“I'm a big believer that a startup, at the end of the day, is a series of experiments to unlock some type of learning or user psychology.” – Vivek Sodera

Vivek Sodera (@vsodera) is Co-Founder of Superhuman, a platform striving to be the fastest email experience in the world. He is also an investor, with a portfolio of companies including Framework, UtilizeCore, Rewatch, Bunches, and Playbook. He previously co-founded Airseed and LiveRamp, though he started his career in nuclear engineering.

To listen to Vivek’s bonus interview and learn more about the his habits and routines, click here.

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Chapters in Part 1 of this interview:

• Vivek’s background and road to entrepreneurship
• On early failure and learnings as a CEO
• Vivek’s connection with Rahul Vohra and Superhuman
• The many roles of the non-CEO co-founder
• The difficulty of the startup environment
• Advice for entrepreneurs
• Empathy and the CEO role
• Building an amazing team
• Failure is life’s greatest teacher

Links from Part 1

• Connect with Vivek Sodera: Twitter | LinkedIn | Superhuman
• Superhuman Raises $75 Million for Its Waitlist-Only Email Productivity App – Forbes
• UC Berkeley
• Auren Hoffman
• Rahul Vohra
• Rapportive
• Elon Musk
• Conrad Irwin
• Twitter thread on the non-CEO co-founder
• Galvanize 
• Kristen Hayward 
• Zenefits
• Flexport
• Airtable
• Zapier
• ADHD
• NLP coach
• Ruby
• Javascript
• IVP 
• Y Combinator Demo Day
• Uber
• Reality distortion field
• Facebook
• Salesforce
• Golden State Warriors, Steph Curry, Klay Thompson
• The Matrix

Learn More About This Topic

The Founder’s Dilemma – HBR

An oldie but goodie, this article gives a great overview of how startup CEOs must choose between wealth and power, and how their level of control must vary based on their investors and structure.

How to Find a Technical Co-founder – Y Combinator

Vivek emphasizes the importance of having a technical background when founding a tech startup; Y Combinator has put together a few tips for finding a partner if you don’t have that background yourself.

Founder, Not A CEO - Some People Need To Start Companies, Not Run Them – Forbes

A great feature on reasons founders may choose not to be CEOs, and how that can be a good thing.

The benefits of failure – TED Talks

Vivek discusses how helpful it can be to work through failures and learn from them. This series of TED Talks features talks from Elizabeth Gilbert and more on embracing and learning from failure.

75 Impactful Company Core Values Examples – Builtin

Builtin has compiled a list of 75 companies and their core values here; from Hyatt to Facebook, there are plenty of examples to review when creating your own company’s values.

Daniel Scrivner:

Vivek, welcome to Outlier Academy. I have been looking forward to this interview for a long time, and I really appreciate the time. Thanks for coming on the show.

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah. Thank you.

Daniel Scrivner:

So just to start, we're going to chat about a lot of things that I'm really excited about today. I think your journey founding, co-founding multiple companies, all around what that role entails being a co-founder at a company. So to start, I thought it would be helpful, we're going to spend most of our time kind of focused on your experience at Superhuman. So can you paint just a quick sketch of your background before Superhuman leading up to that?

Vivek Sodera:

Sure. My career started as an undergrad at UC Berkeley. I was a chemical and nuclear engineering major. Was going down that path, and it was my senior year of college where I actually took an entrepreneurship class. Long story short, a friend meant to email a different Vivek, accidentally emailed me about this class. I was like, "What is this?" Took the class, caught the bug, and took a few more classes. And then I completely course corrected my career in my life. And I started taking entrepreneurship classes, came out of college, decided not to do a PhD in nuclear engineering and instead go into startups.

Vivek Sodera:

So I'm going to date myself here, it's 2006. And I got connected to this founder by the name of Auren Hoffman who had previously startup and sold multiple companies. So for me, I was just very eager to learn at the feet of a master and just learn what it takes to build a company. So that first company was called Rapleaf. We went through various pivots. It started out as a peer-to-peer reputation platform that turned into a marketing intelligence company, that then pivoted to become an ad tech company and rebranded as LiveRamp. And that is now a publicly traded company. I think it's worth 4 billion valuation market cap on the New York Stock Exchange. So that was my first foray into tech. And I really cut my teeth there. And I joined that company as his co-founder, as kind of a business co-founder, a Jack of all trades.

Vivek Sodera:

So after that, I had a lot of people tell me, "You know what Vivek, you'd make a great CEO. You should go start a company. You have a lot of really cool, interesting ideas." So I was like, "You know that's not a bad idea. I think I shall do that." So I took some time off, explored some ideas. Started a second company that I named Airseed, and it was a developer platform around consumer intelligence and analytics. Didn't get to product market fit with that company. And I learned that the hard way. With my first company with Rapleaf that turned into LiveRamp, it went through various pivots, and we stumbled into product market fit. So the second company, I wasn't intentional around finding product market fit, assuming it was going to happen. And that was a huge mistake and a huge lesson learned there.

Vivek Sodera:

But it was too late at that point. I was pretty burned out. I had burned through pretty much all of our investors' seed capital. I burned through a lot of my savings, and I realized a few things. Building a developer platform is really hard. Don't grow the business until you hit product market fit. And the third I think was incredibly salient for me. It was you're not actually meant to be a CEO. That's not your place in the world.

Vivek Sodera:

So made the decision to shut down that company. And literally the next day, got reconnected with Rahul Vohra, who is our co-founder and CEO here at Superhuman. He's someone I had known for many years. And that was the history prior to Superhuman itself.

Daniel Scrivner:

That is fascinating. I don't typically ask follow-up questions, but I think I have to ask a couple. The first is what serendipity to be emailed instead of this other Vivek that piqued your interest on kind of studying entrepreneurship. It seems like very out of left field compared to what you were studying. So I'm curious what piqued your interest and made you decide that this was the direction you were going to start heading in?

Vivek Sodera:

It was a few things. One, there was a ceiling in terms of one's progress if you go down academia. Or if you want to be a PhD. I was doing research on Generation IV nuclear reactors, fusion technology in particular. So there's a ceiling there. Long, long feedback loops and cycles. You're waiting five to 10 years before you actually see any fruits of your labor. And for me, I'm more of an instant gratification kind of person.

Vivek Sodera:

I've also, ever since I could remember, I've had this entrepreneurial business acumen. Like the lemonade stands, kind of coming up with these ideas growing up. And I was never able to fully explore those. And it wasn't until I took this class, and this first class was an entrepreneurship lecture series. So I just sat in the audience. And I'm listening to these entrepreneurs, these founders who have been successful come in. And I've been fortunate enough to actually come back to that same exact class. It's auditorium of couple of hundred people, and speak about my experience to kind of close the loop there. But for me, it was really just an eye-opening like wow, okay. This is an alternate path than what I had been going down through high school, through college, that I can actually have much more of an impact on the world than what I'm currently doing through my academic endeavors.

Daniel Scrivner:

That makes sense. And on the second point, would be particularly that kind of moment in time in your story where you go, you decide yes, I'm going to try my hand at being the CEO. You kind of come out of that. And in your words, you maybe come to terms with the fact or just get comfortable with the fact that that's not your role. That's not where that's meant to be. I imagine that was probably extremely painful. And at some point in time, you got over that and could relate to that more positively. I just would love to hear you talk a little bit about that. Because I think that we all need to learn what we're good at. A part of that is accepting certain things that we're just not cut out for. And I feel like you can either bang your head against that wall endlessly, or you can kind of evolve and move on.

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah. So the failure of my second company and having to shut that down was the most painful professional experience I've ever had, but it was the greatest teacher. It taught me so many lessons, and it allowed me to tap into my self-awareness. So when we didn't hit product market fit, it was something I realized towards the end of the company a couple months from actually shutting it down where I was like, "We should actually be taking more of an intentional approach here." I've made huge mistakes in trying to build out this company, the second company Airseed. And I spent weeks, if not months laying in bed depressed once I had this realization that this is going to end not well. And it's going to end poorly. And the disappointment with my team, the disappointment from my investors, the disappointment from my friends and family, and just having to face that.

Vivek Sodera:

And I really had to look at myself. And I do distinctly remember this one particular moment where I was looking at myself in the mirror in my bathroom. And I don't exaggerate when I say this. I had tears in my eyes and I'm like, "I'm a complete failure. How did this happen?" And I really just had to look inwards and realize, "You know what, maybe you're not meant to be a CEO. What is your place in this world?" So I had all these questions going through my head.

Vivek Sodera:

And I truly believe that each one of us on this planet has this particular place in the world. And they fit within a particular construct around this world and around society. So for me, it was like I achieved some success with my first company. I didn't achieve success with the second company where I'm CEO. So I had very limited data points, but I'm like, "I actually don't care about control. I care about influence." And I've studied so many founders and so many CEOs. Folks I know personally, folks I've studied from afar that I admire, and others who have been unsuccessful and have failed. And I found that the best CEOs without sounding too harsh here are a bit of control freaks. They exercise control. And that's actually something I look for when I'm investing in other founders and other companies. I look for a CEO who has attention for that. I didn't really care about control. I cared about influence.

Vivek Sodera:

So in the context of Superhuman, when we were starting the company, this is a conversation that came up between Rahul and I where he's like, "I'm going to be the CEO of the company." And I was like, "I want you to be the CEO. I never want to be CEO ever again." And I explained why. And one of the things I said to him was, "Look, I don't care if you push the button, as long as I get to bend your ear and say, 'Hey, I recommend you push the button.' That's what matters to me the most." So I didn't value control. I valued influence. I wasn't technical, especially if you're building a software company. I found the best CEOs are ones who have a technical and product background, whereas I had more of a business background. And I would say those are some of the major elements.

Vivek Sodera:

And in all honesty, being a CEO is so incredibly stressful. It's so incredibly stressful. It's lonely. It was a very lonely experience being the founder/CEO of my company, even though I did have co-founders where I didn't really have a support structure. I know that there are a lot of resources now in the market for founders and founders/CEOs in particular with providing support and coaching, whatnot. But I didn't really have that. So it was just something where I'm like I prefer being the number two. I don't want to be the number one, and I'm happier that way. Because I'm trying to optimize for happiness. I'm not trying to optimize for ego.

Daniel Scrivner:

That's a great quote. I think we're going to take that out, put that in the show notes of this one. I'd love to explore, transition a little bit and kind of dive deeper into Superhuman. And to start, I imagine almost everyone on this podcast has heard of Superhuman. The vast majority, a vast percentage are going to be Superhuman users. But for those that aren't familiar, can you maybe just kind of give us the quick sales pitch, kind of get people from zero to one on what Superhuman is?

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah. Superhuman, we're building the fastest email experience in the world. There are a billion professionals who spend at least three or four hours a day in their inbox. Not just folks in tech, but we're talking teachers, and doctors, and architects, you name it.

Daniel Scrivner:

Lawyers.

Vivek Sodera:

Exactly. And we give them time back. We give them mastery at their fingertips. Superhuman is rooted in speed. We obsess about speed. Everything from using the product, to the user experience, to performance, to how you do email. So we see that because of that, we're saving the average Superhuman user about 30 minutes to an hour a day versus what they were doing before.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah. And I can attest to that. I think at this point, I've used it for three years. I've introduced it to a lot of other people. And it's indispensable. I mean, as soon as you learn how to use it and are able to use the features. I use it almost comically in that I've got six different inboxes going in between, and kind of triaging throughout the day. So I would highly recommend it for anyone that hasn't checked it out.

Daniel Scrivner:

I want to go back to that email you got from Rahul. And that timing seems spooky in that you shut down that company and then you get this email. Maybe talk a little bit about what was in that email, what you were thinking in the moment. And then we can start to walk through a little bit of kind of the founding origin story of Superhuman.

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah. So it actually wasn't an email. I went to an event, and it was at Sonoma Speedway. And it was an event for founders and investors. So again, the night prior, I'd made the decision, "Okay. I think I need to shut this company down." I'd already preregistered for this event. So I went to this event anyways. And Rahul pulls up and I haven't seen Rahul in years. He and I had known each other professionally from his first company Rapportive, which my company at the time was helping to power some of the APIs for Rapportive. So we had built initially a professional relationship that then turned into a friendship.

Vivek Sodera:

When he sold Rapportive to LinkedIn, he was in a bit of a black hole at LinkedIn. And I was in a bit of a black hole with my own company. So we lost touch for a couple of years. But I saw him at this event, and we rekindled our friendship. And I remember giving him a big bear hug, and we were just hanging out, and we didn't skip a beat. So it was the next day where we decided we should grab drinks. We should hang out more properly.

Vivek Sodera:

And drinks led to us hanging out over the next two weeks. And we were pretty much spending every evening or every other evening just catching up on life, talking about relationships. But then we also started talking about our own prior professional experiences. And what happened with LinkedIn, what happened with Rapportive, what happened with my company, etc. And yeah. And then he just started pitching me this idea for Superhuman. So if you don't mind, I love telling the story.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah, please do.

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah. I remember asking him, "So what are you thinking now? You've taken about a year off. You've kind of had time to recharge and think about the next thing." And he's like, "I'm thinking about rebuilding email." And I was like, "That's kind of insane. So you want to go up against Google and Microsoft." And he's like, "Yeah." I'm like, "Okay, I'd love to hear more." So I remember asking him, "Do you have a name for a company picked out?" And he's like, "Yeah, Superhuman." So I was drinking a scotch at the time and I remember almost spitting out my drink, like doing a spit take. It was just like, "Wait, what?" And he's like Superhuman. I'm like, "You're kidding. Right?" And he's like, "No." I'm incredibly intrigued. So I was like, "Okay, I definitely have to hear more."

Vivek Sodera:

He pitched me on this idea. He pulled out his laptop. He was showing me all this research he had done. He was showing me billion plus professionals, and all these studies, and all this data around email consumption and usage, and how much time folks were spending there. He then started showing me these high level wire frames for what he was thinking about.

Vivek Sodera:

So I was incredibly intrigued. I, I think like most folks wasn't thinking about fixing email. But I was, my heart is drawn towards the productivity space. And Superhuman wasn't just something that was going to rebuild email. It was meant to be much bigger than the scope of productivity. So what Rahul said to me during one of our conversations fundamentally shifted my thinking. He was like, "You know Vivek, it's unlikely that folks like you and I are going to find solutions to famine or war. It's unlikely that Vivek and Rahul are going to find a cure for cancer, or AIDS, or take mankind to Mars. But what we can do is create tools for people that are. Tools for that cancer researcher, that high school teacher, whoever it is, the next Elon Musk. Help them move 10X faster, be 10X more productive, be 10X more brilliant. That is our contribution to society. That's how we're going to level up mankind is by augmenting people's natural capabilities with the software and tools that we create, give them super powers, and make them superhuman."

Vivek Sodera:

And that's where the name of the company came from. He was so serious about the brand and about the mission, he had already spent over six figures getting the domain superhuman.com. And I was like, "Wow, okay. You absolutely are serious about this."

Vivek Sodera:

So over the following few weeks after that, we started courting each other. We hadn't worked with each other side-by-side professionally, even though we were more business development partners with our prior company. So he was like, "I'd love to talk to some of your professional references." And I was like, "I'd love to talk to some of your professional references." So I gave him I think 15 or 20 references. He gave me a similar amount. I talked to all of these folks. He talked to my references and came back. And at the time, he wasn't looking to bring on a non-technical co-founder. In his mind, he was thinking it was going to be him and our current CTO Conrad.

Vivek Sodera:

So once he and I started going down this rabbit hole of talking about Superhuman, I think his eyes started to really open up, and he started to realize that, "Okay, there's a lot that goes with company building that's not just writing code and producing product." And that's where I came in. And I was like, "Look, this is absolutely where I can lend my expertise and exercise my zone of genius here as we go from zero to one."

Daniel Scrivner:

And I want to talk about some of those functions within the company that you've taken from zero to one. And something that I brought up when we were chatting, kind of preparing for this is, and we'll link to it in the show notes. And I encourage anyone listening to follow you. Vivek's on Twitter @vsodera S-O-D-E-R-A, the Twitter handle. And he put out a thread on August 11th, which I thought was really profound, because it was basically one kind of just being super open with the fact that he's a co-founder, but he's not a CEO and he's not a CTO. And that's something I think is not talked about enough is anyone that invests in companies, see a lot of companies with multiple, multiple co-founders. And I don't feel like you've heard many of those stories come out, but then you listed the functions in the company you've taken from zero to one. Including finance, recruiting, customer delight. I know you recently just did some security work on an incredibly fun new security project. So talk about, I guess starting at the highest level, how does that relationship work? Do you and Rahul map out what the next priority is? And then what does it look like for you to jump in and really take something from zero to one?

Vivek Sodera:

I think it would have been incredibly challenging to operate with confidence if I didn't have done my first and also my second company. The first company gave me a lens, Rapleaf LiveRamp gave me a lens in terms of what it takes to take a company from zero to one, zero to two, etc. The second company allowed me to be empathetic and be more like a CEO whisper, consigliere to the CEO, through my experience and my failure there, and really just empathize with that particular role.

Vivek Sodera:

So the way that that went down, we officially started the company May 11th, 2015. And that week, we were working out of a coworking space called Galvanize only for a week until we found a work live loft that we eventually settled into.

Vivek Sodera:

So that week, we started writing code. This was being done by Conrad, as well as Rahul. Rahul was doing a lot of the design work as well. And then I started to take care of a lot of the other elements pre-product market fit. And these elements included helping with some of the incorporation aspects to we were starting to hire one or two engineers. I took on the recruiting. I've been fortunate to have years of recruiting experience, have interviewed 3,000 plus engineers in my career, had the playbooks in mind.

Vivek Sodera:

So the biggest challenges that startups encounter for the most part, the three I would say are finding product market fit, finding the right people, and then fundraising investing. And we had a strong product and technical team with Rahul and Conrad, and our first engineer [inaudible 00:19:26]. And Rahul is just a master fundraiser. But the hiring piece was something that they didn't have as a toolkit, as part of the toolkit. So I took that on initially, and I wore a lot of different hats. It wasn't a I was just focused on recruiting. It was okay, I'm going to do recruiting. Plus, I'm going to take care of all of these operational aspects with the company. Like setting up payroll for example, setting up HR, setting up all of that.

Vivek Sodera:

And yeah. So from a recruiting standpoint, scale the team to about 25 people or so until we brought on our now head of people Kristen Hayward. And her claim to fame was she scaled Zenefits, she scaled Flexport. But prior to that, I was the one who was doing the sourcing, the interviewing, the final interviews, etc. So I think it's important to let folks who have a zone of genius operate in that zone. And for Conrad, it's writing code, for Rahul, it's product design marketing. So for me, I took everything off of their plate as much as possible to kind of let them focus there.

Vivek Sodera:

And so once we started onboarding customers, we had to have some type of feedback loop and some channel with customers. And in the very beginning, it was Rahul, Conrad, and our current head of strategy and analytics Gaurav where he served as a generalist, a Swiss army knife as well. And it was them answering five or 10 emails a day. But once we really started onboarding customers, I remember looking at, and mind you I'm still managing a lot of our recruiting functions. I remember looking at how Rahul was keeping track of customer issues. And he had a Google Sheet, I think it was a Google Sheet or Excel spreadsheet. And I was like, wow, this is jank. This is not going to scale. And I was like, "How do you know how many people are requesting calendaring for example?" And he would do a control F search. I'm like, "Well, let me type scheduling. Okay. So you missed those people who mentioned scheduling, which is kind of in the same vein of calendaring."

Vivek Sodera:

So that's where I then built out our CRM so to speak. An air table, set up Zapier connections, etc. And then I retroactively, I remember I spent an entire week and I pulled some all nighters to retroactively tag about 10,000 pieces of customer feedback to issues, and feature requests, and whatnot. We surprisingly still use this instance. I was hoping we'd wean off of it by now. But yeah, we have I don't know, however many tens of thousands of customers. And I don't know, however many pieces of feedback, but it's still going strong.

Vivek Sodera:

So while I was running a lot of our recruiting functions, I was answering customer emails. And I think at one point, it scaled to about 100 emails a day. So I'm just trying to go super fast. And we had a goal of getting back to customers within five minutes. So it's like we'd get an email, and I would try to respond in five minutes. So it's constant context switching, which is incredibly painful for someone who has ADHD. So I'd been diagnosed with ADHD. This was actually during the period of depression. A few months of depression, was shutting down my company and I saw a psychiatrist about this. And they're like, "You've been diagnosed ADHD. Here's some meds if you'd like to take some." So it's incredibly painful to do this constant context switching, but it's what the company needed. And then we eventually brought on our first customer delight specialist. And then I started to hand the reins over to that person. And now we have an entire organization, entire team around what we call customer delight, other organizations call customer support.

Vivek Sodera:

And now we're managing our finances. I'm driving a lot of that until we bring on a director of finance. I had to take care of Superhuman SOC 2 compliance, which we're still in the middle of.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah. It feels like you jump into areas, try your best. Even when it's not the perfect setup. Get the work done, which is incredibly important. And I think for anyone that hasn't been in the operating seat at a quickly scaling company, there's just a mind-boggling amount of very manual work where there's no leverage to be found. All you can throw it at is brute force it with hours.

Vivek Sodera:

Absolutely. And I do want to touch upon that for a bit.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah, please.

Vivek Sodera:

Doing a startup, I think there's really a romanticized notion of starting a company and being a founder. And it is a lot of work. It's less inspiration and more perspiration. It requires a certain work ethic. Being the non CEO, non CTO co-founder is oftentimes a thankless job. Even if I wasn't a co-founder and just I was an early stage employee, a later stage employee, exercising this fiduciary duty and looking out in the best interest of the company over your own needs. So I'm constantly in service of the company and put aside my own wants and needs in order to help the company scale.

Daniel Scrivner:

I'd love to continue that line of thought, bubble up the conversation a little bit to a little bit higher level and kind of ask the question, and maybe reframing it a little bit. If you were sitting down with someone that was like, "I really like the path that you've gone on. I want to be a co-founder. I don't think I'm the CEO or the CTO." What advice would you give them in terms of how to kind of set their expectations correctly, but also how to just set them up for success?

Vivek Sodera:

All right. So I'm going to rapid fire, make some recommendations. One, get a therapist, get a coach. A therapist helps you deal with your past issues. A coach helps you work towards the future. So when you're starting a company, you're a founder, the company is an extension of you. So if you have baggage and issues that you haven't dealt with, it's going to come up, and it's going to manifest in dysfunctional ways in your company.

Vivek Sodera:

So for me for example, I had someone who was an NLP coach who actually employed some therapist-esque techniques. And he was like, "Vivek, it seems like you're kind of doing this company to prove to your dad that you could do this." And it was within the first session within 20 minutes of talking to this person. And I was just like, "You're totally right. I shouldn't be doing this to prove to my dad my worth. I should be doing this for myself." And it really just kind of lifted this weight off my shoulders. So I'd highly recommend getting a therapist, getting a coach. Also by the way, working with a therapist helps you kind of better understand your own emotions, your feelings, and how to communicate. So I take a lot of my learnings through therapy and I apply it in my professional relationships. So that's been a huge, huge value add.

Vivek Sodera:

Start to identify advisors and mentors. I'd done this more from a piecemeal, non-intentional point of view. But I think if I could have done it over again, I would have been very intentional, and just surrounded myself, and have a periodic cadence of kind of having these folks provide level of mentorship and advice. Learn to write code. If I could go back, I would push myself to be more technical. When I started my second company, I did a four day sprint. This is back when Ruby was all the rage. I taught myself Ruby. Enough Ruby to write a LinkedIn scraper using the Selenium gem and scrape LinkedIn data. And I was doing this for the purpose of trying to build out my founding team. But as a result of that exercise, I was able to actually have some technical conversations with potential co-founders that I would like to bring onboard.

Vivek Sodera:

So not just that, but by having a technical background, you can spin up prototypes, you can spin up products. You don't even actually need to be super technical nowadays with all these low-code, no-code solutions in the market. But I think it definitely makes you that much more valuable if you have the ability to write JavaScript or write some code.

Daniel Scrivner:

You talked about something that was pretty interesting, because I've had a similar experience of even if you spend a little bit of time leading a company, founding a company, and then ultimately decide that you just don't feel like you enjoy that position, kind of leading a company. But there's something that gives, which is a tremendous amount of empathy. That if you're going to be a co-founder to a CEO or work closely with the CEO is enormously helpful. And it feels like even your advice there of learning to code is partly just so you can speak in that, so you're more fluent in it. But I'm guessing part of it too is maybe empathy. But talk a little bit about just your experience being able to relate as a co-founder to a CEO and what they're going through. And if there's any advice there, any general advice to share.

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah. The CEO role is the absolute hardest role. It is one that should be appropriately compensated. So whenever I see there's a founding team, and let's say there's two founders. And they each give themselves a 50/50 split from an equity standpoint. I'll actually advise them, "No, actually it should be 55/45." The CEO incurs the most risk. And compensation like equity, I have a definition. Equity is a form of compensation that's a function of risk. And the CEO incurs the absolute most risk. They're the face of the company. They take the heat. At the end of the day, everything's their fault.

Daniel Scrivner:

That's the job.

Vivek Sodera:

Right? If there's a problem with a particular part of the organization, it's because the CEO didn't set up the leader of that organization, it might be a VP, it might be a manager, it might be a head of. Didn't set up that person for success. You can do a root cause analysis, and every problem in the company is the CEO's problem. It's the CEO's fault. They did something not right. Maybe they didn't make the right hire. They didn't set this person up for success. They didn't provide the right north star, the appropriate expectations, etc., etc.

Vivek Sodera:

So as a result, the CEO takes on so much burden, so much stress. I've actually seen my CEO friends within a matter of two or three years go from a full whatever their hair color is, to all of a sudden they have a lot of gray hairs. It's that stressful. At the same time, it's also incredibly lonely as I had mentioned earlier. So in my conversations with Raul especially during the early days, I would poke, and I would prod, and I would try to get a sense of how he's feeling. Because I understood from my prior experience how lonely it was, and I would get him to open up about it. And I would be a support structure for him and let him know, "Hey look, this is going to get better. I'm here to support you. You tell me what you need. I'm happy to help out here."

Vivek Sodera:

And I remember even in the early days, this was probably I want to say three years ago where I had pushed Rahul to work with an executive coach. And it wasn't a top priority for him because he was kind of thinking about all the different fires that he was dealing with at the company. But I realized that the potential of the company was really limited by Rahul's potential. So I needed to push him to be better and to level up. And as a result, the company would have a higher ceiling and would be inevitably leveled up as well. So I did a lot of the legwork in finding various coaches, different styles. And I interviewed them, I took notes, and I handed it to him on a silver platter. I'm like, "Here you go. Pick which coach you want to work with." And he eventually worked with I think two of the three coaches over the following couple of years.

Vivek Sodera:

So having that ... look, I can empathize to a degree of what you're going through. I obviously can't empathize, like right now Superhuman is 100 plus person company. I cannot fathom the level of stress and the things that Rahul has to deal with at the scale that we're at. We had just raised a Series C from IVP, companies valued at X amount. We have a lot more eyes on us now, and so there's a lot more pressure to keep this thing growing and scaling. And that then turns into a lot of stress on someone like Rahul.

Vivek Sodera:

But during the early days, it was definitely like, "Hey, I kind of can get what you're going through. Let me try to help out here." And I would proactively try to take things off of his plate, or proactively help him behind the scenes so that he can scale, and therefore the company can scale as well.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah. I love your perspective. And I want to come back and talk about some of your comments there around coaching in just a second. But one question that I have to ask, and it's a super broad question and kind of by design, because I'm just interested to see where you take it. But Superhuman for anyone that's familiar, I think people are just really impressed by. They're impressed at the execution. They're impressed at obviously how it's grown. I think they're impressed at the product experience. I think it just feels like it's kind of playing its own game and doing that really successfully. And I don't think I'm making that up. I think that's something that's generally kind of the perspective of the people that I talk with. So the question I would ask you is what do you feel like is Superhuman's secret ingredient or its superpower that allows it to kind of have been so successful so far and to just continue kind of exceeding expectations and growing at an unreal rate?

Vivek Sodera:

Do you want to know the secret?

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah.

Vivek Sodera:

I don't know if I should share this. The secret is, it's the people. It really is. I think we have pound for pound, the best team in the world. I sat in a couple YC demo days. Not the last YC demo day, but the one or two before. And there were so many of these YC startups that are pitching themselves as, "We're the Superhuman for X. We're the Superhuman for Y." And it was flattering, but at the same time weird. I'm like, "We're not Uber scale." At the time I think we were only 50 people. I'm like, "This is crazy. This is insane." And that's a function of how much we've invested in the brand, how much we've invested in the product, our customers, and just how folks perceive us. And that really comes down to having the right team in place.

Vivek Sodera:

I think Rahul has the strongest founder market fit when it comes to building an email startup. This is something I also look for when I invest in other companies where I see is this what this person was meant to do in this world? And Rahul has this mantra where it's all about helping people be brilliant. So with Rapportive, he was helping people be brilliant with other people. With Superhuman, he's helping people be brilliant with email and their productivity. But he just bleeds this mission.

Vivek Sodera:

And then, here's someone who has some of the strongest product chops I've ever seen, who has this really distortion effect, almost like Steve Jobs-esque who can paint such a vivid story and vision. And that's rare to find. And it's also, he has a technical background. It's like Superhuman would absolutely be a very different company today, and I don't think we'd be where we are if it were a different CEO.

Vivek Sodera:

And then you have our CTO Conrad who is without a doubt the strongest engineer I've ever worked with. Folks talk about the unicorn, the 10 extra. That's Conrad. These are highly influential, key players, force multipliers in the company. Where we have Gaurav is our Swiss army knife. He can wear a lot of different hats. We have Emuye who was actually probably the best hire I've ever made in my life. She's now our head of all engineering at Superhuman, but she came on as our first iOS lead. Kristen, and we've kind of made recent hires. So at the end of the day, it's the people. There's actually really no secret sauce. It's the people.

Daniel Scrivner:

But I love that.

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah.

Daniel Scrivner:

I love that because I think it makes sense. Even hearing you talk through that, I mean, it checks all the right boxes. And one thing I was thinking about as you were kind of listing those names and talking through that a little bit is I think it'd be interesting to hear your perspective on why the people are so important. Because I think obviously the kind of first order answer is, "You can just do more." The more talented people you have, the more you can do. But the thing I've noticed is that the best people also are, they are themselves as an individual very ambitious. Meaning they have very ambitious plans, and they also have very high expectations of what they're going to make, and very high expectations of what they want to build. And it seems like those are as important, if not more important than just being able to do the work. Any thoughts perspective there?

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah. If you look at a sports team like the Warriors, it's not just Steph Curry. It's Klay Thompson. It's these other folks who are on the team that come together and help take a team like the Warriors to becoming NBA champions. So yeah, it is the ambition. It's important to find folks who have core values alignment. Because if you don't align on values, like their values as well as the company's values, then you're going to have not the synchronicity and kind of like being able to move effectively forward. You're going to have friction and tension. We're not at that stage in society. Maybe give us a few hundred years where you can assign non-people, I.e., and robots, and whatnot to build companies. And maybe it might even happen much sooner than a couple of hundred years. But at the end of day, it is the people. And you do have different perspectives, different life experiences.

Vivek Sodera:

And this is why I think diversity is not just the right thing to do from a hiring standpoint, investing in diversity. But it's just fundamentally good business. To have people with diverse backgrounds, it really shows when you have this wider rage from a perspective standpoint, from a problem solving standpoint, from finding a solution standpoint. So yeah, I would say those all play key parts in our components around why I think people are the primary driver.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah. On that diversity note, I think the way that I always kind of contextualize that and thought about that is the more diverse team that you've built, you're just increasing the sample size. Meaning you're increasing the perspectives that people are going to bring to the problem, or the solution, or the discussion, which is really, really important.

Daniel Scrivner:

We've covered a ton of really interesting things. Looking at my page here, there's so many questions I had written down that you naturally covered. So I think it would be great to maybe end on a couple of notes and touch on some things that we've talked about before. And one was this came up, and it was a quote I wrote down when we were initially planning out what we discuss. And you just wrote down this notion and you gave me this quote, that failure is a rite of passage, especially for entrepreneurs. And I would love it if you could just take it from there and expand on that idea for a little bit. Because I think it's important. It relates to your story. And I think you'd have an interesting perspective.

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah. Failure is life's greatest teacher. You learn so much about yourself, what you're capable of, what you're not capable of, in such a condensed amount of through this experience of failure. It hits you like a truck. But once you wake up from the disorientation, and then you can evaluate. And you get over the initial emotional dysregulation or the emotional shock from the failure, you learn so much. And as long as you have a particular growth mindset, failure can absolutely be a great teacher.

Vivek Sodera:

So for me, I'd mentioned this with my second company where it was a slow failure on my part. But once the realization hit me that, "Hey, we failed in this endeavor." It did hit me like a truck. Because I've always held this hope of maybe, maybe we'll figure out. Maybe we'll get there. Maybe we'll get there. And it's like okay, at certain points, I'm compromising my health. I'm compromising all these aspects of my life. And I actually have to be realistic here. I don't think we're going to get there.

Vivek Sodera:

So yeah, it's something that I think ... I wouldn't be where I'm at today with Superhuman if I didn't go through that failure. If I didn't develop that empathy for being a CEO. If I didn't develop that chip on my shoulder of finding product market fit. Because that played into Superhuman where we were talking about okay, we need to figure out getting to product market fit. And I had shared stories of my experience and how painful it was that I wasn't intentional about it. And I never wanted to experience that ever again. And I didn't want our team to experience that, what I had gone through.

Vivek Sodera:

So yeah, it led me to where I'm at today. And I think you learn much more through your own failure and other people's failures in a much shorter timeframe than I think you do through success. And it's a much looser and slower feedback loop when you have success. You have to retroactively look back and see, "Yeah, that was successful." For example with Superhuman, we invested in this one-to-one onboarding approach.

Daniel Scrivner:

Distinctly remember that.

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah. It wasn't immediately successful. And we didn't realize from day one, this was going to be a successful endeavor approach. But it wasn't until we did a certain number of these that we then looked back, analyzed the data, and we were like, "Oh wow, we are successful in this approach." Whereas with failure, you get hit with all that information and that data very quickly. And as long as I think you have the appropriate tools and you have the appropriate mindset to be able to consume all of that data and then piece it together and start to take some of the key learnings from that.

Vivek Sodera:

Closest analogy or comparison is when Neo's in the matrix. And he learns karate for the first time. And he's just jolted with all this information. He's like, "I just learned karate. I just learned kung fu." And it's analogous to that.

Daniel Scrivner:

But with failure.

Vivek Sodera:

But with failure, right. It's just like okay, I can't do this. I shouldn't do this. Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And then you're just armed with all this. So I think the more you can fail, and obviously you should minimize instances of failure over time. But if you can fail early, and often, and learn from that as quickly as possible, you're going to learn so much. And that teaches you adversity. And adversity is required when you're trying to build a startup from the ground up.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah. I've often thought about failure as it's a chance for you to prove that you've got the grip to keep pushing through a little bit further. I want to ask one more question around that, which is your story of founding that second company, having the slow failure. And then realizing it, and having that all hit you at once, and processing that. And I just really related. I've experienced many failures in my life, but I mean one super vividly that felt similar. Felt like it was slow motion. And that realization all at once took a long time to process and a long time to sort out. So I guess the question I'd be curious is if you could go back to that moment in time in your life, and let's say you could whisper in your ear as you were going through those moments and laying in bed and just really struggling. What would you say to try to I guess remind yourself that this isn't the end? What would you say to maybe reframe that?

Vivek Sodera:

It's tough when you've set this expectation for yourself. And I found that a lot of frustrations in life tend to be the disconnect between expectations you set versus reality. So I set this huge bar of life. "We're going to build a billion dollar company. We're going to be super successful." These are all vanity things. At the end of the day, I'm human. I still have an ego. I'm imperfect. But I still had these ... my ego was kicking in. And my ego was kicking in pretty hard, and set this really high bar from an expectation standpoint. And then when we were so far off from that, that was what caused the depression. That's what caused the not leaving my bed for weeks at a time.

Daniel Scrivner:

It's like whiplash. Totally.

Vivek Sodera:

Absolutely. So I think it's important with whatever you do in life. And I've learned this being in a relationship up with my wife, and just professional relationships, and just things that I want for myself. That if you don't manage your expectations, and if you keep your expectations static, you will be very disappointed. You will experience a lot of pain, and anxiety, and frustration. So I've had to learn to make expectations fluid, and not keep it static. And I've had to learn to evaluate expectations along the way. So I should have tempered my expectations about the company, my second company from day one. So it was a very humbling experience to experience that failure, but it kind of put me in a more appropriate mindset to go into Superhuman where I didn't have these crazy expectations. I wasn't like, "We're going to do this. We're going to do that." I did have ambition. So I think it's important to discern the difference between expectations and ambition. I was like, "I would like for us to get there, that would be great." But I'm not expecting us to get there. And we'll just kind of see where this takes.

Vivek Sodera:

So that's what I would kind of whisper to myself, especially during the early days and through the painful experience of shutting down the company is just constantly remind myself to evaluate my expectations, and maybe refactor or recalibrate expectations. And it might be hard coded a weekly thing, a monthly thing, whatever it may be. But just making that an intentional exercise.

Daniel Scrivner:

I love your answer. That's something I've been spending a lot of time thinking about and have come to similar conclusions. And I think the way you described it of being fluid, being in the moment, which is another way of being pro present, and not being fixed in allowing those expectations to be fluid is I think fantastic advice. This has been an incredible interview, and you have so much to share. For anyone that wants to follow you, find you online, wants to find Superhuman, obviously I guess we talked about it at superhuman.com. But where can people find, follow you?

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah, yeah. I'm on Twitter @vsodera. Feel free to DM me. My DMs are open. My email is [email protected].

Daniel Scrivner:

We can expect a five minute response.

Vivek Sodera:

No, unfortunately not. Not these days. I am nowhere near inbox zero. I know that we get a lot of our customers to inbox zero, but I'm still a bit a ways from there. But feel free to reach out to me there, and I'm happy to follow up and be helpful any way I can.

Daniel Scrivner:

Thank you so much, Vivek.

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah, thank you.

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Bonus Vivek's Habits, Influences, and Life Lessons – Vivek Sodera of Superhuman

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Daniel Scrivner:

Vivek, I'm super excited to have you back to run through these 10 questions that we ask every guest. Thank you so much for the extra time.

Vivek Sodera:

Thank you.

Daniel Scrivner:

So the first question is a little selfish. I mean, one of my favorite things that I've heard you talk about is some of what you look for in founders and founding teams. And some of that's obviously based on your background, some of that's the kind of lenses that you put on as an investor. Some of the things that you've said in the past is when you're thinking about founders, asking yourself the question is this what this person was meant to do in the world? And looking for founders that are controlling, looking for founder problem fit. So I'd love to hear you just kind of expand from there on other things that you look for as an investor in founders founding teams, and just the approach you take there.

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah. So when I talked about control, it was less about controlling, and more about they would not outsource or delegate some of the early work to others that they would own the initial work in the beginning. And make sure that the product, the company, the user experience, whatever it may be is molded in their fashion. Because I think it's very easy recruiting for example to offload recruiting to a third party agency. But, I don't think you would actually build a right team in that effort. It's important that the founding team own that particular approach. So for me, I do look for just from my own experience from being a student of tech, and also now from an investing lens where I'm a pre-seed, seed, and Series A investor. And I have my own small fund on the side, where I look for founders and founding teams that as I mentioned, have a technical background, have product chops, have strong founder market fit. I should get a sense that they were meant to do this better than anyone else on the planet. If Rahul came to me and was like, "I want to build a self-driving car company," I'd be like, "I don't see strong founder market fit there." But if Kyle from Cruise, he has strong founder market fit. He's best suited to do this better than anyone else. So I really look for that.

Vivek Sodera:

I get turned off when I come across founders, especially first time founders, who don't have a mental model and don't understand what it takes to build a company. That then they are just trying to find a problem to solve. They've gone through six different iterations and they're like, "I'm going to try to solve this problem." And it's like no, the problem should be so near and dear to your heart that you're like, "I have to do this. I obsess and I breathe this."

Vivek Sodera:

The other things I look for are does this person have a chip on their shoulder? What really drives them to do this beyond just the idea of starting a company and solving a customer issue? There's something that has to be more there. It might be that they experienced this pain point so deeply in a previous company, or if they're doing a healthcare company and maybe their parents experienced health issues while they were growing up. So something along those lines. I also look for does this person have a particular secret about the world and understand something that I don't know and that a lot of other people don't know?

Vivek Sodera:

So for example, with Superhuman, Rahul had this idea around having this keyboard centric, command light interface experience that didn't have all the Gmail extension bells and whistles that was rooted in speed and search. And I did not agree with that in the beginning. But I was like, "Look, you're owning product and you're driving this." But he was right. He was absolutely right. He understood that the next great productivity companies are going to be the ones that help people get time back, that focus on speed, that reduce people's anxieties and so forth. And I do look for that when I come across founding teams where I'll dig in, and I'll dig in, I'll dig in. And I'll learn something that I didn't realize, or I didn't know before.

Vivek Sodera:

I'm a big believer that a startup at the end of the day is a series of experiments to unlock some type of learning or user psychology. And you kind of have to go through this experience of starting a company, and iterating, and trying to see what works. And then you unlock this. And I've been fortunate enough to see that with some of the recent companies I've invested where I'm like, "Okay, you understand this unique thing that not very many other people understand. That's going to give you a competitive advantage and allow you able to build a moat around that."

Daniel Scrivner:

I love your perspective there. I'd love to now take the lens, kind of focus it on yourself. And there are really two questions that we ask everybody. And the first one, which is going to relate a lot to Superhuman, is what are your superpowers? When you kind of look at yourself, think about yourself, what are some of your biggest strengths?

Vivek Sodera:

I don't think I'm the smartest person in the room. I think I'm pretty hard working. I don't think I'm the strongest or the best looking. But I would say that I pride myself on being able to identify winners and being able to identify people who are special. So when I met Rahul back in 2010, from our first encounter, I knew he was incredibly special, and this was someone I wanted to work with at some point in my career. So I've been fortunate enough to have that experience and to be really refined over time and to identify, like finding Emuye, initially our iOS lead, who's now head of all engineering at Superhuman. I met her within the first five minutes. It was like she's special. We need to bring her on the team. And we moved mountains, even though she had offers on the table and she was going to make a decision in three days. I ran back and I moved mountains for us to kind of super expedite the process. And we came in, and we beat out everyone else. So whether it's teams of companies, whether it's individuals, that's something I do pride myself in.

Vivek Sodera:

Another superpower is I like to predict the future. And I pull in a lot of discreet and non-discreet data. From my own experience, studying a particular industry, look at tangential industries, kind of like what's going on. And then try to map out what the future looks like. So it's really eerie to see Superhuman where we are today.

Vivek Sodera:

Like for example, when we raised our seed round, I had told Rahul, and I don't remember saying this. But I told him specifically, this was prior to actually raising the seed round. We were just starting the process. I told him specifically we need to raise from first round for our seed. And we need to raise from Andreessen Horowitz for either our Series A or series B. And I was very adamant about that. And I was like, "This is what feels right. And this is where I see us going."

Vivek Sodera:

And then first round came in as the last investor in our seed round. And we ended up closing them. And they ultimately led, they put in the line share of our seed. And then fast forward, a16z led our B. And Rahul reminded me of this conversation. He was like, "Do you remember saying that?" I was like, "Vaguely." He's like, "Yeah, it's kind of eerie how you're kind of [inaudible 00:56:55] this out." And a lot of it's just like, there's a certain intuition feeling I have, which I'm still trying to deconstruct and turn into data beyond just feeling an intuition. I'm like, "How can I bubble this up and actually turn this into something that's more tangible beyond just a feeling?"

Vivek Sodera:

And then I would say the third is really around relationship building. I really pride myself on building relationships with people, internally in the company, external to the company, with just people in general. I'm fortunate to be where I'm at professionally, personally. Through all these relationships, many of them turned into friendships. Over the past 15 years, I am very prideful. And I very much value the Rolodex I've built, this network that I've built. I do enjoy people at the end of the day. I think people are the most complex systems and they're the most complex puzzles. Forget trying to debug some code. Trying to really understand people, it's a really interesting exercise. It kind of gets me really excited. What makes this person tick? What are their motivations? What are their wants and needs. And then through that exploration and understanding as I'm building this relationship, I do start to build a connection with that particular individual. And I'm fortunate to have a lot of really close people in my life and an extended network as a result.

Daniel Scrivner:

Love those answers. On the flip side, and we've talked about this a little bit. But what have you struggled with professionally, personally, and how have you gotten better at those things over time?

Vivek Sodera:

My health. It's everything from sleep, to mindfulness, to even the process of losing weight. I'm trying to eat better. I'm trying to work out. It's really challenging to do all these things consistently when you're in a startup environment Monday through Friday, and then you angel invest over the weekends. And it's challenging to have consistency, because there's constantly something that comes up. And you have to derail your plans of getting up at 6:00 AM, and then getting on the Peloton, and then taking a swim, and then meditating. It's like nope, I have to stay up quite late the night before. So I can't do that. So that gets thrown out the window.

Vivek Sodera:

So what's been helpful, honestly having an accountability partner. My wife has probably been the biggest help is she would of just kind of like, "Hey, you shouldn't eat after 9:00." And, "Go to sleep." And last night she was like, "I'm going to make sure you are tucked into bed by 10:00." None of this staying up late etc., because it cascades. You might get a short-term fix, but it has long-term negative effects. And at this point in my life, I'm trying to optimize more for long-term versus just the short-term. And it's just challenging to kind of balance that where short-term needs and not letting my health suffer.

Vivek Sodera:

I see my life as an equilateral triangle where the points represent wealth, health, and social. So I've indexed, ideally, it's a full equilateral triangle that isn't disproportionate in one area or the other. But I've indexed so much on the social and wealth. And by wealth, I mean work, professional aspects. And in social, friendships, and family, and whatnot, that I've let my health suffer. So if I could go back in time, I would absolutely invest in fitness. Justin Kan has the saying fitness is the first step to greatness. I would've absolutely invested in that, and absolutely invested in my mental health and wellness around that. So those are definitely the main things that I struggle with the most.

Daniel Scrivner:

I mean, I can relate. I can't list the number of days where it's like I have plans to go do X or Y, or go work out at the end of the day, or at the beginning of the day. And it's of course the meeting, or the email, or whatever needs to happen. There's always a push and pull there.

Daniel Scrivner:

The next questions that we ask are just around kind of areas of your life. And these may be things that resonate for, and these may not. But I think one of the first ones is just habits and routines. I think the common way people kind of think about that is what is my playbook for the day? And that's certainly one aspect. I think the other aspect would just be I try to do these things, and I try to kind of have this bar for myself most of the time.

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah. I also am guilty of having these playbooks for the day. Aspirationally, getting in time to work out, getting in time to meditate in the mornings. And then just sprinting throughout the day, trying to be disciplined around having a hard cutoff. My wife and I, we don't have kids yet. We will soon. And I've talked to peers who are fellow founders who have families. I'm like, "How do you do this? How do you have a baby and you're the founder/CEO of this company. Because a startup is a baby in itself. So you're kind of juggling two babies. How do you do this?" And ruthless prioritization and just say, "No, no, no." So I've had to do that now where I get quite a bit of inbound requests to chat about things from folks I don't know. And I have to say no a lot. I'm like, "Sorry. Nope, nope, nope." Or if it's from an investing standpoint, "I exclusively keep my Mondays and Fridays for Superhuman. If you want to chat, let's chat on Saturday. I have this kind of time block available."

Vivek Sodera:

So that's been helpful just to have those aspects of my life segmented so I can laser focus. I did mention from a routine standpoint, therapy is helpful. My wife and I go through couples therapy as well. So we see a couples therapists every couple weeks. And that's been so immensely valuable. And I mentioned learning these habits around communication in the context of a romantic relationship can also be used in a professional context. Using I feel statements, and not going over the net, and all these things I've learned that I've applied and I've tried to push internally within the Superhuman executive staff group.

Vivek Sodera:

And so we have a cadence around that where we meet with our couples therapists. And I learn something new about myself every session. And I'm just like, "Okay, I need to get better at this." Or, "I didn't know that this was important to me." And I think that makes me a better founder, a better entrepreneur is just having that level of self-awareness. But that needs to be hard coded. It can't just be something you do once, and then maybe you do it again a couple years later. Being intentional about it and putting that on your calendar.

Daniel Scrivner:

Those things have a decay curve. You have to make sure to kind of sequence them.

Vivek Sodera:

That's right. Yeah. So that's definitely part of my routine as well, in addition to the aspirational aspects around improving my health and kind of getting into a particular rhythm.

Daniel Scrivner:

On the tool side, and this can be physical tools, digital tools. It can just be anything from, "I recently bought this thing. I love it." Or, "Here's an app that's not Superhuman," or Superhuman. It's totally okay, you use day in and day out. But any tools you rely on that you just think are incredible.

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah. So I rely on, from a physical product standpoint, with respect to my health, I rely on my Fitbit, and I rely on Levels. So it's really interesting just learnings I get from, "Oh wow. When I had two slices of watermelon, my glucose levels kind of spiked. And that contributed to my sleep issues that night." And just kind of drawing this correlation analysis. Levels has been really eyeopening. It's something that I'm a happy paying customer of.

Vivek Sodera:

Fitbit, it's just having something that's just a constantly I can check to see what my activity levels have been. And it's just a reminder to push myself to be better there. With software, for me of course Superhuman. It's number one. I probably live in my inbox at least four or five hours a day. When it comes to note taking, I use a tool called mem.ai. This is a company I wish I invested in. They had raised their seed I think from Andreessen Horowitz. But it's probably the best note taking experience I've come across. If you're not part of the Roam or Obsidian religion or cults there, it's replaced my Evernote and whatnot.

Vivek Sodera:

With project and task management, I use Trello pretty religiously. That's been immensely valuable. I still haven't found a good tool for calendaring. I've explored every single one of them in the market. And I'm still waiting A from the standpoint of a user, and B from the standpoint of investor. And then I started using reader by Readwise, and it's like the Superhuman for Pocket or Superhuman for Instapaper. And I love that product. And full disclosure, I'm an investor in the company. The founder is a former Superhuman engineer. So I just think that's going to be the next billion dollar plus company, just kind of owning all things reading. But that's been a huge boon to my productivity and information consumption is using a product like that.

Daniel Scrivner:

Those are some great ones. Last question kind of in this vein would be around people. And these can be modern or historical figures. But just any person in particular or people in particular that have had an impact on you. And that can be being an inspired by their stories. That can be just people like Justin Kan that you follow today. Anything in that vein?

Vivek Sodera:

Historical figure is MLK. I studied civil rights. MLK, Malcolm X, etc. growing up. And there's a Martin Luther King quote. It's my all time favorite quote. "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." I think that's what the quote is. And anytime I experience some discomfort or I experience some challenge or controversy, I think about that quote. And it's just this extra push of okay, I am not going to grow if I'm comfortable. One rarely grows in comfort. One grows in discomfort. Because if you're in a box and the boundary conditions of the box serves as where you're comfortable, you're just going to be confined to that box. But if you want to keep growing and kind of want to grow that box, you have to literally step outside your comfort zone.

Vivek Sodera:

And so it's a reminder that when I'm experiencing something, this is an opportunity for growth. This is an opportunity for me to level up in a particular area. And MLK had to deal with so much of that, part of the civil rights movement. And then from a modern figure standpoint, I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, it's someone like Elon Musk. Where I don't know how he does the things that he does, and how he moves mountains the way that he does. And he does this with multiple companies all at the same time. I think he is the greatest entrepreneur of our generation. And I think he's going to have the most impact of any modern figure that I can think of. And it's like someone that I don't put people on pedestals, but this is someone that I absolutely do.

Daniel Scrivner:

To your point earlier, it's special, something special there. Similarly around books, any books that either you find yourself wanting to go back and reread often, you find yourself recommending to others often? And this can be in any vein. It can be whether it's professional or not.

Vivek Sodera:

A few books come to mind. One is Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. I am naturally introverted. And when I was starting to work on my first company, I realized I had to become more extroverted in order to be successful professionally, but also with respect to the companies that I was doing. So there are a lot of really basic principles and concepts in How to Win Friends and Influence People that I remember reading at the time. And it's like oh yeah, smile, or say someone's name. And just remember their name. And all these different things that's just so trivial when you read it, but it definitely has significant impact. And it's definitely allowed me to become more of a relationship builder over time.

Vivek Sodera:

Another book that I read, if How to Win Friends and Influence People is my favorite book, the book that's probably had the most impact on me is 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. Now there are folks who view that as the psychopath's Bible. For me, I read these laws. And they give examples in history. It's actually a really good book to read from a history point of view, because Robert Greene goes in depth in terms of a historical figure like Otto von Bismarck. This is an example of a transgression of this law or the opposite. And things that I've learned, one of the laws is don't outshine the master. And I tried to outshine my co-founder at my first company many times. And I look back at my behavior. I'm like, "What was I doing? That wasn't the right thing." So now with Superhuman, Rahul is the CEO. I'm not going to outshine him. I'm never going to outshine him. I'm going to try to propel him as much as possible.

Vivek Sodera:

And these were things that I've learned as a result of reading this book. But at the same time, I've also have been more acutely aware of the various sharks that swim in the ocean with us. And people who really adhere to these laws, I can identify and see what they're doing.

Daniel Scrivner:

Even if they don't know the laws, but they're using them.

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah, exactly. They might not be able to speak to exactly what they're doing from the lens of this particular chapter in this book. But it's an unfortunate reality that there are a lot of psychopathic type people and sociopathic people in tech and in the professional world. And I think it's important to identify who these people are. And I was incredibly naive when I was doing my first company. And I was a guppy swimming in the ocean. And I learned the hard way that there were certain people that did not operate like how I operated. And they were sharks, and I aspired to be a whale using that analogy and that metaphor. So that book has definitely opened up my eyes. So whenever I work with founders who are starting in their career, "Hey, you're going to be interfacing with a lot of investors. You're going to be interfacing with VCs. You're going to interface with these types of people." I recommend just immerse yourself in this, but don't let this become your Bible. Just be aware that this exists.

Vivek Sodera:

And then the third book, which I recommend to every founder is The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. This is sort of a bit of a Bible for Superhuman and how we scale the company. There's a lot of really interesting content, and learnings, and best practices and principles around organizational health, the right leadership team, investing in your core values. In fact, we as a leadership group read the book The Advantage, we referenced The Advantage as well as Patrick Lencioni's other book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team all the time. And there was a particular chapter around core values. And we took that to heart. And we ended up refactoring Superhuman's values. We had a set of six values when we first started the company. Fast forward a couple years later, we read this chapter, we read this book, and we decided to completely refactor. And we came up with these three core values that as the operating conditions for the company. Create delight, be intentional, and remarkable quality. And that came out of the exercise in The Advantage. Highly recommend that book.

Daniel Scrivner:

Love those.

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah. Your core values in a company, it's essentially what you would do almost to a fault. What your company does better than 99% of other companies. And it's true to the DNA of the core team. We actually blogged about it. I don't know if this is something that you can link to in the notes.

Daniel Scrivner:

Oh yeah. We can link to that in the show notes. Yep.

Daniel Scrivner:

Hearing you describe the 48 laws of power is such a good example of I know that book. I've never felt compelled to read it. Now I'm actually interested in reading it. So thanks for that tee up in The Advantage. Those are going to be books I'm ordering after this.

Daniel Scrivner:

So we ask every guest the same two closing questions, and I'm really excited to hear your answers for these. The first one is if they're able to share a favorite failure. So something that obviously from the outside looking in, it probably felt like a terrible failure. You don't view that way for whatever reason.

Vivek Sodera:

Yeah. I think we touched upon this a few times. And I would say my favorite failure is the failure of my own startup. I learned so much about myself in such a short amount of time. And it at the time was incredibly painful, but I am where I am today because of that. And I wouldn't trade that for any anything.

Daniel Scrivner:

And then the last question is what is your definition of success? In whatever direction you want to take that question.

Vivek Sodera:

I don't believe success is a function of vanity metrics like how much money you make, or income, or anything financial, for me at least. So success to me is what correlates with your happiness? So there are folks who they are just genuinely happy creating art. And those people are successful using whatever their definition of happiness is, if they are at home or wherever they're at and creating art. And they're creating these art installations pieces, I think that person's successful.

Vivek Sodera:

And then I think about success in the context of impact to the rest of the world. So for myself, I would consider myself successful. If I look back in my life, if I had significant impact, that if I positively impact and change people's lives for the better.

Vivek Sodera:

This is why I love the productivity space and this is why I love what we're doing as Superhuman is it's not just rebuilding email. But we're giving people time back. And we're helping people, whether it's a few hours a week or whatever it may be, spend that time with their family, or catching up on sleep, or doing more work. And time is the most expensive resource. We can't buy time back. But, what we can do is try to save as much time in whatever activities that are important for us. So I look at that as I think I am successful, just purely looking at the number of customers we've had and all the anecdotes and feedback we receive from people where they're like, "I love this product. You saved me so much time. I'm able to do this now. Thank you so much." That's success to me. Not evaluation, not having a particular exit event with Superhuman.

Vivek Sodera:

In fact, Rahul asked me, he's like, "How would you feel?" This is the early days when we were just starting Superhuman. "How would you feel if a Google, or a Microsoft, or a LinkedIn wanted to buy us for let's say 300, 400 million, whatever it may be?" And I was like, "You and I both been there done that. This is a once in a generation type company that we have an opportunity to build. Let's really swing for the fences here. Because I think we can actually impact tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people's lives in what we're trying to do here."

Daniel Scrivner:

And you can do it in a bigger way if you stay independent, or you can do it on your own terms if you stay independent and adhere closely to your values. This has been incredible. Thank you again so much for the time Vivek. This has been one of my favorite interviews in a while.

Vivek Sodera:

Wow. Thank you. Appreciate the kind words.

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On Outlier Academy, Daniel Scrivner explores the tactics, routines, and habits of world-class performers working at the edge—in business, investing, entertainment, and more. In each episode, he decodes what they've mastered and what they've learned along the way. Start learning from the world’s best today. 

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