How We Built Our AI Email Assistant: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Cora

You don’t need to handle your inbox anymore. It’s Cora’s job now. Cora is the AI chief of staff we built for your email at Every. It’s been in private beta for the last 6 months and currently manages email for 2,500 beta users—and today we’re making it available for anyone to use. Start your free 7-day trial by going to: https://cora.computer/ Cora is the $150K executive assistant that costs $15/month. Or $20/month if you want an Every subscription, too. This is what that actually means: Cora understands what’s important to you, screens your inbox, and only lets the most relevant emails through. The rest of your emails are summarized in a beautifully designed brief that’s sent to you twice a day. If it has enough context, Cora drafts replies for you in your voice. You can talk to Cora like you would your chief of staff—you can give it special instructions on how you want certain emails handled, ask it to summarize things, and even give you an opinion on complex decisions. In this episode of AI & I, I sat down with the team behind Cora—⁠Brandon Gell⁠, head of the product studio; ⁠Kieran Klaassen⁠, Cora’s general manager; and ⁠Nityesh Agarwal⁠, engineer at Cora—for a closer look at how it all came together. We talk about: The story of the first time Brandon, Kieran, and I used Cora, while sipping wine at the Every retreat in Nice. The evolution of Cora’s categorization system, from a 4-hour vibe-coded prototype to a multi-faceted product with thousands of happy users. The features on Cora’s roadmap we’re most excited about: a unified brief across different email accounts, an iOS app, and an even more powerful assistant. This is a must-watch if you’re curious about what it feels like to give Cora your inbox, and take back your life. Go to https://cora.computer/ to start your 7-day free trial now. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: ⁠https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt⁠. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free. Sponsor: Experience high quality AI video generation with Google's most capable video model: Veo 3. Try it in the Gemini app at gemini.google with a Google AI Pro plan or get the highest access with the Ultra plan. To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: ⁠https://every.to/subscribe⁠ Follow him on X: ⁠https://twitter.com/danshipper⁠ Timestamps: Introduction: 00:01:40 Three ways Cora transforms your inbox (and your day): 00:04:21 A live walkthrough of Cora’s features: 00:05:09 The inside story of the first time Kieran, Brandon, and Dan used Cora: 00:12:13 Train Cora like you would a trusted chief of staff: 00:16:30 The AI tools that blew our minds while building Cora: 00:27:25 How we build workflows that compound with AI at Every: 00:30:34 The dream features that we’d like to put on Cora’s roadmap: 00:42:36 Links to resources mentioned in the episode: Try Cora now with a 7-day free trial: cora.computer The episode about how Kieran and Nityesh use Claude Code to build Cora: ⁠"How Two Engineers Ship Like a Team of 15 With AI Agents"⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is my inbox. Normally, before Quora, I was not an inbox zero person. I had just thousands of emails here in my inbox. And if you click into Quora, you go here.

• 0:11Dan Shipper?

  And so for people who are listening, he clicked into Quora. And what you see is a bunch of different sections of this brief. And each section takes a bunch of emails that we think fit that section and then categorize it together and summarize it.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  We were in an offsite in Nice, in France. Let me just build this. Very basic. It took me like a few hours. The day after, so we're in Nice, we're sitting at a cafe, drinking a wine, like you do in France. And we were checking our inboxes on our phone, on the Gmail app. And we were like, holy, like, like, it feels cleaner. It's so quiet. Yeah, it was quiet. I remember, I remember getting my first brief and thinking, this is so much better than what my life was like before.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  This podcast is supported by Google. Hey, everyone. David here, one of the product leads for Google Gemini. Check out VO3, our state-of-the-art AI video generation model in the Gemini app, which lets you create high-quality eight-second videos with native audio generation. Try it with a Google AI Pro plan or get the highest access with the Ultra plan. Sign up at Gemini dot Google to get started and show us what you create.

• 1:40Dan Shipper?

  Welcome to the show, everybody.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  Thanks, Dan. Thank you. Glad to be here.

• 1:44Dan Shipper?

  Thanks for having us. So today is a really big day. We are officially GAing Quora. Quora is the AI email assistant that we've been building for the last, basically, almost the last year.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:54Dan Shipper?

  It's been in beta for the last six months. It's had about, it's had 10,000 people on the waitlist. Now it has like over a thousand daily active users, which is incredible. It's like one of the most sticky products that I've ever seen. And it's saying that everybody on the team Uses every single day. It's like a total delight to use and it's so fun to finally have it out where anyone can use it. And so I wanted to bring the whole team on the show to talk about what the product is, how we got here, what it's been like to build it, what we've learned and where we're going. Let's go around and everyone introduce themselves. Brandon, you want to start?

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Yes, I'm Brandon. I run the studio here at Every and I help run the consultancy.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  Karen? I am the GA. I'm building Cora. I'm writing the code. I started writing all the code by myself, doing support, features, everything. And then got Nataj on board to join the team to ship features because we felt there was something we needed to go quicker. Even with AI, you still need to have people. So that's when Nataj joined.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I'm Nataj and I'm the engineer, an engineer at Cora, helping Karen. I'm the newest member of the team. I'm having fun helping Karen build cool stuff in Cora.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Basically, we're just jamming on like, how can we use AI the best way to build Cora, which is really, really cool.

• 3:25Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, basically for anyone who's been following along with the podcast, like they actually don't build anything. They just tell Claude to build stuff now. So if you're interested in how Cora has gotten built, like all the details, definitely go check out an episode we published like three weeks ago on Claude code.

• 3:42Dan Shipper?

  But yeah, like I want to start with showing people the product because I think that's the best way to get to understand it and get excited about it. So Karen, maybe share your screen and while you're doing that, I'll tee it up a little bit. I think a good way to think about what Cora is, is it sort of like having a chief of staff in your inbox for 15 bucks a month instead of 150K a year? And the thing that it does for me is I just have that kind of like. It's handled feeling where I'm just like, someone is taking care of my emails so that I don't have to think about it. And I can focus on stuff that actually matters to me. And Cora does three things. One is it screens your emails, so it decides what needs to be in your inbox.

• 4:26Dan Shipper?

  And what, what you don't actually need to see. So like anything urgent, anything you need to reply to from a human gets to your inbox. And also, the second thing it does is it pre-drafts replies. So when an email comes in that you need to respond to, it will take a look at your, your writing style and previous emails you responded to like that. And try to draft a reply for you, so it saves time that way. And then twice a day, it sends you a brief summarizing all of the stuff that comes into your inbox that you need to read, but you don't need to respond to. So you sort of just scroll through your email and in 30 seconds, you've read through your email and it's done. And that's what Karen's looking at right now. So Karen, do you want to just go up to the top and, and, and talk about what we're looking at?

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there, there are two, two, two things here. This is the product Cora, but obviously you have your inbox as well. So this is my inbox. Normally before Cora, I, I was not an inbox zero person. I had just thousands of emails here in my inbox. And now the main, mainly, so I was on vacation last week. That's why I didn't read all my briefs, but mainly what I see here are briefs and everything else that's in here. I should do something with, so, and, and this is funny, like we were, I was invited to Cora as well. So really the idea is to get to the most important things in my inbox and

• 5:54Speaker 00

  open the brief and look at my brief.

• 5:56Dan Shipper?

  Can you show us what that brief email looks like?

• 5:59Speaker 00

  I, that's actually.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  So what I do is I can open my brief within Gmail and it will give me a number like 84% of my emails today are handled. And it will give an overview of the stuff that's in the brief. So I can kind of see like, hey, I can scan over it. And everything important will also be highlighted. So you don't need to go into Cora, but you can. And if you click into Cora, you go here and you can dive deeper.

• 6:39Dan Shipper?

  And so for people who are listening, like he clicked into Cora and what you see is this really beautiful like oil painting of a sky background. Like it's a very kind of different aesthetic for email software. And then there's a bunch of different sections of this brief and each section takes a bunch of emails that we think fit that section and then categorize it together and summarize it. So if you go back up to the top, Karen. So yeah, talk about, talk about each section.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  Okay. So yeah, I jumped to Wednesday, the afternoon brief. You can see the background change as well to afternoon. And the most important stuff is on the top. It's called imported info. It means you should know about it, but it doesn't mean you have to take action. Like anything that needs your immediate attention or action will stay in your inbox. That is like time sensitive, but everything that's important to know, like for example, Chase said something to me. So everything important is here. This is the one you always want to look at. And everything else is kind of, it will get the

• 7:56Speaker 00

  most important stuff for you summarized. So you can actually read everything else. Like newsletters, if you receive 30 newsletters per day, this is an easier way to scan your newsletters. For payments, you just see a summary of what happened, like where did the money flow? Who did you pay? Did you receive money? And you can see here also like the, this is in English, this is in Dutch. So if things are in a specific language, if you are not all receiving English, it will summarize it in your, in your language.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  And it's really fun because what we try to do here is we try to give you the highlights of what the newsletter says and like the most important points and give you enough information to say, hey, I want to learn more. I want to see more. So let's see. I want to learn more here. I can click into it and open this email or newsletter and read it in here, or I can jump to Gmail and read it from there.

• 9:10Dan Shipper?

  One of the really cool things about this, at least for me, is obviously like we publish a daily newsletter and you can even see every here. The man inside the minds of the people building AGI is one of the newsletters here and that's every and it's it's a it's an overview of a previous episode in this podcast, which is kind of fun. And what's really cool for me is like, these summaries, I spent a lot of time with Kiran, just like refining the prompts to be like, how would I as a writer summarize these emails? And it's it's a really interesting, like different kind of writing task where you're not writing a specific piece, you're writing like many pieces. It's like it's meta writing. And that's one of the things I think

• 9:53Dan Shipper?

  we can bring to emails is we have a writer sensibility inside of every and that that comes into how we summarize your emails for you. So you're getting the best summary possible of what's in your inbox.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  I think the other thing that I really like about what we did with Cora was it's kind of like this extremely opinionated way of using email, starting from a place of all of us hate email. We don't want to be doing email.

• 10:23Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  How can we but like, it wasn't like we were like, let's make an assistant, you know, wasn't it? We didn't start there. It was just like, very, very first principle. How do I want to be interacting with this thing that is a open door to anybody in the world?

• 10:40Dan Shipper?

  And like, I remember our first pitch was it's a to do list written by everybody but yourself.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  Email, email.

• 10:47Dan Shipper?

  Email is.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  Traditionally, email is a to do list written by everyone but yourself.

• 10:50Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  And so I feel like just over the past year, like we all started, we had like the initial hunch of an opinion of how we wanted to manage our inbox, which was that we didn't want to be distracted. And that has sort of like grown into this fully fished product that is 100% opinionated, which is why when we have people use it, you know, 80% of people that use it, they absolutely love it. And it like literally changes their relationship to email, which is how I would describe my experience with it. And then there's another 20% that absolutely hate it. And we're like totally okay with that because it's so opinionated and you're just like not a good fit. But that's made it an amazing sticky product.

• 11:33Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, I think the thing that it reveals is how much we have this anxious attachment to our email inboxes.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:41Dan Shipper?

  And, and so it's actually very uncomfortable to use it for the first time. But over time, what I've learned is I don't actually need to be looking at my inbox all the time. That was just like, that was a lie.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:55Dan Shipper?

  And my life is way better when I'm, when I'm not, because I know Cora is handling it for me. And I know, Kieran, you have this, this story of like the first time that we like realized this. The first time we tried having Cora handle our emails. Do you want to, do you want to tell that story?

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So we started Cora first as a like, let's generate drafts for your emails because we thought that will solve all our problems. But then we still felt like eh, I still have hundreds of emails in my inbox. So clearly there is more to it. And that was really important because we realized, wait, only like 10% of emails that we all receive, we actually need to write responses to. Yeah. Which means the bigger problem is this other 90% that you need to sift through. That was a huge unlock. Yeah. So so we realized that and you were like, okay, how how are we going to do it? And we came up with this idea of a brief, like, like you get a brief once a day or twice a day.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  And we were in an offsite in Nice in France and I was like, let me, let me just build this. This was in the Cursor Composer times, so it was very ancient AI. Times, but Cursor Composer helped me create a very rude version of.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  Basically scanning an email, see if it's important or not, archiving it automatically. In in your inbox and then sending you an email with a summary of it. Very basic. It took me like a few hours. It's it's not too hard to do that because it's, yeah. The first version was easy and. I enabled it for my own account. I was like, Dan, are you sure you you want to enable this on your account? Because like it will go hard, it will archive maybe. A lot of things and and then I was like, yeah, I yeah, I understand. I'm like. And and and Brandon said, I I I want to go. And then Brandon jumped in and Dan was still like, hey, okay.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Brendan does it, I'll do it too. So so I was like, okay, well, we'll add three people. And I think one other. So we had four people. We were we were all there and. The day after, so we didn't really understand what was going to happen, but the day after we. Were in Nice, we were sitting at a cafe, drinking a wine, like you like you do in France. And we had, like, we were checking our inboxes on our phone on the Gmail app and we were like, holy, like, they're. Like, it feels cleaner. We still had that urge to check and to refresh and to refresh, but there was nothing. It was just. It's so quiet. Yeah, it was quiet. I remember I remember getting my first brief and thinking.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  This is so. It needs so much more work, but it's so much better than what my life was like before. And for me personally, I feel like I've been on this crusade of like. Sort of trying to deny this like previous version of myself where I'm like. Super on top of my email and like I'm trying to like create these new habits where like. Doing great work is important versus just like doing fake work of like. Constantly maintaining inbox zero. And this was the first time where I was like, oh, I doing that on my own is impossible. But Cora just forces me to do that. And I feel like that was the first time that I was like, this is just a better lifestyle.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  Like, it was like a lifestyle change, not just like product change. It felt emotional, like we felt chill, like we could feel it, which is really cool. If software makes you feel a certain way, clearly there is something like, yes, it needed a lot of work. I have a direction that we could go, which is we, so we did this and then we like, we invested in making it prettier and refining the summaries and building all this functionality. And it got really good at like, it just got to be a really smooth experience, but we all had one problem.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  And a lot of our customers had one problem, which is it knows me, but it doesn't know me like super, super well. And sometimes it Just the context, like the context thing and the anxiety. Yes, we sort of also had this anxiety of like, am I missing things? And that was because like, it was doing some personalization, but it wasn't going like really, really deep on that. So we decided to build Assistant, which is, you know, a tool that now lives inside of Cora. And we decided to like, go really hard at customizing your experience during onboarding. Um, we have a beautiful onboarding that like, you know, people will now get to experience. But maybe, Kieran, you can talk a little bit about what Assistant does.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Maybe we can even show it. And then I think this is like a pretty unique product that exists. Maybe you can talk about how the two of you went about building it.

• 16:57Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, let's, let's definitely show the assistant. And I think one of the, one of the things I love about it is that it also is in my inbox. Like I can just email it and it will reply. And so like, The reason we call it a chief of staff is because it does all the things you would expect an executive assistant type to do, like it automatically categorizes emails correctly. It knows what you should see and what you shouldn't see. It writes the briefs, all that kind of stuff. But the thing it can also do is it's it's an AI in your inbox. So like, for example, if I get a big, long email from a lawyer, I just like forward it to Cora. And I'm like, can you summarize this for me? And I get something in line that like tells me what the lawyer is trying to say. It's really good at that. And it even it forms

• 17:39Dan Shipper?

  memories and it keeps track of who you are. So it's it's it's pretty powerful. So take it away, Kieran. I'd love to maybe maybe show us the assistant.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  So yeah, so we built all we built a brief, we built a drafting, but we really realized the power lies with like it really understanding who you are, because people loved it. But comments mostly were like, like, I needed to do something very specific to me. And having software be very generalized and opinionated is good, but there should be also like room for your personality. And like, for example, I have a category here called daycare. I get photos of my daughter every day, which is nice. Like, it's just me and not everyone

• 18:30Speaker 00

  has kids. So some people have investors that they talk to a lot. I have kids.

• 18:39Dan Shipper?

  So similar, honestly.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  I mean, they want a lot of attention. So so everyone wants to personalize things within the realm of our opinion of like, this is how it should be. And we realized that actually all of that context is already there. It's in your email, like, like, your email is the story of your life. That's kind of how we launched. And that's very powerful. And you lose track of pieces of that story if you just don't look at your email. And Cora can use AI to pick out things, create memories and learn about you. And

• 19:19Speaker 00

  That was a realization. So we just launched the assistant and like a simple interaction could be, for example, um, here, like this is about Claude Code new features is categorize and other and other is like a little bit weird category where like it doesn't really understand where it should be, but like I, I think it's important. So make it important info.

• 19:42Dan Shipper?

  So for people who are listening, basically like in the brief, we had, Kieran had a Claude Code email that he clicked a button and it automatically opened up the Cora assistant on the right side. And basically in the Cora assistant, it's like, hey, like I see you want to talk about this email. Like, what do you want me to do with it? Um, and Karen said, like, make it important, make it categorize it as important. Um, and then it just automatically knows how to do that and it shows up in the brief and he can be confident next time an email like that comes in, it's going to go to the right place.

• 20:15Speaker 00

  He also equally could have just said, this is an important email for me.

• 20:19Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  And it would know, cool. That means it needs to be, it will might actually ask him, is it so important that you want to see it in your inbox? Or do you just want me to categorize it as important info? And then you could respond and say.

• 20:28Dan Shipper?

  And it in fact did do that. It did ask him, um, uh, if he wants to return this email.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. So do you, do you want to return this to, to my inbox? Because sometimes it's like, hey, this is very important. Like that can mean different things. It can mean like, I need to respond to it, never brief it. Uh, I want always to get this in my inbox. Or it needs to be like, there, there are all these flavors and the, the nice part is that the assistant will ask you these questions. Like, we just launched the assistant and there, this is version one and we're going to like go way further with this, but this is a very easy way to interact with. One of my personal favorite use cases is like my, my work changes over time, like what I'm focusing on. And just the other day, you know, uh, I realized that like pretty consistently Cora will, um, brief.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  Cold emails from people who want to be EIRs at every and I'm like, I want to sort of see those right away because like that's important to the work that we do. So, but I can't define Decorah, it's from this domain, it's from this email address. And I literally was just like, hey, you know, people who are cold emailing specifically about every product studio and want to be EIRs, I want to see those emails right away. And it made like a vibe based rule for me about that. So it's, it's really, the assistant is really dynamic and it allows you to fully customize what your experience is. By the time we launched this, uh, this, this podcast, uh, you do that during onboarding. Um, so like right out the gate, it's like this really personalized experience, which I feel like is a, was a huge learning lesson for us.

• 22:07Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. One of the things I think I would love to hear Kieran and Natasha, I'd love to hear you guys talk about is this kind of categorization. Sounds simple, like if you're listening to this or watching this, you might be like, well, Gmail does some categorization for me. I can set up filters or whatever. Um, but it's actually a really hard problem to, um, put the right email in the right place at the right time. And what Cora can do is actually a lot different from what like a Gmail or a superhuman can do with splits where, um, it, it, it can do this sort of like rule based, like if it comes from this domain, don't brief it. Um, but it can also do what, what Brandon referred to earlier, which is vibe based, which is like, basically take a look at it and let me know what you think it is. And then it will, uh, put it into the, put it into the correct category based on it's

• 22:52Dan Shipper?

  like glance at the email. Um, do you guys want to talk about that?

• 22:57Speaker 00

  Yes. Um, so what I hear sometimes is like, oh, great. You, you spent like months building an email classifier. Isn't that very easy? I can vibe code that in a weekend. And yes, that's what I did with the first version. I vibe coded that in four hours and uh and and there it started. So it is really hard, like there there are many moving parts. There are many kinds of systems working at play. We have like traditional algorithms like that just rule based. We have uh more modern L L Ms that are English based. And they all need to work in harmony and do the right thing.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  And what is the right thing? The right thing is also different for everyone. Everyone has their own right thing and is contextual. So it's like, okay, great. How do I even know this works? Like, yes, when we were using it, it was great. Like, we were just complaining if something was wrong. We fixed it, but we're with thousands of users now. There's absolutely no way if if like even 10 people per day complain about something wrong that I manually go in and fix it. So it is about building a system that uh works, where people can give feedback, that learns, that understands who you are, what you find important,

• 24:26Speaker 00

  listens to signals that you do. Like, it's a pretty extensive, complex system. And and that's important, like like we need all these things to work together. We cannot just use L L Ms because another obstacle is L L Ms are expensive. And if you have thousands of users, like we were on target to like burn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year just in L L M costs. And then Brandon was like pinging me in private like, hey, the the bills are in. Can you review the costs? And there was like a subtle hint of like, do we really need to spend all of this money? And then I was like, uh, yeah, okay, let me spend a day. Let let me do do some work.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Let me analyze things. And like, that's part of building L M apps. It's like you run against all these and and then you have L M user limits. Like you can like certain models have limits and we we were just. Using so many tokens that like Anthropic at some point just said, no, you're like, you're over the 500 or the 400,000 tokens per minute. Like every day I would get that and, and, and you're like, oh, we're not, we didn't even start. So then you start like increasing limits, moving things around, reduce like, there are so many things going on here.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  That seems very easy on like a one to one scale, but if you scale to thousands of users suddenly becomes very different. Yeah. And, and, and yeah, and there are many things like we do embeddings, we do like pooling in similar emails. We, we have many strategies that work together to hopefully make the best decision and evaluate that as we go. My favorite sort of like way that this has presented itself recently is like in this little like debate that you got on X, Kieran, where someone was like, all this for an email summarizer. And I just, I love making products that are so complicated in the backend

• 26:37Speaker 00

  that they can be described as simple, as simply as just an email summarizer. And it's so naive to be like, the most beautiful products in the world are so simple that you can describe them as, you know, in three words, but what's actually happening in the backend is so complex. And it's also indicative of like what you and Natasha do to build this. I feel like you guys are like truly at the tip of the spear in terms of how you're actually going about building this functionality. And I feel like every week you're, you're not, you're just launching new features for Cora, but like new ways of building those features or reviewing those features. I mean, there's so many of them, but I wonder if like, maybe Natasha, like we haven't heard from you.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  Like, is there like a single thing that, single tool that you and Natasha are using that like, really blew your mind in terms of the capabilities of building with AI?

• 27:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. Um, there were like two instances, I would say. Um, so both of those were, uh, you know, Kieran led me into those tools and I was like, okay, my mind is blown. This completely changes how I'm working. So, um, the first time it happened was with, uh, the tool we're developing, Monologue. Uh, it's a simple like, uh, voice to dictation, uh, voice to speech, uh, uh, thing. And, um, but it massively changed the way I was interacting with, uh, AI models. Because, uh, you know, like when I'm speaking, I can give so much more context. So, um, that, that was the first.

• 28:16Dan Shipper?

  Let me just, uh, jump in, jump in there. I, I think that's, uh, just, just for people who are listening that don't have context. So we, we have another product we're incubating at every called Monologue that, uh, it's a smart dictation app. So you can talk into it and then it will turn what you're talking about into text. And so, Nataj, I think what you're saying is, um, talking to your code base was a thing that you maybe like hadn't considered doing. But here in literally his hands, don't even touch the keyboard. Um, and so that's been a game changer for you. Like, what is that, what is that like? Why is that so much better?

• 28:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just better because, you know, when you're typing, like I, I, I, I can type like really fast. I can touch type, I get all of those things that I've been typing like my whole life. But, um, when you're typing, like you get lazier and, uh, with these L L M's context is the king. So, um, with speech, I can ramble on for a minute or two. And, um, uh, every time when I, uh, ramble, like I, it, it just gives me a better output. Like that is, uh, fundamentally a better way to, uh, uh, work with, uh, L L M's, whether it comes to code, I feel, or, uh, anything else. So that was the first time, um, it blew my mind.

• 29:27Dan Shipper?

  Sweet. And then the second one, I assume is Claude Code, but, uh, yeah.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. Of course. Yeah. Uh, we did, you know, uh, one hour podcast about it, but, um, yeah, Claude Code, uh, it's just amazing. It has changed the way we're working. Um, and, um, yeah, it's, uh, it like the software development that, um, I started doing like when I joined versus what I'm doing like today. It's completely different. I'm not even, uh, you know, opening the same apps or, uh, working with the same tools. So, um, yeah.

• 30:01Dan Shipper?

  That's great.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, and one really cool thing that we have going on between us that I really enjoy and like I would encourage everyone else to do is like I have I've run companies. I was VP for engineering of a few before as a co-founder and I manage teams and I have that experience of like managing, doing code reviews and all of that. And it's becoming more important again, even as an IC to have these skills. And what we do, Natasha and I, we just go do a pair code review. Natasha records everything I say. I just ramble about my philosophy, when to make a method longer or shorter like.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  And then Natasha's like, oh, but why not here? And I'm like, oh, yeah, good question. Like, that's a feel, but like, this is the feeling. And Natasha records all of that and then feeds it into an LMS and says, okay, can you create a Claude comment for this that I can run like key run review every time I do a certain feature? Or when there's like a high risk feature, you wanna like you look at code a different way. But how do you know when it's a high risk feature? And like, we try to distill all of these thoughts from my head and from Natasha's head into like a rule set, like, like an operation SOP style thing that we can then automate and try out. And that's really cool.

• 31:27Dan Shipper?

  We should totally put that on every and make that available for people. Like, I want the Kiran code review. And it's actually interesting because I think there's a there's a common pattern here, like what you're doing with code, I'm doing with writing.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 31:41Dan Shipper?

  In the editorial organization, like every time I give feedback, we're starting to like record all of the feedback on like the headlines and the intros and all that kind of stuff. And then another one of our and we have a prompt that all of the writers now use that does the does that kind of editing or it does copy editing, which our editor in chief, Kate, is usually spending a lot of time on. That Natasha also like automatically now runs in our codebase whenever we're doing copies. So our editor doesn't have to look at it, which is amazing. And I'm also doing this with. Danny, who runs Spiral, which is our short form content automation tool. And I've just been sitting with him every, every day almost and talking about what good writing is.

• 32:22Dan Shipper?

  And he's recording all of that and putting that into the tool so that it can write with my taste, basically. And I think that there's, you have a word for this, Kiran, that I think is actually, it's, it's, we're applying it to engineering, but I think it applies more broadly, which is compounding engineering, which is instead of doing the work, you do the thing that, that does the work going forward. So instead of always, you know, doing a code review with Nitesh, you're recording that so that it compounds. And now you have a slash command that Nitesh can use and it takes less time for each successive code review.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Agreed, yes. Like, we don't want to repeat ourselves. Nitesh and I like joke because clearly these tools are not perfect. And sometimes AI slop comes out in a review and you're like, what is this mess? And we just need to jump in manually and do things. But that's the moment where we learn because we talk about why it is a mess and what is wrong to extract that and make it better next time. So as long as you learn and improve and don't make the same mistakes, you can use tools like this to never have to repeat yourself. I feel like you guys embody, like, so I spend a lot of time, obviously, with, with you all on the studio side, but also in consulting projects.

• 33:39Speaker 00

  So I'm seeing, I feel like I'm simultaneously seeing like, what is the best version of this? In which case you're recording every conversation. There's like golden nuggets of information in every conversation and you turn those into like rules. You turn it into like operating procedures. So I see like the best version of this, which you guys do. And then I see the absolute worst version of this, where people spend so much time trying to identify every single issue, but then not doing the actual work and building the muscle of, of actually doing it. They're just spending time trying to like write it all out. And I feel like the thing that I've like loved watching the two of you do is,

• 34:23Speaker 00

  there's no, it, there's no like end goal. This is just a journey that you're on and it's going to constantly be getting better. And you're going to be constantly discovering new things, but the through.

• 34:34Dan Shipper?

  Line between all of it is it's actually conversation, conversation with the tools you're using, but also conversation with one another, recording all those conversations, and then using the AI to pull out the important pieces in those conversations that you don't. It's hard sometimes to identify, I just spoke for an hour, what's the important thing that I just said? If there's only, if only one important thing comes out of a conversation, that conversation was worth it as long as it's captured and put into, you know, cursor rules or whatever, you know, your, your, whatever tool you're using. So it's just been a pleasure to watch you guys do that.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, and like basically this learning or this muscle applies to everything. It's also the prompts that generate the summaries, like there is a loop like that. The evaluations rerun to see if something is good or not. Like you can use all of these as feedback to improve the system, improve everything. And like, see, see what it does when a new model drops. Is the new model better? Is the cheaper model better? Like, it's very surprising because sometimes the cheaper model is also better. Like, we live in times like that, which is ridiculous. Yeah.

• 35:50Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, one of the things that I think is, is true about that too is like, the models just get cheaper on their own. So like, even if you don't do anything, like you're, it's like 10 times cheaper to run the same model in like three months. So we just get all these performance gains for free.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  But also don't try to solve problems that we think is gonna be solved soon.

• 36:11Dan Shipper?

  It's gonna be one shotted by the, by the model in three months. Yeah. But I, I think one of the special things, to bring it back to Cora, I think one of the special things is like,

• 36:21Dan Shipper?

  we're, we're GA, we're GA-ing it today. It's coming out today for everyone. And as part of that process, I've gotten the opportunity to talk to a lot of users because we're trying to figure out, okay, like, how does it fit into people's lives? How does it?

• 36:34Dan Shipper?

  How did they, how did they talk about it so that we can use that on the landing page or on the launch video or, and also like what value, what value do they get out of it? Yeah. And, and so how do we price it? Uh, which has been a big journey. We like released, uh, the initial version of standalone pricing to our beta group like two months ago and it was like, uh, everyone freaked out, which is a big lesson learned is like you never, uh, you never want to, uh, they had been using it for free and we put a price on it and you never want to like take something away from people. Like obviously that is upsetting, but I, we had not thought of that, but now we know. Um, and we're, you know, now, now we have pricing, which has been, been difficult to figure out. Um, but I'm pretty confident in it. Um, but the thing I wanted

• 37:18Dan Shipper?

  to say is I, it's just very special. I've worked on a lot of products. I think we've all here worked on a lot of different products and it's very special and rare to work on something that is not even publicly available, that has a 10,000 person waitlist and that has a thousand or more daily active users. Um, like, and getting to talk to them, people love this, um, or at least the people that I'm talking to, because we're, I'm talking to like the, the fans, but there are real fans that are like, this has changed my life. Like it has completely transformed my relationship to email. And, um, there's something so satisfying about it and I feel so like proud to get to like be a small part of that. I wonder how, how you guys feel?

• 38:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's really nice. Like I've, I've worked on many products, but this one especially, like I've, random people reach out, say, I love Cora. I'm like, okay, great. Like that energy of like, like super fans or like really, really dedicated people, even though in the beginning, like it was kind of crap in places or there were bugs. They were like, it was, wasn't smooth everywhere. Like now, now it is smooth, but like people are, there are people that are using this for so long and giving great feedback and growing with us. So it's, it's really nice. And

• 38:39Speaker 00

  I know that means that we're building something. There is something here, like there is something important. And yeah, it's the best thing, like making people feel good or feel a certain way using software, telling a story. It's like the most fun thing to do. So I love to to work on this, yeah. I just like the fact that it's so opinionated. And because of that, people have come back and been like, this has changed my life. It's very driving for me personally. And I think it's because we all have the same kind of like wants and desires, which is to like, continue to do a great, or this is one of them, to do a great job with our work,

• 39:23Speaker 00

  but be able to enjoy our lives to the fullest. And email is just like death by a thousand cuts. And I feel like we've really done a great job of like freeing people from that. I feel freed from it. And I think that's why when people tell us they love the product, they like are obsessed with it. And that's also why for some people like that's, it's not a good fit.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  It also has been like,

• 39:53Speaker 00

  you know, you do have to pay for it now. You have just have to like subscribe to every and

• 39:59Speaker 00

  when, you know, this gets released, you'll be able to buy it standalone as well. And it's been really successful, you know, and you know, we have thousands of users and they're actually already are paying for it too, which like, I almost feel like we don't give ourselves enough credit for the fact that like, oh, there actually is value already. It's $20 a month total. Yeah, we had like, I think 60 people sign up last week for the paid plan and we're not even promoting. We're not live, like it's like a very hard way to even figure out where where to where to click until we go live now. I want to show one other way. So like, we're at the start. This is really the start of the vision we have

• 40:43Speaker 00

  for where this can go. But there's another cool way is like, I don't know, for some reason it's things that solar is very important to me. I can forward this to [email protected].

• 41:00Speaker 00

  And say, this is promotion, yo. And

• 41:07Speaker 00

  and this will, this will, this is another way to interact with the assistant. So you can just email the assistant. And I've seen other people use it very creatively, like one other person. They have like investors that are added to a certain list and they created a Zapier integration that if something got added to a list, they would forward that new email, say, hey, Cora, can you add this new investor to this category? So it's kind of like an API integration. And I've seen Dan also like get a like a complex document and say like, hey, like summarize this for me or say,

• 41:49Speaker 00

  or like, can you, can you draft a response a certain way? Like, there is an interaction. So,

• 41:58Speaker 00

  oh, well, then great. This is, this is an email that's older, so it's, it gives me that. But it will unsubscribe for, for this email or give options. And if you do this, you can, you go into here. So, yeah, okay.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  So, so, yeah, it will unsubscribe. It will do the same thing. So you can continue the conversation in Cora. You can see we're still prepping for some last things for launch. But, yeah.

• 42:30Dan Shipper?

  Cool. So we're almost out of time. I think I want to just talk a little bit about the future, like where, where do we want to go with this? And one way to, one way to think about this is like, I'm curious, what's the next feature that everyone like wants that you're like, oh my God, it's going to be amazing when this happens? I have one in mind.

• 42:52Dan Shipper?

  Do you guys want to go around and say that your next feature?

• 42:56Dan Shipper?

  Kieran, maybe you start.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  I want the iOS app. I want it on my phone.

• 43:01Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, that's a big deal.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. Yeah. So I secretly have like an app on my phone called Cora, but

• 43:09Speaker 00

  but it's not there. Yeah.

• 43:13Dan Shipper?

  Natasha, do you have one?

• 43:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just want the assistant to be like so powerful that it replaces the AI systems for me. Like, because it can already do that. I know that. So I'm waiting for that.

• 43:28Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. What about you, Brandon?

• 43:30Speaker 00

  I think I'm just done with Gmail. Like, I want to start to, I want to be in Cora at all times. And I think that, like, we can do crazy things if we're responding from emails too. It's an amazing companion right now, but I want it to be the whole thing.

• 43:43Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, I agree with that. I also, I agree with all these. My other big one is I just want a true unified brief of all my inboxes. Because I have a couple of these inboxes where I'm just like, I get so many emails, but they're all basically like not important, except every once in a while, there's an email that's like, you missed a credit card payment or whatever. And I'm like, oh, my God. And so, like, I really want.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  You don't have AutoPay set up?

• 44:10Dan Shipper?

  I do. It was a new credit, it was a new credit card. I thought I set up AutoPay and I was like, oh.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  Cora down, then missed an email. Yeah.

• 44:18Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, so, so I just want, I want that unified, unified brief. Instead of having to collect through different briefs. But I think this is a great roadmap. I'm psyched for the next six months.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I want to add one more thing. I want to just make whatever we do with categorization and summarization, like just the basics that we do now, just like 100 times better. Always keep improving that because we can, like, we're, we're really at the start and there's so much potential to make them like way better. Yeah, I feel like when I work with Cora, I'm like, okay, I'm, I'm working with an assistant that I've worked with for like a year and a half and knows me really well. And I'm like, what would it be like if I worked with them for 10 years?

• 45:02Speaker 00

  Where they just know me better than anyone else.

• 45:05Dan Shipper?

  And they have a PhD in all of human knowledge.

• 45:07Speaker 00

  And they have a PhD.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  And access to my whole life.

• 45:11Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 45:14Dan Shipper?

  Cool. Well, the sky's the limit. I'm psyched for this launch today. I'm psyched to get to work with all you guys. Thank you for joining and we'll see you next time.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  Thank you so much.

• 45:24Dan Shipper?

  Cheers.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  Thank you. Go check it out. cora.computer.

• 45:28Dan Shipper?

  cora.computer. Check it out.

• 45:38Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh, folks. You absolutely, positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI and I. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard. But instead of gold, it's filled with pure, unadulterated knowledge bombs about ChatGPT. Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions, insights, and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat, craving for more. It's not just a show. It's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. So do yourself a favor. Hit like, smash subscribe, and strap in for the ride of your life. And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely, hopelessly in love with you.