Special: Superhuman Part II - Designing Software to Feel like a Game (with Rahul Vohra)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
That gives you a lot of cred when you're building software like games. It's like, yeah, yeah, okay, sure, everyone thinks they know about games, but RuneScape is OG. Welcome to this special episode of acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and venture capital firm in Seattle.

**David Rosenthal** (0:33)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor and independent advisor to startups based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:39)
And we are your hosts. Today, we have superstar repeat guest, Rahul Vorha. Welcome, Rahul.

**Rahul Vohra** (0:47)
Awesome. Thank you for having me back.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:49)
Rahul had probably, I don't know if it's exactly the most listened to episode of all time, but it was certainly a standout episode when we released it. David, when was that? Last June?

**David Rosenthal** (1:02)
Last June, yeah. I think it was the finale of season five. Wow, another lifetime ago.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:10)
Truly. Well, the last time Rahul was on our show, many of you knew him for being the founder of the innovative, fast email client Superhuman. His frameworks for finding product market fit and how they did it at Superhuman have since become quite famous. This year, many of you may have heard Rahul speaking on Patrick's Show or the A16Z Summit and elsewhere about a new concept, how they think at Superhuman about designing software like it is a game. Today, in true acquired fashion, we are going to dive into the actual stories behind these concepts and how Rahul and the team at Superhuman have put them into practice as the product has matured from that initial product market fit that we talked about on the last episode to a professional or really even enterprise class suite of tools where they've rolled out some calendar functionality as well recently. For ULPs, we have something special today. When we finish up here on the main show, we are going to do an LP episode with Rahul, a master class on fundraising, which for anyone who doesn't know, not only has Rahul done this like a total pro with Superhuman, really being thoughtful about the process and employing every tactic in the book for building a great company and capitalizing it the best way he sees fit, but also with his previous companies with Rapportive, he actually also now has two funds of his own, the most recent being an AngelList Rolling Fund, and we will talk with him about that on the LP show, which you can get to by going to acquired.fm slash LP or clicking the link in the show notes.

**David Rosenthal** (2:46)
Can't wait for that.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:47)
Yep. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:54)
So, Crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners and literally Crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because Crusoe's cloud is purpose built for AI and run on wasted, stranded or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:19)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:25)
The other element that makes Crusoe special is the environmental angle. Crusoe, of course, locates their data centers at stranded energy sites. So think oil flares, wind farms that can't use all the energy they generate, etc. And uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:43)
Yep. Obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on cost, since Crusoe doesn't rely on the energy grid. Energy is the second largest cost of running AI after, of course, the price you pay and video for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (3:59)
It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote-unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers such as AWS and Google and Azure, who need to build their data centers close to major traffic hubs where the internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:15)
Yep. If you, your company, or your portfolio companies would like to use the lower cost and more performant infrastructure for your AI workloads, go to crusocloud.com/acquired, that's crusoecloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. All right, David, let's dive in to this episode with Rahul.