✨ Exclusive Guest Announcement
Hi Venturers,
Before getting into the topic of the day, I hope you’re doing well and not too much caught up by the crypto market swings and FOMO. Let’s not too much talk crypto price action and remain focused on the long term crypto opportunity that the bear market has not questioned at all, as illustrated by the increasing wave of institutionals joining the space.
In connection with that long term crypto opportunity, I am excited about what’s next for Olive Capital, and I can’t wait to reveal soon what I have been working on this year.
If you are an investor in web3, let’s talk!
Book today a 25-minute slot:
✨ Exclusive Podcast Guest Announcement
I will be at Slush (Helsinki) at the end of the month for 3 reasons:
as a journalist, writing a piece for Frenchweb titled “Made in Switzerland” that I have unfortunately not been writing for a while! Read past issues.
for IMD, covering Venture Capital Research focusing on DE&I and Sustainability. I am researching in the field of VC for IMD, read here my first, quick piece “Why venture capitalists aren’t afraid of losing money“. More to come.
for.. the RUNWAY SERIES Podcast of course! More about that right now.
I will be hosting an episode of the Runway Series podcast with Rahul Vohra, the Co-Founder & CEO of Superhuman. I am very excited because I have been a hard-core Superhuman user since February 2019 and experienced first-hand how helpful Superhuman is for my own productivity.
IF YOU’RE A PAID SUBSCRIBER TO VENTURE NOTES, SUBMIT TODAY YOUR QUESTIONS I WILL ASK RAHUL!
If your question is chosen, you will be authentified as the author of the question in the podcast and your full name/linkedin given to Rahul (if you wish to).. great visibility for you!
📧 REPLY TO THIS EMAIL WITH YOUR QUESTION
(not a sub? become one with 50% discount)
Backed by a16z, Tiger Global and First Round Capital, Superhuman is an AI-driven email app that helps individuals and teams save up to four hours every single week. I can confirm that.
Rahul is well-regarded as an entrepreneur, a CEO and a product strategist. Before starting Superhuman, he founded Rapportive, which he eventually sold to LinkedIn.
His non-traditional approach to finding product market fit has been featured in multiple business school case studies and podcasts, and was one of the most widely-read posts ever on First Round Review.
Rahul is also a prominent angel investor whose fund has invested more than $35M in companies like Classdojo, Clearbit, Alt and Dapper Labs.
Rahul will be at Slush to give a talk on the builder stage about how early-stage founders can build their brands.
As Rahul and Superhuman have already been featured on many podcasts, I want this episode on RUNWAY SERIES to be very different and I want Rahul to talk about unique thematics he’s never discussed on a pod before.
Topics I will be covering with Rahul:
The nature of product consciousness
The user's digital legacy
The metaphysics of user interfaces
The emotional architecture of design
Product intuition and instinct
Digital alchemy and transformation
The ethics of digital augmentation
Product sentience and empathy
Time perception in the digital realm
The quantum mechanics of user interaction…
.. and because Runway Series focuses on web3, I’ll ask Rahul how web3 builders can leverage the above.
IF YOU’RE A PAID SUBSCRIBER TO VENTURE NOTES, SUBMIT TODAY YOUR QUESTIONS I WILL ASK RAHUL!
If your question is chosen, you will be authentified as the author of the question in the podcast and your full name/linkedin given to Rahul (if you wish to).. great visibility for you!
📧 REPLY TO THIS EMAIL WITH YOUR QUESTION
(not a sub? become one with 50% discount)
More about Superhuman, for context.
In May, they launched Superhuman AI, which takes their mission of helping people get through their Inbox even further by empowering users to draft emails in any language, fix spelling and grammar, improve clarity, change length, and more — all with just a few keystrokes. Users can even have it write an entire email from just a few bullets, and because it's trained on their emails rather than a generic LLM, it sounds like them and not an AI.
Last week, they launched their new Auto-Summarize feature (which they've nicknamed "TL;DR" internally). It automatically provides a one-line summary above every conversation. As new emails arrive, it updates instantly. If the recipient wants to see more detail, they just hit "M" for a bulleted summary of the thread. It's especially great if users are just a passive observer and don't need to read every email on the thread.
They built this product and the process of going from a cold-start to a fully realized AI product in 90 days (Rahul wrote a whole post on their blog about it, as well as their overall AI strategy). At a time when a lot of AI tools are experiencing significant churn, Superhuman AI has proven to be super popular with users so far. In fact, their average customer uses Superhuman AI 25 times per week.
Since their initial launch in 2018, Superhuman was built for individuals, but in recent years, they've seen more and more teams get value from the product and they realized that there was a big opportunity to reimagine email specifically for the enterprise. Last week, they launched Superhuman for Teams (you can learn more about the launch on their blog and see the product in action on YouTube). They've evolved the product from single-player to enterprise ready, in order to further build a modern email experience for high-performing teams at enterprises. In the coming months, they'll also be building special editions for specific teams — starting with Superhuman for Sales — including integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot.
I can’t wait for your questions!
Thank you and chat soon,
Raph Grieco
Host @ Runway Series Podcast / Writer @ Venture Notes
Founding Partner @ Olive Capital, web3 pre-seed fund
Co-Founder @ NFT Factory in Paris
Creator @ Beardy Punks NFT Collection and other AI-assisted artworks
Founding Co-President @ La French Tech in Switzerland