Episode Details

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Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman, joins NEW ECONOMIES to explain why he renamed a 16-year-old company mid-flight instead of just adding a new label on top, why he built his own board by ranking every past boss he’s ever had instead of chasing famous names, and why the real threat to a legacy SaaS category isn’t a faster competitor but the coordination problem AI agents are about to make bigger, not smaller.

About Superhuman

Superhuman is an AI-native productivity suite built from products including, Grammarly, Superhuman Mail (formerly called Superhuman), Superhuman Docs (formerly Coda), and Superhuman Go, serving over 40 million people and 50,000 organizations worldwide.

During this episode, we also hear the four myths of bundling Shishir learned after his time running YouTube’s failed paid products, why marginal churn contribution, not usage, is the real basis for how bundlers split revenue, and how that same framework now governs how he prices and packages Superhuman’s four products. We get into why he treats a rebrand as a “do no harm” exercise for the existing brand first, the DACI-based ritual (Driver, Approver, Contributor, and Informed) his company uses to kill ad hoc meetings entirely, and why he thinks the SaaS apocalypse thesis has the coordination math backwards.

We close on his “Jeopardy style” critique of most board meetings, why he’d rather ask a departing CEO to shadow him for a week than assume he already knows what’s unique about how he runs his own, and how a decade of hitting inbox zero taught him that the goal was never to answer faster, it was to never touch the same email twice.

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Timestamps

(0:00) Meet Shishir Mehrotra(1:50) The Naming Process for Superhuman(9:45) How Rahul (the original founder of Superhuman) and Shishir Met(11:28) Launching and Building Coda in 2014(14:42) Lessons from Reid Hoffman(17:51) Picking the Right Investors as Partners(19:49) What Is Bad Capital?(21:42) The Art of Bundling Products(31:38) The SaaS Apocalypse(37:50) What’s Missing from Superhuman’s Bundle(42:40) Getting to Inbox Zero(

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