The Future of Email: Superhuman CTO on Your Inbox As the Real AI Agent (Not ChatGPT) — Loïc Houssier

**Loïc Houssier** (0:00)
We, as a human species, we started to write because we didn't have enough storage for stories that we were telling to each other. So we had to write to store those stories. Now, all the content can be stored in YouTube, in TikTok or whatever. So what's even the need to write? What's the need? Because everything can be vocal. And I see kids now, they don't read article, they want a TikTok video talking about the article. Being a bit more grounded, what does it mean about the future of the user experience for email and communication? Will people still type? Or will they just talk to emails and they want to hear an email? And this is where it becomes interesting because Rahul, as a CEO, maybe next year, he doesn't want to write to you with the new feature. Maybe he wants to talk to you. And then the way you will receive our marketing campaign about the new features, you in your car commuting, listening to Rahul talking about that.

**Alessio** (1:03)
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio from the Recurrental Labs, and I'm joined by Swix, editor of Latent Space.

**Swix** (1:09)
I just realized I have the tough job of always pronouncing names.

**Alessio** (1:13)
I know, man, you got to prep. You're on YouTube, namepronunciation.com.

**Swix** (1:17)
Loïc Houssier, welcome.

**Loïc Houssier** (1:18)
Wow, I'm impressed.

**Swix** (1:21)
It's... Did I get it right?

**Loïc Houssier** (1:23)
I know, you got it right. I'm surprised. Usually, I make a joke about like, yeah, you know what, you can delete like the way you want and everything. But like, you nailed it. So I'm impressed. Thanks for having me, guys.

**Swix** (1:32)
Yeah, of course. So you're CTO of Superhuman Mail, which is the new name for Superhuman. I've been using Superhuman for a long time. I think I was one of Rahul's personal onboarding things back in the day. And yeah, we're here to talk about all things AI engineering, but also you have a lot of history in product board, first base, Docusign and nuclear submarines.

**Loïc Houssier** (1:54)
Yes, yes. That's kind of like the fun icebreaker that I give to people sometimes, like two truths and a lie. Like I went into a submarine and the people are like, yeah, no way. But I did, I did. I spent one year working around submarines and helped to carry out.

**Swix** (2:09)
The trajectory is a bit weird. You were an engineer and then you were sort of chief of staff on some submarines thing. Yeah. And then you went back to engineering.

**Loïc Houssier** (2:17)
I started studying math. So I'm a math graduate. I was about to do a PhD in math and applied math in cryptography.
So like crypto before crypto to some extent. It was cool for a moment. And then I was like, no way I spend like three years of my life on the same topic. But in the same lab, there was a bunch of people doing like security, like offensive security type of stuff. And I was like, that's what I want to do. So I was basically an engineer, I was a security researcher in that lab. But I did that in a pretty big corp, one in Telco and then in the defense industry. And in the defense industry, they have this nice kind of like career framework, like you're young, high potential-ish between quotes. So they want you to do like different types of jobs, and kind of like have a spiral of careers, so that you at some point reach to the C-level eventually. So they gave me the opportunity to be out of the tech industry for a year. And I went in an hardware, and I was there as a, I mean, financial controller, process improvement type of person, and basically helping people do a better job. Which was interesting because I had no clue. Torpedo system, radar systems, like even like nuclear engine inside a submarine. But still, I had to help people take a step back from what they were doing and everything. And that was really fun because I came from Paris, came with my tie and my suit and my ego. I was used to drive people through my technical legitimacy on the security space. And all of a sudden, I didn't have any technical legitimacy at all. But I still had my ego. So like it was a pretty fast ramp up, and I put my ego in my pocket and basically drive by questioning people, like how does that work? Like help me. Like I don't get it. And just by questioning, I kind of like build a new skill, which is like getting curious and understanding how people are working and being comfortable facing people that are way smarter than me, knowing better their field, but probably having a way to ask questions to help them, like identifying gaps or like productivity gaps, for example. So that was cool, but I missed the tech. So I moved back to the tech industry after basically two years.