YouSaid · the spoken record

Shishir Mehrotra

lines on the record: 96
first: 2025-10-30
most recent: 2025-10-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Sometimes it's like, oh, this is a customer support threat. I really should get the customer rep C'd on this. So now I'm adding people. Oh, and I shove the head of customer support to this. Oh, and I should also have the sales manager. Now you get three people and then everybody's email boxes flooded and everybody's day is trying to get to inbox zero, which superhuman helps you do, but wouldn't it be better if you could just start a chat alongside the email? So now you can just hit the little chat button and say who's managing this in our case, who's the primary contact for this startup, and are they aware that they had an acquisition offer. And then I can just CC one person. That person can CC somebody.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that seems really wise to me. The thing I love about grammarly is that it persistently follows me around my desktop, it's on my keyboard, on my phone, and I feels like it's starting to learn and become a little more personalized, which is to say the name Calicanis, it should understand after a certain amount of time. And in a company, and I talked to Raul about this incessantly with superhuman was multiplayer mode. And multiplayer mode is so powerful because in superhuman, when you send an email thread,”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, like, 40 million people who love grammarly and it is what you say it is. It helps you have perfect grammar and spelling. It makes you a better writer, but you want to do more as a company. So you are keeping that name, but you're going to try to also have grammarly fall under the superhuman umbrella. Must have been a big debate. There's a huge debate”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now that's a real decision you had to make very big decision superhumans obviously a more expansive name okay we all want to be superhumans great as a very aspirational awesome name when I heard that name from Raoul when he was starting the company I loved it and I am a name snob I love that name”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's fash, yeah. Our friend who's the co founder of HubSpot, of course, and a great angel investor. But you have the amazing coda, which we built the Twist 500.com list on, the top 500 private companies, Superhuman, which my whole team uses day in and day out, and we pay for, and Grammarly, which my whole team uses, which we pay for. So I think we might be getting some relief here. You have three different brands. Tell us what you're announcing today. Vis the brands and the pricing.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, I'm huge fans of Grammarly and was the first investor along with Darmesh, who Raul told was also the first investor he told us. Both were the first investors. I don't know who got their wire in first, but Darmesh probably got in first because he was probably doing it from his personal account. I have to do it through a whole.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wages haven't grown so the confounding part about inflation is it's not enough to have inflation not increase because the prices of a stake are jaw dropping even for me I look at a stake now and I'm like wait what it's $40 for this Whole food steak it's $50 for this tomahawk it's $60 for this tomahawk am I at a restaurant I got to cook this myself for 60 bucks and it's like yeah steaks Expensive now. It's not the, and if it doesn't go back down, people are having a permanent price increase, which is the reason why this is polling so bad.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inflation is negative 33. It looks like 34% net approval. So that's when you take the approve and the disapprove and you subtract them from each other and you get people are disapproving on inflation and prices. When the truth is, inflation has been modest, you know, like 3%, 2.8%. It hasn't been crazy. If inflation isn't crazy and people are not feeling good about it, you have to wonder why. Well, there's also wages, and wages haven't been booming. They've been muted for many years. In fact, many decades.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're looking to upgrade their lifestyle. So that's important for founders to understand there's always some group of people who are willing to spend. But I think the bottom half, and this is where the job displacement, if it is not managed properly, and we can manage it. We have managed it before. If it's not managed properly and we keep doing tax cuts on the rich and we keep doing things that stimulate the stock market, this is going to increase chasm between the two groups of people.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one group of people is sorting a search result when they're shopping by lowest to highest price. Who's doing high to low? The high to low is there. Why is the high to low there? Well, some people, when they're buying a sweater or a shirt, I used to buy my shirts and I'd be looking for the cheapest white shirt. When I started looking at shirts, I said, let me sort it from the top. I want to know what the best is and why. So now I'm looking at $800 bioni shirts. Okay, that's too much. Oh, ETON's $300. That feels like the right thing. I used to pay $100 a white shirt. Now I'm doing $200 or $300.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody But what I tried to explain to people is now having moved from the bottom third to the top third of income earners in the country and perhaps maybe more, which is embarrassing. And I got lucky 12 times. So a lot of things broke in my favor, like being born at the right time, putting all that aside. I do think... What I learned is rich people and affluent people, they don't think about their cost of living. And in fact, they think about the opposite, Alex. They think. What could I do to upgrade my cost of living? Okay. Maybe I should get a new car. Maybe I should remodel my ski house. Maybe I should refurnish something. Maybe I should redo my wardrobe. Maybe I should get a chef to come twice a week to feed the family. They actually think the opposite.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, it's happening right now. This is the conversation. I did a tweet today where the cost of living has gone up for.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the robots are going to replace a lot of people at Amazon, and Amazon's laying off 30,000 white collar executives, UPSs, you know, letting go of management as well. And the robots take the jobs of drivers and delivery individuals or factory workers, you might see some folks who have benefited from that say, yeah, charge me a little bit more in taxes, and let's increase the number of teachers, the number of people who work at parks, increase the budget for that because I really don't want the guillotines. That's I really don't care if I paid a little more in taxes or not. It doesn't really change my lifestyle. I think it's like one of the things rich people need to also consider. When it comes to tax cuts”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the next couple of years, if the wealth keeps polarizing like this, you can't make your product better without listening to your customers, but how are you supposed to actually figure out what your customers want? You can send out a survey, of course, but people just want to give the right answer in that case. They're not really giving you their honest opinion. Well, at this week in startups, we actually found the perfect answer. It's called perspective AI. They're expertly trained AI conducts one-on-one interviews. Where the top half owning equities keeps doing so well, you will hear some folks who are notable and affluent and rich say, you know what, charge me a little bit in taxes and why don't we double the number of teachers and have them work four-day work weeks. That would be a way to deal with unemployment. So if it is true,”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we talked about on all in this floating of the wealth tax. Hey, anybody who's a billionaire is going to have to pay 5% on their assets. So if you have a billion dollars in, I don't know, meta shares and you were some senior executive there who hit it out of the park, you just have to give $50 million one time, which means you'd have to sell $100 million in shares to the government, I guess. Or maybe you would not have to pay tax on selling those. I guess you have to pay the capital gains and then pay the wealth tax. So you get hit twice. There's a reason why that's getting popular and those ideas are floating and they're going to win with certain folks because they would like to see the government get bigger. And then if the government gets bigger, they can do things like provide universal health care and hire more nurses and orderlies and doctors. And then you could hire twice as many teachers. There is a possibility that you would even hear tech and rich people endorse this. You might hear”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you think about it, YouTube and podcasting and crowdfunding and Patreon is actually named after patronage is actually made a pretty big comeback and it's been done in a kind of capitalistic way. The people who do Patreons are making full-time salaries in many cases, but working the hours in which they prefer. So that opportunity is available for rugged individualists and brave people who start companies. I do think as a society what we'll see this manifest itself in two ways. The 54% tax in New York under Mandami is the largest in the nation, followed by, I think, California, just right behind it by maybe three or four less points.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends on the culture you're in, America and Japan and China want to be at the top of that GDP list. And if you look further down, France and Italy. They are known for maybe not wanting to move up that list, but wanting to have a better quality of life. So you can pick the culture you're in. And then if you were to look at the outlier companies, the greatest companies in the world, if you pull up a list of by market cap, No coincidence that the top companies by market cap come out of the United States, China. And then once in a while, you know, when you get down past 25 or you got a Ramco on there from Saudi and you've got LVMH from France, but you don't really have many outside of. I mean, Aramco and LVMH putting”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fridays, yeah Fridays, Kanje and asked the same thing, but they had to get in at 8 a.m. So they had to like put in at least a half day of work. And, you know, they were very pampered. Everybody had an assistant. Nobody was really working. They were selling 20,000 dollar handbags. Let's just leave it at that. That's the equivalent of 37 signals. They're Chanel in this equation. They're not grinding it out versus 20 competitors who are going to eat their lunch.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you have to know the game on the field and the context. The context is highly profitable company, extremely stable revenue, no investors, two owners. They can do what they want and they can pursue whatever they want. I remember when I worked in New York, I would go to Chanel and we managed their IT systems, like the luxury brand. And they all were allowed to leave work at 12 o'clock or 12.30 on Fridays during the summer.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the end of our lifetime, the emergent work week. I think a four-day, not this five, six hours that people are working and going and getting matchas and yoga, whatever. Like, you know, the full-on 10-hour day, four 10-hour days might actually, for some people's rhythm, be better than five, eight hour days or five of these like six hour days where you do a life in the thing. So I think it's worth noting here.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can make a lot of decisions like this that are quixotic, but you can be 20% inefficient over the summer or for four months. You can be if six weeks is like giving every three years is like giving people an extra two weeks of vacation essentially. If you've built a company that's resilient and you have plenty of people and you're overstaffed by 20%, it doesn't matter if people go on sabbatical for six weeks. So you can build companies like that. Now, if you tried this strategy and you were up against open AI and XAI, you would fail miserably. So you do need to understand the game on the field. If you had venture capitalists and you tried this and the company wasn't growing, they'd be like, hey, maybe people should come in on Fridays since we're not growing. But we will see in the United States, I predict.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You really appreciate stability. You really appreciate the fact that Alex shows up three days a week and has a suit and tie on, or I wouldn't tell you about the ties, he has a press shirt on. Don't make me buy ties. You never know. So you start to appreciate that, right? And then when you lose a couple of video editors because they want to go make the next great movie or they want to be a screenplay writer, you're like, oh my God, I own this business and I'm going through this again. I got to hire that person. Oh, you know, start the process again. It becomes a distraction from growing your business. So these kind of offerings. Seem crazy if you were to run a large company, and they would be. They would create entitlement, they would create abuse on the margins. However, with a small company,”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They can build the world they want to live in. Now you remember they had a whole DEI woke thing happen at their company where people wanted to bring all their opinions to work and debate it on Slack just like at Coinbase and we had this sort of pendulum swing the other way. Hey, if you're at Coinbase, you're here to do one thing, provide crypto solutions to the world. If you're at 37 signals, they took a similar approach. Hey, if you want to be here, you're here to make great productivity software full stop. And that's it. And then here's an incredible pay package. I think both companies just said, hey, if you want to opt out, we get it. So during that culture war, which we forget about, but I guess that was 2017 to, you know, COVID, basically, they went through that. Then whoever's left, what's happening today is companies are getting more efficient. If the company gets...”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To dev stats.com twist for your 20% discount. That's DEVS T-A-T-S.com slash twist. So they are a highly profitable software company that has existed for a long time with a loyal base of users and it is pretty reliable that those revenue streams, people who use Basecam, they just love it. They're never going to stop using it. Okay, period full stop. So when you start a company and you don't have a bunch of investors, which they don't, I think they bought out Bezos, who was their only investor back in the day”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the great challenges of running a startup is getting your business and engineering teams on the same page. It's almost impossible to build the sleek, effective product your customers need if these teams aren't communicating well. If this sounds anything like your company, you need to check out DevStats. DevStats integrates your dev work and your business goals into a shared language that everyone can understand. One team using DevStats was dedicating half of their dev time to low impact bug fixes and other internal busy work. And none of this was improving their product, or more importantly delighting their customers. But after using DevStats, they were able to revise their allocations and workflow and start actually moving the company forward with impactful updates. So it's time to start focusing your team on the work that actually matters. Check out DevStats today, and we're going to give you 20% off plus access to their dedicated Slack channel.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure. And I wanted to just point out I asked producer Claude, just tell us, remind us the 10 largest economies in the world by GDP and their populations and their GDP per capita. And it's really interesting. People forget just how amazing Japan is in this ranking. Japan is still the third largest economy in the world at 4.2 trillion behind the 27 trillion for the United States and $18 trillion for China. And then you have Germany, India, United Kingdom in fourth, fifth, and sixth, and then France, Italy, Brazil, Canada. And so it is a Not a giant company, right? Not a giant country at $125 million, but that's a pretty impressive GDP. And thank you to our friends over at.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good news is not wind, wind is a bit expensive right now, but solar is so cheap. That even taking away the subsidies, which there's an argument for taking away subsidies from a lot of these things, if the free market is working and you don't need to accelerate it, in the case of AI, I mean, this thing's regulatory bound, local, there's a lot of, these things are not like putting up solar farms. Let's just leave it at”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Higher prices. This is going to be, I mean, if you want to talk about a revolution and the beginnings of one, when you see Mom Dani winning, when you see the cost of living going up, it creates resentment. And then that resentment will happen in the, hopefully, you know, when people go vote. But hopefully they don't vote for socialists and we don't kill capitalism. But I would be lying if I didn't say I was concerned with the game on the field. But I am excited about this because nuclear is just. Such a clean, great solution. If you told me you're going to put a nuclear power plant within 50 miles of my home, I would be like, okay. And when I said that on Twitter, somebody said, hey, dipshit, here's a nuclear power plant within 50 miles of Austin. You're already living within one. I said, okay, so I guess that's consistent.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thousands of dollars a year. And if it goes up 10 20%, people are going to feel that. And they're starting to, and it's creating a negative perception of AI because the public is now starting to put this together, Alex. You're building AI solutions. Great. My cousin, who's an Uber driver, and my brother who's doing DoorDash while they're in college, and my other second cousin who's in college for computer science can't get a job and the Uber drivers are going away because they'll be in Waymos and the DoorDash has their own delivery robot. The reward we get for everybody losing their jobs.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About nuclear. And so this is another one of these win-win wins. You can disagree with many things in the 47th administration or other 46th or pick any administration. One thing that they're getting right, I believe, is investing in infrastructure. Because if we're going to win the AI race, we're going to need power. And if we don't get this power, yeah, we're going to need lots of it. And if we don't get this power dialed in quickly from all different sources, we're going to have a real problem with PR because energy prices keep going up. Energy prices are not insignificant if you're in a household that makes under, I don't know, $100,000 or $200,000 in household income, you know, that electrical bill for $500 a month or $800 a month or $300 a month. I mean, it adds up.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then if this does come to pass in the next three years, and Westinghouse's valuation, which is a private company currently, I understand, if that becomes worth $30 billion, the company is forced to IPO and the government, our government U.S., gets an equity stake. And you remember, I guess it was Besson, who talked about at the AI summit we had over the summer with all in, that he had just closed up this $550 billion investment package. And when I was talking to him, I talked about this on all in, I talked about it here, he couldn't shut up.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a little bit of a complicated deal. I saw Bloomberg was like, this is convoluted and I just read their story on it. We are going to underwrite this, we being the US government, but we're going to be underwriting it with some amount of the capital coming from Japan and in return for their participation. I'm unclear as to what they get, but the US is going to get a 20% share in any dividends that come out of Westinghouse above $17.5 billion.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, by going to uber.com, that's u rot.com. And it's very exciting because we're also going to be bringing the Angel University there, which is my course based on my book where I just help people learn about angel investing. And we're doing all of this with the Japanese external trade organization known as Jetro. And so they are dedicated to promoting trade and investment between Japan and other nations. You may have seen are amazing. Extraordinary Fantastic President Trump. has done was just in Japan. And so I am turning into Trump Jr. and I will be in Japan as well doing business deals. But apparently, and I'm not sure we're on the docket, this story is, what we're definitely going to be talking about it, we're going to be building more nuclear power plants thanks to this relationship with...”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like everything else, the old saying is so true, garbage in, garbage out. Without the right training data, you're not going to get great results. But my pals, that Uber, they're now working with enterprises all over the world to source, label, evaluate, and scale high quality real data for your startup. Uber is one of my favorite companies on the planet because they demonstrated their ability to scale and to build great products. First in the rideshare market, then they figured out Uber Eats, and then they moved on to autonomous driving. And all of this was only possible because of a deep understanding of how to collect, label, understand, and analyze data. Now with Uber AI solutions, you can put the team and tools that turned Uber into one of the world's best companies to work for you, partnering with top talent and experts from Uber's global network. What better partner to help you scale your business than the company that organizes over 36 million rides every single day?”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just tell me a little bit about yourself. My team will review the applications. You could be right out of school. You could just be highly technically savvy. We'll train you up on what we do in terms of mentoring and finding resources for and supporting founders. But we need to have boots on the ground for these programs. And as you know, I am going to be in Riyadh next week for the launch of Foundry University in Riyadh. So the Sun officially never sleeps on the JCAL Empire now. It is literally now, I think we're going to be in three very disparate time zones.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very interesting products, both hardware, software, and have for many decades. And so we're going to build that bridge between Silicon Valley and Japan and look for great ways to work together. Now, I need an analyst, a researcher analyst to come work here at launch. So if you know somebody who speaks Japanese fluently, they could be Japanese American, they could be a Japanese expat living here in the States who wants to split their time between two amazing cities and hang out with me doing it. It's Austin and Tokyo is where you will be living. And yeah, you got to be fluent in English and in Japanese. You can just apply by emailing Japan at launch.co. We don't have the dot com yet, but launch, we keep trying for 10 years. Japan at launch.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so pretty excited to announce that we will be bringing our Founder University to Japan. As many people know, I have a love of Japan, the people, the nation, the culture, and the skiing. And I go every year to do a little pilgrimage and get some of that JPO, the Japanese powder. We will be kicking off on November 14th. I will go to Tokyo to announce our 10-week program. And this will culminate with an immersion week in San Francisco and a demo day. So all the great startups and founders that launch from the Foundry University will come to San Francisco and spend a week with us. And it'll be great because I've always had great admiration for the startup ecosystem in Japan. They are incredibly innovative.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just a little bit in the news this week. But I guess at the start of the show, I hate to talk about myself, but we have a little announcement”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. It's Wednesday, it's October 29th. Yeah, time continues to march on. Lots in the news. I noticed OpenAI did their restructuring. I noticed we're going to have nuclear power plants to power all these AI data centers and that they're not hiring young people and they're laying off everybody.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fridays, yeah Fridays, Kanjay Nast, the same thing, but they had to get in at 8 a.m. So they had to like put it in at least a half day at work. They were very pampered. Everybody had an assistant. Nobody was really working. They were selling 20,000 dollar handbags. Let's just leave it at that. That's the equivalent of 37 signals. They're Chanel in this equation. They're not grinding it out versus 20 competitors who are going to eat their lunch.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Five, eight hour days, or five of these like six hour days where you do a life in the thing. So I think it's worth noting here because you have to know the game on the field and the context. The context is highly profitable company, extremely stable revenue, no investors, two owners, they can do what they want and they can pursue whatever they want. I remember when I worked in New York, I would go to Chanel and we managed their IT systems, like the luxury brand. And they all were allowed to leave work at 12 o'clock or 12.30 on Fridays during the summer.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the end of our lifetime, the emergence of four day work week. I think a four-day, not this five, six hours that people are working and going and getting matches and yoga or whatever. Like, you know, the full-on 10-hour day, four 10-hour days might actually, for some people's rhythm, be better than...”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can make a lot of decisions like this that are quixotic, but you can be 20% inefficient over the summer or for four months. You can be if six weeks is like giving every three years is like giving people an extra two weeks of vacation, essentially. If you've built a company that's resilient and you have plenty of people and you're overstaffed by 20%, it doesn't matter if people go on sabbatical for six weeks. So you can build companies like that. Now, if you tried this strategy and you were up against open AI and XAI, you would fail miserably. So you do need to understand the game on the field. If you had venture capitalists and you tried this and the company wasn't growing, they'd be like, hey, maybe people should come in on Fridays since we're not growing. But we will see in the United States, I predict.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you start to appreciate that, right? And then when you lose a couple of video editors because they want to go make the next great movie or they want to be a screenplay writer, you're like, oh my God, I own this business and I'm going through this again. I got to hire that person. Oh, you know, start the process again. It becomes a distraction from growing your business. So these kind of offerings. Seem crazy if you were to run a large company, and they would be. They would create entitlement. They would create abuse on the margins. However, with a small company,”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to be here? You're here to make great productivity software full stop, and that's it. And then here's an incredible pay package. I think both companies just said, hey, if you want to opt out, we get it. So during that culture war, which we forget about, but I guess that was 2017 to, you know, COVID basically, they went through that. Then whoever's left, what's happening today is companies are getting more efficient. If the company gets more efficient and you own a business, you really appreciate stability. You really appreciate the fact that Alex shows up three days a week and has a suit and tie on, or I wouldn't tell you about the ties. He has a press shirt on. Don't make ties. You never know.”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they are a highly profitable software company that has existed for a long time with a loyal base of users and it is pretty reliable that those revenue streams, people who use Basecam, they just love it. They're never going to stop using it. Okay, period full stop. So when you start a company and you don't have a bunch of investors, which they don't, I think they bought out Bezos, who was their only investor back in the day. They can build the world they want to live in. Now you remember they had a whole DEI woke thing happen at their company where people wanted to bring all their opinions to work and debate it on Slack just like a Coinbase and we had this sort of pendulum swing the other way. Hey, if you're at Coinbase, you're here to do one thing, provide crypto solutions to the world. If you're at 37 signals, they took a similar approach. Hey, if you...”
2025-10-30 · This Week in Startups · Grammarly is now Superhuman! CEO Shishir Mehrotra explains the rebrand | E2201 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source