Summary
Brett — founder & CEO of Micro — joins Nitay and Kostas to share how he’s turning email into a knowledge graph and rebuilding CRM right inside the inbox. He traces a path from Google’s M&A and Allo product team to Clearbit and Launch House, then digs into why most “inbox zero” workflows fail, how interoperability and AI agents shift power to the interface, and what it takes to design an email experience people actually live in.
What you’ll learn
- Why email is a system of record—and how Micro converts threads into people, companies, attachments, tasks, and “updates”
- The wedge: founders’ real workflows (fundraising, hiring, sales) and why CRM belongs in the inbox
- Product & UX lessons: skeuomorphic first, flexible theming (consumer vs. enterprise), and copy-the-UI-before-evolving-it
- M&A realities from Google: talent vs. tech vs. business acquisitions, and why culture kills most deals
- Burnout and agency: why founders report less burnout than big-company roles
- The next phase: cross-app “updates” (email, LinkedIn DMs, etc.), Salesforce/HubSpot read–write, and agentic automation
Chapters
00:00 Brett's Journey: From Consulting to Tech Innovator
02:41 The Role of Strategy in Tech Companies
05:16 Understanding M&A: Successes and Failures
07:55 The Evolution of AI in Corporate Strategy
10:26 Transitioning to Product Management
13:19 Lessons from Clearbit: Culture and Growth
15:50 The Impact of Burnout on Career Choices
18:15 Finding Fulfillment in Entrepreneurship
21:09 Navigating the B2B Landscape
23:34 The Necessity of Products in a Crisis
33:24 The Unexpected Layoff and New Beginnings
34:39 The Launch House Experience
37:16 Transforming Reality into an Accelerator
39:17 The Evolution of Founders and Content Creation
41:52 Introducing Micro: A New Email Experience
47:02 Extracting Information for Better Workflows
53:49 Integrating with Existing Ecosystems
