Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason
Speaker 1: Kelly on Bloomberg Radio. All right, well, it's always nice
Speaker 1: to start out the five pm hour with little R. E.
Speaker 1: M and with a very cool guest who's gonna help
Speaker 1: me solve all my problems at least when it comes
Speaker 1: to email. Rahol Vaura is here with me, founder and
Speaker 1: CEO of Superhuman. First of all, awesome name, Uh, tell
Speaker 1: me what you do? Superhuman is the fastest email experience
Speaker 1: in the world. Our customers get through their inbox about
Speaker 1: twice as fast as before, and many of them see
Speaker 1: in book zero for the first time in years, which,
Speaker 1: as you can imagine, it's pretty life changing. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: so what's the secret here? How did you actually, let's
Speaker 1: take a step back, how did you come up with
Speaker 1: this idea? Well, back, I interviewed over a thousand people
Speaker 1: about how they do that email and what they hated
Speaker 1: about it, and unanimously they all hate it, how long
Speaker 1: it took, how anxious it made them, and how unbearable
Speaker 1: the whole experience was. And so that was really the
Speaker 1: the impetus for Superhuman was to make something that was
Speaker 1: blazingly fast and dare I say it even fun to
Speaker 1: be inside of? Right? All right? To take me even
Speaker 1: an even further step back, because this isn't your first company,
Speaker 1: were you? Did you have your own problems with email,
Speaker 1: your own challenges? I most certainly did, yes. So I
Speaker 1: had a startup prior to this reportive that I ended
Speaker 1: up selling to LinkedIn back in, and as the founder
Speaker 1: and CEO of that startup, my day was my life
Speaker 1: was email as it is today, and I realized that
Speaker 1: no one was really building tools for that segment of
Speaker 1: the population. And then at LinkedIn, I ran all of
Speaker 1: our email integrations and I become very familiar with how
Speaker 1: professionals do that email, and long story short, it's pretty
Speaker 1: badly and I thought, well, someone needs to solve this problem,
Speaker 1: so we set out to do that. All right. So,
Speaker 1: as you were interviewing people, tell me, like, what what
Speaker 1: they surprised you that you found? I mean, like I'm
Speaker 1: just purely like overwhelmed by it. I mean, like all
Speaker 1: that you can see, you know, all these screens we
Speaker 1: have going all these things, both the internal external all
Speaker 1: of that, or people just generally overwhelmed. Do they have
Speaker 1: bad habits? Like what what's the what did you find.
Speaker 1: I think what surprised me is the heterogeneity of approach.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of ways that you can do email.
Speaker 1: So some people like to archive emails, some people like
Speaker 1: to delete them. There's quite a few filers still, you
Speaker 1: know folks who will drag things into various folders and
Speaker 1: it's superhuman. We we don't really take a perspective on
Speaker 1: this except for however you want to do it. We're
Speaker 1: going to help you do it really, really quickly. Alright,
Speaker 1: so tell me how it works. How does it work? Well,
Speaker 1: first let's talk about desktop, then we can talk about mobile.
Speaker 1: So on desktop, essentially everything is done via keyboard shortcut.
Speaker 1: And actually I feel pretty great saying that sitting here
Speaker 1: and inside the Bloomberg HQ, because everything here is done
Speaker 1: by keyboard shorcut. And so we've really taken that philosophy
Speaker 1: and brought it to your email. Imagine if you never
Speaker 1: had to touch the mouse for absolutely anything, and that's
Speaker 1: part of how people get through their inbox twice as fast.
Speaker 1: Now you might be wondering, then, well, what is the
Speaker 1: equivalent on your phone? On on the phone, the equivalent
Speaker 1: is doing everything in one gesture. So we've optimized the
Speaker 1: app for one handed use. So if you just have
Speaker 1: a few minutes when you're on the go waiting for
Speaker 1: a train or what have you, boom, you can get
Speaker 1: your email done right, all right? So email culture is,
Speaker 1: did we get addicted to email just because it's an
Speaker 1: amazing form of communication? Like? How did we get here? Well,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. I would say we're addicted to email.
Speaker 1: I would say that it is essentially the lifeblood of
Speaker 1: our companies. It's it's how stuff works. How did we
Speaker 1: get here? It's just a very resilient technology. It's one
Speaker 1: of the few technologies in the world that is genuinely decentralized.
Speaker 1: No one institution or company owns email, and every single
Speaker 1: company uses it. And that's why it's going to be
Speaker 1: here for a very long time to come right. And
Speaker 1: when you think about email versus you know, other technologies,
Speaker 1: whether it's messaging or slack or things like that, people
Speaker 1: have tried to I don't know, like knock off it
Speaker 1: too geminy at one point or another. What do you
Speaker 1: make of those efforts? I think that valiant efforts. What
Speaker 1: we're seeing though, inside of the email space itself, is
Speaker 1: that email is actually turning into messaging. So it now
Speaker 1: turns out that the emails that we send and receive
Speaker 1: are essentially one line is Hey, I'm running late, or
Speaker 1: did you receive my document? Or can you please take
Speaker 1: this decision? And so we're seeing this convergence of messaging
Speaker 1: and email, right, And so what does email look like
Speaker 1: in the future. Obviously you're going to help shape that
Speaker 1: if you have anything to do with it, um, but
Speaker 1: what does our relationship with it look like if you
Speaker 1: have your way? Well, if we have our way, we're
Speaker 1: going to change how people feel about that email. Instead
Speaker 1: of feeling anxious, they'll feel relack stan, productive and happy.
Speaker 1: I think will be in a world where messaging an
Speaker 1: email combine. I think will also be in a world
Speaker 1: where machine learning and artificial intelligence help us do it
Speaker 1: even faster, perhaps pie pre composing emails. Imagine waking up
Speaker 1: one day looking at your inbox and all the drafts
Speaker 1: to all the emails in your inbox are actually pre composed,
Speaker 1: so all you have to do is go in, make
Speaker 1: a few edits, and hit sent. Right, So how much
Speaker 1: do you worry about sort of competition from Gmail or
Speaker 1: other the big platforms? Not at all? In short, so Gmail,
Speaker 1: for example, has one point five billion users and a
Speaker 1: fun little challenge I like to ask engineering candidates I'll
Speaker 1: give the secret out on it is how many emails
Speaker 1: do you think the average Gmail user receives per day
Speaker 1: that they have to care about? And they'll often say
Speaker 1: a hundred or two hundred or three hundred emails, but
Speaker 1: the answer is actually five. That's the average Gmail using
Speaker 1: it is right, it's unthinkable for folks like you and me,
Speaker 1: whereas our users see dred emails per day, some thousands
Speaker 1: of emails a day, and we are therefore able to
Speaker 1: focus on the needs of that user. And we only
Speaker 1: need because we charge thirty dollars a month, we only
Speaker 1: need a few hundred thousand users paying thirty dollars a
Speaker 1: month for us to be a billion dollar company. H
Speaker 1: I have so many questions that that's it's been off
Speaker 1: of that, and people are paying for this, and what's
Speaker 1: the are they paying basically because thirty dollars is worth
Speaker 1: like it is worth their sanity? Like what's what's the
Speaker 1: value proposition in that regard? Well, time is the most
Speaker 1: precious thing we have, and we save our uses considerable
Speaker 1: amounts of time. So the average user saves many hours
Speaker 1: a week and by comparison, thirty dollars a month is
Speaker 1: totally worth it, right right, Rahel Laura is still with me,
Speaker 1: founder and CEO of Superhuman. So you're here in New York.
Speaker 1: What's going on back in San Francisco? What's the feel
Speaker 1: of the text sing there right now? Still very much
Speaker 1: a bulliant I'm seeing a plethora of seed deals getting done,
Speaker 1: and there's all kinds of exciting things in the work. Uh.
Speaker 1: You mentioned angel investing for me, three core areas of
Speaker 1: investment of future of work productivity I companies like Superhuman,
Speaker 1: business infrastructure, and also health and wellness. Uh, And we're
Speaker 1: seeing a lot of exciting things happening across all three
Speaker 1: of those. And the tech lash, as it were, is
Speaker 1: it manifesting or now? I think everybody running companies, anyone
Speaker 1: involved in product or marketing is just a lot more
Speaker 1: cognizant these days of what they're saying and how they're
Speaker 1: saying it, and trying to think harder. I wouldn't say
Speaker 1: that the tech lash has changed things, except for people
Speaker 1: are a little bit more self aware, right, And does
Speaker 1: it change what gets funded? Do you think, like as
Speaker 1: an as someone who's sort of on both sides of
Speaker 1: this equation. Does it make you think differently about what
Speaker 1: you've found? Not at all. I think for stage funding
Speaker 1: you're always looking for the same set of things. Are
Speaker 1: really gritty, resilient founder with some kind of unfair advantage,
Speaker 1: whether it's technology or distribution. Yeah. Interesting, interesting? And so
Speaker 1: how much? How many deals have you done on the
Speaker 1: angel side? All right? You just you're just getting started
Speaker 1: on the Well, I've been angel investing actually for about
Speaker 1: let's see, since eight years now into it, fully into it.
Speaker 1: This is the first time that my partner in the
Speaker 1: fund and I have actually raised a vehicles. We've raised
Speaker 1: a seven million dollar funds and out of that fund,
Speaker 1: we're coming up to nearly ten deals done. Wow. Rahaol
Speaker 1: Vara is here with me still founder and CEO of Superhuman.
Speaker 1: All right, so I've got you here, I've got you captive. UM,
Speaker 1: help me understand some of the tips and tricks that
Speaker 1: you have discovered in terms of helping people get to
Speaker 1: that elusive in back zero. So we analyze the data
Speaker 1: from and we found three key things. Number one is
Speaker 1: right for mobile. Number two is schedule your emails for
Speaker 1: nine am or just before. And number three is split
Speaker 1: your inbox into multiple streams. Interesting, all right, so let's
Speaker 1: start with the right for malble. What does that mean? Well,
Speaker 1: it probably would come as no surprise to hear that
Speaker 1: we send approximately three times as many emails from our
Speaker 1: laptops then we do our phones, because we have our
Speaker 1: keyboards there, of course. But what make them as a
Speaker 1: surprise is that we check email on our phones about
Speaker 1: eight times as frequently as we do on our laptops.
Speaker 1: And what that means is, if you're writing an email,
Speaker 1: you're way more likely to have that email read on
Speaker 1: a phone. And so as a result, I would recommend
Speaker 1: keeping it extremely short. And personally, I'm a big fan
Speaker 1: of the three sentence rule. The three okay, so no
Speaker 1: more than three sentences. So if you can't say it
Speaker 1: in three sentences, so when you pick up the phone,
Speaker 1: you actually pick up the phone and cars battle pretty much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you go, context data question. Those are the three sentences,
Speaker 1: all right. So in the nine AM thing, that's just
Speaker 1: about sort of our habits as humans. Well, we looked
Speaker 1: at when people were hitting inbox zero, and it turns
Speaker 1: out that the most common time for people to hit
Speaker 1: in milk zero is just before nine about eight fifty
Speaker 1: a m. And so in Superhuman we have a feature
Speaker 1: design specifically to use with this, you can actually schedule
Speaker 1: an email to arrive later, so you can hit send.
Speaker 1: It could be four pm in the afternoon, it could
Speaker 1: be three am in the morning, and we'll actually hold
Speaker 1: the email for you until let's say, and that way
Speaker 1: it's right at the top of the other person's inbox
Speaker 1: when they start their day, right, And is that just
Speaker 1: because people's habits are they get in the morning, they
Speaker 1: sort of want to get through their email and then
Speaker 1: get on with the rest of their day. It's just
Speaker 1: that simple, right. We think it's actually something that the
Speaker 1: phone has shifted. So peak inbox zero four phone is
Speaker 1: around nine am. Peak inbox zero for laptops though, is
Speaker 1: ten am. So we think it's commuting. We think people
Speaker 1: going into work triaging that email real fast before they
Speaker 1: get into the office. And it got it all right,
Speaker 1: And what was the third you reminded me the third thing?
Speaker 1: But yeah, it was splitting your inbox into multiple streams.
Speaker 1: So there's this feature and Superhuman called split inbox, and
Speaker 1: it actually allows you to take the stream and split
Speaker 1: it up. So a lot of our most successful users
Speaker 1: split out their calendar notifications, which as you know, can
Speaker 1: be quite voluminous, or invitations to collaborate on Google docs
Speaker 1: or office documents or tasks, and that way they can
Speaker 1: really stay focused when they're in one mode. They can
Speaker 1: do their calendar in one go, they can collaborate without
Speaker 1: getting distracted, and they can work on their tasks without
Speaker 1: being pulled away by incoming email. Right, all right, I
Speaker 1: gotta ask you just in a few minutes we have
Speaker 1: left what you learn from your first startup to this one.
Speaker 1: What you take from that experience that you said, I
Speaker 1: will always do this, or I'll never do this, or
Speaker 1: I have to do this. Oh boy, there are so much.
Speaker 1: If I were to pick one, it would be don't
Speaker 1: keep changing your strategy. I think this is something that
Speaker 1: first time founders do all too often, bicker strategy and
Speaker 1: then perhaps three or four months later, they'll change it up.
Speaker 1: And so the mistake that I made in my last
Speaker 1: company was I thought I was going for growth of users,
Speaker 1: and then I decided, oh, actually, I'd rather want to
Speaker 1: grow revenue and dollars instead. And you really do have
Speaker 1: to choose between the two. Yeah, And so remind me
Speaker 1: that the company that you saw the LinkedIn remind us
Speaker 1: what they did. So the company I saw to LinkedIn
Speaker 1: was called Reportive. We were the first Gmail plug in
Speaker 1: to scale to millions of users, and essentially on the
Speaker 1: right hand side of Gmail, when people email you, you
Speaker 1: could see what they look like, where they're based, what
Speaker 1: they do recent tweets, obviously their linked in profile. And
Speaker 1: we've now built that again inside of Superhuman. In fact,
Speaker 1: my team and I have built that over the last
Speaker 1: ten years about eight different times. And so is it different?
Speaker 1: What's different about building a company today versus you know,
Speaker 1: ten fifteen years ago. Ten fifteen years ago, things were
Speaker 1: a lot harder to build and there was a lot
Speaker 1: less capital available. Today you can build the same thing
Speaker 1: in half time and with perhaps three or four times
Speaker 1: the amount of capital available to build it. And so
Speaker 1: as a result, timelines are vastly compressed. And what we're
Speaker 1: seeing now is the mean time to becoming let's say,
Speaker 1: a unicorn company worth over a billion dollars is as
Speaker 1: short as it's ever been. Right, And so you raised
Speaker 1: at fifty million dollars or last year, and so is
Speaker 1: that enough for you gonna raise another round? Where are
Speaker 1: you in that cycle. Well, we still have plenty of
Speaker 1: that money left. Uh, And if things go according to plan,
Speaker 1: which or or metrics suggest that they're going according to plan? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I suspect will raise another round of funding, probably our
Speaker 1: Series CE next year. And do you feel just only
Speaker 1: about a minute left, do you feel like the path
Speaker 1: to sort of exit or sort of that next stage
Speaker 1: has changed at all in this sort of private first
Speaker 1: market that that we're living in. I think it's a
Speaker 1: really exciting time for both early stage investors and management
Speaker 1: of companies. There's never been more options for secondary liquidity
Speaker 1: than there exist today. You don't necessarily have to go public, right,
Speaker 1: you can always sell to a subsequent round investor. Does
Speaker 1: it surprise you, as someone who's been doing this now
Speaker 1: for for a bit, how much that has changed, how
Speaker 1: robust the private markets have become. Or was that where
Speaker 1: we were always headed? I think there was songs without
Speaker 1: a very long time ago. Yeah. All right, rahol Vara,
Speaker 1: thank you so much, Founder and CEO of Superhuman. He's
Speaker 1: based out in San Francisco, here with me in New
Speaker 1: York City today. The product, it's been called by The
Speaker 1: New York Times one of Silicon Valley's quote buzzyest startups.
Speaker 1: There's a wait list of hundreds of thousands of people
Speaker 1: to get into this wanting to pay for the opportunity
Speaker 1: to get to in box zero on a much much
Speaker 1: more regular basis. Check it out.