In 2012, Paul Graham wrote about people living in "email hell".
Thirteen years later, many people still complain about the same thing.
How come?
The question nagged at me when I started working on my next project. After running a tech-enabled property management firm in France for six years, I'd seen the problem firsthand. Property managers received 50+ emails daily—legal documents, tenant complaints, contractor coordination, emergency requests. Every day, someone said "I have too many emails."
But here's what I realized: the email problem couldn't be solved until now. Only recently have we had the right combination of technology and market conditions to tackle it properly.
The Core Problem
For many professionals, their inbox has become their todo list—not by choice, but by necessity. Property managers, lawyers, or insurers take tasks from the outside world: tenants, clients, contractors who only communicate through email. Your inbox becomes your task manager because it's the only interface your task-generators can access.
The fundamental issue is that email has no gatekeeping. Anyone can dump anything into your todo list with no filtering, no prioritization, no context about urgency or importance. A lawyer from a big tech law firm in Paris mentioned to me that he spent three hours just sorting through new emails after being away for a single day. Three hours to figure out what needed his attention, not to actually get any work done.
Tools like Front added features to make the inbox a better todo list—tags, assignments, workflows. But the core problem remains with its side-effects: instead of doing your job, you're constantly maintaining your task management system. You have the interface to manage a todo-list but you're still manually sorting through an unfiltered stream of requests, complaints, documents, and noise.
The Perfect Solution Already Exists
The perfect solution already exists and it's called an executive assistant. They act as the gatekeeper and triage emails, prioritize them based on context, handle basic tasks, save important documents, and draft replies. They understand what's urgent and manage the todo list that is your inbox. But obviously, not everyone can afford having an executive assistant.
So the question is: can tech create good executive assistants for the inbox?
It Couldn't Be Built Until Now
Until recently, two technical barriers made building this impossible.
First, emails are unstructured data. You need a layer that organizes emails by understanding them—extracting priority, intent, and urgency from natural language. This requires deep language understanding that only became possible with modern LLMs.
Second, effective email triage sometimes needs context sitting in external software. For example, an investor can check his CRM to decide if a startup pitch is worth a meeting. Until recently, most business software was siloed. Now systems are opening up through APIs, and AI can automatically identify which systems to check and retrieve the right context—both breakthroughs only recently became possible.
These barriers are gone. We can now build an email client that acts like an executive assistant—automatically triaging emails, extracting todos, drafting replies, and coordinating calendar scheduling based on content and context.
Embarking On The Onbox Journey
Building an AI executive assistant that you can trust is hard. AI demos make it look effortless and magical, but after 3 years with LLMs, I know better. Cursor wouldn't be Cursor without hard work on their custom models and smart engineering.
But transforming how millions work with email?
That's worth the challenge.
We don't think incumbents will care enough about their inbox business to truly improve them.
So we decided to do it ourselves 💪