Letter #116: Satish Dharmaraj (2013)
Managing Director at Redpoint | Email Again
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Today’s letter is a blog post Redpoint Managing Director Satish Dharmaraj wrote detailing what he would do if he started Zimbra (the company he started and sold to Yahoo! for $350mn before joining Redpoint) again. He wrote about the massive opportunity for a smart company to serve the professional market with a real, thoughtful solution for mobile email. Just a few months later, he began working with Acompli, a team working on that exact challenge. And just another few months later, Microsoft purchased the company for $200M. In just 20 months, Satish went from blog post to $200M exit.
Satish is a Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures. He started his journey in the US as an immigrant with $5k in debt at a trailer park in South Carolina, but is now recognized as one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capitalists. At Redpoint, he’s invested in companies including: Snowflake ($50bn market cap), Cockroach Labs ($5bn valuation), Duo ($2.35bn acquisition), Pure Storage ($12bn market cap), and Zendesk ($10.2bn acquisition). Prior to joining Redpoint, Satish was the Founder/CEO of Zimbra. Before Zimbra, he was VP of the Messaging Product Division at Openwave Systems, responsible for the email, unified messaging, voicemail, and instant messaging product lines. Satish managed the engineering and product management teams which had over 200 people and a $45 million budget. While at Openwave, Satish's division deployed 180 million mailboxes worldwide with the largest deployments being 20 million mailboxes at JPhone and KDDI in Japan. Satish previously was part of the founding team at the unified messaging company Onebox, where he led engineering and network operations, and was instrumental in the sale of Onebox to Phone.com for $850 million. Prior to Onebox, Satish was at Sun Microsystems' JavaSoft Division where he was responsible for the conception, design and implementation of Java Server Pages (JSPs); in addition, he led the team that designed and implemented the Java Servlet API. Satish previously held several positions at IBM and Transarc Corporations.
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Letter
I think it’s time to revisit email. Mailbox.app revealed the demand in the market for a better mail client. But I think more can be done and a venture scale company can be built around email, particularly corporate email.
Microsoft Exchange dominates the corporate email market with greater than 60% market share. But that seemingly unshakeable grasp is showing weakness because of the lack of innovation in the core product, powerful mobile app distribution channels and the BYOD/consumerization of IT waves.
It has been proven that you don’t have to sell to IT anymore. You can sell directly to the consumer who happens to work in a business and flood the business with your software without the IT team knowing about it.
Through my days at OneBox and Zimbra until now, I’ve built a deep passion for email. If I were to start Zimbra now, this is how I would approach the market:
First, build a beautifully designed mobile email client that talks EWS/AS to Exchange and is available on iOS and Android.
Second, develop an email client with a built in social feed for all those people on the same domain as a left shelf. One tap to post your location so you can tell your co-workers you are traveling or working from home. One tap to share the latest news on a sales call. The right shelf is an attachments and files browser combining Dropbox and Box files with email attachments.
Third, enable full text indexing of all emails in the cloud so it’s easy to search for everything. i.e. bring a Gmail like experience to exchange of fast and effective searching.
Fourth, embed gesture based shortcuts within the mobile client. Unlike keyboard, a smartphone has a much more sophisticated input system – the touch screen. Users could configure gestures not just for simple actions like delete and spam but more complex actions. For example, a single tap responds to a message with the answer “Yes” and a double tap will reply with “No.” A three finger tap might add an appointment to the calendar; something else would add a map of your current location to the body of a mail. And a pinch might ask the app to read your calendar, figure out who you are meeting with at this hour, emails everyone on the invite with “I am running late!”
Fifth, automatically generate a whitelist for your inbox to limit junk. Everything whitelisted is prioritized and the rest is put into another folder. The whitelist is created from implicit signals when you use the app. Every email recipient from your account is automatically whilelisted, as are CC’ed people, and everyone in calendar invites. Also, imagine a one button unsubscribe within the app to quickly triage junk.
Last, to-dos and notes should be integrated into my inbox and appear like emails. Alongside the compose button for email, there should be text box to quickly create a task. Every task appears in my inbox like an email. Emails, Tasks and Notes have a subject, a body and attachments (optionally). I think a fully searchable and mobile mail product can store notes and tasks the same way it stores email. It’s a matter of UI to surface it right. Deletion is the same as completion of tasks. A note to self is the same as an email without a sender and a recipient.
The business model is self-evident: pursue a direct to consumer, bottoms up freemium approach with a top-down sale to IT.
Ideas are dime a dozen… execution is everything. If there is a world class team going after this area, I would love to be part of the journey.
Wrap-up
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