AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace, Business, Ethics, HR, and IT for AI Enthusiasts, Leaders and Academics
00:00:01 · Rahul Vohra
[00:00:01] S0: Where do we spend all of our time? This is a little bit of a trick question. Can you guess the one thing that professionals spend the most time doing? That's not scheduling. It's a very good guess because a lot of you know actually are scheduling. It is in fact sleeping. We all spend more time sleeping than we do basically any other activity in our life, and after sleep, it of course turns out to be email. In fact, there are roughly 1,000,000,000 professionals in the world, and on average, we spend three hours a day reading and writing email. So that's three billion hours every single day that go into email. And that's how I knew it was a problem worth solving. Turchin. Y'all remember the name. People ain't in the mix. No stopping the float. Better work, better life. Yeah. We're ready to go. Robots and humans are collab. You know? Okay. Let's start the show.
00:00:57 · Dan Turchin
[00:00:57] S1: Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening depending on where you're listening. Welcome back to AI and the Future of Work episode 412. I'm your host, Dan Turchin, CEO of PeopleReign, the AI platform for IT and HR employee service. If you enjoy this episode or any other, you owe it to humanity. Pay it forward. Share a link to this one or anyone you enjoy with just one friend, and they'll know that you care about making humans better with AI. If you leave me a comment, I just may share it in an upcoming episode. Like this one from Sonia in Ralla, Missouri, whose favorite episode is number three thirty nine with former Slack exec and Future of Work Authority, Brian Elliott. It's a great conversation if you haven't heard that one about AI anxiety, burnout, and building trust in the workplace. You know what? I'm gonna call an Audible. There are so many fun facts I could be sharing with you today, but we've got an amazing guest. And I don't wanna sacrifice any of our time with today's amazing guests. So, you know what? We're gonna jump right into the conversation. Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman, the most loved email client on the planet. He launched it in 2014. Superhuman Mail has now teamed up with Grammarly and Coda as one powerhouse productivity platform. Prior to Superhuman, Rahul founded Rapportive, the first Gmail plugin to scale to millions of users, which he sold to LinkedIn in 2012. He's also a prominent angel investor, and his fund has invested $50,000,000 in over a 120 companies, including Placer, Supabase, Mercury, Zip, ClassDojo, and Writer, home, of course, of a prior guest, Habib. Rahul received his BA in computer science from Cambridge, which is notably the second oldest university in England founded in twelve o nine, more than a hundred years after the founding of bitter rival, Oxford. One thing that Rahul has not yet accomplished in his life is having been a guest on AI in the Future of Work that's going to change today. Rahul, it's absolutely a pleasure to welcome you to the podcast. Let's get started by having you share a bit more about your background and, how you got to where you are today.
00:03:21 · Rahul Vohra
[00:03:21] S0: Well, hey. Thank you for having me and allowing me to accomplish this bucket list item today and finally coming on the podcast. So in terms of who I am and and how I got here, I I think you did an incredible job. I can add a little bit of color. I've always been drawn and passionate about making things. And, I studied computer science at Cambridge, as you know. Started a PhD, in fact, dropped out, which I think is the cool thing to do, and then ended up getting into entrepreneurship. My last company, Rapportive, took part in Y Combinator in the summer of two thousand and ten. That's when I moved over here to California with my two cofounders and their partners. All in, I think I've moved about 20 plus people to California over the years and sold that company to LinkedIn. Took a year off also and then started Superhuman, the fastest email experience ever made. That company grew very quickly and as you mentioned, we were acquired by Grammarly in the middle of last year. We then renamed the entire company to be Superhuman, and we're now building the AI native productivity suite for apps and agents. And this is an entirely new kind of AI. We're bringing AI to everywhere you already work. That's in every app and tab you might be working in today, and we're rethinking the core application services that you work from, like email. So today, the suite starts with Grammarly, which, of course, is the most trusted writing agent in the world with north of 40,000,000 users and 50,000 organizations that use it. Superhuman Mail, the company I founded, which is the most productive email app ever made. Coda, like you mentioned, the all in one AI workspace for teams. And a new product that we're making, Superhuman Go, which is a proactive AI companion that works in every app and tab you use without you having to ask. And so that, of course, is just the beginning. We have big plans for the whole suite, which I'm excited to get into.
00:05:26 · Dan Turchin, Rahul Vohra
[00:05:26] S1: Rahul, I had the pleasure back in 2019 having received a personal invite to superhuman, which at the time, it was just called Superhuman. And I kind of on a whim registered to be on a wait list. Of all bizarre things, I got a call from someone on your team to see if I could clear the wait list. I... At the time, I thought that you were building a rocket ship, a literal rocket ship and not an email client based on how sophisticated that onboarding conversation went. Since then, you've really become renowned for kind of coaching others through how to find product market fit. Just if you could share a little bit about the backstory, how you thought about the onboarding process and how that contributed to the the early success of Superhuman. [00:06:18] S0: So there's a lot of ground that we could cover here. Are you more interested in how we define products market fit, or are you more interested in the genesis of the onboarding program? Where would you like to go? Give [00:06:31] S1: us a case study in how you used the output from those onboarding conversations to deliver early versions of Superhuman.
00:06:40 · Rahul Vohra
[00:06:40] S0: Got it. Okay. So to begin with, I was insistent that we do every user. We put every user, I should say, through an onboarding, that we actually sit down and we watch them use the product because nothing approaches that in terms of the amount of information you get and how much you learn when you're watching those users. It's actually relatively easy to get people to try a new piece of software, especially if it's in a well known space like email. I mean, there are any number of upstarts that come and go. Any company can at least try to build an email app. It's, of course, incredibly difficult to build one that people fall in love with. And say, hey, folks. Come try this email app. And overnight, you'll get tens of thousands of people easily to come try your thing. However, imagine what most of those people go through. For most of those people, they will download the app. They'll put it through its paces, encounter a few bugs. Maybe think to themselves, okay, I'll I'll report one or two things, but they probably won't even do that. And then as the bugs they encounter increase, this is inevitable for early stage software, they end up giving up on the product. Sometimes it's bugs. Sometimes it's feature parity. Sometimes it... The the secret source didn't quite land. But that's the normal experience of a new user with a new piece of consumer software. That is why churn is such a big problem in any new piece of consumer consumer software. So I've seen this happen with any number of companies, and I knew that that would happen to us unless we did something different. So I don't really believe in doing a traditional launch at this point. What I believe in doing is putting your products in front of increasingly large sets of customers, and then listening to their feedback, and tweaking and iterating for them. So we initially did this, and we were initially onboarding as low as five users per week. And I would actually go to the customer's office. I would take a bottle of wine or some kind of gift to say thank you. And deliberately, also at this point, these were also the most influential people you could find in Silicon Valley, well known CEOs and investors. And I would... This this whole thing would take an hour or two. We would sit down and I would ask them to show me how they're doing their email today.
00:09:06 · Rahul Vohra
So they would pull up Gmail and then they would show me how they do it. I would then give them a demo of Superhuman. I would then say, okay, this is the point where you have to pay. And so I would ask them to pull out their credit card and and put it in, like type in the number as I was in the room, which led to some socially awkward moments. But I'm also a strong believer in charging from day one for for your products because price is actually part of packaging, is actually part of products. The... All of these things are inextricably linked. And I would then spend the next hour or so actually onboarding those users, showing them how to take their workflow, dial it up to 10, and get through their inbox twice as fast as before, responding to important messages faster. And about half of those users actually hit inbox zero within that session, which for them was life changing. Like, this was something that was just impossible before using Superhuman. Of course, during that process though, we would find 10, 15, 20, 25 bugs. And the fact that I was there watching as opposed to the user having to spot that something had gone wrong and report it meant that we found way more than if the user was just trying to find issues themselves. So I'd be furiously scribbling down notes in my notebook of all the things I'd seen that had gone wrong. And here's the part that made this magic. I went back to the team and I said, there is no point onboarding the next five or 10 users until we fixed all of the things reported by this week's five or 10 users. And the reason for that is we'll never start to get to the next layer of issue until we fix this layer of issue. There are there are only so many issues you can actually think about and encounter in a half an hour or a forty five minute period. And so initially, were some grumblings, but the logic made sense and we started to work on all of these issues. And sure enough, that uncovered the next set and the next set and the next set until what you actually have is a finely tuned, highly polished product experience that most people are just unaccustomed to today. And this is how, unlike almost every other... I think, actually, every other email startup that has come and gone, we were actually able to, in a very high quality fashion, reach parity with something like Gmail or Outlook.