Zeno Rocha
On Latent Space
“It's almost like if you are 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 always felt like, no, I want to live in a society where I'm born free. … We're going to trust you by default versus make the whole platform worse for everyone because of those bad actors.”
Latent Space · AI Builders · November 2026
Context
Asked why Resend can offer an easy free tier without drowning in spam, Zeno contrasted incumbents' manual vetting and approval forms with Resend's approach: trust new senders by default and block quickly when bounce and complaint rates look off.
Transcript
you're screwed as a business. Is that not
pretty common? Like you make it very easy to just sign up, free tier, send a bunch of emails. I would assume you have a lot of spam, a lot of phishing, but you're able to avoid. And this is why.
Yeah, I think what was different to me, and then this is more like a philosophy, right? So I saw those other products and the way they behaved. And I felt like, okay, it's almost like if you are 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 always felt like, no, I want to live in a society where I'm born free. And if I make a mistake, then 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 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 those bad actors, right? So…
learned we have skill issues too. We wouldn't have expected. For
sure. 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. No, no, no, but I will say, 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 call, you have a pledge that you will make email safer. Like if you're interested in this stuff, you know, you, you have quite a bit up here. Yeah.
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