Taking on Incumbents: A Strategy for Success

Superhuman recently launched AI-powered Summarize and Instant Reply features, and has since processed 4 billion emails. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with CEO and Founder at Superhuman, Rahul Vohra. Rahul shared with us what email will look like in the future, the internal product design decisions in building Summarize and Instant Reply, why he’s bullish on the agentic future, and why and how startups should go after incumbents.

(0:00) intro 

(1:20) why email will never die

(10:46) how ChatGBT changed Superhuman 

(17:01) making design decisions 

(24:34) how Superhuman personalizes email voices 

(28:35) choosing which models to use 

(31:00) how does cost play into decision-making 

(34:10) teaching users how to use AI 

(46:27) competing with incumbents 

(56:57) how work has evolved 

(59:02) how Rahul would redesign Slack / Slack Agent 

(1:04:54) Jacob and Pat debrief

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint