Becoming Superhuman: Rahul Vohra on AI, productivity, & the future of email

0:01And so there's this big question of how do we react? How do we adapt? And I think it's helpful to crawl before you walk and then walk before you've run. So we think of the evolution of AI in three distinct phases. Number one is on demand. Number two is always on. And number three is agentic. Welcome to the SaaS Revolution Show, a podcast by SaaS.com. Here we interview SaaS founders from around the world who've been there and done that. as they share the ins and outs of how they built their businesses, their operations, their path for securing investment, and more. Our mission with the podcast is to help you, the founder, learn how to scale your SaaS, maintain your well-being, and navigate the complexities of this ever-changing industry.

0:45I'm your host, Alex Thuma, and together we'll explore the good, the bad, and the ugly in the journey to SaaS success. Okay, welcome back to the SaaS Revolution Show. I am your host, Alex Thuma, the CEO and founder of SaaStock, also general partner at BackFuture Ventures. Delighted to be welcomed today by a returning guest, hasn't been on the podcast for a long time, but ahead of speaking at SaaStock USA, which is in Austin on May the 13th and 14th, I'm delighted to be joined by Rahul Vora, who is the CEO founder of Superhuman. Welcome Rahul, how are you doing? Doing great. Thank you for having me back.

1:23Yeah, good to see you again. As I say, it's been, we had you on the podcast, so I can't remember it's probably around like 2020, 21 something like that and also you spoke at one of our virtual events and so it's been a while so it's kind of an opportunity to catch up a little bit but also really excited about just the conversation and getting very excited for Sasquatch USA in five weeks now from recording so yeah looking to get into it and Rahul we always start the show, just get to know the guests a little bit better, but not necessarily just about what they do, but who they are on a personal level, how they think, etc.

2:08So I'll start with who is Rahul Vora? Great. I love going all the way back. So as you know, I'm the founder and CEO of Superhuman. But if you want to go all the way back, then I grew up in the UK. And I started programming as a hobby at a very early age when I was about eight years old. I studied computer science at the University of Cambridge. I even started a PhD there, which I ended up not finishing, which I suppose is cliche. I dropped out because I was much more excited about being a founder. I then started a variety of different companies. One got into Y Combinator. I sold that to LinkedIn.

2:48And shortly thereafter, found myself starting my current company, Superhuman. You don't meet many, I don't hear of many people that start a program at the age of eight. So it's pretty impressive. And I don't know what programming looked like back, back when you were eight. So it would be interesting maybe to know, just anecdotally, actually, I had somebody reach out to me on email. And I think luckily, I caught the email, because we've got a pitch competition at Sasot USA and the email was, my 10-year-old son is building an AI app and would love to pitch it at your conference. And I just thought, well, wow, like 10-year-old building an AI app and like why not give him a platform and hopefully that will be beneficial for him.

3:35So we're actually going to do that at Sasot USA and have this 10-year-old pitch his AI app. And it'll be interesting to see how that fares up with all the adults that are pitching their AI apps. But so probably that instance and you programming at eight are maybe one of the very few that I've heard of. And so very impressive. What did programming look like back when you were eight? Well, of course, it was very different to how it looks now. And that story you just told of that child wanting to pitch their app, I think is incredible. And honestly, it mirrors a lot of what I've been hearing out here in Silicon Valley.

4:16It's fairly normal for eight, nine, 10-year-olds to be programming, to be teaching themselves using Claude or ChatGPT, to be using apps like Cursor and Bolt and Lovable to build those AI-based apps. So it's a lot more accessible than it was back when I started. In my case, it was because both my parents were doctors and working long NHS jobs in the UK, they would often finish late. And so I would often have to wait for them to pick me up after school, and I would just hang out in the school library. and so I started reading all of the books and once I'd read all the fiction that I wanted to read I started on the non-fiction and then I was so excited to find the section on programming and you maybe you remember this maybe you don't but there was a time in the UK where the government actually took programming and computer science incredibly seriously this was the era of the BBC micro which I believe was a partnership between the BBC and some computing firms to produce a computer.

5:21And that was taught as, I believe, part of the national curriculum. Many schools had BBC micros. By the time I was 10 years old, this was a generation prior, so those machines were mostly lying around, disused and underutilized, but they still were there. And you would program them in this language called BBC Basic, which was a version of Basic that folks may be familiar with. And that was really how I cut my teeth, because they were simple enough just to turn on and start programming and you could do some really, really great things. What I wanted to do as a kid, as a kid obsessed with video games, was make my own simple video games.

5:59So I did. And that was really, really fun. And that then gave me the confidence to learn how to program modern day PCs, which at the time meant learning how to program in Visual Basic 2 all the way back then. And I stayed with Visual Basic up to Visual Basic 6, taught myself C and C++, and this was actually all very lucky because I don't know if people still believe in the whole 10 ,000 hours to become proficient in something idea but by the time I went to university I had done north of 10 ,000 hours of programming all self-taught and full of blind spots of course and things I didn't know were bad ideas but I'd put in the hours.

6:39Just maybe well there's definitely a connection but anecdotes of that and about uh the influence of video games and coding and building your own games uh i've got two kids uh two daughters eight and ten and um uh certainly my 10 year old is addicted to roblox and and she's very good at it and very passionate about it and i foster it uh you know to an extent um uh the mum is often like uh you know take the ipad off her and i'm like well she she's you know found something she really enjoys and you can do courses uh on how to code you know robots games and i actually have a colleague uh who's uh one of his kids friends has created a robots game and you know it's generated like 40 000 50 000 in revenue for this 10 year old kid and so i'm like to my kid hey daddy could do with an extra 40 50 50k um like get going but um she hasn't yet but uh maybe maybe we will uh sort of one day and she's actually also um uh really good at youtube and uh creating youtube videos but not of herself but of these games and like what's happening in the games and and actually uh maybe because her tam is bigger than the b2b sass niche but uh she's getting more views on her videos than we do at sas stock and i'm like maybe we should hire her for the content marketing team she's only 10 but we'll see we'll see if that happens but it's it's great to see and that the the abilities and uh that kids can you know code or create games and uh perhaps it's getting a little bit easier to do it than like reading textbooks and uh um uh so on and so forth so that perhaps will foster this future of many more uh you know software developers many more software platforms ai platforms that are built.

8:30And I guess that's an exciting time to be in, right? Absolutely. I 100 % think it will. And so Superhuman, just tell us a little bit about this. This is your current company, but it was founded back in 2014. Tell us a little bit about why you decided to do that. And also, where is it today? And what can you share about it? Well, when I started Superhuman, I really wanted to solve the biggest possible problem. and email turns out to be a way bigger problem than most people realize. And it hit me just after I'd sold my last company, Reportive, to LinkedIn. I was commuting from work, which was in Mountain View in the Bay Area, to where I lived in San Francisco.

9:11And for folks who haven't had the distinct pleasure of doing that drive, it's roughly a one-hour journey, often back-to-back. But this was in 2014 and both Uber and Lyft were having their heyday. So I was in the back of an Uber. and on this trip I finished writing some documents, I cleared out my email, I checked my calendar for tomorrow, I made dinner plans with my partner, I even called my mother and so I was simultaneously being a productive employee, a proactive boyfriend and a present son. I was just being a better human being and then it hit me. I realized that the magic of Uber was not commuting, it was not transportation.

9:51It was not about skitting from A to B. It was time. It was being able to do other things. And so I asked myself the question, where do we spend all of our time? And let me ask you a question. Can you guess the one thing that professionals spend the most time doing? And I warn you in advance, this is a trick question. Yeah, I would say email probably or Slack now, but yeah. Email or Slack. But of course, the answer is neither of those. It is sleep. We spend more time sleeping than we do anything else. And for most of us, actually, we don't do it very well at all. And so briefly, I dallied with the idea of working on that.

10:28But then I quickly realized I had no idea how to fix that. And there were much better placed doctors and scientists and entrepreneurs working on that. But after sleep, of course, it is email. And in fact, there are roughly 1 billion professionals in the world. And on average, we spend three hours a day reading and writing email. So that's 3 billion hours every single day or north of 1 trillion hours every single year that go into reading and writing email. And that's how I knew it was a problem worth solving. I couldn't imagine anything bigger than 1 trillion hours per year. Now alongside that insight, I could see Gmail and Outlook becoming more cluttered and worse every single year, using more memory, consuming more CPU, slowing down your machine, and still actually not working properly offline, even to this day.

11:18And on top of that, people were installing plugins like my last company, Reportive, but also things like Boomerang, Mixmax, Clearbit, Yesware, you name it, they had it. And then each plugin took those problems of clutter, of memory, of CPU overuse, of performance slowdown of offline and made them all dramatically worse. So we decided that it was time for change. We set out to rebuild the entire email experience from the ground up. And today, Superhuman is the most productive email app ever made. So imagine getting through your inbox twice as fast as before, responding faster to the things that matter, saving four hours or more every single week.

11:58Those customers include the latest YC startups, the fastest growing tech companies, and top-tier strategy consulting firms. And as I think we'll get to a little bit later, we're also inventing the future of productivity with AI. Imagine waking up to an inbox, for example, where every email already has a draft reply. You would simply edit and then send. And sometimes you wouldn't even need to edit. I'm going to come back to that very shortly. You mentioned that you lived in Mountain View, But I understand now, and I was trying to see from what I can see in the video, how Austin or Texas, your house is.

12:40But I understand you've relocated to Austin. Is that correct? And if so, can you share any reasons as to why Austin? I'm actually in Los Angeles at the moment. I relocated about two years ago from Silicon Valley after having lived there for 14 years to LA, mostly for a change of scene. I think 14 years is a long time to live in any one place. And I love it here. I think it's fantastic. There's a greater diversity of people. Of course, LA is what, 18, 20, 22 million people large, depending on how you count it. And so there is just naturally going to be more of everything. But I do miss the Bay Area.

13:22So this year, I will be moving back to Silicon Valley. So the rumors about you living in Austin were unfounded. I believe so. I don't know where those rumors are from. I think it was Nathan Latker, but all good. So the point you sort of mentioned then about perhaps potentially inventing or like you're being super early around this sort of like AI productivity, right? Because what we're seeing today is, and certainly over the last couple of years, but if I look at today, like AI is the trend, right? And AI is making people superhuman. It is helping everybody with their productivity across all these different like functions.

14:10I had a conversation it was two weeks ago with CEOs about AI efficiency and I said what are you doing around AI efficiency because I'm curious to learn about this it seems the soup du jour at the moment and I feel I'm not doing enough beyond my chat GPT prompts which are not on a daily basis but I need to do better one CEO listed off probably about 15 different apps that he's using to help him you know be much more productive these are all like ai first apps most of them i never heard of but when he uh you'll probably be pleased to know when he talks about email he said i use superhuman for email and uh i think that was interesting because to say this is a company that was you know invented 10 11 years ago but now today kind every app is this trying to be this superhuman you know for x so how like how do you think about that like in terms of being ahead of the curve uh i think sort of like back then and and how it it sits in today's world of all these apps effectively you know having this superhuman element uh to help everybody you know just be more productive whether it's on sales and marketing or whatever the function is.

15:28I think when it comes to AI, there is this big question that products and companies that existed pre-genitor of AI have had to ask, which is how do we adapt? What happens if in the worst case, I mean, there are companies like Stack Overflow and Chegg where arguably they're losing their products market fits because of AI, because folks can do what they need to do just within ChatGPT. And so there's this big question of how do we react? How do we adapt? And I think it's helpful to crawl before you walk and then walk before you've run. So we think of the evolution of AI in three distinct phases. Number one is on demand.

16:06Number two is always on. And number three is agentic. And so in phase one, we'll go through each of these in turn. We saw features that were on demand. And these were features you had to remember to use. An example from Superhuman would be right with AI. Just jot down a few words and we'll turn them into a fully written email. And if you're thinking, well, I have that in Gemini, I have that in Copilot, of course, all products are going to have very similar looking features. But the difference these days is going to be how well they work. And unlike Gemini and unlike Copilot, we match the voice and tone in the emails you've already sent.

16:41So the emails actually sound like yours do. And the proof is in the pudding. Our average user uses RightWithAI 37 times per week, which is so much more than we thought they would. And it was a sign for us that we were onto the right thing. Now these on-demand features are an easy place to start since they're only running when they're used. You don't need gigantic infrastructure. They don't cost very much to run. That gave us the confidence to move on to phase two when we started building features that are always on. And these are features that you don't have to remember to use. And examples from Superhuman that folks may be familiar with are auto-summarize and instant reply.

17:21And these features have been really exciting, by the way. Over 2024, the percentage of emails that our users write with AI has grown by more than five times over. So these always-on features are quite a bit harder to build because the user isn't directly engaging with them. They require a pretty big build-out of infrastructure and they cost real money to run. They're always on, they're always working for you. For example, for Instant Reply and Auto Summarize, we've already processed many billions of emails. And in phase three, we are building AI agents that replace entire parts of workflows. For example, we recently announced our biggest evolution yet.

18:02And the latest version of Superhuman, which is set to roll out to everyone as of the time of recording, today is April 9th. So next week is now constantly helping you in so many different ways. So let's say you're sending a critical email. You could be trying to close a deal or land a meeting. but of course people are busy you might not hear back. So what might you do? You might set a reminder for example in two days but let's think about that. You still have to remember to set the reminder, decide when it should come back, notice that it came back and then write the follow-up. That's four or five of very manual steps that you have to remember to do and today Superhuman does all of that for you.

18:44If your email needs a response then Superhuman will set a reminder and then when the reminder comes back, superhuman will write the follow-up. This is a little mini agent and it works automatically so you don't have to and we're already seeing people's efficiency in their emails increase by 20 % because of that agent. And then beyond that, you can imagine an email agent that triages on your behalf, that schedules on your behalf and that writes and even sends, if you're open to it, fully written emails on your behalf. And that kind of agent can reason, it can problem solve, it can plan, it can create subtasks, it can execute those tasks in parallel or in serial, it can incorporate deep context about who you are, it can resolve ambiguity by asking you questions and gathering information, it can even access other systems, other tools, and other agents.

19:36And that kind of agent will free us all up to be more creative, strategic, and impactful. So that's where we're headed. We talk about the pre-gen AI SaaS companies, which I guess effectively you could classify that as you were founded in 2014, you're sort of part of. And the majority of these really have to be thinking about AI and putting AI into their products as we think and perhaps welcome your thoughts on that as well. and so this is kind of top of mind for them like building some AI functionality or potentially rebuilding their entire product tech stack and the way that they also go to market but do you think that you've been sort of well placed given that you've kind of had this AI functionality you know for perhaps since the inception that there's an advantage for you you don't have all this legacy tech debt to rebuild the whole product in the world of AI.

20:36So yeah, I'll perhaps sort of pause there. But what are your thoughts around this and these legacy SaaS companies and how you were placed and your thoughts around it and what needs to be done? It's funny that you ask because you're right. We were always an AI company long before generative AI was a thing that existed. And it was a fun exercise to go back to the original fundraising decks for Superhuman, the pre-seed and the seed. and in the vision section, I was articulating the features that we now take for granted today. The idea, for example, that autocomplete can predict on the basis of what you write, or that an AI will be able to turn an idea into an email based on the way that you write, as well as incorporating context and nuance from the conversation.

21:20So all the things that we wished that we could have built have now turned out to be possible to build, And I think that gave us some of an advantage. We always wanted to build these things. So as you can imagine, when it became possible, we jumped on the bandwagon very, very quickly. I think the other thing that has played to our advantage is email is just such a naturally text-heavy medium. And generative AI works especially well on text, as well as images and video, of course. But especially in the early days, it was primarily on text. and all of us have received and sent so much email. Many of our users for example send 10 novel worth of emails a year which if you think about the amount of training data that represents or just the amount of data in general it's an absolutely ginormous amount.

22:11It's unbelievably huge and so that gives us a massive advantage when it comes to building AI products that actually work. In terms of being a older legacy company, that kind of thing can cut both ways. On the one hand, yes, we obviously have technical debt. There are things that we've built that maybe we wouldn't build today or we build them differently today. And that's just normal. That's part of being a somewhat older product. But on the flip side, being an older product gives you this robustness that new products simply don't have. And I was particularly proud over the last year or two, we actually reached three major inflection points that are simply due to grinding it out.

22:57One was on platform and the other was on collaboration. And the third, of course, was on AI. But on the platform side, Superhuman now works wherever you do. We originally set out to bring Superhuman to professionals everywhere, on any device and on any platform. And today, Superhuman now works on every combination of Gmail, Outlook, Mac, Windows, Web, iOS, Android. And that is a very, very difficult thing to do. Very few companies have ever got there. And that then creates the foundation for, for example, true enterprise adoption beyond the needs of any one person. In any enterprise, you're going to require all of those things.

23:32And then in addition, we also redesigned email to be collaborative, to be multiplayer. And as we've grown to serve larger companies over the years, we noticed a fundamental problem with email, which is that many of us collaborate in tools like Slack that you mentioned, also Figma and Notion. There's a whole bunch of tools that we use. And every other piece of software is now collaborative by default. And even though more people use email than any of those tools, traditional email is still not collaborative. It's still not multiplayer. Let's say you wanted to share an external email with your team.

24:07You could paste that screenshot somewhere else like in Slack. But now that conversation is in two separate places. And unless you keep on pasting screenshots, every single time a new email comes in, you're going to have to somehow tell people what happens. There's no way for your team to stay up to date. So you could do what most people do, which is you could forward or BCC, but now you have to remember to do that for every single email you send and receive. And then there's always the risk that someone hits reply wall and says something regrettable externally on an email they were BCC'd on. It's terrible when that happens.

24:39And so in Superhuman, you can now actually share a live real-time view of any conversation directly with your team. And as new emails arrive on that conversation, that real-time view keeps itself up to date. You and your team can then comment directly on it. So there's no more forwarding, there's no more BCCing, and this helps teams move so much faster and save so much time. And we're seeing that it's great for the business, by the way, as you would expect. Being a SaaS investor, one of the most important things to track as expansion rates of teams, teams that use these multiplayer features inside of Superhuman expand twice as fast.

25:15And then on the AI side, we've already talked a bunch about one of the key things that we've seen is we're becoming a horizontal tool to help enterprises go through AI transformation. And it's really exciting to see because there are very few company-wide levers like email. There's also no other solution like Superhuman. So being a legacy company can hurt. It can be difficult. You can often feel like, well, we've built the products we've built and these new upstarts have a clean slate. They don't have to deal with all the things we've had to deal with. But I think if we look at this through the right lens, the lens of what unfair advantages does being a 10-year-old company lend us?

25:57Well, it's the kinds of things I just mentioned. And everything I just ran through, whether it's enterprise readiness or multiplayer or full platform support, genuinely takes years to build. It took us eight or nine years to get to that full platform support piece. And it would take anyone that long. It's just really, really hard to build all of those pieces. So those are the things that can become a source of advantage. Can I just ask, in terms of how you're growing the business and your sort of go-to-market, is it a fair assumption that it's mainly a PLG-type approach? I would say, I mean, the world is very noisy at the moment, very hard to cut through the noise.

26:37So personally, I don't see a lot of marketing from superhuman, but you do hear a lot of people talking about it. And so I'm just kind of curious as to how do you scale the business? And like, maybe what are the kind of one or two things that you do there? Yeah, I would say today that it is still very much PLG, as it was in the early days. When we started the company, I thought we would have three primary pillars of growth. One would be virality. And the product is very viral today. There's the scent via superhuman signature, which you may have seen. that still accounts for north of 20 % of our site traffic.

27:14And there's also the ability to refer people to Superhuman. Excuse me, you both get one month free if you do that. And also to invite folks to your team, which plenty of people do as well. So that's virality. Then there is thought leadership. And we may have talked last time, I think it was about game design. I'm also well known for talking a lot about products market fit. And at Superhuman, we have created a way, not just a measurable product market fit, but a way to systematically and numerically optimize your way to products market fit. And that has turned out to become required reading for basically every single founder.

27:56This is the gold standard for how to measure products market fit and how to get there. And then the third piece is PR. And we found a way to reliably put ourselves in the news cycle in a way that's really authentic and that works very well. The rule of thumb I have for any company that I work with, let's say I'm an investor, is every once in a while your industry is going to come back into vogue. It's going to be a thing that the press talks about. This is definitely true of email. There is a perennial news cycle that happens about email. And the trick is just to figure out how to inject yourself into it, whether it's the way productivity is changing with AI or a few years ago, the way that the workplace and work tools were changing with working from home or in the middle, what about return to office and so on and so on.

28:46There are just so many different ways to inject superhuman into the news cycle. And that is actually true for any company. So those are all still levers that we pull today. But the answer to your question is essentially yes, we are a PLG driven company, primarily, most of our customers find out about us through word of mouth. And the way that that works is we focus on building a product that genuinely delivers value. Most of our customers get through their inbox twice as fast as before, and they're saving four hours plus every single week, not to mention responding one or two days faster to the things that matter.

29:22When you find a product that does that, you kind of tell people because it becomes irreplaceable. Thanks for sharing that. I want to go into a couple of sort of quick-ish fire sort of questions before we wrap up. So I'd like to hear, you know, what is the best piece of advice that you've ever received? So this was after I had sold my last company, reported to LinkedIn, we'd somehow amassed most of LinkedIn's daily active users onto one app. And I reported to LinkedIn's head of growth, who was responsible for scaling the site from 25 million members back in the day to 250 million members when I was there.