Shishir Mehrotra
On This Week in Startups
“If you look at any company or any team, something like 10% of what you do is written down and 90% is spoken. It's all forgotten. And so where does that all go? And how do I make that actionable for you?”
This Week in Startups · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Asked how Superhuman thinks about the crowded market for AI note-takers, its CEO says the real value comes after the meeting. His example is a writing assistant that flags an email to a customer as getting a fact wrong, such as the number of seats discussed on the call.
Transcript
I'm interested. As far as the AI note taking goes, I mean, there's so many,
…already got your emails, we've already got your documents, so the notes are going to be better. Like, how do you sort of slice up that market and figure out here's where our AI note taker really needs to like excel? And what, you know, where do you focus when you're building a new one of those?
I think, I think giving, if you think about the world as you can think about it as pre-during and post-meeting, you can think about it as how the note taker fits in your day. Giving more context to your note-taker is definitely a positive thing. And we can do that through our other products. Like you mentioned, we have a very popular mail and calendar product. We also, through Go, we integrate with just about everything. And so it's definitely the case that a note taker that has read your CRM system and understands tapping your tasks. Tricking system is a better chance of taking good notes. But I think actually the experience, first off, in the, you know, what does it feel like to take notes is an experience that is, I think, has been quite broken. And, you know, we end up with note tickets. It really forced you to change your behavior and how you think about taking notes. And then, but much more importantly, is after. And I think one of our core insights was that if you look at any…
There is an interesting dichotomy coming now, which is what's human, what's not human. And education is such an important moment. Grammarly is a very polarizing product in education. There are people who are like, you have to use Grammarly. And then there are people who are, you cannot use…
I'll come back to assessment. You said a couple things there that are worth reacting to is on Grammarly being polarizing. Actually, I mean, every product is polarizing. I would say Grammarly is the least polarizing AI tool in the suite. So if you look at many schools and universities, we tend to be…
All right, listen, if you're running a company and you're the founder, hey, you're going to have so much work to do. You got to hire a team. You got to build the product. You got to do customer interviews and understand what your product or service is going to do for your customer. Well, you're…
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