Build Forever launches Extra, an AI-powered personal email app that reimagines the inbox as a 'for you' feed

you know, turn it around, put it at a different angle, more shadow, less shadow, all this stuff. And uh it's wild what you can do without any UI. But without further ado,

we have Naveen from Build Forever is the former Pinterest CPO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Hey guys, thanks for having me.

I like the I like the bomber, Jordy. Nice piece.

Thank you. Thank you. It's a oneof one

uh

New York Stock Exchange.

Oh, NYC.

What What date was the New York Stock Exchange founded?

You tell me. 17

1792 11 Wall Street. Wow. That is a very old

Great address. Great great year to get into business.

Great year to get into business. Best day to get into business. 17.

But it's great to have you on the show. Yeah. Uh, first time to the show. Please introduce yourself and the company a little bit.

Yeah, totally. So, my name is Naveen Gavini. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Build Forever. And, uh, honestly, we're just a group of engineers and designers and people that love building, uh, products that people love to use. And, uh, we've worked, as you said, uh, I was early at Pinterest and we worked on a number of consumer products that people use around the world today. But, um, our focus has been on a product that we launched yesterday called Extra. And it's really a a re-imagination of email as your life's inbox. And so for many of us, um, we spend all day kind of working, sending email. And when we have time to get to our personal email, it often feels overrun, overwhelming, and just like I don't know. I've personally gave up on my personal email. I had over 250,000 unread emails. And so we were just kind of looking for a solution of just making email more manageable, more fun, and delightful. And so with Extra, uh, it keeps track of what's important for you, so you never have to miss something. It helps you clean up your email, organize it around your life, and, um, it does things proactively for you in the background, and helps you get stuff done. And so this endless to-do list feels not so overwhelming, and it just feels delightful and joyful to open up your email every day.

Is it a for you page for email?

Um, yeah, essentially. Yeah, that's how you could think of it. That's a good that's a good analogy. Yeah. So everything that's important in your life,

we turn every email that you have into a short vertical looping video.

It's not quite that, but your

I know what you're saying. It's basically like

Yeah, just actually picking and choose. You know, I it's always been so silly that inboxes it it were were primarily based around who messaged you last, not based around what was actually important or actionable or anything like that. Um yeah and I feel like we we need to move

like the idea the whole idea of inbox zero

is just such a pre AI idea where you are just getting flooded with more and more and more and more and more spam and I think products that can help uh here are great. Also uh it feels like you can kind of just Yeah, I'm curious. So you're built on top of Gmail. I don't know if you're supporting other email providers. Google is like aware that AI can be powerful in email. They're working on a lot of features, but I feel like this is one of those things that is going to require like really really rapid iteration. And so I feel like you probably have this beautiful window of like maybe three to four years where they're kind of just slow to figure out some of this stuff and and you can probably build a cool business in the meantime. But where do you want to where where does this go? How how does this how do you know you know how are you thinking about this as a venture scale opportunity?

Yeah, totally. Well, I mean like maybe starting where you kind of left off. I think one of the challenges in email is historically for the past 20 years like all of the innovation in email if you think about it has gone into the enterprise and it's gone into really sending emails faster, right? So that's like kind of all the email clients that you've seen have been like, "Let's help you get to inbox zero and send faster." And when in reality, like our different take on email is that when you think about your personal email, not your work email, um the amount of emails you send is actually very little relative to the amount you receive. And so the the entire experience actually needs to be rethought of from information consumption, not as a communication tool. And I think that's the big pivot with email to think about on the personal side is that it's more around information consumption, delivering to you the right information at the right time. Uh and then from there, there's an entire business to be built on how do you actually get things done for people in their in their lives? How do you help them along that next point in in in time in the journey uh without them having to do work? And so you're seeing, you know, a whole ecosystem of amazing companies being built on the agentic side around fulfilling different actions, but all of them need kind of a distribution entry point of like how do we start that journey and what is the personal data that we actually help achieve some of those actions upon? And so I think email is a really great place for that. Um, and if we could build an experience that starts to make that seamless for a user where they don't have to go and I don't know, set up an API key or connect to a service and they could just seamlessly launch that from an experience that feels native to them like email. Um, it could be a really compelling experience and I think um, you know, we previously built a very big business uh, with ads at at at Pinterest and other companies. And so this idea of being able to show people products and services at the right time um could lead to a really incredible consumer product that's also accessible to the masses.

Ads I was not expecting that.

Well, that was a Pinterest.

No, I know. But but but you're saying, aren't you saying like in theory if you build a really

Yeah. You pay to get the top of the inbox. I'm going to everyone's sending you a thousand emails and if I advertise and pay, I can get more surface area. Maybe. Also, I think people I mean my our stance and many people's stance, I'm sure your stance is like if you get a really nicely targeted ad, it is like additive to a product experience. And so I think in the in the world in the future where you know somebody's using extra for their email like and you decide to turn on ads, you could probably serve you know really high quality

Yeah.

ads users. Yeah. Some of our beta users really love actually finding deals and products from brands that they actually love that often get buried and missed in their in their inbox today. And when we show CMOs and marketers the product, they absolutely love the idea of their products being displayed natively, not buried in a promotions tab. You know, their CTRs are through the floor uh with with kind of the existing treatment in many people's mailboxes. So, if you're actually interested in a brand and you've bought something from them before, the idea of being able to see other complimentary products or things from that brand in the future, um, could be very compelling. And I think we're thinking about multiple tiers, like I think there's obviously a lot of folks that, you know, may just want to not have ads and pay. And so, I think there's there's lots of different ways to go about it. We're still early in the journey, but right now we're focusing on getting as many people to have a joyful inbox experience as possible before we start to monetize.

What's the Beach Head agentic experience? Is it just unsubscribe?

People love coming in to clean up their inbox. It's crazy. I I I recommend everyone that's listening in like if you if you're tired of your inbox being overwhelmed, five minutes with our on boarding flow, we'll we'll give you a inbox designed around your life and you know and you'll feel a lot lighter and cleaner after after using extra. I think

is that specifically for the person that's sitting on like 200,000 emails. if they have like 10 like I probably have like 10 emails in my personal and like they range a lot from like need to write a thoughtful response to need to do some flow in some web app or need to send a payment or need to do and I'm like I don't know that I would hand over the keys to an agent for most of those but I would definitely love for you page on my like promotions and updates tabs in Gmail which are like basically newsletters and and sponsored stuff. And then I would love because Gmail's done like an okay job with the unsubscribe button, but it misses it a lot. And but then there's some services that are just like we're breaking the law and like you have to call us to unsubscribe from our emails. And I'm like that I'm not going to like chase this down. So I'm just going to keep getting like you know random our privacy policy updated for some like telecom service usually.

Yeah. So I think with extra you would get an amazing for you page with the information that you want. And I think honestly a lot of people just feel the sense of control and clarity of being able to see it in a different view of like

here's what's important. Here's what I need to do today. And you know it's distilled down to just a few items versus this long list of things that you have to do in your inbox.

That's cool. Is the app uh live on the app store?

It is. Um yeah we went live yesterday. Uh, your life's inbox. Here we go. Happening now. I'm getting it. Thank you.

There we go.

Very excited to try this.

Great to meet you.

Uh, well, thank you so much for coming on. Breaking it down for us. Congratulations. Excited to give it a try.

We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers.

Goodbye.

Up next, we have Avlock from Angel List. And I believe we might have someone else as well. Anchor is joining as well. Fantastic. They've both been on the show before. You know them, you love them. They have a big announcement today. Angel List is launching USVC, a public venture fund alongside Naval Ravakant. How are you doing?

Yo yo.

Hello. Feeling great to the show. Uh

big day.