#135 with Rahul Vohra (Superhuman Founder) - Why He Started Superhuman and The Ideas He'd Like To See Built

u yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never look him back our guest today is the email god ra founder of superhuman and actually a different startup that both me and sam really love before this i believe you started reported that's right i did yeah i actually kinda wanna talk about that i think that was an awesome startup but i think you are probably only knows ten percent of what he's getting into at this podcast buddy he seems game and he's a brown guy with with a british accent so you know i already feel good i already feel like i'm in good hands so here we go explain people who don't know what reported is let's i'll start with reported explain to people who don't know what reported is what it was and then man and sam will talk about it a little sure so reported was the first gmail extension to scale to millions of users i started it way back in two thousand and ten this is almost a decade ago now and there right inside your inbox it would show you everything about your contacts just over on the right hand side so when somebody emailed you you could see what they look like where they work their job title and even links to that social media like their recent tweets so if you can imagine being the kind of person for whom interacting with other people as important maybe of course you're a founder like you or maybe you're a recruiter or perhaps you're a salesperson or maybe you work in bd or maybe it's just really important to deal with people and it turns out there's a lot of folks like that as well this thing sort of became this the beloved crucial tool first starting in silicon valley and then spreading to millions of users across the world ultimately ended up selling it to linkedin back in twenty twelve in two thousand eleven so i know a lot about you i you're kinda like someone i looked up to and i've known a lot about you since know myself in grace you stopped looking up to me no but i know a bunch of quotes stuff about you from two thousand eleven i was a junior in college and i found rapport and i was like i don't think people understand if you're listening now and you don't if you're a little bit younger younger than i am at least you don't realize that like this idea of seeing people's information on the right side of your gmail and their picture and their linkedin like that's common now that's not special but back then report was the first one to do that and it was so special and so i invented this thing this process is called stock and talk and the idea was i was gonna use it to help me get a job at a company i've made the spreadsheet where i would put someone's first name their last name and then their url like at air airbnb b dot com and like i would put brian and then c and then at air airbnb b dot com and it would give me like a hundred possible combinations of what the name or his email could be and then i would put it in gmail and i would highlight each one and report would tell me which email is his because it would show the social profiles related to each email i ended up emailing the founders of airbnb an interview there using report and so i was obsessed with reported i followed it like crazy i think you started it with a guy named sam and the guy named martin right it's right you do know a look yes and so i like fronted you guys on social media because i wanted to work for you guys and then you sold it to linkedin for the rumor was fifteen million i don't know what the truth is but i was all about it it was it was a fun tool and i i really really fondly look upon those times silicon valley was very different back then of course we're talking a decade ago so i remember thinking at the time this is like you know when presidents or like kind of import ambassadors they go to an event and they kinda have that person behind them or the earpiece that's sort of like the whisper which is like you know this is julie mag she's the you know she she's the representative from columbia ask her about her son you know roger that's what reported was to me was like i could make everything sound personal and i could feel like you would feel like i knew you even though i was just getting it fed to me by my sort of earpiece on the right side which was reported that was fundamentally the idea and i think had i continued to run that company one day we would have made those earpiece we would be bringing that kind of intelligence to everybody everywhere i think the fundamental reason was we were tired and this is one of the lessons that i learned back then i think if i would to be in the same situation again i probably wouldn't sell now that's not to say that selling was the wrong decision i think it was absolutely the right decision given what the company was how quickly it had grown and yet how brittle source it was so you have to remember that i sold the company only twenty months since its existence for a sum that even so this day remains undisclosed and assuming it was a good amount of money then it was a very efficient outcome for the amount of time we'd put in for what was actually a very bristol business we'd only figured out how to make fifteen cents of revenue in the entire history of the company and so why were you tired i was working twelve fifteen hour we all kind of were it was just a really intense period and burnout common i'm sure you've talked about it with other guests it turns out the thing you meant to do in burnout is to take a break right go have vacation for a month all of the reported users will still be there would have been a different solution to the problem but we also sold i mean that was fine it ended up really good for the products i don't think that many acquire would have been as good as linkedin but that product survived for about ten years it only got shut down earlier this year but then you did something really cool that not a lot of people do but i followed you on social media i know this is kinda weird but you went and bought a lamborghini was it a yellow lamborghini you bought yeah it was well that was actually a few years later when i left a linkedin in i was burned us again and i needed to take some more time off and this time i actually decided because it i wasn't really a break between ports and links and i actually decided i'm genuinely go to take some time off and just be me for a good year i went out i bought the really fast car i had fun and i un unwind before i started super so superhuman let's we can talk about that for a minute for people who don't who aren't in the know you guys are kinda like a a darling immediate darling you're talked about a lot how do you describe that business to someone who doesn't know anything the fastest email experience i've made if you're the kind of person who spends hours on or email a day many hours on email a week with superhuman you can get through your inbox twice as fast as before replies important email sooner and even sustain inbox zero and can you give some ideas to how big it is and or anything like that so we don't publicly disclose user numbers because we are ventured backed that's something that we keep to ourselves other proxies or other things that people are interested in we're about sixty people today we've raised fifty one million dollars plus from investors like first round capital and recent har mock andre andres sits in our board it's really exciting to be able to work with the likes of him and let's see what else we have a waitlist list for our products that's something that people are often interested in we now have over three hundred and sixty thousand people on that waitlist list does mark and jason use email differently than clubs like us mark and jason is different in many ways to folks like the three he's one of the most intelligence people i've had the pleasure of getting you know being able to work with one of the things that i think separates mark from most people is his clock speed so to speak is really really high and you know you might think you know smart people but there's like a whole other level of high which is just immediately apparent when you talk to him and as a result he's also very intentional quite a lot more intentional than most people that you are i might need what does that mean this guys he's like oracle he's this he's kinda mystical a little bit what does that mean he's intentional this also happens to be a super even company value so it's something that i put a great deal of interest and value on when someone is intentional they are a very deliberate thinker and actor they tend not to re but they pro they pre they get ahead of things they have a model for how the world or how their business might work and when the data stops matching reality they immediately update the model as opposed to constantly being on the back front back foot rather let me describe this another way many people who know me well know me as a frameworks thinker i have a framework to think about waitlist i have of framework think about onboarding to think about pricing to think about positioning famously products market fits and that's the kind of person i wanna work with other people who also think in a very detailed frameworks oriented fashion how old are you when you say report i believe i was twenty six so how you know you thirty six so he's seven thirty seven so you have this i've only talked to you for ten minutes now or however long this has been you have this thing about you that you are clearly going to be a ceo of a very large company because you have this intangible kinda charisma i don't know what you wanna call it but sean i imagine no i feel like when you're talking you're not talking you're na right it's as if you have left the scene you are observing the scene and you're not caught up in the hustle and the bustle of the scene because this already played out or you're the one the story it's a calm and charisma in the way you speak it's literally just the way you speak like we don't know shit else about you no he's using concepts and stuff i mean you're doing a really you have this you have like an it factor it's very clear i always have i've talked to you for five minutes would you wanna be ceo of a big company like multi thousand person company that's publicly listed is that a is that a goal of yours i know for myself for example i love the start and the bigger the company gets the less fun it becomes for me and i've learned that over time and so some people love it some people dream about that and so which bucket are you in yeah good question i probably find myself somewhere in the middle i've had at this point now just one or two friends who've had the amazing outcome to take a company public and it doesn't seem that much fun they don't seem to be having that much fund they'd be the first to say that it was obviously a huge ambition point for them so they pursued it nevertheless i'm very excited about learning and scaling i think in order to create a business that really truly has outcomes on the world that we as the founders get to play a large person we do have to scale in some part with the companies or as far as we can now this idea that you wanna have thousands of employees apparently larry from google was known for one thing to have tens of thousands of employees i don't really resonate with that that's not a most facing in fact me taking the company public not most amazing facts of me having a very large private company that has a tremendous amount of impacts on the world that's exciting were you like this when you were twenty six and starting rapport or did that year off kind of change you i think the year off helped me recover from what was a very sort of taxing experience building reports them being at linkedin but i don't personally think i fundamentally changed when you were at linkedin so this is a a selfish question right so i i just got acquired by a company that's two thousand person company linkedin i bet was even bigger at that point in time i found it good and bad interesting to be entrepreneur inside of a company like this and some days i feel like i kick a ton of ass and i'm like oh my god only i and this company could do this that's the ego me i'm like only i could've pulled this off and then other days i'm like wow i'm so useless at this company i don't have any of these skills that these other people have and i don't want those skills either and i you know i can't do all these things that you need to do to function to be a high functioning person in these companies and so i'm curious when you got acquired were you a good employee were you just in sort of chill mode like i some people go into when they get acquired or you know what was your experience like there i certainly gave it my all but to be honest i ended up struggling a fair amount and the reason is i think i'm a pretty good founder i'm at best a mediocre products manager of a large company and linkedin was about seventeen hundred people at the time our products management organization was seventy people i came in right in the middle i was a senior products manager one of the very few who could simultaneously code design markets and conceive of new products which is the thing that makes me a good founder but i also didn't have skills set of products manager should have things like being able to establish consensus i don't have to establish consensus i just say this is the direction we're going and you're either with me or without guess what big companies don't work like that other skills like bringing people along fighting for allocation and for resources when rapport was an independent company people would lying around the block to wanna work for me apparently sam you nuances to work for rapport and you know that this is it's exciting if people wanna work for startups that's not the case at linkedin in or it's any other large company or any other large company you generally have to fight and play the politics game in order to get your projects funded and to get people to work on your things and that was a switch that was really hard me the other thing is just what's important to the company unless you come into run product you've gone from your thing being existential to your thing is now probably an experiment or a strategic bet as a founder your job is to find a needle in a haystack as an acquired founder your job is to move the needle the haystack has long since gone i'm a customer how much do i pay twenty or thirty dollars a month thirty dollars when you were starting superhuman i mean it's becoming a little bit normal now or more normal but paying for email i mean i guess we did with aol my mom still pays for her aol account but you know like paying for email is very that's very original thinking that's something not a lot of people would pay for you're proving wrong what else is out there that is a free service that you think people would have an appetite to pay for if they applied some of the framework or however whatever in sites you had to we're like well man people would pay for faster email is there anything else there that you in your head you're like man that that deserves a a paid experience that has more features not one that i've put a tremendous amount of thoughts here but we can try and come up with a framework on the fly so what is it that makes superhuman work as a premium prose product well first of all a premium prose products in the space does not exist so there's a gigantic amount of white space for a high end version of that product then you have to start asking questions like well why doesn't it exist why has not google or microsoft created a premium email experience why have they not made superhuman what was the answer to that well let's take them each turn because i think they're quite a different for google i believe it's the fundamental business model doesn't support creating a premium email experience and the company is so large now that it doesn't matter the fundamentals google business model is of course ads and adwords it's to know everything they can possibly know about you second to keep you in the browser hence gmail both of those things feed into gmail so they can better monetize you in the google world you are the products now of course people pay google for the enterprise solutions for g suite but that is a vest digital business by comparison to their overall business and that explains why when inbox by google grew to five hundred million users it was still considered a failure that would have been a runaway success story for any independent company so that's google it's just simply business model it doesn't fit for microsoft i think it's a little bit different for microsoft it's they sell through bundling almost all of their money comes from companies buying the all you can eat microsoft platform and they just expect every single box to be checked one of those boxes is of course email outlook was built many many many years ago it does all kinds of different things it has to be a one size fits all solution and so that's what it is now both outlook and gmail are great products for what they are designed to do but it does leave underserved a premium segment of users that we were able to go and sell to now then beyond that you have to start looking at the products themselves and asking well what is the product white space to do better and we identified two things number one speed and numbers two design two things that both google and microsoft for various reasons are unable to compete on in a nimble or an agile fashion but why did you start with email just because that's like the biggest thing there is or because you liked email for because a report all kinds of different reasons i think one of the biggest impacts i remember when i was coming towards the end of my time at linkedin thinking about well what his roth gonna do next and thinking this one is gonna be the big one i probably have one company left at me so better be really big their best accounts and i recall reading at the same time the now famous mckinsey study that showed that of the one billion professionals that there are in the world on average we're still doing three hours a day of email that's the average professional does three hours a day of email and as we just discussed they're doing it with one size fits all tools things like gmail email things like outlook so three billion hours per day every single day go into email there's in fact only one thing we do more than email and that's sleeping and when i looked at my ability to be a founder working on sleep versus my ability to be a founder working on email where already sold a company knew all the people and could raise arbitrary amounts of capital i was like well clearly that's the one for me how did the actual idea come about so you're sitting around are you brainstorming on a whiteboard is this like you know what was the actual id when was when did the lightning strike and you understood okay what if i built a pros form email to what if i built an email experience that you would pay for because it was slick it was fast it was well designed etcetera etcetera it's hard to pinpoint the exact moment i think it was perhaps six months before i left linkedin i was having lunch with my team the report team in the linkedin mountain view offices we just all started naturally talking about what might come next and i was like hey folks i think we kind of ruined gmail and they said what do you mean and i said well we were the first browser extension on gmail to really go mainstream and get millions of users and now everybody's copy this you have things like boomerang mix max yes where cleared it you name it it exists all of these products including our own are just almost like a virus to sort of sitting on top of gmail there's no api they don't belong there they slow down the experience they clutter visually they take all of the problems of gmail the problems that it's going slower that it doesn't work properly offline that is visually collected that it consumes ever increasing amounts of cpu memory and so forth and it makes all of those things dramatically worse what if we just built it from scratch what if we built an email experience the same way that apple built a laptop to me that was like the aha moments that no one has done that because it's really scary and nobody knows how and it's very expensive but i might be one of the few people in the world that could actually call it off in the sense of pulling together the team of the capsule to make it happen you said you hadn't given a lot of thought to the warehouse else could you do super i don't believe that i think you probably think about it all the time and you also hear all the superhuman for x that gets built right like i've been pitched probably ten different versions of superhuman for x you know for example superhuman for calendar which i'm sure you guys either already do or about to do or you've have a really good reason why you're like that doesn't work and then there's you know people who have done it in the let's say bug tracking you know space right so i think why use jira when you could use this you know this new new and special one for forgot the name of it but it's a good one yeah are you serious you really haven't thought about the other spaces that you could super out or doing it for browsers which is the app a very obvious one sure and you know there are great companies going after all of this might for browsers linear for the issue tracking yeah there's a number of super for calendar ideas and i'm very fortunate to see most of these through the context of either friendly founder who can help or through the the possibility of being an angel investor with the angel funds that i run with todd when i said i haven't given it significant thoughts what i meant is i haven't given it rigorous thoughts in the same way that i gave email back and day in the same way that when i committed to giving the next ten fifteen years of my life to this project i hadn't done that for these other ideas but with a surface level analysis or with sort of an angel investors level of analysis they all seem very plausible i do think that superhuman for x is is a it's a very real thing there's gonna be multiple billion dollar products and billion dollar companies to be made in the last yc demo day superhuman for x was the most common x for y it's pretty interesting to see the trend take have you invested them in yet or what would you invest in one superhuman for x that we've invested in is command e so command e is a it's kind of actually modeled off command k which we popularized in super human but you press the keyboard shortcuts and you're then able to search across everything not only all of the data that you have locally but all of the data that you might have on the cloud so where did you lastly leave that notes it might be apple notes it might be in evernote notes or it might be in google drive this thing will find it who is the candidate that is on your calendar that you're going to speak to in half an hour command typing in their name will take you straight to the beauty house record want to update the lead all the opportunity in salesforce command you can do that as well and so this is taking a lot of the same product sensibilities that we had and applying it to a different workflow which is search and updating records you seem incredibly calm and you mentioned that you and todd what's his name todd g yeah todd goldberg goldberg you guys have hot big are fun like a ten or fifteen rolling fun right well we have two phones we have an early stage angel fund which is about seven and a half million dollars and we also have a rolling funds which is more of an opportunity funds and that's to invest in the breakout companies from the first fund that's just as well as other amazing companies that we see coming from our own network so you have two funds you have a company that has sixty employees you have a lot of users you've have a lot of investors that you have to deal with how are you managing your time right now have you delegated everything at superhuman like what's your deal how are you able to get this done i'm actually haven't so i'm working on building up the team so i can delegate more and more as time goes on i'll answer your questions separately because i think the answer to them is different how can someone be calm and how can someone in my position manage that time how am i calm i'm a huge believer and i would say a journey man practitioner of transcend meditation yeah no shit that's like the two minutes with you and i could tell that you just you scream that man you whisper that well i'm glad glad to see the the aura conveys over camera but i do better twice a day so i meditate usually the first thing in the morning for about a half an hour and again in the afternoon at around four thirty for another half an hour i'm early in my practice i've only been doing this for about six or seven months for me it clicked when i hired a coach to teach me how to do it i'm also an even bigger believer in coaching i've had coaches for nearly every aspect of my life i've worked maybe five or six different coaches not just meditation but also things like nutrition for physical training obviously being a ceo and being an executive and for me meditation did not work until i hired a coach to actually drag me through the learning process i think i'm a an investor student i'm not the best learner but i respond wealth coaching and that for me was the thing that made it work can you give us like the two or three things you either were getting wrong on your own or you'd you were looking at the wrong way that the like what were two or three other the things that the key points at the coach sort of highlighted to you mental fallacies like well i spent the twenty minutes of my meditation just thinking about stuff not repeating my mantra surely therefore i'm not meditating that's actually a policy that is in fact what you're meant to experience six months into your your journey and meditation it means that it's working it means that your body is beginning to unwind and you're just ever vest all of these thoughts and your your to actually experience them and every time you notice you're thinking of course bring yourself back into the meditation but the fact that your body is taking you there is a good thing i previously thought that was failure when i try to self teach through one of the many meditation apps another one would be the policy of i simply don't have the time right and hour a day is a lot that's five hours a week depending on how much you work its you know double digit percentage of the amount of time that you have the answer of course is that through the time that we spend in meditation we make everything else way more efficient and effective and that's hard to believe until you experience it for yourself i respond wealth to authority one way that you can start to believe some of those things is have a world expert meditation simply tell you that and back us up with science and so the coach that i work with the reason i believe him is he's a scientist and he's also been a tech founder venture backed several times so he know he's what one he's talking about he's not just sort of spout mystical bullshit like this is actually rounded grounded both in his experience as well as in science what's his name you wanna give him a shout out or or is it intentionally stealthy happy to refer folks were interested his name is laurent laurent val he runs the peak performance institute he focuses on leaders and executives with the purpose of performance so he's not after specifically spiritual awakening although if you find that that's wonderful it really is around how can leaders unlock performance okay so that's commerce i think the other question was how do i manage my time right i track it and subscribers are superhuman will know both of these things because i've just sent out a number of sort of productivity tips one on meditation and another on time tracking i do this perhaps somewhat weird thing called a switch i like many other the founders used to have the experience where i get towards the end of the week and i feel sad or where did that week go i don't feel like i achieved anything i felt constantly interrupted forever fu out fires what actually happens and so i this thing called the switch log it's very simple every time i start a task end a task or switch a task i simply go over to slack go to a channel i have specifically for this purpose type in ts colon and then the name of the task that i am switching to and this turns out to be remarkably effective because then i can go back afterwards and analyze exactly where my time runs your calendar in theory does this for you but your calendar at best says what you wanted to do and for most founders it doesn't record what actually happened the switch log does and it's very easy and you don't even have to worry then about maintaining a calendar as an angel investor are you seeking out anything right now are you seeking a category or an idea that you're wanting to invest money in if there was the right team or someone trying to make happen incredible founders in fast growing markets i think as pretty much every angel investor seeks out todd me a fairly generalist investors so our themes of interest are viral saas of which productivity and collaboration are good examples and we've made some bets there for example folks might know tandem is building the water cooler for the remote age we're really interested in health fitness and wellness so we've invested in a company called future that is taking training into the application era the remote area fantastic you've also invested more recently in an amazing company called levels which builds a continual glucose monitor so you can see the real time mass metabolic response of your body to anything you eat for do i'm an investor in that one as well fantastic yep we're really super excited about levels so you have viral sas you have health fitness and wellness we also are a big believer in infrastructure business infrastructure companies and not really at the nuts and bolts level of hardware we don't really understand that but we're a big believer in api companies so some of my personal investments that have done the best have been companies like clear bits which is a rather well known api for data enrichment everything from an ip address to an email address to easy post which is an api for really super simple and rapid shipping api companies are particularly interested because interesting because once they get ingrained in a company that next to impossible to out would you say that like a one example that is zapier yeah exactly zapier would be the oc title infrastructure company i have a bold prediction i think zapier is gonna be as big as atlas i think zap year is gonna be a fifty billion dollar software company yep i think if they play their cards right they could be i think it's gonna be a huge so people love to just hear sort of like your half baked startup up ideas i don't know if you have any i don't know if you're an idea of machine that just can't turn the switch off but most of the founders i meet tend to be that way i'm gonna take a shot in the dark and say you are am i am i right on that or or is that not the case for you actually no i'm more of a let's make a great machine give me an idea where i can describe how to do it fantastically but unless ideas that said i do have a few ideas if you wanna go into them give us a couple of ideas and i actually wanna ask you about the other thing you said too so so let's start with a couple of ideas so these are ideas that i have stumbled upon or opportunities that i've stumbled upon through my role of running super and they're all things that i wish existed in the markets but i cannot buy and so we're probably just going to have to bite the bullets and build them one is a plug and play library for auto correct it's super works in the browser it also works the native mac app we will one day build a native windows app when you type i would love to be able to auto correct the errors in your typing in the same way that macos os does natively by the way windows doesn't do this natively so if you you live on a windows machine you probably don't really know what i'm talking about but everyone's familiar typing into that iphone and the android and having it just fix itself that's what i'm talking about things like missing capitalization missing punctuation trans transportation errors con joined words all of these things should just self eminent fixed i have put so much time into looking for a library or a piece of technology that does this and it does not exist that's shocking to me that doesn't exist and this is something that devs would so a dev would buy this when they're building their stuff i think the reason it doesn't exist is not too many apps are creating new editing services but if you are building an app and you have an editor and you want to actually innovate on the writing experience itself you would just put this thing in there and you would take your web writing experience to be as good as any native writing experience like macos or the iphone that's interesting that's a cool one yeah love that thumbs up on that one for sure okay you'll invest excellent next one would be and again this is something that i just wish existed but it doesn't which is document preview now there was once point time a number of companies like crocodile where you could give them any documents and they would give you a web render preview really quickly obviously this is important for superhuman we want folks be able to preview their attachments super fast as far as i know there are only two ways three ways that i can think of doing this right now you can upload it to someone's g drive and then download it as a pdf obviously user space takes time you can use microsoft's free libraries to do this maximum file size limitation of five megabytes or you can download what i believe is a java library i think from box box acquired it was doc back and day and i think that was the ultimate evolution of that product all of these three approaches obviously have major cons as well as the benefits they bring as far as i can tell there isn't a really great document preview library that you can just throw any file and it will produce a zoom intra render preview and you're gonna use this in superhuman that would be how i use it but i imagine any enterprise tool any tool at all that has to deal with files would make good use for this i would happily invest in this topic if you're building it please let me know if you were running this business so you had started it how much would you i'll ask you about pricing a little bit but for this one like what would you sell something like that for like what would you price it at and i'm not an expert on api pricing at all but what i've seen is that you start with a pay as you go model it's gonna be this much for this many documents or maybe you're actually selling it based on the file size of the documents i specs that will be a good proxy to the comp power that you spend on passing the documents and rendering it and then at the high end what you're really charging for integrations sla service to the organization that you were experiencing with the reason i'm asking is like superhuman at three hundred and sixty dollars a year a lot of software people say that like the there's a dead zone of around you're in like the dead zone of like basically it's really hard to price stuff around that price and a lot of the more successful saas companies and i thinking what's that guy name tom tongues but is what is it thomas tongue guys or whatever is yeah yeah it's like a vc red point yeah he's have to scrape post like analyzes all the saas ipo it he's like there's some stuff that it's like free or next to very cheap and then the most all the successes are like it's at least five thousand dollars a year and it's very very hard to scale because like hubspot they have this cool study or this cool what's his name brian be he has this thing called ref ford you know what brian and i bet and he basically says like when he was at hubspot he helped launch this thing called the it was your competitor at report what was it called side kick side he like built the thing called side kick which was basically kinda like reported but a little bit different and he charged thirty dollars a twenty dollars a month and he grew it and it like got to three hundred thousand dollars a month one year and eventually they're like no we gotta shut this down there's no way that this could be become a big business because it costs too much money to acquire customers when you're thinking of superhuman and this new in all the products that you've named seem like they actually would cost in thousands of dollars a year you're thinking of superhuman are you like we're gonna have to figure out a way to sell something else to make a lot of money or do you figure are you think you're gonna be able to get a million users for a very low c so the good news and this was the tail end of every vc pitch that we ever made last year was we clearly don't need a million users in order to be a billion dollar plus company it turns out that when you sell a product at thirty dollars a month which by the way i agree is a hard price points but i'll come max to that in a second it turns out that when you sell a thirty dollars a month all you need is three hundred thousand subscribers to we at a hundred million be exactly it's hundred and eight million in today's markets you'd be valued at four or five billion dollars probably assuming you were growing non trivial at the points of three hundred thousand subscribers and so the question that we asked is we don't need to get to millions of users can we see a path to hundreds of thousands of subscribers and me and every other vc who is interested in this said yes obviously yeah there's one billion people who do email professionally so there must be some subset of that that that we can get to three hundred thousand subscribers now that doesn't mean to say that we wrote down the line explore to increase average revenue per user but i do believe that we can create a good cat lt tv ratio just with this core products alone the thinking is like let's just get to two hundred thousand users let's a little bit laser focused on that and then we'll figure out the rest as we go exactly and this is one of the things by the way where mark talking about him again his presence his wisdom is actually very useful so i recall a previous board meeting where i was going off on a little bit of tangent about well maybe we should go and acquire this company or perhaps we should think building the thing that they make stuff like that and he said well it's going to be relatively expensive now and you end up giving up the fair much accuracy you're using a lot of your cash the alternative is we walk the fairly well understood path to hundreds of thousands of users and then when we're making that revenue just spend the revenue on buying the next piece of the puzzle and it kind of makes sense that when you when you hear it laid out like that now i just wanna go back to the side of a dead zone because i find it fascinating and i think there's a lesson in here which is future success will not always look like previous success and i think if we're a founder and we're trying to come up with something really big something really cool we have to deliberately and this goes back to that id intentional pick something that is on purpose not like all the things that came before and the thing that i observed is that i thought the time was right to start to go after the pros humor the thirty dollar a month price point precisely because everything prior had been very cheap or very expensive and i thought there was a new path to growing a company in the middle i hear you a little bit but to play devil's out of advocate like why would you make this needlessly tough on yourself superhuman doesn't have competition no one else is selling a thirty dollar a month email experience and they would have to catch up with everything that we built in order to try and do so so you bring with other benefits i think the key is you don't say okay what is the perfect price instead you say alright to first to realize our ambitions we wanna be a billion dollar company you need a hundred million dollars in revenue to get a hundred million dollars in revenue you need three hundred thousand users at this price point do i believe that i can do that yes i can believe i can do it this it's the right price for us because there's a competitive advantage like the lower your price gets generally the more customers you're gonna be able to acquire because there's less friction you know along the way so i think that's there that's the i i would guess the retention is pretty strong although i did churn out a superhuman i would assume i think most people who are power email users is very hard for them to churn once they get a better experience and they go back to a slow thing exactly all of this relies on the idea that you have a high retention products that people do genuinely love the thing that you've built you are creating the delight and that you can build a revenue stream that lasts for a long time and you haven't even really gotten into companies yet because i know when i used it i couldn't use it for my work email because it wasn't like it didn't pass the security whatever not there was anything wrong me but the security team at the company was like we haven't vetted this so it it doesn't work with our work email yet there's probably ample room to grow in just in that one regard exactly we think there's a ton of headroom there we're now starting to see really big company accounts organically form that classic bottoms up promotion and we're beginning to develop some competency this is new for us so obviously there's something new every time but competency at going through the vendor approval process right it used to take us gosh three days it took us three days to get through uber questionnaire there and now we can get through a security questionnaire in in two hours and and so there's been a lot of learnings since condensing that down before you were starting superhuman i bet you were thinking of one or other two things that you were passionate about even if they were related but a little bit different what were they the one other thing that came up against superhuman obviously superhuman was by far and away the one that i chose was this notion of small scale private applied to saas businesses the idea that the first two three years of a company not very much happens you're not making that much revenue is spending a lot of time pulling together capital people and building a product and a lot of people make that journey and then flame out either because like happens or they lose interest or they literally don't know how to do the next stage and so i think there is a very good business model to be had and i do know some people pulling this off where you find companies that have done that phase maybe they're making a hundred thousand dollars year a month or maybe they're making ten thousand dollars a month and you spend anywhere in the region of half million to five million to ten million to buy these companies outright you own all of them and maybe you raise some money to help you do this but ultimately you own these companies scale them ten x that is a relatively well understood problem there's only a few ways you can scale companies like that maybe even support the companies with some kind of centralized resource pool whether it's development or sales or support and then sell them onto the next buyer once they reach let's say you can go from a million dollars of arr ten million dollars of error you can then sell it for more than ten times than when you acquire it so cancellation software i think does this right constellation software is one there's also x on software run by my good friend jonathan seagull yeah i know those guys there's and there's another german outfits as well so there's maybe five or six pry small scale private equity funds that essentially do this kind of operation what would you do a little bit differently as them or is there just enough out there that you don't really have to be that different you just as long as you execute okay you would it would work to me this feels like the very earliest days of venture capital i don't think you necessarily have to do anything specifically different people are still buying companies by what they're interested in running so for example my friend jonathan siegel he recently bought first class mail which is a mail forwarding service there's a location out here in san francisco i don't think i'd don't want to run earth class mail i'm sure it's a really good way to make money but i don't have any particular interest in running a male scanning and forwarding service so i think folks are simply buying things that are interesting to them that also happen to make money that they see an opportunity to work with it's mostly greenfield i think there's a ton of room for folks to come in and to try something like this now in a case i ended up comparing that to the thrill and the excitement of building a big household brand like superhuman and i'm working on something that i know incredibly well productivity and email and having a vehicle to make the best email experience that exists and do some of the best work in my life and for all of those reasons and more ended up choosing superhuman yeah i think one definitely is more fun than the other and you're probably gonna create a significant amount of wealth with superhuman it does seem that the second idea is easier actually to get rich but maybe just probably more reliable because by definition all of my eggs are in one basket whereas by definition you're creating a portfolio when you're buying multiple saas companies we're at the hour market and i know you said you go to yahoo finance so make sure you're not late for for them so tell us if we got wrap up but i liked the ideas that you had shared because they they fit this thing that we talk about on the podcast called my import export framework which is i learned that one of the best ways to generate ideas is it's a go work at a company and then think about what what businesses what solutions would we import in like we would pay for this if this existed and solve these problems that's a great way to generate ideas and the other is the export it's like we hack together this crappy solution for ourselves there's probably a thousand other businesses that have the same problem a third of which you're hacking together their own crappy solution and if someone just made the good solution if we just took this thing we made that product size it that's could be a standalone alone business of its own and so sounds like you had a couple ideas in that realm and me personally that's always how i've come across business ideas well cool man this is wonderful i'm happy i was able to talk you finally i like i said i think we're for facebook friends or something like that where you've like i've been an admire from a little bit of a distance again that sounds really creepy but i've been at admire for a while so i'm happy we're we were able to talk i like how you were like sean do the intro when actually this is like your hero that you've been stalking for for a decade and you should have done it no you guys like reported was special because it how many people work there including myself it just seemed like kind of a rag tag group you guys like seemed like pretty hardcore like nerds and hackers which i like it was also really non obvious to do an email extension right that wasn't even a business space i didn't feel like before report i never used a single product in that space before reported and so was that just like a hobby project that turned into a real thing or you intentionally were like no this is a this is how we should build this company it was the thing i built myself it was a hobby project and then i realized that a browser extension could be a real company and today we have outcomes like honey multi building dollar company gran another multi building dollar extension company people are building real businesses on these platforms let me ask you one more question for you leave it looks like you're in if i had a guess maybe soma or financial district in san francisco that's right let's because everyone's talking about it are you gonna stay are you gonna go what's your plan my plan currently is to stay i think that perhaps in the long term i end up not being in the bay area maybe i raise a family somewhere else but in the meantime my focus is on being here i actually think that the founders teams the investors really everybody who stays over the next twelve to eighteen months in san francisco will have the edge when the city inevitably as it has done multiple times in the past fifteen years rebuild why because our connective tissue will already exist there will be an enthusiasm to get things done and for all of the reasons why location was important to begin with they will be important to begin the fact that you can get a deal done just by walking down the road and walking at somebody else's office it's pretty special hey i agree i just you know i lived there for i i just moved a few months ago like a lot of people but it was a hard decision but i agree you should come back we we should we should wrap it up rahul thanks for coming man and congrats on building something that's legit i think a lot imitation is the greatest former of flattery as they say and there's a lot of people out there who are trying to build superhuman for x and you know i think that's probably the highest complement one entrepreneur can give another is like oh the thing you did to your space i wanna do to whatever the next space i can do too well thank you so much for saying so and thank you to both for having me it's been really fun yeah