Superhuman (with CEO Rahul Vohra)

The hosts introduce Superhuman as a fast email client intended to change how users relate to their inboxes. Rahul Vohra previously co-founded Rapportive, which LinkedIn acquired in 2012, and the discussion treats Superhuman as a continuation of his work on email rather than a sudden change of direction. By the time of the interview, the company had grown to around 30 people and occupied its fourth office, reflecting the speed at which it was expanding. The promise is simple but ambitious: make a tool used throughout the workday feel dramatically faster and more usable.

Rapportive began as Vohra's attempt to solve his own problem while he was at Cambridge. After leaving a PhD program in machine learning and computer vision, he wanted to become an entrepreneur but had no clear idea to pursue. Through Cambridge University Entrepreneurs, he raised money to help students and staff build companies, without taking equity. The work gave him practical exposure to fundraising and entrepreneurship, and led him to ask what tools might help him connect with potential funders more effectively.

Vohra imagined an email client that showed a correspondent's photo, location, recent tweets, and social profiles alongside their message. He believed that context would help people build more authentic rapport. With no comparable product available, he built the first Rapportive version in about six weeks. It began as a Firefox add-on, then became a Chrome extension; users could enter an email address and see a profile enriched with social information. The immediate usefulness made the experience memorable, but the underlying data came from RapLeaf, a third-party provider, and raised questions about LinkedIn data and platform access.

LinkedIn objected to Rapportive buying its data from third parties, while Vohra wanted access to LinkedIn's API. He says Rapportive did not need bulk data and was serving LinkedIn's most engaged members. The disagreement eventually became a business-development relationship; he recalls that only about 20 companies had access to the private API. This path helped Rapportive become useful, but also exposed a structural limit: a product built on another company's platform and data can remain dependent on that platform. The hosts describe that dependence as a challenge for plugins trying to grow into standalone businesses.