Rahul Vohra: preference

Transcript context

…You got to hang out with a Jan from WhatsApp. He's all about the naturally aspirated Supercars, Porsche, specifically. He is a Superhuman customer. I will drop him a line. You can imagine this car—it has gigantic air, and takes out the front, a race swing at the back. Everything that could be made out of carbon was made out of carbon. I used to race this car. These weren't sensible races on tracks. This was madness in mountains and canyons. There is a certain speed where something magical happens. A speed where you stop thinking in words, because words are too slow because by the time you've had that thought, you're already around the corner and through the next valley. This is the speed where you and the car become one. The car is you. You are the car. It's a human and machine in full synchrony and speed where every sense is at capacity because you see the landscape rip by. You hear the scream of the engine. You taste burning rubber. You can feel every imperfection. Now, this is the most extreme flow I have ever experienced. This is the experience that I most want to share with others. Of course, I can't recreate that sensation, but it was an underlying inspiration for why we built the fastest email experience in the world. It's why the unifying theme for everything that Superhuman does is speed. It's why we try so hard to engineer for flow. It was my first real visceral experience of it. Since then, I've gone deep into the academia behind it. You mentioned how our subjective experience of time changes. It can all happen in both ways. It can stretch out forever or it can flash by in an instant, both asymptomatic of experiencing flow. And there are many other things that contribute to what flow is as well. 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.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.