New York Times one of Silicon Valley's quote buzzyest startups. There's a wait list of hundreds of thousands of people to get into this wanting to pay for the opportunity to get to in box zero on a much much more regular basis. Check it out.