Email as a Knowledge Graph: Micro CEO Brett on Rebuilding CRM at the Inbox

Nitay Joffe (00:02.114)
Brett, it's pleasure to have you with us today. Thank you for joining us. Why don't we start with just give the listeners kind of a background of your work experience and so forth.

Brett (00:12.879)
Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, let's do the, we'll do the LinkedIn walkthrough. Yeah, I guess, you know, I'm the co-founder or I'm the founder and CEO. I'm a solo founder now actually. Founder and CEO of a company called Micro, we basically have transformed email into an all-in-one tool by converting email data into a knowledge graph and lets you build cool apps on top of it, primarily CRM right now.

And before that, I was the co-founder and CEO of Launch House, which was startup accelerator incubator and kind of an ed tech for entrepreneurship. And then worked at Clearbit, which is a data startup doing a bunch of cool stuff with APIs and integrations and stuff. then I was at Google on the &A team, as well as the product team working on one of their many apps that you have.

never heard of and because they shut down, but it was Allo. a messaging app. It actually had the first AI agent in it called the Google Assistant. And then before that I was in consulting. And before that I was at Berkeley and I was never had an internship in my life and was going to go get a PhD in something I later thought was useless, but turned out to be very useful. It was AI.

Next, I literally, my literally honor thesis was on next word prediction. So it's like, yeah, this is, seems a little bit useless. So I'm going to go and do something more better with my time and go into consulting like all the, all the ambitious people did. So jokes on me now.

Nitay Joffe (01:57.518)
It is amazing how far we've come with just predicting the next word for sure. That's quite a tour of duties. That's quite a diverse background. Maybe we start with like, how do you like going back to the early days, having the consulting background and going to Google and then the nice side product side like that. Just that right there is already such a wide spectrum. Tell us a bit about kind of the different roles and the learnings from each and kind of what made you move from one to the other.

Brett (02:01.685)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brett (02:28.015)
Yeah, so I think I've always had this problem of just wanting a breath of learning and wanting to be aspiring to be a Renaissance man of sorts rather than kind of a one trick pony, which is why I majored in cognitive science, is like, it's not neurobiology. That was the neurobiology major, but we studied neurobiology. It wasn't philosophy, but we studied philosophy. wasn't.

computer science, but we studied computer science. And so when I did consulting, was another one of those things, which is like, okay, you don't have to actually commit to any one sector or discipline. You get to push off that, that, that decision later and learn about a lot of different things. I was actually in a research and development group, at the consulting firm. was Accenture.

It was called the tech labs. And my job was to basically, I was focused on enterprise collaboration, productivity, looking at emerging startups, trends, helping big companies think through strategies and stuff. And got the chance to help start up Accenture Ventures, which is their venture fund. And there I was basically doing a lot of ops and like, you know, sourcing and like all set up a Salesforce instance and like all that stuff turned out to be pretty interesting.

to a family friend who had just been acquired by Google. I met at a Thanksgiving dinner and I think like, I don't know, young people, at least back in the day, like probably not right now, it's probably like open AI, but everybody wanted a job at Google. It was like a cool company to work at. you know, you get your kind of gold star for being a competent human being. If you work at one of those companies and your, parents can be proud of you.

So I always wanted to work there and as kind of like a strategy nerd, I was like writing a bunch on medium in the early days about like where, you know, what should Apple be doing or what are some start, start up all this, all the fall leadership stuff. And I'd read a lot, write a lot about strategy and there's no strategy more exciting than the &A strategy of the most acquisitive company in the industry, which is Google. so I found that opportunity and it was just like this.

Brett (04:47.159)
It was cool. was like you're walking into the, it's like you're joining the All-Star team that you've been watching on TV for like years and years and years. So, there, my job was literally just to partially, it was kind of like business analytics. So was like analyzing the success and failure of Google's various acquisitions. There's, it's a lot of failure. It's mostly failure. and I even got to present to the.

to the CEO of Google on some proactive &A strategy. So what are some companies in the AR space Google should be acquiring? What's the actual state of AI? This was 2014. If you remember, AI was like a total joke back then. But that was just, it was a really interesting experience. like, you know, you see how the sausage is made at the highest level, basically.

Nitay Joffe (05:41.33)
And you mentioned a couple of interesting things there. First, this role of strategy, I think for a lot of our listeners, is this kind of like abstract term, like, okay, I kind of get what it means, but what do you actually do day to day in a strategy role? What does that actually entail?

Brett (05:55.339)
Yeah, it's a lot of research. It's just like a lot of reading, research, meeting with people, figuring out what's going on and where the company should play. I think about strategy as like, it's almost like forward looking on a longer horizon, whereas tactics are like strategy, but like right now. If you're tactical, you're doing something, you're executing a strategy.

if you are more strategic, you are thinking about what tactics to execute over the longer term. And so, you know, Google with their giant money chest could like afford to have lots and lots and lots of straggling people, in the company. so that was, that was part of my whole and A team. So I, instead of actually executing the transactions and like doing all of the diligence and all that stuff, I was basically looking at spaces and companies that.

Google should be thinking about acquiring if even if the product leaders or others were not suggesting it.

Nitay Joffe (07:02.574)
And you mentioned an interesting stat there that I've seen and heard from many other &A and corporate folks that most acquisitions basically fail, or at least don't live up to what they expected. ROI or whatnot would be A, why is that? And B, does everybody know that? And is that built into the model and it's just an assumption or constantly getting surprised? Something seems interesting or odd about this, right?

Brett (07:27.715)
Yeah, I mean, think every, yeah, every, every acquisitions is snowflake. I mean, you want, you went through on yourself, so you probably have your own perspective here. I'd love to, I'd love to hear after this, but yeah, every acquisition is a snowflake. You know, what are the things that matter with an acquisition depends on the type of acquisition. So how an acquisition is the team. Are you retaining the team and are they productive? That those are the two things that matter most.

Nitay Joffe (07:36.941)
Mm-hmm.

Brett (07:55.425)
founders will leave after two and a half years. Like literally we did, we did the analysis two and a half years. that's, this doesn't matter how much money you are, you are, you're given, whether you're leaving a hundred mil on the table or, one mil on the table. Most people are leaving after two and a half years. and that's because founders are just built different. Like, you know, you know, like you, you, you're working on your baby for years. have all this agency. It's like, you know,

It's awesome. And then you're just like a cog, mostly, right? Unless you are like Diane Greene and became the head of Google enterprise, Google cloud or something. So talent acquisition, that's the measurement for a tech acquisition. It's like, are we, did we integrate the technology that they've built into our, into our systems? So a purifier was a good example. Back in the day, they had built this kind of mobile app testing suite.

And the founder literally just integrated the thing and there's kind of sat on the beach. Right. And it was a success because like, like they didn't really need the founder beyond that. Of course, he's an amazing guy. Of course it'd be awesome for him to like really contribute to the company. But the reality is it was really about the, the, the technology that they had built. And then the last bit is the, is a business acquisition. like nest is an example, right? Like.

did it's all about like continuing the business that has been built and then enhancing the other businesses. so, NEST I think was not considered a huge success, even though people use it and all this stuff just because there was a lot of cultural problems. you get acquired, it's like, mixing the two cultures is usually pretty hard. And then Tony Fidel left after not too long.

Nitay Joffe (09:51.758)
Yeah, I think the cultural aspect is certainly probably one of the most trickiest bits, no matter how much diligence and kind of, know, schmoozing in relationships you can do. And what was the, so right around the time you mentioned 2014 and earlier, to your point, it was kind of pre-AI, but like that stuff was kind of just starting to be, if I remember correctly, the whole kind of trans-Sovereign paper was around that time, maybe a bit earlier. Tell us a bit kind of what was the like,

corporate strategy like and how did it shift over time?

Brett (10:26.381)
Yeah, mean, AI wasn't like the topic of every conversation like it is now. Most people had the like bearish kind of AI winter view. We did have that blip in 2014 where like, I don't really remember what the research was or what the breakthrough was, but people were just doing these like fake chat bots where it's like, you know, type yes if you want to continue type no if you, you know, like

Not real AI. I actually have a founder friend who said that she would pretend to be AI on the other side of one of these chats. So she would like, you know, a customer would text her and she would be like, hello, I'm an AI agent. You know, which is funny because now we have the opposite. Now we have the AI agents trying to pretend to be humans. But yeah, back in the day, was like Snapchat was on the rise and there was a lot of discussion about the future of

Like AR VR kind of like has had its ebbs and flows. And, you know, the project that I worked on was really centered around this idea of the default camera. And basically the idea that if you own the default camera, you own the entry point to the AR kind of internet. And, I noticed that younger people were defaulting to Snapchat as their first camera. Like if something's happening, what camera do you open? If it's not.

the Google Android camera, then Google has a problem in terms of AR. And so that was kind of the analysis there. But we looked at the sharing economy, remember that? So old school.

Nitay Joffe (12:12.114)
Yeah, it's crazy how fast things shift. I actually met somebody once who was, think, like a call center agent. Her name was like, it was something AI. mean, it was like, it was like Alice Ives or something like that. So she famous who would tell everybody, yeah, I'm AI. So shifting from there, you move to a product role. Tell us a bit about that. Obviously encompasses its own kind of version of strategy, but now you're owning some product line. Tell us a bit about that experience.

Brett (12:25.103)
Yeah.

Brett (12:41.923)
Yeah, it was funny because look, think in Google and broadly in tech, product management is the executive track role. I think whether you're an engineer or designer, you wind up in a product manager role if you want to ascend into leadership and stuff. Obviously, there's the edge management and stuff like that, but if you want to own more of the business, the strategy, the vision, all that stuff, you need to be in product. And Google really like

You know, engineers are number one in Google, but like if you're non-technical, it's the product manager role that you is the best. And I knew I wanted to be in product. The strategy stuff was fun. The &A stuff was fun, but nobody's building anything. Right. It's, it's, it's, yeah, it's more intellectually stimulating that it is actually like, you know, fulfilling. And so.

The other part of that is like, look, the &A team at Google is like something that everybody wants to be a part of. If you're into strategy, like this is the number one team to be at, right? Like my coworkers were from like HBS and GSB and McKinsey and like all these fancy places. And so once I was on that team, I was like, okay, I did this. Like, what's the next bigger thing that I can do? And product was definitely that. And the other thing is that like,

people noticed on the team that I was really good at product. So I'd be on top of the and A stuff when we're doing looking at deals and things like that. I'd be analyzing the UX and in the context of strategy. how does like that default camera thing, like the way that Snapchat designed their interface to open to the camera has a lot of impact on the overall arching strategy and the, the makeup of the industry going forward. Right. And so

Al, uh, my boss's husband was, uh, Nick Fox, who's the head of, uh, a bunch, a huge area. actually hired Sundar. So he was kind of an OG, but he, uh, they were working on this app called alo, which is a messaging app. And then she was like, can you take a look at this? Like, they're going to launch this thing. I don't know how, I don't know how I feel about it. And so I took a look at it and I was like, Oh, this is going to be a disaster. Like there's no way this is going to work.

Brett (15:09.037)
And then I wrote up this like five page analysis of everything from like little UX issues to like overarching go to market strategy issues. were gonna, they're basically gonna like pre-install it on every Android phone and be like, look, we have like 150 million users right off the bat, you know? And the goal was to be a WhatsApp replacement because they saw Facebook acquire WhatsApp and it was okay. We need our own, whatever.

wrote up this giant thing and then they were like, this is awesome, why don't you just join the team and fix it? Fix all this stuff by joining the team. Obviously I took that because it's very hard to transfer into product management. Like anybody I talked to was like, yeah, you just have to leave Google and join a startup or something. So I took it, even though I wasn't super excited about the product and long story short, Aloe went the way I thought it would go.

but it was a great experience.

Nitay Joffe (16:12.718)
And there's clearly a lot of interesting for shadowing here for some of the stuff I think you guys are working on now with a lot of focus on kind of deep UX and even the stuff you said at the beginning of like setting up your own Salesforce instance. So we'll get there shortly, I'm sure. But so you kind of stayed in the product role, right? You went to clear a bit. So clearly you kind of enjoyed that role. Tell me a bit about kind of having seen the Google way of doing product and the way to...

move fast, experiment and doing with large user base and so on, but at the same time, ultimately not yield a successful product. What was kind of the lessons there to take to the next role? then how did you think about being a product manager now that you've done it after that?

Brett (16:58.937)
Yeah. So it's interesting as I actually took a year break between Google and Clearbit. While I was at Google, I had a form of burnout that is kind of the opposite of what you think of when you think of burnout. When you think of burnout, you think of actually just like working too hard. And I actually think burnout is about like not feeling fulfilled.

in the work that you are doing. And it's especially challenging when it's like, you're putting a lot of hours into something that is like not fulfilling at all. But Google was so slow and the product was not going in the right direction. And there weren't other teams I was excited about that I just had this like insane burnout of like, I can't, I don't want to do this. And that's, it's funny. Like my first day on the &A team.

This guy, Dave Sabata, who's like legendary OG Google, worked with Kevin Sistra when he was on the &A team back in the day. We went to lunch and he was like, you don't seem like any of us. Like you seem like an entrepreneur. What are you doing here? And that's just kind of like burned into my brain and like hurt, kind of hurt because I was like, happy he said that because it was like, okay.

I am an entrepreneur. That's cool. Like that seems like he respects me a lot. But then I was like, man, I'm not really going to feel fulfilled in this job. Like I'm not, this isn't, this isn't the right thing for me. And so that really compounded over the time that I was at Google. And by the end, I was just like, I need to go and do something. I need to, I need to get into the startup world. I need to start a company. need to like be the person I think I want to be.

and so it's funny, I like was interviewing with at like Uber in the early days and striped in the early days. And I made it to like these final, final, final rounds, like, you know, got to mug out my rejection from, from strike because I failed the interview with John. John Callison, you know, dodged basically generational wealth a few times before I realized I needed to take a break and figure stuff out. I, I.

Brett (19:19.033)
did this like magical, totally magical fairy tale story, like trip around the world. Took a year off, went from San Francisco to Bali to Vietnam to China, Trans-Siberian Railroad to Mongolia, then Russia, South of France, Germany. I volunteered in refugee camps in Greece. I went to Israel, I went to Burning Man, I went.

Back to Germany for Oktoberfest. I went to India for two months. I did a meditation retreat in Sri Lanka. I actually did an artist residency with my mom in India. And the whole plan was to like, okay, let's maybe we'll do some consulting along the way. Maybe I'll like, I'm gonna produce some music because I'm a big musician and was like, maybe I'm gonna go and become a musician instead of.

this tech stuff. And I was trying to explore my interests and where I wanted to take my career on that trip. And it was interesting because I was carrying this book about Ethereum the whole time. And I was like, I'm going to get into crypto. And I never read the book because it just didn't interest me enough. I owned Bitcoin and Ethereum, bought it early.

but it wasn't like, didn't call to me. You know, know that if you're really excited about something, you're just like, can't put the information down. You're constantly looking stuff up. Couldn't force myself to be excited about crypto, even though I consulted a few crypto projects. then, yeah, I mean like the TLDR of that trip, I didn't really find anything on that trip until I went to the meditation retreat in Sri Lanka, 10 days silent, no talking.

No writing, no, no, no, nothing. Like you're sitting on your butt for like 10 hours a day. And, uh, you actually by the end are not thinking about it much. Like the beginning part, you're like, your brain is going wild, but by the end, you're really not thinking about anything. And you're, you've kind of wiped your, wiped your slate clean. So when I, when I finally came back, I almost, I like started to, I was like, okay, I'm going to start a company.

Brett (21:45.849)
but also maybe interviewed some places. was like thinking about starting a company in the religion space. So I interviewed these rabbis and priests about how they acquire customers. And like, was, it was insane. It was like really crazy. And what drew me to Clearbit was obviously they had just like raised some funding and there was a little bit of hype, but it was the most kind of thoughtful, thoughtfully

managed company I've ever seen. Alex co-wrote a book about conscious leadership. The CEO wrote this book about conscious leadership. They really tried to embody it in their culture. I didn't give a shit about data enrichment or B2B SaaS, but it was just like a very, very special culture and approach to management that I like really, really, really resonated with me. And so that's kind of, that's,

It didn't quite answer your question, but that was why I wound up joining ClearVid after Google.

Nitay Joffe (22:50.08)
No, that's not that's actually does answer in a great way because I think it ties very much to first off the year trip they took sounds amazing and fantastic. It sounds like there was a big part of the priority was more so than that, you know, the particular project obviously had to kind of be excited enough about the product, but more so kind of the organizational structure and the leadership and the culture and all these kinds of things became really important, it sounds like.

Brett (23:15.31)
Yeah.

Nitay Joffe (23:16.918)
And then, so you spend a bit of time there, what was kind of the findings there and then what led you to then take the leap and go ahead of yourself afterwards.

Brett (23:26.479)
Yeah, something, one really interesting takeaway from that company is like, think it was on our final round interview or something. Alex had this really interesting point where he said, nobody wakes up in the morning excited about marketing tech or data or B2B SaaS. He's like, nobody on this team. Nobody does, not even me. And he's like, so why are we here? He's like,

The reason that everyone comes in every single day is because we're here to grow as people. We're here to build something challenging and exciting. And we are, we're here to make a lot of right. And, and, and do it with each other, with cool people along the way. And look, it's not that, it's not that every single company is like that. I realized from that, that, you know, this is more tactical, but

If you are building a company that doesn't have a massive, you know, save the world mission, that is very obvious. Like my friend has a company called super power. It's about longevity. Cool. We are making people healthier, live longer. Everybody has family members that, you know, are sick or passed away or they don't want to be sick or pass away. It hits you in the, it hits you in the feelings and it's really easy to sell investors, team members and stuff on those types of companies.

But for ones that are in pretty boring spaces and stuff, you have to sell them on this thing that Alex sold me on. And so was like a really, really awesome takeaway. I think the other thing, I was kind of complaining about like, I called it jet lag, but in the context of going from consumer to B2B. So,

A lot of consumer people just like, B2B. They don't want to move to B2B because it's like, it's a different type of company. It's a different type of business. It's, feels a little more soulless. so I think a lot of consumer, whether it's a founder or an employee or something, they experienced jet lag, which is like this kind of slowness and like lack of kind of excitement for what they're doing. and so that kind of message that Alex kind of,

Brett (25:52.079)
said to me, it really, really helps with the jet lag. Yeah, overall, maybe one last semi-tactical thing is Clearbit had built a really impressive business around the API. But the problem with data and APIs are that you don't have a relationship with your customer. And so

especially if it's easy to rip out, like Stripe is not very easy to rip out, but like Clearbit is, you are going to get ripped out a lot. And that means that like the company at the time was pivoting to building a end user facing software product using the data because they were like, we need something that is not going to get ripped out. that like, can maintain a relationship with the customer.

Kostas (26:45.242)
Great, you mentioned the burnouts at Google, right?

Kostas (26:54.918)
I truly agree with what you defined as like what Bernat is from my personal experience too. So you did your one year of like traveling around and exploration, having some signal that maybe you should do your own thing, right? Like people saying to you, you're, why are you here? Like you look too entrepreneurial like to be among us, right? And then you go and join ClearBeat.

Obviously completely different type of environment compared to something like Google, right? Like even for just because of the scale. But still not the entrepreneurial thing of like, okay, I'm starting something like from zero. Like it's completely non-existent thing there. I need to literally take care of everything from like what we are building here to the toilet paper we are going to have kind of like experience. Which I bet like you are going through like now with a...

with what you are doing, how you would compare the two experiences, like what you were doing at this burnout experience in Google and your move to Clearbit, and why you did that instead of going and starting something at that point from scratch.

Brett (28:10.316)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the quick answer around like why I didn't start something is I couldn't find anything that I was super excited about starting. And I don't know if I had a co-founder at the time.

that I knew I wanted to start something with. so there was not a lot of like, you know, we didn't have AI, vibe coding at the time. Solo founding wasn't as popular. And so it was like, well, I don't have, I don't have an idea. I don't have a co-founder like, you know, maybe I'll get some just startup experience, meet some people. I think I really underrated strategy. If you're like, you want to start a company and you don't know what it is and you don't have a co-founder is just join a great company.

and meet people there, you know, get some experience, make some money, do all that. And yeah, in terms of burnout, like Lenny Roshitsky shared this really amazing graph that was showing the level of burnout, maybe misquoting, the level of burnout people were reporting depending on their role and the type of company that they worked at. And so founders had the lowest

reported burnout compared to designers and designers in like larger companies. And what's interesting about that is the difference isn't really the role and what you're doing every day. Like I'm a designer. I do a lot of design for my company. To me, it's the, it's the agency and it's the control of your own destiny that is actually the thing. And one of the most.

interesting things I've noticed is that my founder friends, even the ones who are shutting down the companies and like, you know, figuring out their life or like companies are not going sideways or something, are way happier than my big company friends, all of them. My big company friends are not the happiest people that I know. And I have this like, you know, little bit that I always like to talk about and it's distance from necessity.

Brett (30:25.603)
Like this philosopher came up with this idea, mostly to talk about like how wealthy elites, you know, are attracted to certain luxury goods and things like that. But distance from necessity is like, how far are you from a net needing something? Right. And so in big companies, you are very far from needing to worry about is the company going to survive next week?

Is this thing going to get done on time? Will I have a job in a year? Are my team members that report to me going to have jobs in a year? You don't have to worry about that at all. Massive distance. In startups, you have a smaller distance. You do have to worry about these things. It is on your mind. It is a possibility. What's interesting is the larger the distance from necessity, whatever the domain is,

Whether we're talking about startups, whether they're talking about wealthy people, we're talking about, you know, peacocks, like whatever it may be, the less optimized you are. So big company people tend not to be very optimized towards producing amazing work because they don't have to. They really don't have to. Versus small company people, startup people are insanely optimized. Every dollar matters.

Every amount of saving matters. Every line of code matters. And so what that means is, you know, this is why startup people are just absolute killers compared to like big company people. but it's also why startup people are happier than big company people and particularly roles where you have a lot of agency. And so a lot of my burnout came from that lack of agency, you know, as a,

As a young person, had so much energy to like go and do things and like change the world and like fix things. I felt like I was a crazy person in this organization because I was like, I know what we're doing wrong, but we're still going to do it no matter what I say and do. So am I just going to sit here and like ship this stupid feature or am I going to like go and do something? And there was a conflict for a while because it was like, Google's paying me well. You know, like my mom loves that I work here.

Brett (32:48.783)
It's a good pedigree. I haven't been here long enough. I should stay a little longer. But the inner thing was like, nothing you do make here matters. Nothing you do here matters. And you're wasting your most important years on something that doesn't matter.

Kostas (33:08.358)
Yeah, a hundred percent. think I want to connect what we are talking about with the statistics that you shared at the beginning about the founders not lasting more than like two and a half years after an acquisition, because I think that's when like the burnout comes in with founders. And the burnout, because many people will say, oh yeah, it's because now like, okay, you're not like in this frenzy of survival. So you can...

you know, like take a step back and then you realize how tired you are, like doing all these like really intense work like all this time. But actually it's not that it's exactly the lack of that. And it's up like, you know, burn you out. And I think I've experienced that in different ways, like in my past, like Joe's, but I would say it's also like a little bit of

Brett (33:53.487)
Yeah.

Kostas (34:07.598)
When you're like in the startup and it's the control that you say, but I would say it's also the, the loop between thinking of something and getting evidence for this, something positive or negative, right? it's really, really short, like in a startup, you don't have to go through like all the politics, all the processes, all the stuff like to wait potential months.

Brett (34:35.769)
Mm-hmm.

Kostas (34:36.89)
to get that back. I think, I don't know, for some people at least, and like I'm talking like about myself, this is really important. Like when I start something and I have to wait for like months, then I start like really getting tired. Like I'm like, I can't, like I just can't. That's what I feel like personally. It's like the burnout. So yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

Brett (34:46.991)
Yeah. Yeah.

Brett (35:03.024)
Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say just like, you know, any, any sort of friction to your own agency and, you know, desires to do things is, you know, a huge detriment to like your psychology for sure.

Kostas (35:18.212)
Yeah, yeah, it's definitely painful. Cool. So, okay, you go to Clearbit. I loved all the things that you described there, like all the difference between B2B, B2C. I'm mainly coming from B2B, but I can relate to what you are saying. So, all right. And after like Clearbit, you start something different, not Clearbit, right?

help us connect the dots there, how the experience there led you to do what you are doing today.

Brett (35:50.189)
Yeah.

Brett (35:55.543)
Yeah. So I was at ClearBit in like 2019 to 2020. like we hit COVID while I was at ClearBit. And, you know, at the time I was feeling like, I was kind of feeling mixed about my, my experience there. Again, it wasn't like the, you know, it didn't feel like a perfect fit. Like now, honestly, looking back, I'm like, Holy shit, like my life makes sense.

Working at Clearbit was one of the best things I could have done, especially with what I'm working on now. But at the time I wasn't super happy about it. And I was like, okay, I'm going to leave when I hit my year cliff. 10 months in COVID hits. And there was this interesting thing where, so the market crash, right? The market crash, there's like this chaos in the industry. And what was happening in B2B is people were figuring out if their product was

a necessity or not, because we all do this thing where we buy a bunch of SaaS, we forget we have it. And then, you know, it takes like, you know, a global pandemic and market crash for us to say, hey, maybe we should just cut all the stuff we actually don't use and find ways to cut costs. Because, and that's basically what happened. So we started seeing, okay, you know, is our people going to cut clear bit or not?

And the interesting kind of like, my question that I like to think about is like, would you're building a product? Would the person you're selling the company you're selling to cut your product or lay off team members first? Because if they're going to lay off team members, then you know, you're before they cut your product, then you know, you're a necessity. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to get rid of Stripe.

You know, I need Stripe. I need like a couple other things. I wouldn't lay off team members before I, before I cut Stripe or I would laugh people for cut stripe. So basically we, know, there was a lot of concern. and we're starting to see people move off of clear bit. Obviously it's pretty important for sales. So people were, some people were keeping it. Some people are not, but you know, it definitely, there definitely wasn't hit.

Brett (38:18.895)
And they basically decided to do a massive downsize because the last valuation was too high. They had grown too quickly. And so they basically cut like the workforce or something. I think they kept like 1 PM or something like that. And then I got cut. So I got laid off. And it turned out to be the best thing ever because

You know, obviously got the severance, got my equity, investing, expedited. and I was already planning on leaving and so, got cut and I was like, okay, cool. What am going to do? I was interviewing at like my dream jobs. You know, I literally was about to join a 16 Z is an investor. and I got into this program called the on deck, which is like a founder.

founder, was kind of a YC style, no equity accelerator thing where you go there online, you meet your co-founders, you brainstorm ideas and stuff. And it was awesome because it was the first time I felt like I was around people that were like me, entrepreneurs. And we're all about to start companies. And so while I was there, it was all online. It was kind of not super fun. And then one of my friends in the program rents a house in Tulum. And he's like, Hey, we're going to go to Tulum.

during the pandemic, like staying at home sucks. Let's go to do this house in Tulum with a bunch of founders, build some startups, and then see what happens. So I almost didn't go, but I was like, sure, whatever. Let's try it. So I go, and on the flight over, I blasted out this tweet just as a joke. We're giddy in the group chat, because nobody had

you know, socialize with humans for a while. And I blasted out this tweet that said introducing a launch house. We've just made up the name in like five minutes. A reality show where 20 entrepreneurs live in a house, who never met before, you know, follow along to see what happens. Right. It goes viral. New York Times picks it up. Like all this crazy stuff happens. We get to the house and it's like this magical.

Brett (40:43.639)
amazing experience. It's like a bunch of founders were, you know, sitting in the hot, sitting in the hot tub whiteboarding, like startup ideas, like we're doing hackathons. We're like, you know, writing blog posts. It's like, we're doing all this really fun stuff. and all these people from Twitter where we're like dying to be part of it. And so we're like, maybe this is, maybe this is actually a reality show. Somebody from Netflix, who is associated with Netflix.

reached out to us and was like, this is a cool concept, can we, let's talk. And so we're like, crap, I guess we should like pursue, let's just pull this thread and see how far this thread goes. We decided to do a second house in Tulum the next month. And we put out a casting call. We're like, we're looking for founders with big personalities who want to be on a camera. We flew down a videographer film, this is a real, it was like, it was a whole thing.

That house went well. And then we went to LA because we're like, let's be closer to Netflix and Hollywood and stuff so that we are in better negotiating position. Um, and we rented a house that Paris Hilton used to live in in Beverly Hills, 902 and O it was like a very, you know, magical place. bunch of founders move in and the problem was that we faced was the founders were good. These were not like.

These are not cringy reality TV show founders. These are like real founders, right? Real high potential young people who are probably gonna build something really, really meaningful and valuable. And so we kind of changed our mind about what we were gonna do, because we were like, okay, this is really good. It'd be stupid to waste this opportunity on a cringy reality show. Let's turn this into an accelerator. And at the time, like YC was remote and nobody was happy with that. And so we're like, okay.

you know, let's build, you know, this new type of accelerator that is, you know, co-living in person in LA and then maybe New York, um, and then kind of grow it from there. So that was kind of like the, the transition and origin story of launch house to kind of where it came from.

Nitay Joffe (43:03.138)
And I'm curious because you said something interesting there where like the second house you did, you had a casting call for founders. And yet the result you had was you ended up with just really good founders. Did you find that it's because you treated it kind of without whether you kind of consciously knew it or not, you kind of treated it a little bit like a fund or like an incubator where you're like, we're going to find the absolute best funds as opposed to thinking.

we're creating a TV show, we need people who are just personalities, right? Like, cause those two are not necessarily the same. I founders can be a just a granadic too, but like it's not necessarily the same, right?

Brett (43:29.924)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we did bias towards like really good people, you know, as good people as we can get. But yeah, for the second house specifically, we were like looking for people who are like interesting personalities. So we had this guy who was like this super flamboyant, crazy French guy who's like super into crypto and stuff like that. And he, you know, he was the star. And like we had this

We had this Eastern European, like, creator economy founder, Airbnb, ex Airbnb engineer, who was like a YouTuber also. But the reality is like, the thesis of Launch House has really played out. Like one of the original theses, at least for the accelerator part is founders are going to have to do more content. Founders are going to have to...

Either partner with creators on a deeper level or become creators themselves. And you saw that transition with YC, Gary Tan, who we actually shared a video producer with, literally has, you know, tons of videos. He's a YouTuber himself. And now basically every YC startup has like a, a hypey video and they're doing vlogs and like all this stuff. it definitely aligns up. Like I think.

great founders do need to understand distribution and all that stuff.

Nitay Joffe (45:02.566)
And in particular, sounds like great founders, especially in this day and age, because I agree strongly with what you said. I think it really has changed the last maybe decade or so. It's not just understanding distribution, but it's even if you're an enterprise company, like the social aspect of the early founder days has such a strong influence.

Brett (45:24.227)
Yeah. Yeah, totally. look, think like early, like early stage founders are still drawn to being around other founders, like whatever, wherever they are. and that was kind of a draw. The other thing is like, I think young people are, you know, are predisposed to like being excited about programs like co-living programs or, you know, accelerator programs and things like that. So it's easier to attract.

those types of people to kind of what we were doing. And again, like it was a cool, it was a cool setup. Paris Hilton's mansion, you know, like a bunch of cool, amazing speakers. Like I interviewed Fred Herson, who's a co-founder of Coinbase. And half of the audience was like famous TikTokers and half the audience was early stage crypto founders. Interviewed the head, the CMO of

former CMO of Airbnb, like CTO of Patreon, all of these really, Justin Con, all these really insane people stopped by the house because, you know, a lot of people had moved to LA during the pandemic. And it was just one of those things where like you, it was so unique and so crazy. Like this is a mansion in Beverly Hills and there are startup people in it. People wanted to go come check it out.

Kostas (46:51.526)
So you keep, you're still doing that, right? Together with the startup that you have right now.

Brett (47:00.013)
Yeah. So we realized running a hotel at the same time as running a VC fund was really hard on top of an events company and an ed tech company. And so now launch houses is basically just a fund. And it's so funny because I like, I don't know, like I see all these funds doing all these crazy things, like, you know, the coworking spaces are like all this stuff. And I'm like, at the end of the day, you just have to get the good deals, you know, like.

Kostas (47:06.244)
Mm-hmm.

Kostas (47:14.181)
Okay.

Brett (47:30.063)
Like I could you spend that 10 10 $20,000 a month you're spending on that office space and another team member who is going to help you know increase your likelihood of getting the deal that's probably a better use of funds So I kind of went the opposite direction with a lot of this stuff

Kostas (47:46.628)
Yeah, 100%. Okay, cool. Let's talk a little bit about like the company now, right? So what are you building today? What's the product?

Brett (47:56.303)
Yeah. So, um, Micro is a new kind of email experience. Um, basically while I was building LaunchHouse, um, my co-founder, Michael was this kind of productivity guru. He was at inbox zero all the time. He would respond to like notion comments and, uh, under two minutes, he set up all these Zapier and Airtable integrations, like all this crazy stuff. And like, I just wasn't that guy. I was kind of an Apple Notes guy.

You know, just kind of like do whatever the easiest thing is. I'd miss some emails from time to time. And I'd always feel bad about it because, you know, I'd miss the email or like I missed the comment or something. And, you know, obviously it made sense, but the other part is that this society really kind of isn't super kind to the Apple notes people. think the requirements for being considered a competent professional these days is you got to get to inbox zero. You got to respond to stuff quickly.

You have to, you know, hyper optimize every single little piece of your life and productivity schedule and stuff like that. And our tools that we've been working on for the last 20 years are set up around that. So super humans whole idea is we're going to get you to inbox zero. We've designed our products so you can get to inbox zero as fast as possible. Notion is designed to have you do these like, you know, intricate apps and set up all the, know, any sort of thing you want to build instead of notion that's your.

place for your life's work, whatever. It's like, you can do all that stuff. But when you talk to, you know, I talk, and I talked to a lot of really successful people is like, how do you guys do this? Like, how do you get to inbox zero? How do you do these things? And they're like, we don't. Yeah, most people don't. And I would say, I really want to get this number, but I would bet that under 1 % of superhuman users get to inbox zero regularly. And I would bet that

probably maybe under 20 % of Notion users set up any sort of intricate apps in their product. And so kind of what that led me to is like, we're gaslighting ourselves. We're totally gaslighting ourselves right now. We're saying, you suck at your job if you aren't doing these things, but by the way, nobody's doing these things. Which is a problem because it makes people feel bad about themselves when they shouldn't.

Brett (50:22.239)
And it just said, all it suggests is like, we haven't designed the tools the way people want to use them. I read a bunch of these books about like addiction, dopamine, ADHD, psychology. There's amazing book called The World Without Email. you know, it's just like, the whole thesis is this thing isn't designed the way that human brains actually do work and want to work. And so that was like,

billion people use email for three hours a day, this feels like a big thing to fix. And email was the focus because it was like the biggest culprit of this productivity drama. And GPT-4 came out and I was like, okay, AI and email is gonna be a thing for sure. But it's go beyond tagging and summarization. And the...

Place that we landed was because of my background in CRM and all this other stuff, which is that email is a system of record. It's a database. It's not just a list of messages. And it's actually the closest thing that we have to WeChat in the West. WeChat is a global, you know, a massive communications platform with micro applications built inside of it to do anything. So email is already a place you're doing a hundred different things. You're doing your shopping, travel management, deal flow.

hiring, fundraising, whatever, like literally hundreds of different things, no matter who you are. And so I was like, maybe AI isn't just about sorting emails, but it's about extracting the information from them, storing it in a knowledge graph so that you can create interfaces that actually make sense for what you're doing. Right? So that's kind of the word. That's why it's called Micro Applications, Inc.

Kostas (52:15.268)
No, that's very interesting. So, okay. You have email, it's like out of control for most people, including me. And I think, especially when you have like multiple mailboxes that you have to handle, like your personal email, you have your business email and like all that stuff. You use AI. I agree with you. And I've seen, let's say the first like attempt.

with like even like with something like superhuman was like okay let me magically write the email for you but like I've felt like okay like that's not what I need like I mean I know what I want to write like sure you can help me like with spelling like write like a little bit like better but at the end of the day okay it's good to have but it's not going to change my life right

But the extraction part is very interesting because there is like a lot of information there, right? But why do you choose to extract this information and put it into like a graph, like into like a structure that has like relationships? Like what is like the information that you're seeking to extract and represent there, which is let's say the minimum viable data set that you need in order to build all these micro applications that you're talking about.

Brett (53:40.243)
Yeah. Yeah. So, so I mean, it's, it's easy to understand this in the context of like a specific user group. So, um, early stage founders have been our kind of target audience spread in the butter for a bit, because obviously I came from launch house, thousand founders in my community have a big audience on social media founders and, and a newsletter full of founders. If you talk to founders, what are their biggest problems besides

building a good product, is fundraising, hiring and sales. All of these happen in email mostly. And all of these are, what's the object that we're talking about? It's a person or a company. And it makes sense that people and companies are the most important things in your life, right? And actually, if you're doing search, most of the time you're searching the context of a person or a company.

You're searching through your email. You're looking for an email from a specific person. You're looking for information about a specific company. And so we're like, okay, let's, let's start with that. And the other important point is that like the, those, all those workflows are CRM based workflows. And this is kind of like, one of the exciting things about this company and product is that, you know, think founders often have this problem of having

Huge vision, but no idea how to get there or a great wedge product, but no idea where it goes. And this is a rare kind of company where you have both. And so the wedge product to see around because. know, founders have problems with these, these workflows. These are CRM workflows and CRM is the shit show for early stage founders. Like nobody, you ask a bunch of YSC founders. They'll give you 10 different answers for what, like what they use for CRM.

So that's been our wedge case and that's kind of why we focused on those. But the other basic objects are like attachments and links, know, all the documents that you send back and forth. Like, you know, email is a larger document storage product than Dropbox. More people are searching through their emails and Dropbox yet you are still, and you still have to search through email to find the document. You can't just search through documents to find a document. So,

Brett (56:02.735)
Yeah, attachments and links, tasks, extracting tasks from emails and things like that. it's, know, the system's generic. So you, you, if you were a horse trainer, you could extract horses from your, from your email.

Kostas (56:20.049)
Okay, so do you also use Clearbit to enrich the information? So tell us a little bit about like the connection there and like how do you see, because you said about Clearbit, COVID hit, people start like looking into, okay, what we can cut. Let's cut that first, right? And also you mentioned something also like very interesting.

Brett (56:24.419)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kostas (56:48.088)
it is like, let's say like a product can be substituted easily because the API, right? How do you see like AI and products like the one that you described, right? Changing like the position of these data providers at the end of the day, right?

Brett (57:03.508)
Yeah. Yeah. So basically what's going to happen is interoperability of products is going to get really simple. Migration, rendering, pulling data from one product, taking actions in another product. Like there's a bunch of these APIs that are popping up that allow this to happen very easily. And it's just going to get easier and easier and easier. So you should assume that if you are a data only

product that users are, that is not a workflow product, like something that people need to look at a lot. people are going to pull your data and go somewhere else with her. And what's important about that is maybe that's fine now, but over the longer term, that means you can be disintermediated. It means that, other companies are going to be incentivized to rebuild some of what you've built and upstream you.

And so value is going to accrue to the interface. So the place that people actually hang out and spend their time because the place people spend their time, the reason that email is the largest document storage product in the world is because people spend their time in email. know, the reason that Slack can do all these, you know, they're starting to do all these really interesting, they had, they've had these bots for awhile, but now they have documents and all this stuff. That's because that's where people spend their time. The reason notion is losing ground to.

linear for documents is because product teams spend their time in linear, not notion. And so basically if you own the thing that people are spending the most time in, you have the opportunity to kind of build anything and pull in the data from anywhere. So that's why we focused on email because of any product, it is probably the most widespread product that people spend the most time in for work of any product in the world.

you know, for the long, for the most number of years as well. And it's also the jumping off point for all these different workflows. So, you know, we could build, you know, a better applicant tracking system. We could build a better CRM. We could build a, if we wanted to go super crazy, we could build an ERP. We could build a financial management platform. We can build all these things inside of this product because people are already living in this product and doing so many different things inside of it. And so.

Brett (59:27.951)
Yeah, that's a big bet that we have. And along with that is that the cost of data enrichment and AI is going to go down significantly.

Kostas (59:40.598)
Some great points. Okay. My last question for me, and then I'll give it to Nitai because we are close to the end here. You mentioned something like very interesting and I won't like to ask you also as like a strategist. You said that interoperability between like applications and systems is going to become much, much easier because of AI. And you mentioned CRMs and like Salesforce.

Outside of having a generation of salespeople who, as you said, they don't want to move to another tool. They're of trained to live inside Salesforce. But I think another very, very big mode that Salesforce has is the connectivity, the ecosystem that is built around Salesforce itself. won't forget when I first started learning about Marketo and I was like, why people like...

Brett (01:00:22.287)
Thanks

Brett (01:00:26.447)
Okay.

Kostas (01:00:39.494)
use this horrendous thing. Like it's like so bad. Like how? Like, and the answer that I was getting was like, because it has like the best connectivity with Salesforce and it's easy like to move like the data between them. Right. And it's not just like market. It's just like a simple example, but there are like so many vendors and like this whole ecosystem of like partners and integrations and all these things.

Brett (01:00:53.066)
Yeah.

Kostas (01:01:05.498)
What kind of make, know, like if you get, start like getting into like Salesforce, like makes the product so sticky at the end of the day, right? But what's your feeling about these changing because of, of AI.

Brett (01:01:19.649)
Yeah. I mean, we're integrating an API this summer that allows you to read and write to Salesforce. There are a lot of companies, tons of companies that are doing this right now. so when you can read and write to Salesforce, that means you can be a layer on top of it. You know, one kind of strategy nugget is that in order to replace something, you have to integrate with it first. So.

One of my favorite examples, kind of adjacent example is one of the ways that Instagram grew in the early days. know, Instagram's a full on social network. it's, it's, you know, it competes with Twitter, but in order to compete with Twitter, they actually had to integrate with it in the early days and allow people to share their photos to Twitter for distribution and stuff like that. Cause there are people who are like, well, I'm already using Twitter.

Why would I want to share my photos on Instagram or if I'm already using Facebook, why do I want to share them on Instagram? So Instagram said, Hey, it integrates with those. use, you just use Instagram to filter your photos and then put them on those platforms. And then over time, people are like, wow, Instagram is awesome. I'm just going to use this. So the same thing with us. Like, you know, if you fast forward a year and a half or something like that, I think we'll have a lot of customers who are basically using

Micro as an interface for HubSpot and Salesforce, right? Because it's a better interface. People are spending their time in email. It has all these other awesome features. and yeah, I think there's just like a million of these providers that are popping up that make, that whole ecosystem thing, right? Like what is that? What is made up of the Salesforce ecosystem? It's a bunch of developers who spent a lot of time building these one-off apps and things that make Salesforce better.

great, we have an amazing integrations provider so we can get a ton of integrations out of the box really quickly. And now we have AI agents and that's coming to our platform this summer. They will be able to do all of the things that you would want in one of these like Salesforce apps. So I think, I don't know how long it'll take us to get to that, the same style of ecosystem, but we'll get there.

Nitay Joffe (01:03:43.574)
I'm curious, you mentioned throughout this call, kind of the fine grain touch and care, clearly you do have a deep care for kind of getting the UX right and the product experience and kind of understanding what the users want. And so give us, obviously it's hard to do on a call, but give us a sense of like, what are some of the key decisions you've made from a UX perspective from micro? Where do you think email, either traditional email gets it wrong or it's just outdated or kind of.

anything around or the CRM side as well.

Brett (01:04:15.097)
Yeah. Yeah, there's a handful of points. So one is...

Brett (01:04:24.183)
In order to get people to adopt a new product, it has to feel like the old one. So this is very important for AI, this paradigm shift we're going through. If you look at previous paradigm shifts, they always had this like translation skeuomorphic phase where the new products looked very similar to the old ones. If you look at the history of documents, you had a piece of paper and then Microsoft Word looked like a piece of paper on your computer. Google Docs looked like Microsoft Word in the cloud. know, notions of

a little bit more different, but it's still Google Docs with Markdown. Right. And so if you wanted to build the next document editor, it would have to feel like Notion with something extra. Right. And so one of our big learnings, the first product we built was TikTok for email. It was a bunch of email summaries rather than the full email inbox. And people were like, this is cool, but like, where's my email? And they didn't want to use it. And even now we notice that like,

When there's subtle differences in the UI, people feel like people don't use it as much. like will react. They won't be able to explain what the problem is, but the problem is, it's not as fast or, this button is way bigger than I expected it to be. You know, these subtle things really, really do matter, which is why I like super recommend, like, if you're going to try to replace something, copy the UI and then make some modest adjustments for it.

Yeah. And so that's why like in our product, you, it is an email client. It works like a normal email client. even have presets that we're shipping where during onboarding, you could set it to look like superhuman or you could set it to look like Gmail. Right. and the other thing is about flexibility. So, the reality of these transitionary periods is that the final design in UI paradigm

after everything is settled and everything is people are accustomed to AI will not be like what we've been using. It may be very different. And I think a lot of companies in the productivity world and consumer world enterprise, they kind of get stuck because they were opinionated about a UI that is now out of date. Right? So what we've done, very cool things. One is

Brett (01:06:49.933)
It has a very flexible property system so that you can show and hide different things in the UI if you want to and render it differently. So if you, in the future, you could render your emails like a gallery of cards if you wanted to, you know, and just showing the summaries if you wanted to do that. The other really cool thing, which is coming down the pipeline is basically like actually changing the full on styling of the UI.

So something I noticed is that enterprise products typically have sharper edges, you know, sharp corners and consumer products have rounded edges and more padding, right? Circular buttons versus square buttons. And so you're kind of screwed as a founder. If you're selling in an enterprise, you got to have those square buttons. But if you're selling to consumers, if you want to also go through consumers, people are like, this is like so boring and stodgy. Like I can't use this.

So that's the solution is we basically pull out corner rounding as a variable. We pull out padding as a variable and then allow people to select the preset that they have. like literally it'll come in a little bit, but you'll be able to basically do a fun consumer bubbly version of the product or a more enterprisey serious version of the product. And depending on who we're selling to, we can preset it however you want.

Nitay Joffe (01:08:19.022)
I love that aspect of recognizing the consumer versus enterprise. I mean, there's obviously tons of products out there that allow you to do theming and set different color schemes and so on. But I don't think I've ever seen a single product that's like give me the consumer mode versus the enterprise mode of this product. I love that aspect.

Brett (01:08:31.833)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And we actually, we actually just chose an icon pack that has three types square, super rounded, and then right in between. So, you know, we're obviously defaulting to the middle one, but you'll be able to choose, choose either. So not only will the UI change, but the icons will change.

Nitay Joffe (01:08:54.584)
Very cool. All right, last question to close us out. So I talked a little bit about kind of the notion of inbox zero and trying to get people towards that. You mentioned kind of whoever owns the interface and the workflow that people work in is really where the value is going to accrue. So give us a bit of the kind of the longer term, the big picture vision of like, if it's not inbox zero, if AI is coming and taking over and potentially taking over some of these workflows itself,

know, agentic systems and so on. What do you see the world of email and CRM and AI and the right interface being, you know, five years from now or what have you?

Brett (01:09:35.065)
Yeah, I think just the important place to start is that email is almost like an activity log of a bunch of stuff. And our goal is literally just to reorganize that into the actual apps, quote unquote, that that activity log is being pulled from. Right? So your newsletter experience should be a more visual.

Awesome experience. Your shopping should be a more visual experience. If you're tracking deliveries, you shouldn't be flipping through text emails to find them. You should see them on a map. You should see a list of everything you bought, their status, one click return, your flights. You should have a history of every flight you've taken and see flight status and where on the map they are and all of that stuff. so the vision is like splitting this interface.

taking out all of these different core apps and workflows into better interfaces is the first part. And then the second part is actually getting the AI to generate and show you these interfaces when it matters. So we're testing a feature that we call updates, which you could think of as one level higher than an email. If you have

A flight, example, you'll get like six emails from United about when you buy it, when you confirm it, things to remember, your flight's coming up, all that stuff. An update would just be about the flight. know, here's the flight itself. Right? And this is important because people don't want to read six emails about a flight. When you're looking for your flight, you're looking for your flight, not the six emails about it. And so it's interesting, especially as we add more data sources beyond email.

So this month we're shipping LinkedIn DM integration, right? We'll add WhatsApp, we'll add, you know, for B2B, you can add segment, you can add your Postgres database, all this stuff. Then suddenly your updates turn into these cross application kind of notifications that can be proactive and memory-based. The AI can remind you to do things or tell you that it's doing things.

Brett (01:11:56.707)
that cuts across everything that is happening in your life. so I think email will be, know, messaging as part of email will always be a thing. You will still need to like interact and interface with the core email thread because, you know, it's the main business messaging system in the world. But I think what we'll do is abstract most of the other stuff so that you can, you know, get to the bottom of what you need to do and have the agents.

kind of go ahead and do it. But I think we're, I think we're still little ways away from agents just being able to go and like, look around the internet on your behalf and do stuff. It's kind of like, I think we're in the like, credit card, your credit card on the internet era of AI. Remember that? Where like everybody, everybody does it now and nobody thinks about it, but like it's, and it worked in the early.

Nitay Joffe (01:12:44.003)
Yeah.

Nitay Joffe (01:12:47.884)
Early days I was like, am I really going to do this? Is this safe?

Brett (01:12:51.039)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That's exactly where we are with AI.

Nitay Joffe (01:12:57.066)
I love your vision of email as the geek in me thinks of it as like email is the right ahead log or the event log and you guys are making smart caches and intermediate state that's just constantly computing on top of the email. So that's to your point. I don't have to look at the six United emails. I just know, okay, here's the current state, the flight's still on time, here's the gate, here's the terminal, I'm Very cool.

Brett (01:13:20.067)
Yeah. Yeah.

Nitay Joffe (01:13:22.818)
Well, thank you for joining us today. This was really fantastic. Quite a journey you've been through and some awesome stuff you guys are building. Definitely have to have you on again to continue and see how the story unfolds.

Brett (01:13:34.957)
Yeah, this was awesome. Thanks for having me.

Kostas (01:13:37.2)
Thank you, Britt.