The Future of Email: Superhuman CTO on Your Inbox As the Real AI Agent (Not ChatGPT) — Loïc Houssier
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What is Loïc Houssier’s background and how did he end up at Superhuman?
We as a human species like we started to write because we didn't have like enough storage for stories that we were telling to each other. So we had to write to store those stories. Now like all the content can be stored in YouTube, in TikTok or whatever. So like what's even the need to write? What's the need? Because everything can be vocal. And I see kids now, they don't read article. They want a TikTok video talking about the article. Uh being a bit more grounded, what does that mean about like the future of the user experience for email and communication? Will people still type? Or will they just talk to emails and they want to hear an email? And this is where it becomes interesting because Rahul as a CEO, maybe next year he doesn't want to write to you uh with the new feature, maybe he wants to talk to you.
And then the way you will receive our marketing campaign about the new features, you in your car commuting, listening to Rahul talking about uh about that.
Hey everyone, welcome to the Laden Space Podcast. This is Alessio from the Reconal Labs and I'm joined by Swix, editor of Laid in Space. I
just realized I have the tough job of always pronouncing names. I know, man, you gotta prep. You go on YouTube, name pronunciation dot com. Lloyd Cusilla, welcome. Wow. I'm impressed. It's i I I don't know, did I get it right? I know you got it right. You got it
right. I'm I'm surprised. You thought you make a joke about like yeah, you know what, you can tell it like the way you want and everything, but like you nailed it, so I'm impressed. Thanks for having me guys. Yeah
of course. Thanks for coming by. So your CTO of Superhuman Mail, which is the new name for superhuman. I've been using Superhuman for a long time. I think I was one of Rahul's personal onboarding things back in the day. And yeah, I mean we're here to talk about all things AI engineering, but also you have a lot of history in product board, first base, docuSign, and na nuclear submarines.
Yes, yes. That's kind of like the the fun like icebreaker that I give to people sometimes, like like two truth and a lie. Like uh I went into a submarine and the people are like, Yeah, no way. But I did. I did. I spent one year uh working around submarines and the trajectory is
a bit weird. You were engineer and then you were s sort of chief of staff on on some submarines thing. Yeah, Yeah. So
then you went back to engineering. I I started like uh studying math. Uh so I'm a math graduate. I was about I was about to do like a PhD in math and applied math in cryptography. Uh so like crypto before crypto to some extent. It was cool for a moment, and then I was like, No way, I spent like three years of my life on the same topic. But in the same lab, there was like a bunch of people doing like security, like offensive security type of stuff. And I was like, that's what I want to do. So I was Basically an engineer, I would say security researcher in that lab. But I did that in a pretty big corp, so one in telco and then in the defense industry. And in the defense industry, they have this nice kind of like career framework, like you're young, high potential ish between quotes.
So they want you to do like different types of jobs and kind of like have a spiral of career so that you at some point reach to the C level eventually. So they gave me the opportunity. To be out of the tech industry for a year. And I went in an harbor and I was there as um, I mean, financial controller, process improvement type of person, and basically helping people do a better job, which was interesting because I had no clue. Torpedo system, radar systems, like even like nuclear engine inside a submarine. Uh but still I had to help people take a step back. From what they were doing and everything. And that was really fun because I came from Paris, came with my tie and my suit and my ego. I was used to drive people through my technical legitimacy on the security space.
And all of a sudden I didn't have any technical legitimacy at all. But I still had my ego. So like it was a pretty fast ramp up and like oops, put my ego in my pocket and basically drive by questioning people, like how does
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Loïc Houssier’s background and how did he end up at Superhuman?
0:00–9:29
2
How does Superhuman’s “Ask AI” agentic search work and why is latency so critical?
9:29–18:00
3
What architectural choices enable sub‑100 ms AI responses (local‑first caching, on‑device storage, etc.)?
18:00–26:59
4
How does Superhuman evaluate AI quality (canonical queries, the wood‑table test, end‑to‑end evals)?
26:59–34:42
5
Why does Superhuman prefer box‑pricing over per‑token pricing and how do they think about cost per trillion tokens?
34:42–43:45
6
What is the vision for an AI‑powered Executive Assistant that drafts replies and schedules meetings?
43:45–52:17
7
How does the Grammarly + Coda + Superhuman stack create a unified, context‑aware productivity experience?
52:17–1:01:23
8
What does Superhuman look for when hiring engineers and why does coding fundamentals still matter?
1:01:23–1:10:51
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
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