Superhuman (with CEO Rahul Vohra)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
Great, one take feels good. Welcome to season four, episode 10, the finale of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:25)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:26)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are covering Superhuman, the fastest email experience ever made. This show was originally going to be a limited partner bonus show with Superhuman CEO, Rahul Vohra, on understanding his algorithmic approach to find product market fit. But we realized that Superhuman was a perfect way to round out our trilogy on the modern productivity stack on the heels of our Zoom and Slack IPO episodes. And we learned that the timing would be perfect with some big news that just dropped for Superhuman.

**David Rosenthal** (0:58)
Indeed.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:59)
Well, they just raised their $33 million Series B funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz, on the heels of some very rapid growth, as you'll hear. If you want to read more about the company after this episode, you can click the link in the show notes for the New York Times article that broke the news. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (1:20)
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** (1:45)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (1:51)
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** (2:09)
Yep. Obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on costs, 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 NVIDIA for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (2:25)
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** (2:41)
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 C-R-U-S-O-E cloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. Now, without further ado, here is our conversation with superhuman CEO, Rahul Vohra. So welcome, Acquired LPs, to a very special episode of the LP show. David and I are sitting here in superhuman world HQ on California Street in San Francisco, and we have with us an awesome guest, Rahul Vohra, CEO of superhuman. Welcome to the show.

**Rahul Vohra** (3:23)
Absolutely. Thank you both for having me.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:25)
Yeah, you bet. To give a little brief bio, so Rahul is the founder and CEO of superhuman, the wildly popular, blazingly fast email app that is changing the way a lot of us think about our relationship with our inbox. And before superhuman, Rahul was the CEO and co-founder of Reportive, selling that to LinkedIn in 2012 So if you're noticing a pattern there, I think I definitely am. Rahul is also an active angel investor and advisor to several startups, and we are lucky to have him with us today. So I already said welcome to the show, so I don't need to say that again, but welcome to the show.

**Rahul Vohra** (3:58)
Thank you again.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:01)
Are we right that this is your second office?

**Rahul Vohra** (4:04)
This technically is our fourth office.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:07)
Fourth office. And you're about 30 people now here, it looks like.

**Rahul Vohra** (4:11)
We are, yes.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:12)
It's nice and decked out in superhuman colors.

**Rahul Vohra** (4:15)
Yeah, we do like our pinks and our purples and our blues, although we're sort of trying to keep the we just moved in vibe. We don't want to go too crazy here.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:23)
Yeah.

**Rahul Vohra** (4:24)
Because what we've found is we grow so fast that by the time we've made a place nice, it's like, okay, time to move on to the next office.