Shortwave Rides the Tidal Wave: Inbox Agents, Hyper-Growth & Hiring AI Managers, with CEO Andrew Lee

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm excited to welcome back Andrew Lee, founder and CEO of Shortwave, for a conversation about the incredible speed of AI progress, how Shortwave is maximizing agent performance with today's frontier models, and fundamentally reimagining digital communications, the ongoing transformation of the software industry at large, and company building for the AI era. The impetus for this episode was a beautifully exponential revenue growth curve that Andrew recently posted on Twitter, the sort that you can really only achieve with genuinely word-of-mouth worthy practical value. Over the next two hours, Andrew takes us on a tour of everything that he and the Shortwave team have done over the last year to transform what was a useful but perhaps not quite transformative email assistant then to an email agent that is now routinely surprising and delighting both users and Andrew himself with the increasingly complicated projects it can tackle. So much so, that Shortwave is now expanding beyond email and reconceiving the product as an AI agent to help manage communication across all major channels. Having concluded that AI makes software so much easier and faster to create, such that speed is really the only moat going forward, Andrew does not hold back on lessons learned, and the technical insights here are outstanding. Andrew breaks down how they've completely rebuilt their infrastructure at every level, by constantly testing and swapping in new models, moving to Pinecone's serverless offering for their vector database, and adopting a hybrid structured plus vector search paradigm that delivers better results at lower cost.
Perhaps most fascinating is Andrew's perspective on agent architecture. While many companies are pursuing multi-agent approaches with specialized subagents, Shortwave has found better results with a simpler approach that makes careful use of Anthropics caching features to support long-running tasks with lots of context, while also maintaining positive margin unit economics for the business, but otherwise largely trusts Clawd to act effectively as an agent, both by calling the right tools and determining for itself when it's found what it's looking for. Personally, I've had a number of wow moments as a user. I was honestly a little nervous to allow it to organize my inbox for the first time, but now I'm making regular use of the conceptual to-do lists that it's created for me, and it also saved me a cool 30 minutes the other day when it collected all receipts from a recent trip and compiled them into a tidy expense report. In the last third of the conversation, we turn from the product itself to the question of how to structure a company for success in the AI era. Having recently closed another round of venture capital, Shortwave is hiring for a number of roles, which Andrew describes not as traditional individual contributors, but as AI agent managers across software development, marketing content creation, and more. He plans to keep the team quite small, targeting just 15 or so employees for the foreseeable future, and prioritizing talent density and speed of execution above all else. With that in mind, he's offering a $10,000 referral bonus, including to listeners of this podcast. Finally, before getting started, I want to note that this episode is brought to you ad-free by Shortwave. I've mentioned in the past that we are experimenting with sponsored episodes that allow companies with a timely story to cut to the front of the line. Of course, my commitment to you, the audience, is that our bar for interesting content and my preparation process will remain the same as always. Andrew and Shortwave were really a perfect fit for this opportunity. Their product is clicking, their business is booming, and he was eager to get his hiring message out sooner rather than later. As always, if you're finding value in the show, please take a moment to share it with friends or colleagues who might be interested, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and I always welcome your feedback, either via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. Now, let's dive into this fascinating conversation with Andrew Lee about Shortwave's AI-powered transformation, not just of email, but now all digital communications. Andrew Lee, founder and CEO at Shortwave. Welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Andrew Lee** (4:06)
Thanks for having me. It's good to see you again.

**Erik Torenberg** (4:08)
Yeah. Boy, a lot gets packed into just a year in the AI space. When I was looking back, it's been just about a year since your first appearance on the pod, and indeed a lot has changed. At the time, I called Shortwave the AI email assistant that I had been waiting for, and then as we were catching up in preparation for a second conversation, you said, at that time, it only worked. I was like, yeah, I guess that's true. I looked back at these things that seemed so mind-blowing to me at the time, and obviously, we've way surpassed them. But what caught my eye and got me to reach out again was you had posted a graph of shortwave revenue on Twitter, and it's basically the canonical exponential curve where it looks like it's on the verge of going totally vertical.