20VC: Rahul Vohra @ Superhuman, The Most Downloaded Founder Episode of 2019

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The Twenty Minute VC

Finance, Venturecapital, Tech News, News, Siliconvalley, Technology, Investing, Startups, Business

4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2020

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rahul Vohra is the Founder and CEO @ Superhuman, the fastest email experience in the world. Fun fact, users get through their inbox twice as fast — and many see Inbox Zero for the first time in years! To date, they have raised funds from our friends at Boldstart, First Round, John Collison, Sam Altman, Wayne Chang, Mike Ghaffery and Yes VC just to name a few. Previously, Rahul founded Rapportive, the first Gmail plugin to scale to millions of users. Rapportive was ultimately acquired by LinkedIn.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How did Rahul make his way into the world of startups with the founding of Rapportive and how did that transition to changing the world of email with Superhuman?

2.) What does Rahul mean when he says, “you can reverse engineer a process to get to product-market fit”? What does Rahul believe is the defining metric which determines your “product-market fit score”? What is Julie Supan’s framework? How did Dropbox and Airbnb use it to increase their product-market fit? How can founders implement it into their process?

3.) What can founders do to expand the customer base to include users that currently are “somewhat disappointed”? What are the right questions to ask? What do we do with this feedback? How do we further segment the user base? Why should we “disregard the users whereby the primary benefit of the product does not resonate”?

4.) How does Rahul approach product roadmap and prioritisation? How can founders ensure that continuous tracking and user feedback is engrained within the organisation? What tools does Rahul do to monitor and capture this? What are some of Rahul’s biggest lessons from going through this painstaking process stage by stage?

5.) Finally on fundraising, what does Rahul mean when he says, “always be raising but never be actively raising”? What are the benefits of this? How can founders transition catch up coffee into fundraising subtly? How does Rahul feel about party rounds? What are the pros? What are the downsides? How does Rahul advise founders here?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:

Rahul’s Fave Book: The Art of Game Design

As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rahul on Twitter here!

Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Happy New Year, you are listening to the first 20 VC of 2020. What a special year and some
0:04.3	amazing episodes we have in store for you. But before Christmas, we played our most downloaded
0:08.3	VC episode of 2019 with Bill Gurley at Benchmark. And before we kick off into 2020, with new
0:14.1	shows next week on Monday, I wanted to recognize today the most downloaded and loved founder
0:18.6	episode of 2019. Also, most recently, crowned
0:21.6	startup of the year by Semmel Shah, friend of the show. And so with that, I'm thrilled to say
0:25.5	our episode with Rahul at Superhuman made the number one spot. For those that do not know,
0:29.9	Superhuman is the fastest email experience in the world. Fun fact, users get through their inbox
0:34.6	twice as fast, and many see In inbox zero for the first time in years.
0:38.7	To date, they've raised funds from some very dear friends of the show in Ed and Elliot at Bold Start,
0:42.5	the team at first round, Andresen, John Collison, Sam Altman, and more.
0:47.4	And before Superhuman, Rahul founded Reportive, the first Gmail plugin scaled to millions of users,
0:52.6	and Reportive was ultimately acquired by LinkedIn.
0:55.2	But before we dive into the show today, the question is, will you have the marketing budget
0:59.0	to boost your best ads? Can your inventory supply? Keep up with shopper demand. Are you starting
1:03.9	to sweat? Well, Clearbank's here to help. They offer fast, affordable investments for online
1:08.1	businesses. Fill out a 20-minute term sheet today and within 24
1:11.4	hours you could be approved for $10,000 to $10 million in funding. And the best part, they can top
1:16.9	you up with more as you need it most. So time is running out. Make sure you're prepared to capture
1:21.5	as many sales as possible this holiday season. Head over to clearbank.com forward slash 20 min
1:26.9	VC to apply for Q4 funding.
1:29.2	That's clearbank, c-l-e-a-r-r-B-A-N-C.com slash 20 minvcc.
	...

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