While attending the recent Camp Hustle’24 (which btw, was an awesome LP-GP event; my notes from the event here), I got the opportunity to witness a candid fireside chat with Rahul Vohra, Founder of Superhuman.

I have followed Rahul’s journey for a while now. My last startup Workomo was tackling a similar problem statement to Rahul’s previous startup Rapportive. Also, his article ‘How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit‘ from First Round Review really helped me as a 0-to-1 founder. In fact, I wrote a post on it myself in 2019 deconstructing Superhuman’s PMF playbook.

Listening to Rahul talk through his life journey in detail during Camp Hustle reminded me of one of my core mental models – the ‘Success Flywheel‘. I first wrote about it in a May’23 post. It essentially means that our world is wired in a way that winners keep winning.

Unpacking this a bit more, I have seen that in every case, the “winner” had a clear first event of success that then kickstarted the Success Flywheel in their lives.

Let’s look at Rahul Vohra’s life journey as an example (from what he shared during Camp Hustle):

• Started coding at the age of 8.
• Completed undergrad in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. Went on to enroll in the PhD program but dropped out.
• Reid Hoffman (Founder of LinkedIn) was speaking at an event in Cambridge. Rahul met him and asked for one piece of advice, to which Reid responded – “move to the Bay Area”.
• Rahul followed this advice, moved to SF, started Rapportive, and as luck would have it, got acquired by LinkedIn!
• As Rahul was thinking through his next startup idea after spending a couple of years at LinkedIn, he got this golden advice from a mentor:

If you are a first-time founder, start by going after a niche market with little competition, even if it’s small in the beginning, so you can differentiate more easily.

If you are a second-time founder, go after a very large and crowded market from the very beginning, because you are likely to out-execute and out-raise competition in the space.

• Rahul followed this advice and started building Superhuman to go after the behemoth Gmail (which…is free!). On the back of his previous success with Rapportive, Superhuman was able to get backed by top-tier VCs like a16z, First Round, and IVP, in addition to celebrity angels like Ashton Kutcher, Will Smith, and the Chainsmokers.
• Through Rapportive and now Superhuman, Rahul obviously became deeply entrenched in the Valley venture ecosystem, building relationships with some of the best founders, angels, and VCs out there. Given this access, he started angel investing on the side and soon started running into Todd Goldberg (Founded Eventjoy; Acquired by Ticketmaster) on several deals.
• They both connected, decided to join hands, and started Todd and Rahul’s Angel Fund. If the founding and operating success weren’t enough, check out some of the portfolio companies of this Fund – Mercury, Circle, Descript, Clearbit, and AngelList.

Rahul’s journey is another great example of the Success Flywheel in action – how he was able to keep parlaying his initial success into more success, and it continues.

Even before his move to Silicon Valley and starting up, the initial success event that seems to have catalyzed the Flywheel in Rahul’s journey was his getting into the ultra-competitive CS undergrad course at a top-tier uni like Cambridge. Few get the opportunity to meet OGs like Reid Hoffman in person, let alone get his advice. Being part of a highly selective cohort of young students positioned him to get this sort of early exposure.

As I was ruminating on these learnings from Camp Hustle, I saw this LinkedIn post from Aravind Srinivas, Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity:

Based on current vibes, Perplexity seems to have the best odds among the new generation of AI-native companies to be the “Google-killer”. If this is true, then check out who has access to the next (potential) Google – Jeff Bezos, the entire YC gang, Naval Ravikant, Elad Gil, Balaji Srinivasan, Tobi of Shopify, and other successful repeat founders, operators & prominent investors. It’s the same set of folks who succeeded first in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, many of whom then also benefited in Web 3.0/ Crypto.

These individuals are already at the top of the pyramid, operate at the tip of the spear of capitalism, and keep parlaying their success from one economic cycle to the next, one asset class to the next, and one technology to the next. Each of their Success Flywheels keeps ripping and getting exponentially stronger with each rep.

Of course, it’s important to acknowledge the hustle, passion, and hard work that continues to grease these Flywheels. But the Flywheel nature ensures that the ROI on each ounce of input keeps compounding at an exponential pace. Then it’s a personal choice whether one eases the input-effort but still gets growing outcomes, or like Bezos and Musk, keeps growing the input-effort and given improving ROI, translates to even better outcomes with each parlay.

PS: for thoughts on how to get the Success Flywheel going in your own life, check out my May’23 post ‘The Success Flywheel‘.

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