---
author: Latent Space
date: '2026-11-10'
guest: ''
layout: post.njk
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdIoODXsu8k
speaker: Latent Space
tags:
- email-infrastructure
- developer-experience
- category-creation
- work-life-balance
- api-design
title: Resend创始人Zeno Rocha访谈：从开源到击败SendGrid，平衡创业雄心与家庭生活
summary: 本文记录了Resend创始人Zeno Rocha的访谈。他讲述了从前端开发者转型构建邮件基础设施平台的过程，强调以开发者为中心的设计理念。Resend已服务430万用户，ARR达千万美元，并超越SendGrid。访谈还探讨了API架构、MCP工具使用、品类开创策略，以及如何在追求商业成功的同时保持家庭关系的平衡。
insight: ''
draft: true
series: ''
category: tech-trends
area: tech-engineering
project: []
people:
- Zeno Rocha
companies_orgs:
- Resend
- SendGrid
- Warner Brothers
- HBO
- HubSpot
- Svix
products_models:
- Dracula
- React Email
- MCP
- Next.js
media_books: []
status: evergreen
---
### 击败 SendGrid 与平衡生活
当时的感觉就像是，天哪，我们怎么可能击败 SendGrid？这根本是不可能的。然而在今年早些时候，我们的下载量超过了 SendGrid。当时我觉得，这太不可思议了。而现在，我们的数据已经是对方的两倍以上了。
Original English
It's like, oh my gosh, how are we ever going to beat Sang Grid? It's just impossible. And then earlier this year, we crossed the number of uh downloads from Sang Grid. And I was like, that's insane. And now we're more than double.
Original English
So recent now is powering 4.3 million users as of this morning. Uh we have all sorts of customers like uh Warner Brothers, HBO, there was a Japanese gang that recently came. They they brought like maybe 20,000 domains at recent like those are 20,000 different TLGs registered in different domain registars and we are 10 million AR company. I would rather live in that reality than live in a reality where we're hund00 million company and my daughter doesn't want to play with me. It's not interested in me and we're not that close.
Original English
So we are we're building the infrastructure and going like down to the metal now. But it's a big project. Like we've been working for months now and we're gonna announce something soon about
Original English
>> Okay. We're in a studio with Zeno Roachcha. Roa
Original English
>> Roachcha.
Original English
>> Rocha from recent. Uh you and I go back to your VS Code theme days.
Original English
>> Yes.
Original English
>> When you're just an indie hacker and I was like, man, uh I don't know what this guy does, but everything he does has taste. And then now you made build an email infrastructure platform. Uh anyway, welcome. You underell just the indie hacker top 20 most active GitHub under 2020 22 very very active open source stuff.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Original English
>> Yeah. What's your typical how do you introduce yourself these days?
Original English
>> Yeah. I think I just focus on my recent career for the longest time. Uh even today when I say like oh I created Dracula people know Dracula more than recent but yeah but it's been nice like there's a Yeah, it's changing.
Original English
>> Yeah. What was the impetus for I guess picking email? You know, I think I you know, uh people always have like obviously react email and all those things.
Original English
>> I just don't know if I would have made it a company, you know.
Original English
>> Yeah. If if I knew like how hard email is, I I probably wouldn't start the company either.
Original English
>> Yeah. Were you a primarily JavaScript front end to
Original English
>> CSS Jav like
Original English
>> I was a front end guy.
Original English
>> No infra, right? No email
Original English
>> HTML 5 guy, you know. And I think what was interesting and what draw me to it is like I just look at all the tools uh around that and I've used all of them before. The male guns, the male chimps, the sang grids of the world and I've always felt like man there should be something where um there's just some someone should care about this space. That's that that's how I felt like you have all these players. It's a massive market, a lot of competitors, but no one that cares about the developer persona. maybe they care about the marketer, the product manager or whatever, but not for the developer. So, I started just building around that premise of like if this was the the stripe of email, how would that look like? Um, and yeah, the like I had no idea or knew nothing about email. Like I was a user of email, but I have never built like an email pipeline and and all that infrastructure before.
Original English
>> Yeah. I mean like you know typically if you ask me like Postmark was still a thing but like uh and then and then obviously Sang Grid and all these all these guys they're still around but like uh they're not maybe as innovative as someone who's like a new YC startup like trying to try to make it.
Original English
>> Um just to just upfront I like to let people brag a bit. Can you like for people who never heard of recent what are like the the ways that you talk about like the most impressive numbers or logos anything?
Original English
Yeah. So, Recent now is powering 4.3 million users as of this morning. Uh, we have all sorts of customers like uh Warner Brothers, HBO. So, customers that are really big and have all sorts of demands, but also a lot of indie hackers and folks who are just building a website, building their own application. And yeah, we just crossed 120,000 paid customers and the endless logo.
Original English
>> Oh my god. Yeah. Do you think this is effective?
Original English
>> You wanted the flex. There. There you go.
Original English
>> You know what? Like in the beginning I felt like I just need to have some sort of social proof and then in the end I was like, you know what? This is actually pretty cool. And I I I honestly like I found companies like Warner Brothers just like on a random Saturday. Uh I was just this was before AI. So I will go to my database. I'm like, "Oh, let me see who can I put on the website." And I just I did the the most naive thing you can do like let me look at the domains. Yeah.
Original English
>> And let me just filter bys and filter by the small ones. And there was this domain WBG, Warner Brothers Discovery. I didn't know what is WBG.com. And I was like, oh no, Warner Brothers is using us. So yeah, I I I just love featuring customers and yeah,
Original English
>> specifically for listeners. One of the reasons I reached out for this interview, one, you know, I'm uh I I should declare up front I am an angel. Uh when you sent me the memo, it was super simple. you were like, "Look, uh, Mailchimp has exited, Postmark has exited, Send Grid is under Twilio, who is doing this?"
Original English
>> And I was like, "Okay, yeah, seems seems right."
Original English
>> Honestly, like in terms of like the the pitches I get, I've invested in about like 30 plus companies. That was like one of the most straightforward things ever.
Original English
>> And then uh secondly, I I don't like to add API keys, right? Like I like to have everything on one platform, one API, one API key everything. So, uh, Cloudflare has built-in email
Original English
>> and I had a project and I set up my Cloudflare email
Original English
>> domain DNS, all that junk, the DKIM,
Original English
>> what have you, right? I don't know all the alphabet super stuff.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Original English
>> And I already had this set up and then I was like, okay, well, I want to add another sort of email thing.
Original English
>> Bloody model said, you must add resend.
Original English
>> And I'm like, who the resend that like, you know, even already I have a cloudflare email set up and is still recommending it. It's on the on the screen now.
Original English
>> This is him praising and like I don't need resend, but you want me to keep adding resend.
Original English
>> Yeah. So, okay. Who did you bribe in OpenAI in Andropic to get resent on there?
Original English
>> Oh, man. I I wish there was someone to bribe because yeah, I will definitely be paying them.
Original English
>> But I do personally spend a lot of time on that topic. Like that's something that I feel like every generation that's why I was so interested to build this thing in the first place. like
Original English
>> every generation you have those tools that define that moment, right? We remember the Heroku days.
Original English
>> I mean, Nellifyel,
Original English
>> you know, and and so to me, it was like, yeah, there's room for a new generation. And this new generation is not going to be distributed in the same places that it was before. So, since the beginning, I was like very focused on, okay, we we got to be number one when someone asks about that.
Original English
>> Yeah,
Original English
>> you're very number one. Cloud code recommending 60% plus of the time. I think it'll be fun to see the playbook. How do you how do you win that? Um I do want to get back into Okay, so you said you had no idea why email, how to start email. I think a lot of people actually don't understand what goes into making a service like this, right? Uh you might cuz you've set it up. Some people would just, you know, okay, I can use Twilio, I can use Send Grid, I can use you guys, but what goes into making a tool to just mass send emails? What do people not think about?
Original English
Yeah, there's just a lot of different things you can do because landing on the inbox, especially when you're doing high volume is different from like when you're scaling just like an an app where you throw GPU at the problem or you just scale more vertically or horizontally, whatever it is. With email, you got to respect the rules of the game and how Gmail behaves is differently from Outlook and differently from Yahoo mail. And it's an industry that is fascinating because it's so old school and it relies a lot on on contacts. But what we found early on was like okay we we knew nothing about this world. And so and and coming from this perspective like extremely naive was the best thing that ever happened. Uh like honestly like it was the best thing
Original English
because like there's no preconception of what is right, what is wrong. So for them, for example, every single app you go and then first thing you see is like this form that you got to fill out about like how many emails are going to send, what's the volume, what are you trying to do, and then you go through a human verification process, two days later they accept you or or deny you. Most of the times they're going to deny you. And I was like, this doesn't make any sense, right? Like why are we blocking people? So I know I'm going to remove that friction completely and the friction will be on us. We're going to figure that out. Of course, now four years, three years in into this business, I get it why they do that. There's just so much fraud and fishing and abuse across the board. I don't talk too much publicly about that, but we build like all sorts of crazy systems internally for that. But to your question, like how you architect that. Like for example, when you're sending an email to 100,000 people, if you just throw 100,000 emails uh like to Gmail, what Gmail will do is they're going to throttle the emails because it's way too much. And they they want to see the engagement. So what you do is like they see like, okay, are people opening the emails? Are people archiving, deleting right away or or not interacting? Okay, depending on those initial uh interactions, then what I'm going to do with the rest of the emails will dictate that that beginning. So, there are clever things you can do where 100,000 people put the most engaged audience members in the beginning of that queue. You have to put that in a queue. You You need to It's an art and a science where you got to space out each batch. So, and space out between the different providers, too. And yeah, now we're like buying different IP blocks. You got to look at the history of the IP blocks, distributed folks into different IP pools, and then balance the IP pools over time. So, it's a whole crazy infrastructure game.
Original English
>> How automated can that be or is there a lot of human judgment still?
Original English
>> Yeah, it's a lot of automation for sure. Uh and I think over time we learned that okay this is how fast we can send for new customers. Of course if you're sending more then maybe you can send faster but there's a a throttle that we have to do to protect you as a sender. So like what Gmail and all these players will want to see is like a graph that is consistently sending more and more versus what most people do which is like you send once to a big audience and then you never send again and then it's empty and then boom you send it again
Original English
>> once a week twice a week.
Original English
>> Yeah. And those are patterns that an abuser will have. Right. So the whole way of thinking about email marketing and and email in general is you you need to do exactly what an abuser wouldn't do. It's the opposite of that. So what what's a abuser do? They buy a domain. We have now like there was a Japanese gang that recently came. they they brought like maybe 20,000 domains at recent like those are 20,000 different TLGs registered in different domain registars and we look for every single factor there. So they they come in it's a domain that was bought two days ago. So very new domains they they get bad reputation.
Original English
>> Then you you look at the website is it returning 200 or basic things like that. Some people don't even set that up or they do like a lookalike domain. So they're like, "Oh, maybe I'll do another domain for code outreach." That's terrible because it's it looks like you're fishing, right? Like because you're you're using a domain that looks like the same. So all these little things and they just do they send a lot of emails all at once and then they never send again. So you kind of got to reverse engineer how fishing works and and build a platform that does exactly opposite of that. Do you have a list somewhere or do you recommend people go to some well-known lists?
Original English
>> Yeah, what I've learned is again another thing I didn't know. Email is the type of world where it requires a lot of education but people are not interested in learning right like the platform should do all those things for them. So we added like insights inside the product so people can just apply the insights. So we look at sending patterns and now with AI it's pretty cool too like we have link checkers and spell checkers like all these checkers before you send. So yeah it's a mix of you're teaching your audience but at the same time the product needs to do the teaching and the more you can bake in the the best practices the better. So one example too when you send an email you can send an HTML version and a plain text version. very early on we were like you know what like this the whole world is changing there are way more agents than than before let's just generate autogenerate the the plain text version uh of each email we can extract from the HTML the markdown and then just send that so we start sending that automatically and that increased deliverability a ton you know it's so much easier for spam filters to just look at the content reactly without having to parse that uh so those things that we are like oh No, let's bake into that product. And most people don't do that, but we're like, ah, that this makes sense.
Original English
>> But with plain text, there's no tracking, right? Because you can't embed the the image.
Original English
>> That's right.
Original English
>> So, you don't have open rates.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Original English
>> How do you know you have deliverability if you don't have open rates?
Original English
>> Yeah. This is very interesting because the the industry there are two ways of tracking, right? You have open tracking and click tracking. Open tracking what it does it it includes a one by one GIF uh image a transparent image and then if that image is loaded then you detect that as open. The problem with that is that all the changes that Apple did recently in terms of uh transparency and and data privacy like they read the emails before it lands if they're doing the summaries and all those kinds of things. So like the open rate as a metric as a whole isn't really as reliable as it used to be because all these spam filters are are checking that before. So then you rely on click tracking. Now click tracking can also be uh difficult because you want the URLs to match the sending domain. You also want the images URLs to match the sending domain. That's another pattern that an abuser will do. They would host images somewhere else, point links somewhere else, and then they're sending from this domain.
Original English
>> Yeah. I I feel like I have uh used email services that would rewrite like for the link tracking, right? They'll rewrite to their own domain. Yeah.
Original English
>> You're saying that's bad.
Original English
>> That's bad because what happened we did that too at first
Original English
>> and then
Original English
>> I thought that's normal.
Original English
>> Yeah. But what's bad is when and you have a noisy neighbor problem too where if one of the customers using that click tracking is an abuser and sends a bunch of fishing that domain might get listed on a blacklist and then it takes maybe days or weeks to get out of the blacklist
Original English
>> then you're screwed as a business.
Original English
>> Is that pretty common? Like you make it very easy to just sign up free tier send a bunch of email. I would assume you have a lot of spam, a lot of fishing.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Original English
>> But you're able to avoid and this is why
Original English
>> Yeah. I think what what was different to me and then this is more like a philosophy, right? So I saw the those other products and the way they behaved and I felt like okay, it's almost like if you were born in a society where you first go to prison and then you have to spend like 18 years in prison. you got to prove that you are a good citizen and then you get out of prison and now you can do the things you want to do. I was always always felt like no I want to live in a society where I'm born free and if I make a mistake then I I might be punished just a little bit or if I do something like really bad a bad punishment right so that's how I feel about that too like you come in we trust you by default of course again a a naive way of thinking but you know what we're going to trust you by default versus make the whole platform worse for everyone because of
Original English
those bad uh actors
right So we trust you by default but then what we do differently from others is like at the very first moment like when we notice something is off like by looking at the bounce rates complain rates all the feedback we get from mailbox providers then we block you like very quickly and then we chat with you we try to understand and most of the time it's just misuse it's not abuse so we learned that we need to differentiate
Original English
>> skill issue
Original English
>> yeah it's a skill issue exactly it's just skill issue
Original English
>> I think we learned we have skill issues too we wouldn't have expected
Yeah, email is so important and it's so dirty and it's so secretive and it's just such a I almost just want you to like just tell us everything.
Original English
>> I will say you have a you have a fun page literally your philosophy as you called it. I got lost just reading around this and then there's like a cool you have a pledge that you will make email safer like
Original English
>> if you're interested in this stuff you know you you have quite a bit up here.
Original English
>> Yeah. Um okay so uh actually uh I do want to there's this there's a how we scale support there uh I think that's this is uh you you remind me of another uh investment that I had uh Jake from railway
Original English
>> cuz also another like very very permissive very developer oriented but also you have to scale support
Original English
>> right because the moment someone gets blocked they come to you and say hey like you know don't kick me off your platform yeah
Original English
>> how do you scale support
Original English
>> man I think we if support was a a software we're probably on major version four or something. Okay.
Original English
>> Like the very first version was like
Original English
>> you me and I was so stressed out. I'm like dude I just need someone to be sitting on the chair. Like it's that simple. I cannot be doing this anymore. And it was like just anyone. Anyone I don't care. Then you do that. Of course it doesn't go well because you realize very quickly you need someone that will actually try to prevent the tickets from happening in the first place. So then we went to V2 which was like a new version like a new person that we that we ended up hiring that was like okay we're answering the tickets they have domain expertise but they were still like not doing the proactive work of like no let's make sure this is documented before we we talk about so one policy that we we set it was pretty cool actually is like
Original English
>> you can only respond to a ticket with a link. So you cannot just give the answer right away.
Original English
>> You had to stop
Original English
>> write a a knowledgebased article, write a docs and then so it takes like an hour and a half maybe for you to answer a ticket. But guess what? Now you're sending that link all over again. Uh so that was super cool and it helped us build that knowledge base. But even so like after that we when we crossed maybe 1 million users. So we had 1 million users back in December and now we have four. So, I can throw people at the problem, but that's just not going to solve it, right? Like, I I'm just going to keep staffing and and that's how it is. Like, no. So, we really have to rethink like, okay, everything from scratch again. And we want to keep like that free tier. It's not I don't want to get rid of that free tier. I started as an engineer because I was able to use those free products, right? Like we all like if it wasn't for Heroku's free tier and all these other products, like we wouldn't be here. So I want to keep reasoning that way but it took us many iterations to
Original English
>> yeah to get to
Original English
>> point of this is like okay it's a domain people don't know a lot about there are actually unique questions that need human support versus you know command K with just you have docs you have a model
Original English
>> customer service bots exist right
Original English
>> yeah I think right now is much better the there are few things where man there's just so much friction DNS oh my gosh like that's
Original English
>> it's always DNS See, it's always CNS, right? Like the majority of the questions we get today is just like people not able to set that up. And it's fascinating because we're serving a new audience, right? It's an audience that doesn't even know how to troubleshoot. Like I remember uh last year when lovable came and bolt and vzero, I could tell these are different users. The like they don't know when they have a problem, they are stuck. They don't know how to go past that. And with DNS, that was always the case of like, yeah, they just simply don't know what is a CNAME, what is an A record, txt, where do I put those things? So they they would paste the wrong value or silly things.
Original English
>> By the way, right now I use computer use like codeex or cloud code. Uh, and it just completely manages my DNS records. It's great.
Original English
>> It's beautiful, right?
Original English
>> It debugs it. It like digs, you know, and tries all the DNS stuff. Like I don't have to worry about it.
Original English
>> Yeah. One thing that we did like I found this super obscure protocol that like very few people in the industry were like investing on it's called domain connect and it's super interesting by the way and it's something that started like from some domain providers and
Original English
>> Oh uh yeah yeah yeah this is like the oaf for domains right
Original English
>> exactly that
Original English
>> I yeah this is like cloudflare oriented
Original English
>> yeah so some people have like cloudflare is there then we we convinced versel to be there as well and we started like gathering more people. So you have the the two sides right the DNS providers the service providers uh we are the service providers for example and then the DNS providers are implementing but it's a crazy crazy industry like GoDaddy charges like just a lot of money for that it's so weird like Yonas it took us like the the first one it took us like months to get after that person to like no one really maintains the protocol and things like that but It's beautiful like having a protocol that you can just do an oaf for domains is
Original English
>> Yeah. Yeah. So, so for listeners if you're not familiar if you haven't tried it something like that. Uh it's literally like you do use plaid or use like ooth off. You only click buttons you don't type in anything. There's nothing to get wrong. You basically just like sign in and as long as you trust this thing called domain connect which you have confirmed that it is legit then like it's trust. Like I literally I used it for the first time like two weeks ago. I was like what is this? I've never seen this before.
Original English
>> Yeah. Um, so it's really cool. One of the things that I'm trying to figure out as well is how you like start this company. Like you said, you you you tried to get in touch with the Ionos guy. I'm like I wouldn't dare to start recent without knowing like like having like some guy on the inside at Gmail.
Original English
>> Even now it's like okay, can we vibe code our own email thing?
Original English
>> Clearly no. But that that's that's even with tools today. You did this years ago. Like I've you know you want people at domain like you need the guy, right? Yeah, but you need to pick up the phone. I don't know.
Original English
>> Yeah, there were many times that we had to pick up the phone. It's fascinating. Like it's an industry that relies on relationship a lot. Uh and we didn't have those relationships. So, we hired for a few key roles like deliverability roles, folks that have been at Postmark since the beginning or 15 years ago at Mailchimp and then we releveraged that network. Uh but yeah, it's pretty crazy. But what's interesting now, of course, I didn't know that when I started like I could never predict what was going to happen.
Original English
>> You didn't do any research.
Original English
>> Yeah. No. Like I could never predict like okay what AI was going to do and all that, right? But I think we are in a space where man I'm glad we chose infrastructure. I'm glad we're infrastructure as a service and not a just Yeah. software as a service.
Original English
>> You had a little bit right. You had you made React email the year before. So you did dip your toes in open work.
Original English
>> Yeah. Um and then came the company.
Original English
>> Yeah, React email is our nextjs, right? So we wanted like an open-source channel for top of the funnel and I remember doing some things very intentionally. If you go to the docs, for example, you'll find there are docs about how do you set this up with Srid
Original English
and
Mailchimp
and
Mayo
Gun.
I
wrote
every
single
one
of
those
docs
over
there.
Um,
and
I
just
wanted
like,
okay,
this
is
for
everyone
and
we're
trying
to
redefine
how
this
is
and
it
was
a
strategy
of
like
we're
gonna
give
give
and
then
we
ask
uh
and
if
people
are
is
Gary
Vee
Original English
>> yeah
and
if
people
are
like
building
the
like
the
email
template
using
react
like
now
they
need
a
platform
to
send
it
where
do
they
do
that
here's
resend.
So
it
was
a
like
a
storytelling
kind
of
way
of
approaching
the
market
like
we're
going
to
fix
the
first
part
of
the
the
journey
which
is
building
the
template
and
then
once
you
have
the
template
now
that
that
problem
is
fixed
you
need
a
platform
to
send
it
here's
the
platform
Original English
>> but
uh
did
you
have
the
idea
for
resend
when
you
started
react
email
or
was
it
a
side
project
that
Original English
>> then
became
a
company
Original English
>> we
started
recent
and
as
we
were
building
resend
I
was
like
doing
a
lot
of
user
research
and
people
were
saying
like
oh
the
pain
of
writing
the
template.
I
get
the
the
Figma
file
from
my
designer.
It
sucks.
Like
it's
HTML
tables
and
and
everything.
Original English
>> They
would
cut
the
images,
right?
Original English
>> Yeah.
Oh
my
gosh.
Original English
>> Because
there's
nothing.
Original English
>> And
then
there's
like
a
special
syntax
of
HTML
that
only
works
on
email.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Original English
>> Right.
CSS.
It's
all
in
line
CSS.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Inline
CSS.
That's
right.
And
then
like
for
Outlook,
you
have
like
some
special
comments
and
then
you
got
to
Original English
>> It's
such
a
mess.
It's
like
a
It's
a
mess.
Original English
>> And
so
like
to
me
the
reason
that
React
works
is
that
it
is
basically
a
compiler.
It's
like
it's
like
well
somebody
writes
this
once
and
then
as
long
as
you
fit
the
API
it's
going
to
work
everywhere.
Original English
>> Yeah.
And
you
can
import
your
tokens
from
Ten.
Now
you
have
a
a
type
definition
with
TypeScript.
So
no
more
hey
empty
comma
you
know
like
on
your
emails
like
you
can
actually
have
like
a
string
validation
or
whatever
you
want.
I
think
one
of
the
initial
people
that
pushed
back
on
React
email
is
like,
well,
you're
not
actually
using
React.
There's
no
state.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Original English
>> And
like
React
is
supposed
to
be
a
views
as
a
function
of
state.
Original English
>> Uh
but
so
is
mostly
JSX
is
templating.
Is
there
actually
like
animations?
Is
there
interactivity?
Original English
>> No.
Original English
>> Expanding
like
accordionss,
no
nothing
like
that.
Original English
>> So
you
cannot
ship
JavaScript
on
an
email.
So
then
what
you
do
is
Yeah.
We
basically
use
the
templating.
Original English
>> It's
turning
complete.
If
you
Okay.
So,
cool.
Um,
I
actually
do
want
to
like
continue
on
this
email
path,
but
I
see
so
many
names
I
used
to
know.
I
was
just
kind
of
wondering
if
you
can
indulge
us
a
bit
and
just
go
through
like
some
of
these
names
like
Original English
>> what
you
learned
from
them.
If
you
have
any
like
cool
stories,
if
just
just
anything,
you
know,
Original English
>> man,
so
much
so
much.
Uh
I
remember
the
very
first
year
of
recent
I
was
like
I
got
to
meet
the
founder
of
Mayo
Gun
because
I
was
still
a
user
of
mailogun
and
I
talked
to
Ev
um
he's
he
built
uh
oh
my
gosh
Original English
>> blogger
medium
Original English
>> um
no
it's
a
se
it's
a
different
product
um
but
anyways
like
he
it's
a
security
product
uh
that
that
he's
building
now
and
I
remember
talking
to
him
I
was
like
man
why
did
you
sell
so
quickly
your
company
what
was
the
thing?
And
he
told
me
like,
"Oh
yeah,
90%
of
our
R&D
was
just
to
fight
abusers.
So
it
was
a
it's
a
terrible
business.
Like
you
shouldn't
go
there."
Original English
>> And
I
was
like,
"Uh,
like
I
don't
want
to
live
in
that
world
at
all."
Uh,
so
I
was
very
worried
about
that.
Uh,
and
it
was
a
big
lesson
for
me
of
like,
okay,
we
got
to
automate
this
thing.
Like
there's
no
way
we're
just
going
to
build
like
a
massive
org.
uh
for
we
do
have
a
lot
of
people
interested
in
safety
now,
but
it's
not
like
that's
going
to
be
our
core
business.
No,
we're
going
to
we
have
to
be
pushing
the
industry
forward,
but
that
was
one.
And
S
grid
has
always
been
my
favorite
out
of
those
ones
and
always
been
the
behemoth
like
the
the
biggest
the
it's
like,
oh
my
gosh,
how
are
we
ever
gonna
beat
Sang
Grid?
It's
just
impossible.
And
then
earlier
this
year
we
crossed
the
number
of
uh
downloads
from
S
grid
and
I
was
like
that's
insane
and
now
we're
more
than
double.
Original English
>> So
in
terms
of
unique
users
or
what's
the
what's
the
number
Original English
>> downloads
of
the
SDK?
Original English
>> Is
that
the
best
metric?
Original English
>> Yeah
like
I
think
there
there's
something
about
that
metric
in
terms
of
adoption
but
then
if
you
look
at
how
many
emails
they
sent
is
obviously
much
more
than
us
because
they
have
like
the
big
enterprise
customers
yet
and
that
kind
of
thing.
I
think
one
thing
that's
surprising
Original English
>> is
the
whole
point
of
the
Twilio
Sangid
acquisition
is
that
I
now
you're
no
longer
an
email
service.
You're
a
communications
platform,
Original English
>> right?
You
you
integrate
across
everything.
It's
not
it's
not
just
about
crossell.
It
is
about
I
can
reach
you
across
multiple
channels.
Original English
>> Something
like
that.
Or
that
you
have
the
size.
You
know,
Twilio's
like
I
don't
know
what
the
size
is
now.
Let's
let's
call
it
13
15
billion
company.
Original English
>> Uh
you
should
have
all
the
relationships,
all
the
talents,
all
these
all
these
all
these
things,
right?
So
h
how
do
you
compete
with
that?
Original English
>> Yeah,
man.
I
I
admire
Twilio
so
much.
They
kind
of
invented
that
rail
or
or
or
Original English
>> ask
your
developer,
Original English
>> you
know,
ask
your
developer
like
and
now
when
I
I
I
I
go
past
that
101
billboard
and
I
see
a
customer
AI
or
whatever,
I'm
pissed.
I'm
like,
why?
Like
you
neglected
the
thing
that
got
you
there.
Um,
and
I
think
uh
now
like
Jeff
is
not
there
anymore.
The
CFO
is
Original English
>> he
bought
the
onion.
Original English
>> Yeah,
that's
right.
That's
right.
So
I
feel
like
they're
just
sleeping
on
it.
And
first
they
did
that
with
Sen
Grid
and
they're
doing
that
with
SMS
too.
And
yeah,
Original English
>> but
I
think
my
my
lesson
here
is
I'm
trying
to
figure
out
the
economics
of
scale
of
this
industry,
right?
Like
clearly,
you
know,
let's
let's
call
it
they're
100
times
larger
than
you
when
you
when
you
just
got
started,
right?
um
how
come
they
cannot
use
their
size
to
just
win
Original English
>> right
Original English
>> so
so
in
in
other
words
maybe
maybe
there
is
no
benefits
to
scale
maybe
just
you
know
and
you
just
make
a
better
product
and
you
can
slowly
Original English
>> for
sure
and
I've
always
thought
about
too
like
why
did
Twilio
acquire
Sen
Grid
and
not
the
other
way
around
uh
Original English
>> uh
Twilio
was
bigger
I
mean
SMS
Original English
>> is
big
Original English
>> but
like
if
email
and
communication
is
a
commodity
like
SMS
your
margins
are
even
Original English
>> slimmer,
even
worse.
So,
Original English
>> have
you
looked
into
SMS?
Original English
>> Yeah,
for
sure.
Original English
>> You
send
SMS?
Original English
>> I
think
one
day.
Yeah,
I
think
one
day.
Yeah.
Original English
>> What
are
the
channels
that
matter?
Email,
SMS.
What
else?
Original English
>> WhatsApp.
WhatsApp
is
big
in
in
Original English
>> WhatsApp
is
free,
right?
You
don't
pay
anything.
Original English
>> Yeah.
But
then
you
you
got
to
go
through
Meta
and
now
uh
business
messages
are
going
to
be
charged.
Uh
so
there
there
is
some
friction
there.
Uh
for
sure.
Original English
>> Phone
calls.
Original English
>> Phone
calls
is
a
good
one.
Uh
I'm
less
I
never
take
any
robocalls,
right?
Original English
>> Yeah,
that's
true.
I'm
less
interested
about
that
too.
What
I
care
is
like
Original English
>> what
are
the
things
that
makes
me
able
to
connect
with
my
audience?
Like
that's
what
I
ultimately
care.
Like
I
don't
care
about
email.
Original English
>> DMs.
Original English
>> Yeah,
DMs
it's
one.
It's
hard
because
you
cannot
like
DM
a
big
crowd
like
but
Slack
maybe
is
one,
right?
Slack
Original English
>> like
I
have
so
many
Slack
connects
uh
and
I
need
to
share
the
news
about
like
this
one
new
feature
that
they
built.
Original English
>> Pylon
I
don't
know
if
you
guys
use
pyon
uh
I
think
they
kind
of
innovated
this
like
slack
support
thing
but
you
can
obviously
trivally
build
your
own.
Original English
>> Um
okay
and
then
I
think
the
other
one
I
want
to
touch
on
is
AWS.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Original English
>> U
so
my
connection
to
this
is
uh
I
learned
to
code
with
free
code
campy
Larson
and
everything.
Original English
>> Uh
they
have
like
5
million
subscribers
on
their
newsletter.
Original English
>> Yeah.
sent
through
Amazon
SCES
for
like
$5,000
a
month.
Original English
>> Mhm.
Original English
>> Which
is
cheap.
Original English
>> Cheap.
Original English
>> I
don't
know
how
I
don't
know
what
you
will
cost.
Original English
>> Yeah.
More
than
that.
Original English
>> So
So
basically
like
to
me
it's
just
like
the
lowcost
player,
right?
That
that
is
I
mean
it's
Amazon.
It's
like
they're
they're
super
established.
Original English
>> Uh
what
do
you
take
from
them
and
then
what
do
you
what
should
people
know
to
stay
away
from
them?
Original English
>> We
started
with
SCS
too.
uh
we
Original English
knew that okay if we're going to be innovating here I wanted to innovate on the DX layer and because I felt like that was the underserved uh space so let me have SDKs for every single language I remember with serverless we highlighted service because like no one had like guides on how to send an email with lambda or something so there's just this underserved space in in DX so we started with like the most high level layer and that that served us really well was able to like scale because we were using SCS behind the scenes. Turns out there's just a lot of limitations when it comes to the way you structure domains and they have this concept of configuration sets and the hidden cost if you're going with SCS is that okay you might be paying only 5K for example but now you need SNS for the events. So you need like all the feedback from bounces, complaints, open clicks, all that. And now, so you get the events. Great. Now you need cloudatch for the logs. Now you need a queue because it's going to be a lot of events. So now you add SQS. And now that you have SQS, so you start like adding all these different layers. Oh, you want web hooks. Okay, now you got to build another thing. So if you go with SCS, it's a great platform. It it's fine. But you're going to notice like your footprint will be much bigger than you would imagine very quickly because you need all the apparatus uh around it.
Original English
>> Yeah. Um I would say you know another YC startup that came up in the male area is agent mail and then they they I talked to the guy as well and it was like yeah we were not going to we're going to build on top of SCS and not really compete with them.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Original English
>> But for us it's changing that now. So we are we're building the infrastructure and going like down to the metal now. And for us it it feels like we got to the point where now this makes sense to innovate on the the most basic layer and now we can get better throughputs, better deliverability if we just focus on that. Uh but it's a big project like we've been working for months now and we're going to announce something soon about the
Original English
>> what is the hardest thing to is it like uh trusted IPs is it compute and data centers or what what is the blocker?
Original English
Yeah, definitely IPs you're buying like a whole IP block and then now you're managing the IP pools yourself. That that's one and then you're almost doing like traffic control uh and you're controlling the throughput into each mailbox provider and then you need the relationships with the providers but then like once you have that established that infrastructure now you have way more control into what you can give to users. So one of the my biggest things were like observability you know like that as an engineer I I want to see exactly what's happening and I've always felt like in this space there wasn't enough information like once when an email goes out is it really delivered is it really on this P is in the promotional tab like I never know like you just trust that the email goes out and then you always hear from some users like oh it didn't get the email I'm like what like what happened so there's that empty space between those things and the more we're close to the metal, the more we have in terms of data that we can surface for for users. So, I'm really excited. It's like the the flagship uh change that we're making now to
Original English
I mean, you're becoming it's it's really interesting for all like DX type businesses. You start with like a thin layer like a React email and then it's like okay well we'll build on other people's infra and then once you get size then you can actually build your own infra, right? Are you doing anything differently because now you own everything?
Original English
>> Yeah, I think what we're doing is um
Original English
>> and by the way, obviously your dashboards are beautiful.
Original English
>> It's funny, man. Everyone I talk to now, like all the customers are like, "Oh, I never opened the dashboard, but we can talk about that later." Uh, but it's interesting like I spend so much time trying to make the dashboard beautiful and now people don't go there. It's kind of frustrating, but I get it. But yeah, we're just trying to approach that with the same naive mentality uh that we approach all the other problems and we're like okay this shouldn't be this way. So you're challenging the most basic things of like this shouldn't be this way the P99 shouldn't take this long how we can make it faster. Okay so that's one of the things we're doing now like focused very very deep into performance and we have always been like a no.js JS shop and we have like just TypeScript everywhere and most recently like in the sending path we no longer use a JavaScript we have go there and we're changing other parts to be more more performant in other ways
Original English
>> cuz now languages don't matter.
Original English
>> Exactly right. It's just so cheap to Yeah. like pick a problem and yeah you can rewrite the whole thing in whatever the fast languages. I'm like running Rust projects and I've never I don't really know Rust. Like I know like some theoretical things about Rust, but I've never really bothered to learn it. I
Original English
>> I feel like we're not really covering the recent product surface area. Uh maybe you want to go.
Original English
>> No, no. I mean, you know, there's everything we've talked about, which is why it's hard, what all you're solving. And then there's also just
Original English
>> send emails from CLI super agent forward. You have some takes on this. I think the other day you tweeted like MCP is so back, right? like over a million MCP calls. Like what's the what's the AI side of email?
Original English
>> Yeah. Yeah. Everyone was saying MCP was dead right a couple months ago. Like yeah, the only thing that matters is the CLI. What I've noticed is that I stopped paying attention to what what's in, what's out. And I I really think about these problems is like, okay, how do I want my product to be? Well, I want my product to be formless. whatever they want to do with the product, it should be possible. So that that's why we've always been API first. Uh you know, I had no idea how much this would help us down the line, but I knew, yeah, like if I will never be able to cover all the use cases, so let me just give the API, you do whatever you want. And with the MCP is just fascinating like every month like at least 2x growth. And now in August, these numbers are even more. This was before the end of August. I think it was 1.2 2 million by the time it ended. But um yeah like people are starting to work from cloud desktop or uh codeex and if work starts from there then you need those integrations right it's just super important.
Original English
>> I just want to clarify as well uh so you know you show like sort of like the month- bymonth numbers on the MTP thing. It picked up from like let's say 50% month-to-month growth which is already super high. Then it starts to double basically every month. Mhm.
Original English
>> Did you do investment into MCP or you just had an MCP and it just after some time it gets picked up?
Original English
>> Well, the fun fact about that our very first MCP was built by Yoko from A16Z, our investor.
Original English
>> Wow. Value ad.
Original English
>> Yeah. Right.
Original English
>> So, she she built the the open source version. It was a remote local MCP. And and then it started to grow like like crazy. I was like, man, why are people using it's like so hard to set up MCP? This was uh last year and then Yoko.
Original English
>> Yeah, exactly.
Original English
And so she built that uh and then I just asked her, hey, can you transfer to our org? It was like just like an engineer building something. And it was nice to see after the traction it was getting. But to do the MCP, right, to do the remote one, we had to go back and revisit our entire permissions model because we need it all off. And then we we're like okay now we have a blocker let's build off. So then we build off and it's like okay our back let's look at that like let let's look at how users uh have access to each one of the resources. So it was a whole journey to build OAF and then after we had OF okay now we have the remote MCP and then it's distribution. So then okay now we have the remote speed. Okay, great, great, great. Observability is in place. Great, great. Okay, all the data dog dashboards. Okay, now all in. Let's talk
Original English
to everyone. And that was hard, too.
Like, uh, it's not as easy. I wish I had all your connections. Uh, it's not as easy to me. Talk to me.
Original English
>> Uh, but like talking to the labs and trying to get into like the the official stores and plugin market.
Original English
>> Do you think that actually matters?
Original English
>> Oh, for sure.
Original English
>> Yeah. I I think sometimes like
Original English
>> I've been on the other side where I try so hard to get these partnerships, we launch it and then nothing,
Original English
>> right? So
Original English
>> which one matters?
Original English
>> So as a consumer, I make decisions now based on do I have the access to that data or not? So as a as a buyer of B2B software, if I go to the claude connectors and I don't see the company listed there
Original English
>> with an official MCP like for we had this like we had a we were using Plausible and Post Hog Plausible had an MCP built by Sentry.
Original English
>> I don't care if the Plausible doesn't maintain that and that's not official. I I don't I cannot trust that as much. Even though I love the Sentry team and I trust that team, but I need the owner of the software to own this piece of integration.
Original English
>> Oh my god.
Original English
>> And I made the call like no, we are getting rid of Plausible and we're just going to use uh Post Hog here because I have the MCP there. And I did that as a as a B2C consumer too. I'm like into running and then I'm like, "Oh, let me like Straa Straa has an MCP. I can like access my runs." So I use Straa because of that. So, and if there's like, oh, no, we have an MCP, but you have to connect like this. Like the XMCP for example, I have to do like the the local one. It's just so frustrating. It works on the desktop client, not on my phone. Like like to me, it's just Yeah. If it's not there, I don't use it.
Original English
>> Apart from okay, it is officially maintained by the vendor or whatever. What makes a good MCP versus a social MCP?
Original English
even for hours as I as I interact with that. There were like I always like it's always collapse, right? The the tool calls I'm always opening and trying to understand like what did it do? And just a couple days ago like there was one call where it couldn't put everything on the contacts for some reason. And then I'm like no, this shouldn't happen. Like how much data are we sending? Maybe we're sending way too much data to the client. So that's something that I noticed like the amount of tools. This was a bigger concern earlier like oh if you have way too many tools they get confused. I don't see that as much anymore. Uh and in fact we are just adding more to the MCP. Oh
Original English
>> like we had like maybe I don't know 20 tools when we launched or even less than that. Now we have like 80 something tools.
Original English
>> What the
Original English
>> Yeah. And like I'm adding more and more like the the long tail of to like the the footprint. That's what I've noticed like you can do like only 90% of what your dashboard does
Original English
>> and that's one way of doing it or you can do 100. Getting to 100% coverage of what your dashboard can do is actually very very difficult because now you're doing usage billing team invites account provisioning deletion should that be exposed as an API or not? Like it's it's really hard. Like it's a it's a difficult problem.
Original English
>> Yeah. In fact, uh you know there you are one of the few lat space guests I can I can ever talk about this with.
Original English
>> I think this is one of the mistakes of Nex.js.
Original English
>> Oh really?
Original English
>> Because Nex.js and server components and uh pages API or apps apps API.
Original English
>> Mhm.
Original English
>> Um they make it easy for you to basically bind data to your page.
Original English
>> Okay.
Original English
>> So you never expose a public API.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Original English
>> So by default the thing that is performance and they encourage you to do you will not have an API.
Original English
>> That's right. then you have to just do like separate code paths or whatever.
Original English
>> In fact, you should just always have like completely headless back end and then your front end just happens to be one of many clients that connects to your back end.
Original English
>> Yeah, we started with uh our API on next. I remember that first of all the bill was just so high that we were like there's no way we can pay for this. So then we moved to a traditional node server uh server full or whatever you call it and and then like our dashboard was always like a private API consuming the same thing. and we had to duplicate a lot of code. It was a mess, right? Um, now it's so much better. Everything on a monor repo, you can reuse stuff. But yeah, like by default, ideally those frameworks like just gives us those components, right? We had to build a public API separately from that and it sucks to maintain both.
Original English
>> Yeah. Okay. And then one more thing about just just on front. uh you know so you are 80 you got 80 tools in there you're growing more tools you are very counter consensus compared to Cloudflare which only has two tools search and execute or something like that
Original English
>> so far you haven't felt that issue but uh what would make you change your mind right like you you it seems like numbers are going up but do you actually know do you do you talk to your customers and say they're like oh my god it's like the best MCP on earth like
Original English
>> Mhm. I do try to get a lot of feedback on that and then the way uh the way I like to build products is I got to use the product my on my own right so if I'm like the investor update that I sent you yesterday that was built using the MCP you know I was like fetching data from one place from another place and then uh
Original English
>> you're making me feel bad now I don't do all this I don't use MCP enough now basically is what I'm hearing
Original English
>> I mean I guess the other thing is also like you do have CLI you do have regular SDK Yeah.
Original English
>> Are those also just growing crazy? Is everything just from a lot of growth or
Original English
>> Yeah, the CLI is definitely growing, but not as much as the MCP. But I have a lot of fun with the CLI too. Like if you go to our careers page, I'm actually proud of this because I built it on a weekend or something. But if you go to any job there and you you try to apply for a job and you do those go down now you have three ways of applying. You can apply via
Original English
>> or API. So you can just log in and it has an interactive mode or we have skills baked in into the CLI and you can just ask claude like apply for a product designer role at recent.
Original English
>> Okay. So you're very you are filling yourself with slop especially in careers but no I mean I think maybe that's also the people you want right
Original English
>> totally I actually have a filter if the source is the CLI I look differently because I know people are going the extra mile like setting that up like oh no I got to download this thing and I have to authenticate and then I have to go through that flow
Original English
>> but guess what like people who go through that they always tell me like man I've never applied for a job using a CLI before so even they are not accepted like there's just something like it's just a different experience than other job applications
Original English
>> even API apply for one job through API
Original English
>> exactly
Original English
>> I mean it's you know the same thing as
Original English
>> uh yeah so so I think one of the things I'm trying to figure out as well is like product philosophy right like you you are you're clearly just like you just max everywhere like every SDK every language every uh surface area
Original English
>> obviously easier with agents but I think some other founders that I would know would say, "Hey, this doesn't matter. Give that to Greenhouse or Ashb."
Original English
>> Yep.
Original English
>> It's your job applic. You're not going to differentiate like this, right?
Original English
>> Yeah.
Original English
>> You clearly have a very different philosophy of you care about everything even though, you know, probably some of this stuff is just wasted. The way I see it is um I'm trying to optimize not only for the privileged users like the users who who have the greatest Wi-Fi the MacBooks that are here in ASV or in New York right all these people in the margins that are in other countries with a terrible Wi-Fi
Original English
>> Brazil
Original English
>> Brazil growing up that that's how it was for me a terrible Windows computer and terrible internet access. So that's why we have the free tier. We we don't have the free tier because of the you know like there's a there's a reason behind it when we we have all the SDKs. So I'm maxing on
Original English
the
SDKs
man
building
the
net
SDK.
Do
you
think
that
was
fun?
Like
and
we
looked
into
Original English
>> stainless
Original English
>> stainless
fern
what's
the
third
one?
Uh
but
like
we
look
at
all
these
companies
right
we
didn't
like
what
was
generated.
So
every
one
of
those
SDKs
is
humanly
generated.
The
Java
one,
the
Rust,
all
those
ones,
right?
And
I
do
that
because
I
feel
like,
yeah,
if
you're
using
a
product,
you
should
have
the
best
experience
in
that
language
that
you're
using.
Oh,
but
there's
only
500
people
out
of
the
4
million.
I
care
about
those
four
400
people.
Original English
>> Wow.
Original English
>> You
know,
why
not?
You
know,
Original English
>> why
not
is
you
have
4
million
users.
that's
why
not
Original English
>> there's
a
lot
of
stuff
to
do
but
it's
it's
good
to
have
that
opinionated
side
towards
building
this
right
Original English
>> any
other
product
surface
area
stuff
that
we
should
cover
uh
you
covered
CLI
covered
templates
covered
MCP
Original English
>> I
think
it's
good
to
get
a
highle
perspective
from
you
of
how
much
of
this
is
very
traditional
you
even
have
dashboards
templates
to
manually
write
emails
you
have
programmatic
you
also
have
the
full
agent
build
like
where
do
you
see
it
going
how
do
you
think
about
building
this
for
a
pretty
fast
changing
world,
right?
Original English
>> Yeah,
there's
definitely
still
a
component
of
email
moving
out
of
this
single
player
mode
and
going
more
into
multiplayer.
Uh
we
even
built
our
editor
like
this.
It's
multiplayer.
It
fix
all
the
conflicts
if
you
have
two
or
three
people.
We
actually
run
if
I
have
a
private
recent
account
with
all
the
teams
and
uh
we
run
all
of
our
all
hands
uh
there.
So
the
all
hands
is
pretty
much
you
go
there
it's
a
huge
Original English
>> you
make
an
email
Original English
>> it's
an
email
and
we
send
the
email
together
at
the
end
of
the
all
hands
it's
super
fun
and
you
have
like
20
people
in
the
same
documentary
Original English
>> this
is
like
no
I
I
feel
like
99%
of
people
have
not
thought
about
multiplayer
email
right
but
Original English
>> yes
Original English
>> you
have
a
lot
Original English
>> yeah
and
it
was
really
fun
man
that
editor
alone
it's
so
freaking
hard
to
maintain
that
thing
but
I
love
it
I
love
that
we
have
the
UI
for
people
who
need
the
UI.
Like
some
teams
hate
to
have
the
email
template
pushed
into
their
source
code.
Then
they
just
want
to
build
a
visual
editor,
a
template,
give
to
the
marketing
team
and
just
call
the
ID.
I
do
I
don't
care
about
the
template.
I
just
want
to
call
the
ID
with
variables
and
I'm
I'm
done.
Uh
other
teams
they
they
do
they
do
like
no,
I
want
to
commit.
I
want
to
have
source
control
over
this
and
own
this
piece
of
thing.
So
I
try
to
tailor
to
those
different
audiences
and
uh
and
build
a
product
that
feels
that
we
care
uh
which
is
not
the
feeling
I
get
elsewhere.
Original English
>> Yeah.
By
the
way,
what
does
the
recent
team
used
to
read
email
uh
superhuman
or
Original English
>> Yeah.
Oh
man,
that
have
you
seen
the
last
superhuman
update
uh
this
busy
with
other
launches
too,
right?
Original English
>> Uh
yeah.
And
and
for
for
listeners,
we
are
recording
this
on
the
day
of
the
Astra
launch,
which
I
was
pulled
into
and
like
I
am
not
sleeping,
but
uh
no,
what's
wrong
with
it?
They
just
updated
the
UI
a
little
bit.
Original English
>> Yeah.
The
there's
just
um
a
sentiment
of
like,
oh,
this
is
going
into
the
direction
of
every
other
acquisition
goes,
right?
Like
now
you're
feeding
a
brand
that
has
other
Original English
>> Grammarly
and
other
things.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Original English
>> Okay.
This
is
just
email.
I
know
I
I
do
want
to
keep
up
to
date
on
email
tech
in
general.
Uh
you're
on
the
sending
side,
other
people
on
the
reading
and
receiving
side.
Yes.
Original English
>> Uh
and
then
I
think
uh
you
know
increasingly
I
would
say
agents
reading
my
email,
right?
Like
uh
I
actually
don't
read
most
my
email.
I
have
Poke
and
Two
Humans
helping
me
with
my
email.
Original English
>> Nice.
Original English
>> I
love
that.
Original English
>> Um
Poke
is
pretty
good.
I
I
honestly
like
Instinct
now
super
hot.
$2.5
billion
company
with
no
no
revenue.
Um
and
like
it's
just
like
people
trying
to
read
email
agents.
Original English
>> Yeah,
that
we
are
definitely
looking
to
that
space.
That's
another
thing
that
I'm
spending
a
lot
of
my
time
like
how
you
can
programmatically
create
dozens
of
inboxes
and
then
how
are
those
inboxes
accessed
by
Original English
>> because
you
you
create
you
uh
enabled
re
receiving
email.
What
is
it
called?
Inbound.
Original English
>> Inbound.
Yeah.
Original English
>> Email.
Original English
>> So
now
we're
going
another
abstraction.
Inbound
is
like
the
most
basic
abstraction.
Now
we're
going
one
step
further
and
be
like,
"Oh,
you
need
100
inboxes
for
any
reason
and
here
are
the
APIs
that
you
need
on
top
of
that,
right?"
So
you
need
a
read
API,
markers
and
red,
you
need
star
API
labeling.
I
see.
Original English
>> Uh
so
we're
going
to
be
launching
a
product
around
that
soon.
Original English
>> Yeah.
But
again,
it's
all
API
driven
because
that
the
the
fully
because
like
uh
I
I
would
say
the
comparable
stuff
that
I've
been
looking
at
is
missive.
Original English
>> Yep.
And
there's
other
like
uh
help
scout.
Original English
>> Yes.
Or
Original English
>> like
a
shared
inbox
type
of
product,
right?
Original English
>> Front.
Front.
Original English
>> Front.
Yeah.
So
hopefully
this
can
be
uh
a
version
of
that.
Uh
I
can
share
with
you.
There's
a
feature
flag
for
you
if
you
want
to
try
that
out.
Original English
>> Yeah.
I'm
I'm
very
interested
in
email
tech.
Uh
okay.
And
and
then
to
me
uh
and
then
I
again
I'm
just
like
asking
all
these
questions.
Original English
>> What
percent
of
your
email
goes
to
a
G
Suite
or
you
know
like
what's
the
market
share,
right?
like
Google
versus
Outlook
Original English
>> versus
Apple
versus
Hotmail.
Original English
>> Yeah,
I
don't
have
the
numbers
top
of
my
head,
but
the
vast
majority
like
at
least
60
60%
Gmail
and
then
you
have
like
maybe
the
the
big
tree
after
like
the
Outlook,
the
the
Yahoo
Mails
of
the
world
right
after
and
then
you
have
a
long
tale
of
Original English
>> Apple's
not
that
big.
Original English
>> Apple
is
big.
Yeah.
And
especially
with
the
the
privacy
thing
that
they
did
now,
um
it's
hard
Original English
>> to
sign
up
to
an
Apple
ID.
Original English
>> Sorry.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Like
Apple
autogenerates
an
email
address
for
you.
So
if
you
sign
up
for
Original English
>> Yeah,
I
use
that.
I
use
that.
Original English
>> Is
that
a
problem
for
you
guys?
Original English
>> They're
more
strict
in
terms
of
what
can
get
into
those
inboxes.
Uh
so
sometimes
as
a
domain
owner
we
actually
have
like
an
in
product
wizard
to
help
you
like
register
with
Apple
so
that
you
can
get
your
emails
delivered
there.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Yeah.
Um
okay
I
I
understand.
Obviously
this
is
your
job
right?
The
whole
thing
is
deliverability.
If
you
don't
have
deliverability
you
don't
have
a
business.
Original English
>> Exact
that's
kind
of
the
Original English
>> we
can
have
the
most
beautiful
Rubik's
cube
in
the
website.
the
most
cool
like
coolest
handbook
ever.
If
it's
down,
Original English
>> yeah,
Original English
>> it's
all
for
nothing.
Original English
>> And
how
correlated
are
they
are
they
right?
Like
if
you
get
banned
or
down
downranked
or
put
in
promotions
tab
in
Google,
does
that
transfer
over
to
the
other
guys
or
are
they
very
decentralized?
Original English
>> Thankfully
now,
like
in
the
beginning
of
the
email
industry,
it
was
very
IP
based
and
if
one
IP
was
damaged,
like
now
you
you
getting
the
the
consequences
of
that.
Now
there's
a
lot
of
reputation
associated
with
the
domain.
So
then
what
people
do
is
uh
you
create
different
subdomains
depending
on
what
type
of
emails
you're
sending
like
one
subdomain
for
transactional
emails
that
you
know
that
maybe
doesn't
have
click
and
open
tracking
and
then
you
have
another
domain
for
your
marketing
emails
and
those
subdomains
help
segregate
the
reputation
of
uh
whatever.
Original English
>> Would
it
be
like
transactions.reresend.com?
Original English
>> Yeah.
updates,
notifications,
whatever
you
want
to
use
it.
Uh,
Original English
>> and
do
I
have
more
dots
if
I
want
like
a
b.c.resent.com?
Original English
you
could
do,
but
we
just
see
like
uh
doing
I
don't
know
five
subdomains
is
like
yeah
not
not
really
practical
but
like
people
do
uh
yeah
like
some
special
ones
like
we
do
that
at
recent
for
our
own
emails
like
marketing
has
a
different
stream
than
the
transactional
ones
and
Original English
>> yeah
even
the
the
investor
one
has
a
different
like
I
I
use
confidentialresent.com
to
send
those
emails
Original English
>> I
didn't
even
know
you
could
yeah
and
that
that
is
good
advice
It's
before
it
was
very
IP
based
now
it's
domain
based
Original English
>> you
know
I
have
okay
I
have
received
so
many
bad
I
had
to
buy
a
separate
so
because
we
use
AIER
and
space
these
are
all
like
weird
TLDDS
that
nobody
recognizes
right
so
I
was
told
to
get
coms
for
everything
Original English
>> and
then
maybe
that
improves
deliverability
Original English
>> the
problem
with
that
is
that
now
like
let's
say
let's
take
Coca-Cola
right
Coca-Cola
has
a
domain
now
your
Coca-Cola
like
oh
yeah
let's
buy
Original English
another domain domain that looks like our domain.
Original English
>> It looks like fishing.
Original English
>> It looks exactly like fishing. So, the chances of damage is way worse.
Original English
>> Is this still a thing when you're buying the com? Like, I would get it the other way, right? You're latentpace.com. I buy laten.space looks like fishing, right? But
Original English
>> the com still,
Original English
>> man, you would be surprised like there's just like the things I see on a day-to-day basis. This is like crazy. Yeah.
Original English
>> Yeah. So what I'm hearing is like com is worth it. It's
Original English
>> Yeah. Yeah.
Original English
>> That's all the sort of uh business of email. Obviously some part of it is you just got started before trag
Original English
>> and then you were a leading player that people liked and then obviously organically you you pop up. You didn't do anything special for AEO.
Original English
>> What did you do for AEO? I would say we were not the leaders because we coming up like in 2023 like very few people knew about recent and we were like so behind twillio Postmark mail gun those companies invested in SEO for 10 plus years. So for us to get ranked for anything was like almost like it's it was a uphill battle like so so difficult. So then what we did was like okay let's focus on the docs for sure and the docs was very intentional about like okay if we're doing a docs on it has long tail again like oh here's a docs on uh not just python like how you set it up with Django
Original English
>> yeah how to blah with blah how to blah with blah
Original English
>> super short articles focus on
Original English
>> just traditional SEO
Original English
>> traditional SEO uh nothing fancy there when models started to come then I was like okay maybe I got to change the content of the page because if people are asking questions then I need to like create content that is in action and answer ask and answer type of format. So a lot of FAQs now almost every page at recent has an FAQ you know like you go to pricing page or like Yeah. Uh of course pricing almost always has pretty standard. Yeah.
Original English
>> But like you do FAQs in like all sorts of Yeah. I think maybe security also. Yeah. So like you see it's like a pattern uh of like all pages have that because that's how people are asking is recent so to compliant and then just have the answer right there
Original English
>> and then okay now we have those things in okay now we got to do llm.txt so we added llm.xt on our docs thankfully because of Mintify that we use great product and we're like okay how we take this to the marketing site too so then llm.txt txt for every marketing page. Same with the like docs hatch mark uh markdown versions of the docs. I'm going to do markdown versions of every single page on the website on the marketing website
Original English
>> using content sniffing or you just append like MD.
Original English
>> Yeah, just append you do append uh so if you go to the yeah security page MD it will work.
Original English
>> Yeah. But also if you do content negotiation with that page uh it will render on that page like the markdown version without going to the
Original English
>> Yeah. Which for listeners this is one of those things I'm not sure it matters.
Original English
>> Mhm.
Original English
>> I'm really not sure.
Original English
>> I mean you're winning really well. So
Original English
>> yeah I think what one example that changed uh and maybe it doesn't help with distribution but helps with accuracy. So go to the pricing page. I remember this was like a random Sunday and I I was just like doing competitor analysis and I was just asking like okay if you send 1.2 million emails using resent and you do that with X and Y and Z competitor
Original English
>> who is the the cheapest and who who's the most expensive and it got completely wrong. He got the recent one like so bad and it it actually said like very bad things about us like oh recent pricing is very obscure. I was like what the Like it's not obscure at all. Uh so it was like super frustrating.
Original English
>> Oh so you made a calculator.
Original English
>> Yeah. So the the problem was you know agents don't really uh drag a JavaScript widget.
Original English
>> Okay.
Original English
>> So then what I did was the the MT version of this page uh which has a tremendous amount of uh access by the way like now like
Original English
>> you get analytics on this.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Original English
>> Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Original English
>> Not through the the the regular analytics spots too because like we cannot track that.
Original English
>> Yeah. It's a server side.
Original English
>> So then like we got to go to data dog to figure that out.
Original English
>> Okay.
Original English
>> And man it was really crazy like uh and then I made that change. I pushed that and then I asked again like a few days later and then he got the numbers right.
Original English
>> I see.
Original English
>> So I'm like okay this
Original English
>> way to live update and fix stuff in your
Original English
>> Exactly. And and this is what matters right like okay
Original English
>> it does mean that you don't have a single source of truth like you have to update the MD and then you also have to update the
Original English
>> that sucks completely.
Original English
>> But again if if I wanted the the happy path and the easy path like I wouldn't be doing email. So I'm like that's the price of like
Original English
>> well you know if you're good at react you can write a custom renderer that like yeah you know you know how to do this.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Original English
>> What else we talk baselines basically have FAQ everywhere basic SEO stuff
Original English
>> comparison pages us versus sang grid us versus uh
Original English
>> although our page could be much better go to
Original English
>> yeah I notice it's not there. I mean I'm sure you have it somewhere in some footer or something or whatever.
Original English
>> Yeah just do slashmigrate. Uh, I can give you some.
Original English
>> By the way, 404 pages, I always think we should guess,
Original English
>> you know, pick the slug.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Original English
>> Nearest neighbors.
Original English
>> Oh, yeah. Okay.
Original English
>> I mean, I think there's a side
Original English
>> in case you any break a URL like it just auto fix itself, right? You don't you don't just serve the 404. My intention with those was like, "Oh, let me try to do something that's not exactly like a comparison page, but I don't think uh it was a great idea because it uh our competitors actually built the comparison pages and they get recommended more than ours." Yeah.
Original English
>> But what we try to do like if you go to Postmark for example is like okay let's demonstrate first like hey if you want to migrate here's a code converter uh
Original English
>> insert example.
Original English
>> Yeah. So if you just put any co code block there. Oh
Original English
>> why why dude? Why?
Original English
>> That's what we do. That's what we do.
Original English
>> This is so extra.
Original English
>> There's a cube on the landing page. Everything is extra.
Original English
>> But like the the adoption is one that I pushed this last weekend. Um like now we have a graph that compares like our adoption uh with every different competitor and you you see one thing like again this was a lesson that I learned with the pricing page JavaScript widgets they're not going to be executed so I spell out the same data in text so that uh LLMs can actually read that thing. Uh so
Original English
>> I think they're getting somewhat better. I see a lot of agentic use. Okay. Load load website, click on image, interpret image. It's slower. But
Original English
>> yeah, but with computer use, they are getting much better. I agree. But if you're fetching information and you're just comparing stuff, they don't they don't do that, right?
Original English
>> I think they're starting to go more towards computer use. I've been doing a lot of compare this and this and the browse of website is pretty computer use.
Original English
>> Okay. Yeah. I noticed that you don't have like uh you know another classic AO tactic is like here's how to connect our thing with CL code here's how to connect our thing with codeex
Original English
>> AI page
Original English
>> oh okay
Original English
>> page okay
Original English
>> there are some things that are interesting like if you go to the legal page so recent.com/legal any one of these like oh you summarize or ask to explain
Original English
>> complexity
Original English
>> I see that's just an external link yeah
Original English
>> yeah I Again, not sure that matters, but
Original English
>> you mentioned a lot about recency for AEO compared to traditional SEO. So,
Original English
>> yeah, that was my like the the thing that I was super uh curious about uh in the beginning like there was no reason for any of the models to recommend us because we're so behind in SEO. We we don't have the typical glossery page or whatever like or articles that are so generic that were just like SEO heavy. And I was trying to uncover like what what is that? And I could totally tell like uh at least with Opus 4.5 there was a recency bias in terms of the the technology and where they were fetching data. I know
Original English
recently
like
they
said
like
maybe
rapid
is
not
necessarily
um
something
that
people
suggest
anymore
but
definitely
like
newer
tools
uh
they
started
popping
more
and
recent
was
one
of
those
and
because
there
was
a
lot
of
I
don't
know
organic
content
about
the
tool
then
we
would
be
getting
recommended
more
so
the
advice
here
is
just
like
try
to
get
as
more
people
in
in
more
places
to
talk
about
the
product
as
possible
because
it
definitely
influences
Obviously,
I
think
that
is
a
class
of
it.
I
guess
did
you
ever
engage
SEO
consultants,
AO
consultants?
Are
they
useful?
Are
they
waste
of
money?
Original English
>> We
never
really
did.
Original English
>> You
seem
like
you're
just
doing
everything
yourself.
Original English
>> You're
the
2024
tweet
of
let's
talk
about
I
think
you
were
one
of
the
first
ones
to
to
pick
it
up,
you
know.
Original English
>> Yeah.
I
mean,
I
think
people
generally
the
state
of
things
we
because
we
did
an
AEO
or
GEO
episode
at
the
time
around
this
stuff
and
most
people
were
like
just
do
what
normal
SEO
does
>> and
don't
block
AI
chatbots,
I
think.
And
then
most
most
tools
like
profound
at
at
the
time,
they
would
just
like
track
your
mentions
and
then,
you
know,
let
you
do
experiments
and
all
those
things.
All
those
things
are
part
for
the
course
and
normal.
I
I'm
just
trying
to
obviously
like
people
are
pinging
me
cuz
I'm
also
doing
AO
experiments
>> on
like
what
to
do.
Original English
>> I
have
unfair
advantage
cuz
I'm
a
content
business.
>> So
obviously
I
pump
out
content
whereas
you
actually
have
a
product
Original English
>> but
I
guess
how
important
is
it
to
you
too?
Like
you're
very
winning
but
how
much
do
you
keep
a
track
of
how
well
are
docs
used?
How
often
are
we
recommended
compared
to
competitors?
Like
man,
I
think
it's
so
crucial
because
before
we
if
we
want
if
we're
like
a
little
bit
unsure
about
which
tool
to
use,
we
would
ask
Google
and
then
you
would
get
to
like
those
comparison
pages
or
you
would
get
like
the
first
three
responses
and
now
you
just
get
the
one
response
out
of
the
gate,
right?
if
you're
asking
which
tool
should
I
use
and
yeah
people
just
want
to
go
with
the
the
one
that
is
the
most
frictionless
and
Original English
>> yeah
which
I
think
free
tier
is
very
important
and
um
I
think
uh
Michael
Grenage
from
work
OS
is
trying
to
promote
this
idea
of
off
MD
right
I
don't
know
if
you
seen
this
so
so
uh
the
idea
that
you
it's
very
similar
to
as
well
where
you
don't
need
an
account
to
to
do
the
basic
action
>> so
it's
like
unauthenticated
usage
of
your
product
which
very
dangerous
obviously
because
it's
prone
abuse,
but
uh
it
is
the
the
easiest
like
no
sign
up.
Original English
>> Yeah,
that's
the
thing
that
I'm
I'm
try.
Yeah,
I'm
debating
doing
that
or
not.
Do
we
need
a
provisioning
API?
And
I
keep
going
back
and
forth
uh
on
this
like
okay
call
this
>> provisioning
and
claims
right
is
that
provisioning
and
claims
but
then
free
tier.
Yeah.
Like
I
don't
know
if
it's
something
about
our
industry
but
there
Original English
>> Yeah.
You
just
have
abuse.
Yeah.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Just
have
a
lot
of
abuse.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
I
I
mean
I
I
think
those
are
the
the
main
tactics.
I
I
think
the
other
thing
that
uh
I
would
just
tell
listeners
to
think
about
is
literally
hook
your
clanker
up
to
your
analytics
and
your
codebase,
right?
Like
you
need
to
like
fully
complete
the
loop
and
then
like
basically
auto
research,
>> right?
Like
like
this
like
so
what
I
have
now
is
my
cycle.
I
have
both
lat
I
have
a
latency
CMO
agent,
right?
and
they
spawn
other
agents
or
they
their
job
is
to
like
research
ideas,
keep
track
of
things
that
we've
tried.
Well,
and
then
I
sign
off
on
like
things
that
we
want
to
experiment.
We
have
we
have
an
experiment
window.
We
go
and
do
the
experiments
really
and
then
those
are
other
agents
that
then
moni
are
monitored
by
them.
So,
uh
I
would
say
that's
like
kind
of
like
the
auto
research
loop
for
doing
this
stuff.
Uh
I
think
then
you
also
need
to
give
it
tools.
So
like
I
signed
up
for
AHFS,
I
signed
up
for
data
for
SEO.
Original English
>> Oh
yeah.
Original English
>> And
then
uh
most
recently
I
made
my
own
AEO
tracker
which
which
you
can
make.
Original English
>> Yep.
Original English
>> Um
and
then
yeah,
you
just
want
to
make
the
number
go
up.
Original English
>> Yeah,
for
sure.
And
it's
like
you
don't
know,
right?
Like
you're
throwing
things
at
the
wall.
That's
why
like
Yeah.
The
thing
on
the
legal
page,
does
that
matter?
I
have
no
idea.
But
I'll
I'll
keep
throwing
things
at
the
wall
and
seeing
what
Original English
>> I
think
like
uh
Reddit
doesn't
matter.
Hacker
News.
You
you
used
to
be
big
on
Hacker
News.
No
less.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Not
anymore.
Original English
>> Twitter
doesn't
matter
as
much.
Original English
>> Yeah.
It's
weird
like
like
Original English
>> it's
so
crazy.
Original English
>> Do
you
have
a
tracker?
Original English
>> No.
Like
we
use
all
of
those
profounds
of
the
world.
Uh
there
are
other
products.
So
we
tried
them
all.
Like
people
ask
me
like
oh
should
I
use
godge
or
or
profound
or
this
other
one?
I'm
like
yeah
we
have
four
subscriptions
Original English
>> you
know
like
that
that's
what
it
takes
now.
Like
you
you
got
to
see
which
one
works
best.
What
I
miss
from
those
tools
is
like
give
me
the
action.
And
I
think
that
the
problem
they
don't
they
don't
give
you
like
what
to
do
because
they're
also
trying
to
figure
out
what
what
needs
to
happen
right
like
oh
write
an
article
on
Wikipedia
like
yeah
Original English
>> yeah
I
would
say
like
the
old
school
SEO
tools
like
Moz
and
all
those
kinds
they
will
actually
have
more
more
opinionation
around
these
things
right
now
the
AO
tools
mostly
from
what
I
hear
again
I'm
not
an
expert
we
should
probably
talk
to
profound
>> is
that
they
just
are
reporting
tools
right
they're
analytics
reporting
tools
and
uh
that's
that's
fine
it's
a
big
business.
Exactly.
Original English
>> HFS
is
a
Singapore
business
and
apparently
they
do
like
I
don't
know
$3
400
million.
Original English
>> Yeah,
totally.
Original English
>> Uh-huh.
Original English
>> The
other
parts
of
your
business
like
we're
going
to
talk
about
like
the
parenting
side
and
personal
side.
>> I
just
really
want
to
be
like,
okay,
you
you
seem
very
chill.
You
you
have
50
people
remote
all
around
the
world.
You
are
worrying
about
MCP.
You're
worrying
about
AEO.
That
cannot
be
the
way
you're
closing
all
these
big
customers,
right?
like
where's
your
fancy
sales
guy
with
the
steak
dinner
and
the
golf
course?
Original English
>> We're
just
starting
that
motion.
Uh
and
I
think
we
are
uh
very
lucky
that
we're
able
to
go
this
far
without
having
that
motion.
I've
worked
at
a
enterprise
only
company
in
the
past.
So
I
knew
what
does
that
take
and
the
steak
dinners
like
all
the
the
apparatus
around
like
that
sales
or
the
enablement
there's
all
these
things
that
that
I
needed.
I
knew
that
okay
when
it
when
the
time
is
right
we're
going
to
have
to
turn
on
that
key
but
I've
been
very
cautious
about
doing
that
at
recent
like
in
different
layers
instead
of
just
like
add
20
I'm
very
maybe
it's
because
we
are
remote
but
I
think
we
are
very
protective
about
the
culture
like
let's
make
sure
we
don't
damage
the
culture
at
once
so
no
let's
try
to
figure
out
people
who
fit
so
we
just
have
one
a
now
and
it's
been
helping
it's
been
yeah
going going
super
Yeah.
Good
enough.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Original English
>> I
I
would
say
I
think
you
know
once
you
have
like
you
know
you
double
your
AR
because
of
like
a
couple
deals
you're
like
okay
like
this
is
a
good
time.
Original English
>> Yeah.
Original English
>> Cuz
people
want
to
pay
you
more
>> for
things
that
you're
like
okay
well
you
know
uh
I
have
like
the
agreement
with
you.
I
have
like
your
software
on
my
premises
or
in
my
VPC
whatever.
Right.
Original English
>> Um
so
>> for
sure.
Original English
>> Yeah.
And
it
what
I'm
learning
too
is
like
you're
building
a
different
product.
So
that's
what
how
you
need
to
see
it's
not
only
I'm
building
a
different
machine
internally
as
a
company
as
I'm
designing
the
company
I'm
designing
okay
which
department
who
sits
where
how
each
person
is
is
better
equipped
to
do
their
job.
No,
like
for
an
enterprise
it's
actually
a
different
product.
Like
what
do
they
care
is
very
different
from
what
$20
users
care
and
if
I
just
add
you
know
work
OS
and
SSO
and
and
scam
and
audit
logs
it's
not
going
to
be
enough.
So
it's
it's
not
just
putting
those
items
on
the
on
the
pricing
page.
Um
so
it's
a
journey
for
sure.
Any
other
things
you
want
to
reflect
on
the
the
journey
before
we
go
into
the
the
personal
side?
Original English
>> No,
I
think
yeah,
we
covered
a
lot
of
ground.
Oh,
Original English
>> okay.
Then
I'll
talk
a
little bit
about
my
use
case,
right?
Like
I'm
a
content
creator.
Nice.
Original English
>> Right.
You're
Original English
the bulk of your business, I assume, is transactional email. I I probably could look it up, but IOriginal English
>> That's right.Original English
>> You have marketing emails, you have inbound emails. I'm I'm sure that's like sort of less outside of the business. I pay Substack something like $10,000 a yearOriginal English
>> to send my emails and that seems too high.Original English
>> Yeah.Original English
>> So I think like why why is marketing email versus transactional email so different?Original English
>> It's a great question. UmOriginal English
>> cuz your business model is also different, right? If you clickOriginal English
>> it is it is more expensive too.Original English
>> Yeah. Then I was like I can't do this.Original English
>> Yeah. The industry has this pattern of like charging per contact. That's the first thing. So the way they they try to price is around the value you create in each contact. But now it's crazy like the the AI companies that we serve, they grow so fast. Like uh Mistro uses recent. Okay. So they're like the amount of users that they add is just insane. So like the business model of contactbased pricing is kind of broken and we are realizing that and trying to fix that too. But that's how it had always been. And there's something about like when you send a transactional email, it's just like put a message in a queue and get out of the queue. With marketing email, you you're building that engine of like batches and intervals between batches, analyzing, increasing the speed, decreasing the speed as the sending is going, maybe blocking. SoOriginal English
>> is there is there a max rate you should send emails at a time?Original English
>> Yeah, for sure. Per domain uh specifically. Yeah.Original English
>> Okay. So like let's say I have um 100k emails to send out. It should take me 10 minutes.Original English
>> Yeah. And it for example now with the 4.3 million users that we have, it takes more than a day and you Oh, what? No, that's unacceptable.Original English
>> Yeah, for sure.Original English
>> So then I pay you more to get in a different queue.Original English
>> Yeah. Okay. So you you have to be like always trying to figure out, okay, we need more at the door. So how does that work?Original English
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. It's like uh rate limits for let's say token limits.Original English
>> Yeah. Exactly.Original English
>> Where's my reset button?Original English
>> Yeah, exactly.Original English
>> Yeah. You also like you went into YC, you started this company as a young father and I think like part of things like uh there are a lot of no kids people in in SF. Uh and I think that's part of the consideration. I think a lot of people are listening who are like I can't be a founder like I have this great idea but like I got I got young family. How you manage?Original English
>> You got to preface with you left SF forOriginal English
>> Yeah.Original English
>> kids. Yeah. So this is the recent news like I'm spending more time in Brazil now because we're expecting our second kid and I think at first man it was crazy because I came to SF my daughter was one year old and every YC founder around me had no idea like yeah what does it mean to have kids andOriginal English
>> what is this reproductionOriginal English
>> you don't you don't even have series B like what are you doing married likeOriginal English
>> totally Most of them weren't married at all. And it it's crazy how um I think it again I always try to look at those things. At first you you see them as a the advantage like oh man all of these guys they went from like they came from MIT all these amazing schools. That was not the case for me. Oh they don't have they they are not married. That's not the case for me. They don't have kids. That's not the case for me. But still going for that program, I'm like, man, I'm I just want to build the best company on this batch. Not number four, number five, like number one out of the 250.Original English
>> Oh, yeah.Original English
>> Uh, which cohort?Original English
>> Winter 2023.Original English
>> Okay.Original English
>> You realize in the middle of that is that there's no winner in YC that there's no such thing.Original English
>> Mer,Original English
>> but likeOriginal English
>> I'm I'm pulling a winter 23 now. Let's see who I know.Original English
>> Yeah. And especially what you understand is that uhOriginal English
>> winter 2022 batchOriginal English
>> it's like an infinitive infinite game, right? Like those even if you had an amazing batch and you raised the biggest round, it doesn't matter because like life goes on and it continues and many of the people that I met there, they are not here anymore.Original English
>> Yeah.Original English
>> Co-founder breakups, seven pivots and they're dead, right? But we are here. So I I was very much like no no no we're even the domain when we bought recent.com like no it's going to be an amazing website with an amazing.com like it's not going to be aio or whatever right um but doing that with kids was so freaking hard especially because I wanted to enjoy my my first daughter and I really thought about this like there was one point during YC so this story like translates to what I'm going to say I came to this event and PG was there. So I'm like, "Oh man, Paul Graham, the father of everything. God is here, right?" So everybody is paying attention to PG. And then he says, "You know what? We always tell you don't do this thing. We we tell you that as partners and then you ended up doing the thing and then months later you come to us and say, oh, I regret doing this or not doing this." So So he just said that. So then I came to my partners and I asked like okay what are the things that I'm doing now that I shouldn't be doing that you think it's wrong and then one partner not my main partner but another partner told me like you just worry too much about design you care too much about that if you didn't care about that you'll be much further ahead and that hurt me so bad because it was true like my slides when I was like pitching it was like a beautiful slides and he's like doesn't matter I'm like yeah now I know it doesn't matter But like that hurt really bad. And then a few days later, I was reflecting on that. I'm like, "Yeah, but if I if I were to build a product uh that had like this identity and only 1,000 people used, I prefer doing that than having a product with 10,000 people that it's a product that I don't want to go, that I don't use myself. So, you know what? I'm going to follow what I believe is right." And I think in this industry again going back to the industry everyone had terrible products. There was not not enough like design infused into them. So I felt that was a differentiator and we needed a differentiator in such a crowded market. So, I go back to that for my kid, too. Like, okay, 10 years from now, I have I'm with my daughter and my daughter wants to be with me so much and we we play all the time and we are 10 million AR company. I would rather live in that reality than live in a reality where we're hundred million dollar company and my daughter doesn't want to play with me. It's not interested in me and we're not that close. So that's the decision I made. Maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong. I have no idea. I go extremely hard. I I have a lot of ambition. That's not going to stop me or or anything, but like setting up those priorities and figuring out for yourself like what works for me. I think it was important. So yeah, more than ever like she's the most important thing for me and I I I prioritize her a lot.Original English
>> How do you balance that with your ambition? Right. like I also have this in a smaller way. I don't have kids but uh yeah I have a lot of ambitious things and I have a family that I should spend time with and when I spend time with them I'm not present. I'm looking at my phone. I'm like saying like, "Oh, I should be reviewing Astra, you know, GPT6." Like, it's it's like, you know, AGI.Original English
>> No, it's not right. Like,Original English
>> like, but I really feel like I should be working and, you know, and likeOriginal English
>> Yeah.Original English
>> at the same time like I feel guilty and then and so like I'm unhappy in both areas.Original English
>> Totally. And and that's how I feel. I feel like I'm a terrible dad. I'm a terrible uh husband. I'm a terrible CEO. and like you're failing in every single area of your life. I feel that way ex exactly like that. But every day I try to be a little bit more present, you know, and it's a especially when you're working from home like man, you leave the your your your office and then now you now you're a dad and then now you're not anymore. Oh, now you got to be a husband and pay attention to your wife. Like and yourOriginal English
your mind is like, "Oh, man, how I do this enterprise? Like I got to close this deal. I feel like I cycle all the time, too. We're in the same boat.
Original English
>> Yeah. Yeah. Well, never easy. And I think like just naming the thing for your category is important. And people don't really think about category creation enough. I think uh this is something weirdly something like that Netifi tried to do and failed with Gemstack and I think that more people should really actually try to do a category creation because when they're successful then they own the whole thing. Um so which which which we did for this recent you know it is the next generation sang grid let's call it right or like AI native sang grid something like that
Original English
>> I I think that uh you know and you know this is like being me being like probably too honest
Original English
>> that is not category creation yet
Original English
>> but it is category dominance you know like you own your category that's good but like it is not clear enough yet what is difference so my classic example is another guest that we've had um Dorsha from HubSpot Yeah,
Original English
>> anyone who wants to think about category creation, go and read up about inbound marketing versus outbound marketing and how they created the category of inbound. The the ideal phrase of cate of category creation is once you've heard the category, the two words that your company represents. You don't want anything else.
Original English
>> There's no long essay. There's no long manifesto. There's no talk. There it's just two words. Maybe some examples. That's it. The the your audience can take it from there. M. It's very hard,
Original English
>> man. I've seen friends trying to do that. Like Zix uh from uh it's a web hooks as a service.
Original English
>> Yeah, they took my name.
Original English
>> Yeah, man. It's just so freaking hard, right? Like
Original English
>> I think they're doing okay, right? I don't know if they're still around. It was like a there's a web hook company and then there was like a anti-web hook company where you you would take like you were like we don't do web hooks. We just help you publish a JSON file that you pull or something. Wow. You know, it kind of reverses the the push versus pull the the data flow.
Original English
>> Yeah. This is again COVID era dev tools. That was the most exciting thing that at the time was
Original English
Yep. Yep.
Original English
>> Cool. Well, uh always a pleasure to catch up and congrats on all the success. I still, you know, uh am very curious how much you have dominated your your category. I think you you just chose it very well and you executed very well and you're managing your family as well. So, uh, lots of respect.
Original English
>> Thank you so much. Yeah, it was great chatting with you guys. Thanks a lot.