How Superhuman Took Over Silicon Valley Email
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Convincing people of things is possibly the hardest thing we have to do as founders. Right? And there are so many different audiences. There's investors. There's future cofounders. There's your earliest users. There's the press. There's the industry you sell to in general. And I think each one is its own fun little puzzle. The best, most awesome thing you can do is basically have some form of narrative that sounds like this train is leaving the station, and if you don't join now, I don't know that you will be able to join. The market doesn't care. Candidates and investors are looking for the s
Most founders think product market fit is something you feel. Rahul Voora tried to turn it into a system. Before founding Superhuman, Rahul built Rapportive, one of the earliest successful Gmail plugins. But with Superhuman, he approached the problem differently. Instead of chasing growth immediately, he spent years refining the product, onboarding users manually, charging premium pricing from day one, and obsessing over every interaction. The result was not just a productivity app, but a product that developed a kind of cult following inside Silicon Valley. In this conversation, Raul breaks d
Raul, as I said, is the founder and CEO of Superhuman, but also previously to that, Reportive. He, started out with a CS degree at Cambridge. His, LinkedIn still says PhD on leave. Still on leave. I'm not
sure if he ever
if he's ever plans on going back. He started his career as a game designer working on a game called RuneScape, which was an early MMORPG. Any RuneScape fans in the house here? Woah, a lot more than I expected. Love that. He then founded a company called Reportive that was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012, and then after that founded Superhuman in 2014. Curious, how many people here use Superhuman as their primary email client? Me too. It's a lifesaver and very important to my day to day life. I can't live without it. But in July 2025, Superhuman was acquired by what was then called Grammarly, who
I mean, who doesn't like games? Yeah. Right? It's like it's fun.
It's every kid's dream. Right?
Every kid's dream. I my first game's console was a Super Nintendo. I think Super Mario World was the first I see, like, nod heading here. This is great. And so those were my first games. I learned how to program primarily so I could make games. Both my parents were doctors when they were working, and they would pick me up late from school. And so I would read the books in the school library. And once I was mostly done with the fiction books, I'd started on the nonfiction books, and I found the programming section. And I thought, wow. I can use this to make my own games. And so that was at the
Interesting. Sorry to detour from some of the questions that we talked about earlier, but were you the type that always knew you were going to start a company, and that was just a chance to learn how to work in a in a start up, or did that come
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