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> Information we receive from third parties. From time to time, we may receive information about you from third parties and other users. We may also collect inf

by eterm 7y ago

> Information we receive from third parties. From time to time, we may receive information about you from third parties and other users. We may also collect information about you that is publicly available. No thanks. ( from https://superhuman.com/privacy https://superhuman.com/privacy )

devoply 7y ago
Yes my first thought was great another we'll mine your data for a trivial benefit that you can mostly get from Tunderbird or other desktop clients. E-mail is a utility to be provided by non-ad tech company and browsed using an open source/private desktop client... that you pay a monthly fee for. At $30 / month for a webclient I would hope it comes with full iron-clad private hosting of your stuff with an strong privacy-based agreement to boot. I pay half that for my mail for a few mailboxes about maybe 50 gbs of storage between them.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  In fairness, I love and rely on Thunderbird, but I certainly wouldn't call it a triumph of usability. The UI hasn't changed appreciably in more than a decade, and it wasn't particularly easy or pleasant to use even back then. Don't get me wrong, it works well for what it sets out to do, and the stagnation is understandable given how Thunderbird was always treated by Mozilla as a sort of red-headed stepchild before they cut it loose altogether. This is a project that has been operating in survival mode for a long time now. But it does mean that there is space in the market for an email client with a modern UI and some fresh ideas on how to interact with email.
- jschwartzi 7y ago
  Information hiding is key. I get bombarded by so many trash emails every day that I could spend weeks unsubscribing to stuff. When Gmail came out with their tabbed interface and hid all the marketing messages behind a tab, I started using email again for the first time in about 7 years. Before that it was actually less useful than postal mail because I couldn't find anything for the flood of crap. That's something Outlook and Thunderbird don't do, is give you convenient features to hide information. Sure, you can organize things into folders or labels, colorize things for follow-up, sort emails, etc., but you're fundamentally limited by their model of "emails should be in a list, like a database. And they should be in chronological order. And you deal with them in chronological order, or you colorize them."
  - kthejoker2 7y ago
    Outlook has added a lot of "smart" features to its inbox sorting and management. I'll just say "so far so good" but clearly there's something in the air in the space.
Pyxl101 7y ago
Definitely not if I'm paying for the offering. If it's free, then I'll consider making that trade-off.
chamen 7y ago
One of Superhuman's founders previously started a company named Airseed. To users the service looked like an assistant that accessed your email account to keep track of your travel, purchases, etc., but the actual business was selling that data to third parties (presumably aggregated). I don't think Airseed ended up panning out but I wonder what he brought from that business to Superhuman.
- Alex3917 7y ago
  > I don't think Airseed ended up panning out but I wonder what he brought from that business to Superhuman. There are several other businesses that specialize in doing just this, so even if they wanted to continue doing the exact same thing it wouldn't necessarily make sense to continue using their own in-house technology. That said email is insanely difficult to wrap your head around, I've been doing it full time for several years and don't pretend to be anywhere near close to fully understanding it. So just having experience in the space and having tried out some different approaches to similar problems would surely help a ton.
JeremyBanks 7y ago
Their registration page breaks if you enable Firefox's built-in tracking protection. :|
antiviral 7y ago
Vivek Sodera, cofounder of Superhuman, was also one of the cofounders of Rapleaf acording to (1): Also see: https://money.cnn.com/2010/10/21/technology/rapleaf/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/2010/10/21/technology/rapleaf/index.ht... From the article (10/21/2010): "Rapleaf knows your name, your age and where you live. It knows your e-mail address, your income and what social networks you use. It knows your likes and dislikes. And it makes money by selling much of that personal information to advertisers." (Reference 1): https://dataweekapiworld2014.sched.com/speaker/vivek_sodera.1srsgp1d https://dataweekapiworld2014.sched.com/speaker/vivek_sodera.... "..Previously he(Vivek Sodera) co-founded Rapleaf, a consumer data company that was acquired in 2013, and spun out LiveRamp, a data onboarding platform." It would be great to hear what A16Z's position on consumer privacy is, as I am sure this is just a misunderstanding.

by eterm 7y ago

devoply 7y ago

Yes my first thought was great another we'll mine your data for a trivial benefit that you can mostly get from Tunderbird or other desktop clients. E-mail is a utility to be provided by non-ad tech company and browsed using an open source/private desktop client... that you pay a monthly fee for. At $30 / month for a webclient I would hope it comes with full iron-clad private hosting of your stuff with an strong privacy-based agreement to boot. I pay half that for my mail for a few mailboxes about maybe 50 gbs of storage between them.

smacktoward 7y ago
In fairness, I love and rely on Thunderbird, but I certainly wouldn't call it a triumph of usability. The UI hasn't changed appreciably in more than a decade, and it wasn't particularly easy or pleasant to use even back then. Don't get me wrong, it works well for what it sets out to do, and the stagnation is understandable given how Thunderbird was always treated by Mozilla as a sort of red-headed stepchild before they cut it loose altogether. This is a project that has been operating in survival mode for a long time now. But it does mean that there is space in the market for an email client with a modern UI and some fresh ideas on how to interact with email.
jschwartzi 7y ago
Information hiding is key. I get bombarded by so many trash emails every day that I could spend weeks unsubscribing to stuff. When Gmail came out with their tabbed interface and hid all the marketing messages behind a tab, I started using email again for the first time in about 7 years. Before that it was actually less useful than postal mail because I couldn't find anything for the flood of crap. That's something Outlook and Thunderbird don't do, is give you convenient features to hide information. Sure, you can organize things into folders or labels, colorize things for follow-up, sort emails, etc., but you're fundamentally limited by their model of "emails should be in a list, like a database. And they should be in chronological order. And you deal with them in chronological order, or you colorize them."
- kthejoker2 7y ago
  Outlook has added a lot of "smart" features to its inbox sorting and management. I'll just say "so far so good" but clearly there's something in the air in the space.

Pyxl101 7y ago

Definitely not if I'm paying for the offering. If it's free, then I'll consider making that trade-off.

chamen 7y ago

One of Superhuman's founders previously started a company named Airseed. To users the service looked like an assistant that accessed your email account to keep track of your travel, purchases, etc., but the actual business was selling that data to third parties (presumably aggregated). I don't think Airseed ended up panning out but I wonder what he brought from that business to Superhuman.

Alex3917 7y ago
> I don't think Airseed ended up panning out but I wonder what he brought from that business to Superhuman. There are several other businesses that specialize in doing just this, so even if they wanted to continue doing the exact same thing it wouldn't necessarily make sense to continue using their own in-house technology. That said email is insanely difficult to wrap your head around, I've been doing it full time for several years and don't pretend to be anywhere near close to fully understanding it. So just having experience in the space and having tried out some different approaches to similar problems would surely help a ton.

JeremyBanks 7y ago

Their registration page breaks if you enable Firefox's built-in tracking protection. :|

antiviral 7y ago

Vivek Sodera, cofounder of Superhuman, was also one of the cofounders of Rapleaf acording to (1): Also see: https://money.cnn.com/2010/10/21/technology/rapleaf/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/2010/10/21/technology/rapleaf/index.ht... From the article (10/21/2010): "Rapleaf knows your name, your age and where you live. It knows your e-mail address, your income and what social networks you use. It knows your likes and dislikes. And it makes money by selling much of that personal information to advertisers." (Reference 1): https://dataweekapiworld2014.sched.com/speaker/vivek_sodera.1srsgp1d https://dataweekapiworld2014.sched.com/speaker/vivek_sodera.... "..Previously he(Vivek Sodera) co-founded Rapleaf, a consumer data company that was acquired in 2013, and spun out LiveRamp, a data onboarding platform." It would be great to hear what A16Z's position on consumer privacy is, as I am sure this is just a misunderstanding.