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

This special episode brings back Rahul Vohra — founder of Superhuman, the fast email client, whose product-market-fit framework from his June 2019 appearance (the season 5 finale) became famous in its own right. This time the subject is Superhuman's newer discipline: designing software like it's a game, as Rahul has discussed on Patrick's show and the a16z Summit. The product has matured from that initial product-market fit into a professional, even enterprise-class suite, with calendar functionality recently rolled out. The hosts call him their gold standard for guest preparation — "go listen to our episode with Rahul" — and tease an LP-show masterclass on fundraising (Rahul has started two companies, done YC and not-YC, exited, raised seed and growth rounds, self-funded for a stretch, and now runs an angel fund with Todd Goldberg plus an AngelList rolling fund).

Rahul's starting definition comes from Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design ("the best book on the topic"): a game is simply something you play. Pushed on whether playing guitar counts, he distinguishes usage through semantics: a game is something you play; a toy is something you play with — an object, not a person ("we play with our friends... does that make them toys? Obviously not"). Some toys are more fun than others, so: a good toy is an object that is fun to play with. Which forces the real question: what is fun?

His answer: fun is not merely pleasure — you can't have fun without pleasure, but plenty of pleasant experiences (a relaxing head massage) aren't fun. What pleasure alone misses is surprise: "fun needs surprise," and our brains are neurologically hardwired to enjoy it. The tower completes: a game is something you play; a good toy is an object that is fun to play with; fun is a pleasant surprise.

Against Nolan Bushnell's classic ("easy to learn, difficult to master"), Rahul's verdict is "necessary, but not sufficient": you could list hundreds of attributes with no minimal subset. At Superhuman they think about seven principles across roughly five factors: goals, emotions, controls, toys, and flow. Bushnell's Law covers goals and mastery, but not how you feel mid-game, not the nature of interaction (video game, board game, or game-like software), not the childlike wonder of playing with a toy, and not flow — which Rahul calls one of the most important factors of all. Making a great game draws on psychology, mathematics, storytelling, interaction design.

Rahul's résumé before Superhuman and Rapportive: professional game designer at Jagex, creators of RuneScape, then the world's largest free online RPG. He learned to code at about age 8 — both parents were doctors working late, so he haunted the school library, finished the fiction shelf, and found the programming books because the UK's dominant computer, the BBC Microcomputer, started with B. The kids' books all taught through building your own games; by 18 he'd logged Gladwell's 10,000 hours, mostly making games, then read computer science at Cambridge.