Rahul Vohra: evaluation

Transcript context

…First of all, I have to tell you, if they have a remake for Ford vs. Ferrari and they're looking for a new opener, they can just take your excerpt there and use that directly as the voiceover. I started thinking about being in that car the way you're describing it. I think it's a great transition to some of these principles of game design and how you are embodying them in Superhuman. I don't want to be too dramatic here but the closest I have ever come to being in flow while doing email has certainly been with Superhuman. Props to you and the team for what you just mentioned, engineering for flow. I may have mixed it up a little bit, but I initially brought up that programming point because I absolutely found flow when I used to do a lot of programming. It is really rare to be able to find a non-engineering productivity app where you can feel that sense of flying over the keyboard and losing yourself in the creative work. There is, in fact, a reason for this. This was my recruiting brand that I used to get my co-founder and CTO Conrad Irwin, who is by the way the first employee that we hired at Rapportive to join me at Superhuman. I still vividly remember this, for those of us who have lived in or visited San Francisco, this took place at the Local Kitchen, which is a little pizzeria in South of Market. We sat down and we ordered our pizza. I said to Conrad, has it ever occurred to you how unfair it is that we as programmers have the best tools in the world? I could see the gears turning in his mind as he's munching this pizza, increasingly slowly until his mouth grinds to a halt and he's like, yeah. I said, well, there's a reason for this. Because we as programmers are the only profession in the world that gets to create our own software. How unfair is that? No wonder we have the best software. No wonder our fingers dance across the keyboard like we're playing a piano. We wrote it ourselves, of course, it's going to feel like an instrument. How about we do that, but for everybody else? Let's take the things that we take for granted—hundred milliseconds response times, instantaneous search, command palette, keyboard shortcuts, beautiful layouts, typography as a first-class citizen, design that reports separately and is a thing unto itself. Let's take all of these things and bring them to everybody. That was when he said, yes, okay, I'll join you on this crazy idea of Superhuman. It's interesting talking about the engineering behind games and specifically Superhuman is a game. I hadn't thought about this but we're talking about RuneScape and rewriting large parts of Java just to get it to do what you wanted, to push the bleeding edge of what the tools could do so that you could have this game experience. So many games do this, this is what Epic does, this is Fortnite. So much of the bleeding edge of tech gets pushed forward by gaming. You guys did the same thing with the Superhuman in the early days, right? You rewrote large parts of Chrome's scripting engines, all in pursuit of this speed concept.…

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