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> Grammarly's acquisition of Superhuman follows its recent $1 billion funding from General Catalyst, which gives it dry powder to create a collection of AI-powered workplace tools. Dry powder to do what?! Is this americanism? I've been here for over 8 years and every month I find some wording that's just bizarre, like as if there was a competition for ways in how to confuse someone.
> Grammarly's acquisition of Superhuman follows its recent $1 billion funding from General Catalyst, which gives it dry powder to create a collection of AI-powered workplace tools. Dry powder to do what?! Is this americanism? I've been here for over 8 years and every month I find some wording that's just bizarre, like as if there was a competition for ways in how to confuse someone.
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My history with email clients being acquired is not encouraging. The history is they are effectively abandoned and/or shut down on the order of weeks and months not years. See Dropbox/Mailbox.
Is this really a good metric to aim for? Don't we want productivity tooling to result in less email not more?
> The company claims its users send and respond to 72% more emails per hour, and the percentage of emails composed with its AI tools has increased fivefold in the past year. Is this really a good metric to aim for? Don't we want productivity tooling to result in less email not more?
This is a bit surprising. I even didn't expect Grammarly to have the cash, I used to be a paying customer of theirs when I was writing papers, but apparently with AI I don't even need the free Grammarly anymore.
> The company claims its users send and respond to 72% more emails per hour, and the percentage of emails composed with its AI tools has increased fivefold in the past year. Is this really a good metric to aim for? Don't we want productivity tooling to result in less email not more?
read: spam has increased 5 fold!
This feels like a pattern of grammarly becoming a holdco / following the Salesforce playbook. Find companies with - solid but not breakout growth (and probably slowing) - a loyal cult following - raised at too high a valuation in the peak era - talented teams - still founder led by strong product thinkers Salesforce did this with Quip, Slack, etc.
It's not a bad play, like PE rollups but arguably with more potential for success from a "founder/startup friendly" perspective. PE, historically, is very good at stripping/optimizing/etc (think Bending Spoons), but I think there is magic in startups PE simply does not have that allows for a different, yet more successful, outcome (growing vs cutting your way to financial success). We should see more of this as large…
which i think is a real problem - it prevents "mom and dad" investors from partaking in the wealth creation process, as they are not sophisticated investors and thus barred from being able to invest in these PE investments.
Public listing has become a cashing out operation, rather than a fund-raising operation, if this continues to happen more and more. And the public becomes the bag holders.