Why I started a “communications intelligence” company.

And what the heck is that anyway?

Like all founders, I get asked about our company origin often. And, like all early stage startup founders, I’m used to plenty of skepticism. That’s cool, it’s the cost of doing business, and we’ve heard it all before from … well, everyone (family, friends, past coworkers, investors, mentors, that random dude who walks in off the street thinking your office is an Internet cafe, etc).

Knowing you are right is a powerful force to keep you going undeterred. We absolutely love that somehow, some way, we get to make something we care deeply about come to life.

I care deeply about communications.

It starts with my love for technology. Its ability to expand human potential stirs my imagination.

Our first family computer was an Apple IIe, they had me before “hello” honestly. I grew up dreaming of NASA, watching Star Trek, writing Goto commands, building PCs, and linking SCSI cables up to scanners and printers. It was so awesome.

Sure, comparatively speaking, my kids live in a technology fantasyland but I’m just as grateful for my childhood experience at the very beginning of it all.

I took normal Java courses in college. I was an OK programmer but I couldn’t wait for graduation. How could I miss the birth of the Internet? So instead of class, I went to an unpaid internship at an ISP connecting people to a closet full of US Robotics modems hanging off a T1. It was incredible to see people email their families, all around the world, for the first time. I will never forget how exciting it was to witness the start of instant global communications.

Something is magical about people using technology to communicate with each other.

Since then, my co-founding partners and I have been on an adventure in tech entrepreneurism spanning data backup, cloud storage, group chat, file sharing, and CRM. It’s been a thrill to work with my friends to invent new things while we watched everything in the world around us keep improving.

Well, almost everything.

There is one technology that just seems to get worse. While technology has been moving everything else forward, the efficacy of digital communications is falling away. People are drowning in a huge volume of messages arriving at an ever-faster pace across a growing number of channels, which are all being inundated by advertising.

Apart from a few novel interaction improvements, innovation seems largely absent from where people talk to each other the most, causing us to do more and more laborious work just to keep up.

Slack (who I ❤️) has delivered a modern, more curated platform for our team conversations and brought some hope to organized communities. But this is a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of our communications and Slack’s format has limitations. Can you imagine if all of your emails suddenly showed up as a new Slack messages tomorrow? That won’t work.

So what can we do about it?

Recently our team found ourselves excited to take on our next challenge, and we gave this question a lot of thought.

We started by narrowing the scope. The biggest digital communication problem today is, by far, email, and it’s also where many of us spend hours of our workday. Improvements to the email experience would go a long way, so we started there.

There are about 200 billion email messages generated each day. That’s a lot. It compares to just over 10 billion daily Facebook posts, which we are free to totally ignore. Nobody ever lost sleep over missing an important Facebook post like we do with email. Text messages, being all iMessage, WhatsApp, and SMS combined, amount to about half the number of daily emails, by the message. Of course, if you look at the number of words communicated between people by email, nothing else … even … comes … close.

Keeping up is clearly the big issue. But that’s not the only problem. In part because it’s so hard to keep up, we miss important messages far too often. They get buried under the ceaseless parade of new mail. We drop the ball and neglect people waiting on us. Our poor responsiveness causes costly delays and detriments to both our work and our relationships. Then we start off replies with a lame apology for “our delay.” Yuck.

Most of us turn email notifications off on our phones because they are too noisy otherwise. Unfortunately, that means we have become inbox refresh-aholics to cope, hoping to somehow quickly catch those important messages fast enough before they get lost. And then there is the data. We have a wealth of data from years of emailing but it is so hard to get at and it goes woefully underutilized.

These universal struggles with email have given rise to apps with clever workarounds and interactions like swiping, snoozing, visual cards, and cute terse auto-replies (or the worst: segmentation); all serve to just chip away at the edges of the core problem: email is not very intelligent.

Perhaps Dropbox (who I also ❤️) illustrated this point the best when announcing Mailbox’s shutdown by saying “there’s only so much an email app can do to fundamentally fix email.” Our team agrees.

We need a fundamental change to email itself, and all forms of digital communication for that matter.

In short, we need communications intelligence.

What is communications intelligence?

Today’s best products are intelligent. They learn from how we use them to make our experience better and more intuitive. We think the same must be true for email, and communications in general.

The answer to fixing email lies not in just another email app, but a new type of communication experience altogether. We need an intelligence layer on top of email that learns from how we use our email and is capable of predicting what we will want to do with a message before it is even seen.

It then must help us do common things easier by filtering, highlighting and prompting our focus on what will matter the most to us, all while more efficiently dealing with everything else. And most importantly, it has to keep us in control. Email is mission critical. Any increased risk of missing something important is unacceptable.

Ideally, this is your own personal AI that can extend beyond email, saving you time and increasing productivity now, while getting to know you and creating opportunities to reconnect with your existing network and build stronger relationships over time. After all, the relationships behind our communication are what really matter to us.

That’s what our company, Notion AI, is.

We are making the world’s first communications intelligence company, aimed initially at reclaiming email.

Notion AI, the company, is being built primarily on trustworthiness — being that we are fully committed to earning and deserving our User’s trust in everything we do. Daring is also core to our DNA … We espouse an optimistic view of the future and technology’s role in it. This will always bring challenges but they are worth overcoming. And lastly, we embrace love as a core tenant, in that we are rooted by an authentic care for our Users, driving us to craft the best experience we can for them.

Here’s to the future! #LoveEmail