Superhuman CEO: AI Moved the Career Ladder (Most People Don't See It Yet) | Shishir Mehrotra

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Shishir Mehrotra (0:56)

You learn to be a manager. I spent years giving people the opposite advice.

Marina Mogilko (0:59)

What would you say to people whose job is already automated? This is Shishir. He spent 20 years deciding who gets promoted. He ran product for YouTube, he sits on the board of Spotify, and now he runs the company behind Grammarly. Forty million people use it every day.

Shishir Mehrotra (1:15)

You think about a world with AI everywhere, what happens? It actually pushes that entire ladder up. The original skill didn't go away. It just shifted.

Marina Mogilko (1:23)

The job you're doing today and the job you get promoted for aren't the same anymore.

Shishir Mehrotra (1:27)

Since it's become my number one indicator of someone I want to work with, someone I want to hire, is how good are you at all?

Marina Mogilko (1:33)

You represent someone who's been in multiple careers. You worked at YouTube, you worked at Spotify, you started your own company. Now you're the CEO of Superhuman, which also incorporates Grammarly and helps humans become super humans. So if you had to start your career from scratch today, what would you do in the next 12 months to stand out on the market?

Shishir Mehrotra (2:00)

I'll give a couple pieces of advice. I think one thing that people often don't think about is how to stay out of the recruiting folder. What I mean by that is the most interesting jobs, in fact, all my transitions for the most part, have happened through an interaction where we weren't talking about recruiting. We weren't going through a job conversation. I think a lot of people focus their energy on how do I interview well, and how do I get through the screening and so on. But actually, the most interesting candidates I've ever hired or places I've jumped in, usually happen through some interaction that didn't start with, I'd like a job or would you take this job?

For that, I think it's be interesting in the world. Start projects that people might see, write things that people might see. Not only is it easy to produce those things, the outlets for being able to spread them are so wide. I think that's really important. The way I ended up at, I've been on the board of Spotify for over a decade now, and it started with the paper I wrote. Daniel was interested in it and we started talking about it, and then it led to, hey, would you do more of the company?

Marina Mogilko (3:03)

On social media?

Shishir Mehrotra (3:04)

Actually, it wasn't even shared. In this case, it was passed around through different people. It's called Formats of Bundling. It's how to think about bundles. Somebody sent them the idea and said, you should talk to Shishir about it, and we ended up chatting about it. So I think the main advice I give people that in a world full of candidates trying to find spots, to find your way to stand out, and the best thing to do is actually avoid recruiting. That's not the funnel you want to be in.

In your e-mail, we use Superhuman, so we have our splits, and I have my one for recruiting. It's a lot of people looking for jobs, and those all go right to my recruiting team. Then there's other ones that are interesting people I want to have a conversation with. That's the pile you want to be in.

Marina Mogilko (3:44)

I like how you visually presented it to me right now, because once you're applying for a job, you're ending up in a folder that's full of other candidates.

Shishir Mehrotra (3:53)

I have an auto-split for it. Superhuman allows you to write AI-based prompts for auto-organizing your e-mails, and so I have one that explicitly takes everybody looking for a job and puts them in a corner, and I go through them and I read them, but all I'm doing is directing where they might go. I'm not really thinking, is this an interesting person that I want to come spend time with and learn something? Then unexpectedly, it might lead to an interesting opportunity. The second thing I'd say is, I think it's fairly generic advice that everybody should learn every AI tool that you possibly can. I think the more interesting advice is you learn to be a manager. This is tricky because I spent years giving people the opposite advice, learn to be a proficient executor.