Ignoring the constraint of "email client", has there been any acquisitions where the acquired product got better post-acquisition?
I can think of countless examples where it got worse, but from the top of my head, I can only think of maybe YouTube, but then only in the initial post-purchase period, and same goes for a bunch of other examples. They seem to eventually always turn sour.
Maybe GitHub? But it traded "no new features - no downtime" for "some new features - a lot of downtime" after the Microsoft purchase, so I guess it's very subjective, probably at least some people like that tradeoff.
Diamond Aircraft
Volvo
Cirrus
All retained their culture and brand and the products keep improving incrementally. Parent companies keep a low profile wrt product.
And Google/Sparrow.
What are you using Grammarly for, is it just spell/grammar checking or something more? Is the UX particularly good? Personally I tried it some years ago but didn't understand/see what is/was special about it.
Harper - 10 ms LanguageTool - 650 ms Grammarly - 4000 ms
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api
so it should be a matter of time to have a replacement extension using this local API. However the built-in model is Gemini Nano.
Dry powder to do what?! Is this americanism? I've been here for over 8 years and every month I find some wording that's just bizarre, like as if there was a competition for ways in how to confuse someone.
Perhaps you are familiar with similar phrases “ammunition” and “war chest”?
No, is financialism, which is basically the same thing but I digress.
> Dry powder is a slang term referring to marketable securities that are highly liquid and considered cash-like - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/drypowder.asp
Finance seems particularly filled with terms with no real connection attached to the concepts at hand, not sure why. Sounds cool I suppose?
Dry gun powder is ready to use, allowing you to fire whenever. Much like liquid assets, ready whenever.
If your powder gets wet, it'll take you a good amount of drying before it's of any use. Much like illiquid assets, would take some time to be useful, but still useful nonetheless.
I first heard it a few months ago when Chrystia Freeland, then Canada's Finance Minister, resigned and used it in her resignation letter. The meaning was immediately clear to me.
> "That means keeping our fiscal powder dry today, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war," Freeland wrote.
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2127174/finance-mini...
This is a very common term for business people and especially investors and startups. It's a short phrase that carries a lot of meaning and packs a lot of punch.
Google Gemini:
> In finance, dry powder refers to readily available cash or liquid assets that a company, investor, or fund manager holds in reserve for future investments or to meet obligations during economic downturns. It's a metaphor, originating from the need to keep gunpowder dry for use in battle, symbolizing preparedness and flexibility in financial contexts.
> In essence, dry powder is unspent capital waiting to be deployed
This one term packs in all of that meaning into two words, so it is quite a useful tool. "Cash" alone doesn't have an implied context, whereas "dry powder" is immediately understood for strategy and positioning.
It's also nice to have analogies that are striking and evocative. It makes language fun and flowery instead of dusty and spartan. Business people have to business all day, and this injects a little flavor and excitement with wordplay. Drawing up images of 17th century battles is nice when the reality is emailing back and forth.
There lots of other phrases like this that you'll stumble upon. Someone should make a dictionary of these at some point.
Honestly, I wonder what makes anyone think that Grammarly is the right centerpiece for an AI rollup?
Excited to see what they are doing now after the "acquisition" of Coda (seems like a bit of a reverse acquisition or acquihire since they buy Coda and have Coda leadership take over Gramarly.
Is this really a good metric to aim for? Don't we want productivity tooling to result in less email not more?
Turns out the second you do this you eliminate 100% of the spam in your life. Honestly, if I ever lived in North America again, I think I'd also just stop reading e-mail.
read: spam has increased 5 fold!
Why do their customers even need to send 72% more email?
For those people this would be a great outcome. The question is should this be the goal of most people? Probably not. But most people are not their ideal customer. They explained their ideal customer in depth in an episode of the Acquired Podcast.
The inbox->outbox flow turns into the way to clear the inbox. It's not about better communication, it's about speedrunning their way to inbox zero.
The worst case was a person who would respond to everything with a one-sentence question, then respond to the response with another one-sentence question, and repeat all day long. He could turn a brief e-mail into a thread with 15 one-line responses that could have been avoided by spending more than 10 seconds thinking about it.
> The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group outcome. An office worker’s life is dramatically easier, in the moment, if she can send messages that demand immediate responses from her colleagues, or disseminate requests and tasks to others in an ad-hoc manner. But the cumulative effect of such constant, unstructured communication is cognitively harmful: on the receiving end, the deluge of information and demands makes work unmanageable. There’s little that any one individual can do to fix the problem. A worker might send fewer e-mail requests to others, and become more structured about her work, but she’ll still receive requests from everyone else; meanwhile, if she decides to decrease the amount of time that she spends engaging with this harried digital din, she slows down other people’s work, creating frustration.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise...
I'm hesitant to call the email-skimming workflow that you mentioned a "reasonable decision," but I think the point still stands about how one person speedrunning their inbox can make everyone else's inboxes that much worse.
I think you're looking a little too strictly through that Cal Newport quote.
There's another big problem that isn't external: The people who speedrun their e-mail like this (which isn't every Superhuman user, to be fair) are also harming their own understanding of those e-mails.
From what I've seen in a few people, it turns into a false sense of being productive while they self-sabotage their own communications. Inbox Zero becomes the goal and they think their job is done when those e-mails are all gone.
Superhuman made one of my accounts wait for four years for an invite.
How much did they pay for this? I hope not much.
90 thousand customers sounds like a whole lot of users to me.
I use it myself and it is by far the best email experience ever created. Is it worth the money? That depends on your needs and work, I guess. CEOs laugh at the cost. Developers might think the price is nuts.
What do folks like for desktop email that's keyboard driven? At this point I almost want to go back to Pine ;)
Now to figure out iOS ;)
Grammarly’s value is not in having a replaceable product, it’s in the network, distribution, customer acquisition channels and integrations with tools. Like bottled water, it’s about being in the customers face at the right place and the right time.
This is nuts! I used Superhuman for about a year. And honestly, I might still be using it if the pricing weren't so off. It had a couple of nice features, and the keyboard-driven approach was a welcome change for mail clients.
But ultimately, Superhuman had nothing that couldn't be replicated in a relatively short amount of time (maybe even with plugins?).
$825 million? Maybe I should start a mail client company...
So by that logic, Superhuman may be worth around $165 million.
More interestingly though, let’s assume they spent the $110 million they raised. That means that each of the ~85k customers they would appear to have based on the estimated revenue cost them about $1300. Though probably more as a proportion of ongoing revenue will obviously be driving sales and retention.
I did see something somewhere saying that they have very high customer retention. That matches my anecdotal experience - I’ve been using it for several years as have several people I referred.
But yeah… an $800m+ valuation? That feels like Covid-era hype.
I'm a big fan of Superhuman as an email client and happily pay the premium price for it. I really hope they don't change what makes it great.
I used to love Grammarly until they essentially ruined their product - much like Dropbox did. They took an app that worked perfectly and deprecated it, replacing it with an invasive keyboard replacement that was supposed to work everywhere but performed poorly across most programs and included functionality I wasn’t interested in that is kept nagging me to use. When I complained about the issues, instead of addressing my concerns, they sent form letter responses about their commitment to privacy rather than fixing their intrusive software.
This reminds me exactly of Dropbox's transformation from simple, reliable file storage into bloated software that cluttered my computer with pop-ups and background processes. When users complained, their team never seemed to understand why we were frustrated. Then they started acquiring other services I eventually cancelled as they tried to integrate them into their core service. I eventually moved to iCloud and never looked back.
I hope Superhuman keeps their current excellent email client that I gladly pay for, rather than replacing it with some "next generation" product that nobody asked for and that would likely be inferior to what we have now. I genuinely love Superhuman as it is.
harry2quinn•7h ago
Salesforce did this with Quip, Slack, etc.
toomuchtodo•7h ago
We should see more of this as large, profitable startups have grown into long term private companies with no need to go public.
chii•6h ago
which i think is a real problem - it prevents "mom and dad" investors from partaking in the wealth creation process, as they are not sophisticated investors and thus barred from being able to invest in these PE investments.
Public listing has become a cashing out operation, rather than a fund-raising operation, if this continues to happen more and more. And the public becomes the bag holders.