AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace, Business, Ethics, HR, and IT for AI Enthusiasts, Leaders and Academics
00:23:41 · Rahul Vohra
And on top of that, people were installing plugins, like my last company, Rapportive, but also Boomerang, Mixmax, Clearbit, Yesware. You probably remember some of these email products. You name it, people had it. But the problem with these plugins is that they took those problems of clutter, memory, CPU performance offline, and they made all of them dramatically worse. So we decided that it was time for change. We set out to build the fastest email experience ever made. And today, most of our customers get to their inbox twice as fast as before. They respond faster to the things that matter, and they save four hours or more every single week.
00:24:22 · Dan Turchin
[00:24:22] S1: Today's amazing episode is brought to you by the good humans over at Guild AI Academy, which builds training around your company's own AI tools, workflows, policies, and leaders, then deploys it with small peer cohorts to make sure those habits actually stick. If you've rolled out AI tools, and I assume you have, the real question everyone's asking is, is anyone actually working differently? For most teams, the honest answer is not yet. Tools are there. The payoff isn't. Guild AI Academy changes that. It's the AI training program customized for your company. It's delivered through a cohort based learning experience so employees practice together, and, they actually get better at doing the skills you need them to be learning. A Fortune 500 company had an AI tool sitting mostly unused for a few years. After Guild's AI Academy program, over 90% of its leaders were using it regularly and unlocking new levels of efficiency that benefited the whole company. See how it works for yourself. Go to guild.com/ai. Again, that's guild.com/ai. Now back to today's amazing episode. So at the time when you were launching Superhuman, nobody realized they had an email speed, an email client problem until they saw Superhuman. Today, I would say... Well, this is a... It's a question. It's not a statement. But AI entrepreneurs that are looking for the problem to solve, like email, people not realizing they needed a Superhuman, feels to me like the calculation, the the the analysis that you would do if Rahul was looking for the equivalent of superhuman in 2026 would be different because kind of everyone's sitting on top of this substrate of insanely, you know, intelligent reasoning models and dot dot dot. How would your process have been different if you were looking to do something as impactful starting today versus 2014? In many ways, it would have been the same.
00:26:37 · Rahul Vohra
[00:26:37] S0: The thing that makes Superhuman a fascinating company, highly investable, and why it's been as successful as it has been, is the market is absolutely ginormous. For example, one way to think about it is the top down approach, which we've already talked about, which is a billion professionals spending three hours a day on email. That's three billion hours a day, a trillion hours a year. It is really hard to think of something that we spend as much time doing. Slack is up there. In other words, team chat, so Slack and Microsoft Teams. Scheduling is a second, actually a distant second. And then you have a bunch of the other work activities that we have. So deliberately, I was going after this thing that just impacted so many people and which no one loved. Everybody hates doing their email. It's also a really great edge of a wedge because you can think of email as a central and a key component to an AI native productivity suite or an AI native collaboration suite. And, of course, that's what we're now building here at the wider Superhuman. One of the most exciting things for me about the acquisition is we basically get to do all of our roadmap, but in parallel. The thing that I thought would take twenty, thirty years to build out, we can massively compress the timeline to that. So what I still look for in founders with companies today, my advice to any founder is just pick an absolutely ginormous market. Now it doesn't necessarily have to be ginormous today. It's okay to pick, sometimes in fact better actually, to pick something that seems a bit weird and silly today, almost like a toy, but but that is going to grow incredibly rapidly. That is a perfectly fine alternative approach. But ultimately, the market has to become very large. Either it's very large now or it's growing very quickly. Some things, by the way, are easier than ever about creating companies. I would say, number one, writing code. The cost of creating most software projects, of course, is rapidly reducing with all of the coding agents that people now use on a regular basis. Number two, raising capital. There has never been this many dollars chasing the next big thing. Number three, learning from experts. The art of creating startups is becoming increasingly a science and very widely known.
00:28:55 · Rahul Vohra
I remember when when I was first coming up, there was basically nothing online about how convertible notes work. The safe hadn't been invented yet, just just to pick a a random example. And so trying to figure these things out from first principles working directly with lawyers was very slow. And number four, getting early traction. You know, just a few years ago, a good growth rate for a YC company was five to 7% per week. 10% per week was exceptional. Whereas last year, the average growth rate for a YC company was 10% per week, with plenty doing 15 to 20% per week. And it's not uncommon nowadays for a Y Combinator company to get to a $10,000,000 of ARR in their first year. That used to be completely unthinkable. That was like once in a blue moon. Now, again, it's not uncommon. But some things are harder. Taste, for example. When anyone can build anything cheaply, the real skills actually become taste and restraint. And it's an old example. But one of my favorite examples of this is actually Instagram. And maybe you'll remember this. Before Instagram was Instagram, it was actually an app called Burbn, and it was a lot more than just photos. It was actually in that era of applications that I think we called social mobile local, SOMOLO or SOLOMO. It was this this weird acronym that we had, and then there was like a hyper social mobile local set of apps. And it did... It was a social network. It did check ins. It did location finding. It was like, where are my friends on a map? And it also did photos. And it didn't really take off. It didn't take off because it didn't have a point of view. It didn't do one thing incredibly well. It didn't channel taste. And when they narrowed down to the photography piece and did all of the things that had been very well documented, that's really when it blew up. And that... That's a really good simple example of taste actually making the difference. The other thing that's harder is competition. There are a lot more smarter people and more venture dollars now going after company building than there ever were before. And then the third thing that I think is actually harder is distribution. And in a world where building products is increasingly easy, it becomes increasingly important to figure out how to get those products in front of users. And in such a world, leverage actually shifts a little bit back to incumbents.
00:31:20 · Rahul Vohra
Startups need to find their edge of a wedge and then a durable business before incumbents leverage their distribution to do the same. Basically, before incumbents build or buy the same thing and put it in front of all of their users. So I would say in many ways, it's the same. Pick gigantic markets, either those that are big today that are going to be big in the very near future. But ultimately, it's never been better to build a company. We have never been in a better time. And the proof is in the pudding. Companies today are growing bigger than ever, faster than ever. The bar to be one of those companies might be harder than ever, but the prize has never been bigger.
00:32:01 · Dan Turchin
[00:32:01] S1: On this podcast, we talk a lot about the complicated relationship between humans and machines. And unlike, say, getting through your email inbox faster, AI is forcing us to wrestle with some more complicated questions, like existential ones. Like, literally, like, why am I here? Because it's feeling like this artificial entity does a lot of what I thought was uniquely part of the human condition better than I can. I know you're a deep thinker, so I I get to ask you this question. I haven't heard heard you talk about kind of your perspective on the incursion of AI into in in the... Into everything we do. What's your thought about how does how does Teamhuman... How do we as humans achieve a balanced relationship with AI? It gets us beyond the current state where it's a very polarizing topic. In general, particularly in The United States, as you all know, there's a great mistrust of AI, and yet we're increasingly dependent on it. How do you think about those complicated topics that... Both at a at a Rahul level, but then at a macro level? I think that