 Well, Rahul, I've been excited for this for a long time, so thank you so much for joining me today. Well, thank you for having me again. In order to... Our first episode got 1.2 million downloads, so I actually monetized the shit out of that, so thank you so much for that. Very welcome. Is it the best-performing episode? It is the best-performing founder episode ever. I want to start today, though, with a little bit about you. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of startups, and what was that aha moment for you with Superhuman? Great question. What was possible with Superhuman for those that don't know is the fastest email experience of all time. Our customers get through their inbox twice as fast as before, reply to their important email sooner, and sustainably maintain inbox zero. But to understand how we got there, we actually have to wind the clock back by about nine years. So in 2010, I started a company called Reportive, which some of us may remember. It was the first Gmail sidebar to scale to millions of users, basically on the right-hand side of Gmail, you could see what people look like, where they work. I remember. I used it. Thank you for using it. And yeah, so it was that first Gmail plug-in to get to that level of traction. So we scaled really rapidly. In about two years, we sold that to LinkedIn. And during those four years, I could bizarrely see Gmail getting worse every single year, becoming more cluttered, consuming more memory, using more CPU, making your laptop slow and still, strangely, not working offline. And then on top of that, people were installing plugins like our own Reportive, but also things like Boomerang, Mixmax, YesWare, Clearbit, you name it, they had it. And each of those plugins took those issues of clutter, memory, CPU performance offline and made each one dramatically worse. So we decided, look, this has to change. We imagined an email experience that's blazingly fast, where every search happened instantaneously, where every interaction is 100 milliseconds or less, where you never had to touch the mouse, where you could do anything from the keyboard and fly through your inbox that just worked offline, that had all the native Gmail plugins built in and yet was still somehow subtle, minimal, and visually gorgeous. And that idea became superhuman. I mean, superhumans change the game in terms of how we think about email and definitely how I interact with email. I want to start on something you said before. You said most companies obsess over what customers want and need. We obsess over how they feel. So bluntly, and before we dive into granular tactics, why is game design worth doing? Well, today our business software feels like work. We have to do our email. We have to enter data into our CRM. We have to submit our expense reports. What if we could make business software feel less like work and more like play? With game design, we can. You see, most software companies worry about what users want or what they need. But no one needs a game to exist. There are no requirements. And when you're making a game, you don't worry about what users want or need you obsess over how they feel. And when your product is a game, your users don't use it. They play it. They'll fall in love with it. They'll find it fun. They'll tell their friends. And that's why game design is worth doing. I mean, we see a lot in terms of levels, points, avatars. And so I guess my question is, what's the difference between game design and gamification? Yeah, game design and gamification are two totally different things. And 10 years ago, gamification was a big deal. Everyone was in the process of adding points, levels, trophies, and badges. But that doesn't work. And to understand why, we actually have to dig into human motivation. So here's a fun story for you. In the 1970s, Stanford researchers recruited 51 children aged between three and four. And all of these kids were previously interested in drawing. Now, some of the kids were told they would get a reward, a certificate with a gold seal and a ribbon, I believe. And the other kids weren't told about a reward, so they didn't even know one existed. Now, all the children were invited into separate rooms and asked to draw for six minutes, after which they would either get a reward or not. And over the next few days, they were observed to see how much of their time they would continue drawing by themselves. Now, the children who didn't get a reward, they spent 17% of their time drawing. But the children who did get a reward, they only spent 8% of their time drawing. Because they felt they deserved the reward and they were doing it for that? Quite probably. In other words, the reward had halved their motivation. And to understand that, we have to get into the different forms of motivation. Now, researchers differentiate intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. With intrinsic motivation, we do things because we find them inherently satisfying and interesting. But with extrinsic motivation, we do things to earn rewards. And rewards fundamentally undermine intrinsic motivation. And that, ultimately, is why gamification did not work. OK, so digging deeper, another element you've said, and taking this game design and gamification thinking, you said, all my life, I've obsessed over the question, how do you design a game? If I were to surmise your life, and that's a really unfair question, but with the many years of thinking, where does that lead you in terms of what's the truth on game design? Yeah, so this is true. I have actually obsessed about this my entire life. As a kid, I learned how to code just so I could make video games. Before I was a founder, I worked professionally as a game designer, and as a founder, I've now gone deep into the principles of game design. And as it turns out, there is no unifying theory of game design. To create games, we have to draw upon the art and science of things like psychology, mathematics, interaction design, storytelling, as well as many more. Now in doing so, I have found five critical factors. And they are goals, emotions, controls, toys, and flow. So I want to unpack those one by one. So if we start on goals, what are the core principles of adding goals to your products? Why is that good? Well, I think we're all familiar with goals in a business context, and we know how to create good business goals. It turns out that games also need goals. In fact, goals are a defining feature of games. And for a game, good goals are concrete, achievable, and rewarding. OK, got you. So we have that. How do you push that then when you think about product mentality, product mindset, product roadmap? How do you push goals as a feature of superhuman? Well, let's take the conditions one by one. So first of all, concrete. In superhuman, we give our users a very clear and concrete goal, which is to get to inbox zero. But you can't stop there. Good goals are also achievable. And this is one of the main reasons why we onboard our users. So for each new user, we do a live concierge onboarding. This is a 30-minute one-to-one video call with one of our wonderful onboarding specialists. We teach faster workflows to get to inbox zero. We teach you powerful shortcuts so you never have to touch the mouse. And if you're very far away from inbox zero, we can help wipe that slate clean so you are within a stone's throw, thus making the goal more achievable. And then, of course, there's the rewarding piece. When you do hit inbox zero, you feel triumph over your email, a previously rare and very rewarding feeling. Now, if we take a step back and we look at most business software, they don't have clear goals. And if there are goals, they are often unachievable or very unrewarding. So if you want to make software like it's a game, then you should make goals that are concrete, achievable, and rewarding. This is so unfair of me to go off schedule. And I don't mean to veer away from the five. But you've actually created your own category in onboarding with the onboarding that you have, which is fascinating. I hear so many startups pitch me today. And they say, we're superhuman onboarding for X. Was that always a deliberate strategy? Or was it one where you kind of iterated on it with product evolvement? It was very much an iteration. In the early days, I onboarded the customers myself. I believe I did the first several hundred onboardings. You did me. I onboarded you. And the reason for doing so was to understand truly, intimately, understand what that first 30 minutes with the product was like, to record all the bugs, to record all the issues so we could fix them, so next week's onboardings would run better. Now, in doing so, we saw we had off-the-charts retention, off-the-charts NPS, off-the-charts virality. In fact, every business metric you could care to measure was just benchmark crazy. And we realized there was something special and unique to our method of onboarding users. Now, most people from the outside in just assume, well, that can't possibly be scalable. But the truth of it is, it actually is. And we are scaling it. For sure. Now, absolutely. And I come out of the office, and I tell everyone in the office about how amazing the onboarding was. Kind of speaking of that and that emotion, you said emotion was the second factor. How do you think about integrating emotion and product together? Well, the best games create strong emotions because strong emotions are the foundation of our memory. And in order to do that, we need to be able to analyze emotions. And in order to do that, we need a vocabulary. Now, there are many models of human emotion. The most famous you may have come across is Plutchik's wheel. Plutchik identified eight core emotions. These are emotions like joy and sadness and fear and anger. And it's pretty interesting. So he arranged them on a wheel. And opposite emotions are across from each other. And probably the most interesting thing about this model is you can blend adjacent emotions to create new, more complex feelings. For example, you can blend joy and anticipation, and you come up with optimism. And you can blend joy and trust, and you come up with love. But as game designers, these emotions aren't nuanced enough. We need much more subtle emotions than academia provides us. So at Superhuman, we use the model by the Honto Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership. And this is the most useful model I've come across. It contains the subtleties and the nuances that we need to worry about. Got you. OK. In terms of the third and kind of moving from emotion to control, why is control so crucial in game design? Well, controls can be the number one reason, actually, why a game succeeds. If we remember the we and that original we moat, that console sold over 100 million units. And every single controller since, for any console, has incorporated motion. But we need much more robust controls for our business software if we want it to behave like video games. Imagine you're playing, let's say, Street Fighter or Smash Brothers. So it would be incredibly frustrating if you enter a complex series of inputs and then your character flopped around and then died. But that's how business software works today. Let's say, for example, I want to email my co-founder comrade. In Gmail and in Superhuman, the shortcut to do that is C, so I hit C, and then I type in comrade. In Gmail, if I do this relatively fast, I will, unfortunately, end up with two drafts, one of which is empty and the other of which is to RAD, R-A-D, because the system has just swallowed C-O-N, the first three letters of his name. And in case you think I'm picking on Gmail, this is actually true of basically every piece of business software. Pick your favorite one, drive it fast, like you might do a video game, and it will drop about half of the inputs. Is there a balance between excessive control and then too little control where your character dies? Do you have to get that perfect kind of blend of the middle ground? I don't think there's such a thing as excessive control. The idea behind video game controls is to make them feel seamless. So you can drive them as hard and as fast as you want to, and it never breaks the emotion, so that you are one with your avatar in the game. Got you. OK, the next was Toys. Now, this is a super interesting one, and I was surprised when you said Toys was a factor. So help me, how does Toys differ from the game itself? Well, we play with Toys, but we play games. A ball is a toy, but baseball and football are games. And as it turns out, the best games are built out of Toys, because then they are fun on multiple levels, the level of the toy and also the game itself. Got you. OK, when you think about Toys, how does that integrate into your product thinking with Superhuman then? Well, in Superhuman, a favorite toy is the Time Autocompleter. It sounds fancy, but it's just the box that you use to snooze emails, you type in a few characters, and you punt an email for later. So for example, 2D will become two days, 3H will become three hours, 1MO will become one month. And the Time Autocompleter is fun because it indulges playful exploration. What can it do? How does it work? When does it break? And it's not long in onboarding before people try and start breaking it. So they will do things like enter a string of 10s, and it turns out that's October the 10th at 10 p.m. And then they'll be like, well, what happens if it's a string of 2s, and if you did that today, that's February the 2nd, 2020 at 2 p.m. And then they might try and start doing more complex inputs. So in a fortnight and a day, and it turns out that of course works, and then they'll find more pleasant surprises like the fact that they never have to do time zone math ever again. 8 p.m. in Tokyo, no problem. That's 8 a.m. Eastern time. And then most users are delighted to find that if you really want, you can snooze an email until never. I mean, literally you can hit snooze, type in never, and that email will never come back. Can I ask, I'm sure you've seen the most incredible kind of cohorts of user behavior. Have there been any that have been super surprising where you as a team have really gone out, we were not expecting that? I think very early on, we walked into this with our preconceived notions of how email should work, and that was how we as a team did email. And I think the thing that surprised me the most was how many users successfully are filers. Meaning, for each incoming email, they will move that email to a folder that they've previously set up. And going in, I thought, well, this seems like inefficient behavior, but actually some of the most productive people in the world successfully do this. Yeah, okay, no, I love that, I wanted to ask that for a long time. Final one is Flow. So, help me out here. What actually is Flow when it comes to product and user experience? Flow is a very deep topic, so I'll give you the highlights summary. Flow is a state of mind. Flow is the intense and focused concentration on the present. Flow is so absorbing that we don't worry about the past or think about the future. Flow is so demanding that we don't care about what others think about us. Flow is so easy that we always know what to do next. Flow is so powerful that it alters our subjective experience of time. Time can either flash by in an instant or stretch out to infinity. And most importantly, Flow is so rewarding that our activities become intrinsically motivating, which, as we know from earlier, is the most powerful and effective form of motivation. So, when you have that at the forefront of your mind in terms of creating products and future product with Superhuman, how do you look to create Flow? How does one do that? Well, first of all, we need to enumerate the conditions for Flow. So, number one, users must always know what to do next. Number two, they must always know how to do it. Number three, they must be free from distractions because disruptions take away from our attention. Number four, we must receive clear and immediate feedback. And number five, and this is the most important and the hardest to get right, we must feel a balance between high-perceived skill and high-perceived challenge. If the challenge is too high, we'll feel worried or worse anxious. And if the challenge is too easy, we'll feel bored or worse apathetic. So, how do you create that balance of enough challenge where you're ambitious and invigorated to take it on, but then also not too much where you're like, I don't know, thanks, well, I can't do this or it's too much for me. Do you know what I mean? How do you create that balance of ambition and challenge? It turns out to be incredibly hard and this is truly more art than art. This is like the hardest question. This is the hardest question. But I can explain how we do it in Superhuman. So, people come into Superhuman with a wide variety of skill levels and a wide variety of challenge levels in their email. And for almost everybody, Superhuman massively increases the skill level. But what if your email wasn't that challenging to begin with or you were previously already highly skilled at email? If we don't make other balance shifts, you won't be in flow. Either you'll find your email is too easy, or you'll find your email is still too challenging. And so, here's what we do. And this is going to sound crazy. We actually increase the challenge level. We give you a new challenge, which is you're not just gonna get to inbox zero. You're going to do that without ever touching the mouse. And so, if you come in with easy email or if you come in already highly skilled, we then can put you in that flow state. If we didn't increase the challenge level, you wouldn't be in flow. Got it. Okay, that makes total sense. Now, before we dive into, actually, let's discuss finally the seven core principles. And then I do have to ask one question that I'm dying to ask. But so it's seven core principles of game design before the quick fire. Let's hit them. What are those seven? Well, they relate to the five factors of game design that we just talked about. So for goals, number one, create goals that are concrete, achievable, and rewarding. For emotions, number two, design for nuanced emotions. We have to go beyond things like joy and love and surprise into things like enthusiasm, excitement, hopefulness, pride, triumph, longing, sentimentality, amazement, and awe. Three for controls, design controls that aren't just rapid, but they're also robust. Four for toys, create fun toys, and then assemble them into games. And flow, it turns out, is so important that it actually gives us three principles. Next, users must always know what to do next and how to do it. And then they must be free from distractions and receive clear and immediate feedback. And the final and seventh principle is we must balance high-perceived skill with high-perceived challenge. And the most counter-intuitive consequence of that is sometimes we have to make the goals of our product harder to achieve. OK, so let me think about that and the principles we've discussed today. The question that I have is, it is quite a different mindset to the way a lot of people think. And so when you think about adding to the team in product, in engineering, in sales, in marketing, whatever the discipline, how do you onboard people and hire people for this product mindset and what does that onboarding and education look like? This is an excellent question. So what I would advise any company do, and we do this as well, is you hire against your core values. We have three at Superhuman. Number one, create delights. Number two, be intentional. And number three, remarkable quality. And the most relevant to game design is create delights. If you look into the theory of game design, it turns out that delight has a very specific definition. It turns out to be pleasant surprise. And interestingly enough, the opposite to delight discussed is unpleasant surprise. You can take the same human responsive surprise and either make it pleasant or unpleasant and it turns into delight or disgust. And so we hire for people who inherently create delight because without them knowing it unwittingly, they're actually engaging in game design if they uphold that value. In terms of the education, do you have to do an onboarding with them to really instill the values of actual game design within them or is that something that kind of just permeates within that kind of starting at Superhuman? We do. And this is the case, I think, for any founder, for any company that's scaling, you end up spending more and more of your time teaching core values. So for example, I'm going to take the recording of our discussion here and play it for all the staff at our next offsite. And it just becomes part of the education and part of the curriculum that all new staff go through. Another thing that we do is every new employee receives a copy of my favorite book, not to preempt one of your later questions. Thanks for that one. But the Art of Game Design by Jesse Shell. And this is one of my favorite books of all time. And also, we name every single conference room after a chapter in the book. It's so embedded in our company culture to be serious about game design. OK, so we've got the quick fire round. You've just killed one of my questions with a favorite book, the Art of Game Design, Tic. What do you know now that you wish you'd known at the beginning? Now, this is 60 seconds per answer. What do you know now that you wish you'd known at the beginning of Superhuman? Before product market fit, the number one thing a CEO has to do is find product market fit. And to like to driving a car, it's like you're in first gear and you're very carefully, very slowly climbing up that hill. After product market fit, it's like you've pulled onto the freeway or the most way, and you're going as fast as you can. You're now in sixth gear, and you're dodging, and you're weaving, and you're overtaking other cars. And the role of the CEO becomes change your job every six months and constantly hire the best people in the world for basically every single function in the company. We've got time, so I'm going to ask this one. What's been the most challenging change in those transitional six months for you as CEO? The most challenging change, it's learning how to hire for roles that you don't inherently know how to do excellently. So personally, I can do product marketing and design at a world-class level. But that's less than half of what an organization needs to do. Yet I have to hire executives for everything else. Learning how to do that has been the biggest challenge. Sorry, how did you do that then? Well, I'm still learning how to do it. You do things like pull in outside interviewers, like do the role for a few months so at least you understand the basics, speak to many lookalike candidates. There's a few tactics that can help you at least have a fighting chance of doing this well. Now, one of my favorite movies is actually Titanic. So I want to ask this question. What can we take away from Titanic and apply to game design? I wasn't expecting this as part of the schedule. Well, for those that don't know, Harry and I, we're talking about the idea of resonant truth, which is one of my favorite ways to analyze video games. So there can be two types of resonance, truth and fantasy. Now, resonant fantasy is when it resonates with our desires and dreams. So for example, in Superhuman, the resonant fantasy might be the fantasy of having superpowers. Now, who doesn't want that? It seems both liberating and exhilarating all at once. But it turns out there's something even more powerful than fantasy and that is truth. Why is the movie Titanic so compelling? It's not the performances or the execution or the special effects great though those are. No, it's because the movie constantly reinforces a resonant truth, which is this. Love is more important than life and stronger than death. Now, most of us don't go around saying that all the time. That would be a bit strange. But the reason why the movie is so compelling is because most of us actually deep down believe that. Now, for Superhuman, we've done much soul searching. What would our resonant truth be? And it turns out to be, if I work hard enough, I can achieve anything. You would never find that in a user study. And when we encounter deep beliefs that mirror our core beliefs, it shakes us to the center of our very being. And this is the case for Superhuman. This is something that many of our users deeply believe. Anything that ties back to Titanic, I'm so happy with. So I want to do what would you most like to change about Silicon Valley today? I would say there are two things. Number one is our housing policy. And without getting into the local politics of our fine city, the demand for new housing units per year is in the range of 45,000 to 55,000, which for a city of the population, 800,000 is quite significant. Yet we build in the region of 15,000 new units per year. Now, I've lived in the city for about a decade. I've seen the cost of rent and the general cost of living dramatically increase as a result of this disparity. And the second thing, and the kind of related, is the homogeneity of the city. As a result of this disparity, we have a very tech-centric city. So therefore it's different to, for example, Helsinki or London or New York or a real metropolis. And I'd love to see the city become more diverse in terms of thought and background over time. That's so would I, by the way. But I do want to finish, and this is probably the most exciting. What are the next five years for you and for Superhuman? Paint that picture for me. Gosh. That's a tough question. Well, for sure, I think that Superhuman will become a multi-product company for us. Email is just the beginning. We want to build anything and everything that can make professionals brilliant at what they do. And then for me, I'm gonna have so much challenge ahead in terms of my growth as a CEO. Five years from now, Superhuman will be a billion-dollar company. And I want to be the kind of CEO who can scale into that journey. I've already described one transition, which is pre-products market fit to post-products market fit. But there are probably five similar transitions like that to come every single year in that journey. And I want to be this kind of CEO who can learn, who can scale, and who can adapt to lead the company through that journey. Listen, I've so enjoyed this. So first, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. But second, and what many people don't know, literally Rahul's flown in for like four hours. I got asked who I'd most like to interview, like you were top of the list. So honestly, it means a lot to me that you came and I'm so enjoyed this. Well, thank you for inviting me. Thanks so much. Cheers, Rahul. Thank you. Thank you. Please.