Dan Shipper launches Kora: a $15/month AI chief of staff for your email that filters, drafts, and briefs

rapper, everything's a rapper. Um, should we bring in our next guest? Let's do it. Let's do it. Welcome to the stream, Dan. How you What's going on? Welcome to the show. Good to see you guys. Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you loud and clear. It's great to great to have you back.

You're always calling in from exotic places. Last time it was anthropic dev day. Where are you now?

I am currently in a cabin in upstate New York uh in the Hudson Valley with um Hersh Agarwal, CTO co-founder of the browser company, a good friend of mine, uh and another another friend of ours and uh Hersh's wife and their baby. So, it's uh it's it's a really fun time. Amazing. Uh let's get right into it.

What are you launching today? Break it down. We launched publicly um Kora which is you can think of it like a chief of staff for your email that costs uh $15 a month instead of 150k. Uh so what Kora does is uh it sits on your email it connects to your Gmail. It screens your email.

So when emails come in, it decides is this important? Do you need to see it right now? Is it urgent? Um if it is, it makes it to your inbox. If not, it automatically archives it. For anything that's a common request, Kora will uh pre-draft a response for you.

So, you open your email, anything in your inbox has a response. Um, and then twice a day, we send you what we call a brief, which is a really beautiful summary of everything that's in your inbox that you need to see, but you don't need to respond to.

Um, and so you can basically like do 3 hours of email by just scrolling through in 30 seconds. Uh, it's very, very cool. We also have a full-on assistant, so you can chat with it, you can email it, you can tell it all about your preferences, all that kind of stuff. It's been in beta for about 6 months.

We have about 2500 between 2500 and 3,000 users um active users on it. Um and uh we are launching it publicly today. So anyone can sign up. It's 15 bucks a month. It also is bundled with every.

So if you sign up for every 20 bucks a month you get access to Kora Spiral which is our content automation tool, Sparkle which is our file organizer and all the all the writing that we do on every all for that price. You guys are cooking. You got to raise prices. $100 a month. You got to get those numbers up.

I'm thinking about it. Uh, but now that you said that, I can blame it on you. So, thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, you can say Jordy complained that the price was too low. Um, very cool.

The the perfect irony of the timing here is right before we got on the show, John was onboarding like an an EA uh type uh uh person who just joined the team. Um, and literally saying all these things. So, these kind of emails like just archive them. These ones I want to see it, but it's not important. You don't have to.

sending the link right now so you can install it on my on my inbox. Yeah. So, we'll get it I mean I have a bunch of very specific questions because I'm in I'm like the perfect This is a product you've been asking for. I've been asking for this because Yeah.

I mean I paid for like the top tier of Gemini and like there's this Gemini button but it just it just gives me bullet points for each individual email. It doesn't do anything at like a higher level abstraction at least that I can tell.

And then when I search if I search for Dan shipper, it will it will search like the JavaScript in some marketing email and find that like there's some token in the URL that has the text ship and then it'll surface that.

And I'm like instead of just the email that's obviously from Dan Shipper, like how does it not know to to rank like the the name of the person higher than like some embedded CSS class or something? It's always super frustrating. I've been very very upset about uh the the the Gmail search functionality for a while.

I feel like it's it's it not that it's like degraded. It's more like the nature of email has scaled where I think every person gets about an order of magnitude more email than they did, you know, a decade ago. And so the traditional search tools are just completely breaking down.

And then also email marketers, you're getting a couple hundred a day and you're averaging even 20 seconds in email. It's it's a lot. It's a lot.

And yeah, and then also the nature of the way people write emails like the all there's so many of these hacks where people say um like uh they they'll do that thing where they'll say like uh if you're doing like outbound for every for example you'll be like uh introducing John Dan and John and and it's like wait like this is a sales email like why are you acting like we're why you're making a warm intro or or people will do like re like signing up for every and it's like wait this isn't a re like they're not responding to anything.

Like, you just put that in the title. And there's a million of those little hacks that I feel like the traditional Gmail workflow has been exploited by kind of black hat emailers, SDRs, SDR, black hat SDRs. Um, and I feel like it's the perfect it's the perfect thing that you need to hammer with AI.

So, I'm excited for that. Uh, talk to me about the the the the drafting of responses. Um I I I was I was talking to the the the fellow on our team about um how you know so like we get a lot of pitches from people that say, "Hey, I have news. I want to come to the show.

" Uh sometimes I want to let people down uh like softly and say, "Hey, this isn't a fit right now, but we want to have you on when there's news or or you know, and I kind of have like a template for that. " Um I'm I'm I'm a little bit hesitant to to send something that has like a an LLM flavor to it.

So, I'd almost rather just have a like a pre-written script, but I would also be okay with some fine-tuning. Like, how are you thinking about making sure that the voice doesn't feel too llmmy?

So, basically what we do is when you onboard, um, we will look at all like about a thousand of your previous emails and abstract out, okay, what's your job title? How do you normally talk to people? What do you normally do in these kinds of situations?

So, for comp emails that you get, so like a pitch, what do you normally say? And then we create a set of procedures for ourselves so that when we do the draft, we can refer back to okay, you have a procedure for a process for here's how I respond to pitches and that's what we use uh to fill in the draft.

So it's basically we use your historical emails to inform how we how we uh write the draft. Um to your earlier points though, I think those are I think those are really really important. Um, one thing that uh I think connects to something you said earlier in the show is um the the idea of of rappers.

So like in a lot of ways this is a rapper on Claude and Gemini, right? Um and what's really interesting is I think there was this narrative about like a year ago or two years ago that all the incumbents were going to win in AI because all they have to do is bolt on AI.

And you can see like if you go into Gmail like their AI features or their search features like they're still not very good.

Um, and that's because it's so hard when you have a scaled huge user base that is used to things working in a in a particular way and a large organization that's used to building things in a particular way to actually start from a blank slate and get the most out of a new technology.

And um, so I think that's that's one of the things that we and other startups like us can do for email that like a Google can't or it would be much harder for them to do. And I think you can see that for example in some of the filtering things that you're talking about.

So, one of the problems with the sort of uh black or gray hat um emails that you get is it's a little bit hard to get a specific rule for, okay, this is the kind of email that I don't want to see. Um it's not going to be from a particular sender. It's not going to have a particular thing in a subject line.

It's kind of a vibe. And historical email filtering has to be very rulebased. It has to be it has to be from this center. It has to have this keyword in the subject line. All that kind of stuff. and language models changed that and now you can filter emails on vibes and that's what Kora does.

It also has a rules based filter too but it has a vibes filter to be like anything that looks like this get rid of it or make sure I see it. Um, and that's much more and the funny thing is people have been training, you know, a chief of staff or an EA to detect the vibe of an email, right?

Like like this is the kind of email like it looks salesy, but it's actually really interesting because it came from this person and it's an opportunity that aligns with with with what we're with with with our focus. So, it's interesting. Yeah.

Um and and and I think incumbents it's very hard it's going to be harder for them to do that because it's very expensive um to filter on vibes on vibes for like everybody's email account because there's hundreds of millions or billions of people getting like billions and billions of billions of emails a day and so startups because you start from a smaller user base you can do the expensive LM inference that um is going to get much cheaper in 5 years but for now it's not affordable unless you have a smaller our user base that's all paying and that's something that we can do which I think is great.

How do you think the actual email infrastructure and rails evolved?

I like it seems like every six months Google Workspace just sends me an email that's like we're raising prices and I and I always think it's funny because it's like they could theoretically just like continue to raise the price for a very long time without without much push back because like what's what's the alternative at least as a company?

How do you see um how do you see that evolving? How have you thought about other companies like Hey that actually want to kind of own the the underlying layer the deeper layer? And that's a good question. I mean I think one of the beauties of emails of email is that it's decentralized and interoperable.

Um, and so right now we sit on top of Gmail, but we will eventually add support for Outlook and uh other third party like POP or IMAP type services.

And um I think that that's great and I I don't think that you'll see us create our own like hey that's very hard and complicated to make sure that you deliver emails and you don't get stuck in spam and all that kind of stuff.

And I think um we've been focused on building out a layer above that because that's where that's where the new stuff is. There's there's something completely different about um software that doesn't have to operate on ordered lists. So, email is just an ordered list of things in the order they came in.

And software doesn't have to do that anymore. You can rearrange everything based on based on priority, based on vibes.

And um so I think for us, I'd probably rather not get stuck at a layer like of ensuring email deliverability for senders and and and all that kind of stuff and like let Google do what Google's good at for now. Um, but who knows?

I think eventually this will be an email client where you can do all of your email through Kora. For now, it interoperates with Gmail with superhuman. Um, so that we don't have to mess with like all those baseline features. Even like creating an email sending feature where you're like it's it's a compose window.

There's infinite amounts of complexity in there that you can get stuck doing if you're a small startup that we've tried to avoid to like just make something that's so good at one or two things that you'll use it even if it doesn't have everything. Yeah. How are you how are you building the team?

What what's the ambition with with this product specifically? You're wearing I know you wear a lot of hats. So I only wear the every hat. Um yeah. Um yeah. So there's a super talented team building this that and it would not be possible without them. So Kieran Classen is the GM of Kora.

Um he's incredibly technical is a Rails guy like very agentpilled like he's running like 15 cloud code instances any at any one time. Um and uh we just we have our our most viral YouTube video ever is him like talking about how he uses agents. It has like 50,000 views from a week ago. Um and so he runs Kora.

He he also uh used to be like in his past he was a composer and a pastry chef. So, he's got this like crazy resume um and he's amazing.

We also have one engineer, his name is Nate, who's also amazing and they're just like I think they're both iterating on what email can be and iterating on um how to actually build software in this new paradigm because there's a whole new way of um building software with agents.

Like I think that they're um they they use this term that I love called compounding engineering, which is like doing the work so that each successive feature you build is easier than the last.

Um and I think that that has allowed them as a super small team to just move really fast and build this beautiful product that is scaling to thousands and thousands of users. Yeah. Um we also internally um Brandon Gell is our head of studio. So he he works a lot with them. And then we have a whole creative team.

So Lucas Crespbow is our um uh creative lead and he did like the video and all the visuals and all that kind of stuff. So um and I'm helping out with all you know whatever wherever I'm needed. But I think all of those people are doing an incredible job and I think we want to kill email.

Um I think you should do email very differently. I think generally um we all have a very anxious attachment to our inbox. Um and it's quite unhealthy.

And one of the things that I've noticed using Kora is everything is much quieter and that can be really unsettling because you're like where like what if I miss something? But it has turned out at least for me that mostly it's fine. And only 10% of the emails or 20% of the emails are things I actually need to see.

And um when I use it, I get to spend much more of my time doing that I actually care about and want to do rather than rather than email. And um that's a very exciting mission for for us and for this product. Feel like I developed email anxiety probably when I was like 10 years old whenever I first got an email.

It was like summer break and everyone was just sending emails around and stuff and it's stuck with me ever since. So thanks email. Uh but thank you for for trying to help fix it. We're we're excited to try the product and always great to have you on the show. Check it out. Thanks for having me.

Have fun in the in the woods. Cheers. Bye. See you. Bye. Up next, we have Eleaniano Ununice from Palunteer coming in the studio. Oh,