Andrew Lee

Andrew Lee is co-founder and CEO of Shortwave, an AI-native email client built on Gmail. He helped build Firebase before its sale to Google, then returned to email because he still sees it as the rare open communication protocol — and because he thinks Gmail will not bet the farm on AI the way a startup can.

Firebase, then justice for email

After Firebase, Lee watched chat apps fragment identity while email still only needed an address. In a Letter Two interview he said the company started in early 2020 because email felt "really cool, special, and beautiful": you do not have to ask whether someone is on WhatsApp or Signal. Hong Kong protest reporting about WeChat surveillance and the shutdown of Google Inbox convinced him that if big platforms would not invest in email, people would drift into closed messengers.

The Excel problem and the AI lease on life

Shortwave first tried to revive Google Inbox habits, then hit what Lee calls the Excel problem: email clients need most of the product before anyone will switch. Marketing felt like hell until LLMs arrived. Suddenly, he told Letter Two, AI "reopened the Pandora's Box of new things to try" after twenty years when everything in email had already been tried. Summaries and autocomplete in 2022 redefined the company against Superhuman and Spark.

Server-side AI against client-only rivals

Architecture became the wedge. Firebase-era live sync meant Shortwave already kept mail on servers — useful when you need embeddings, vector search, and GPUs. Client-only apps that once bragged about on-device privacy cannot match that horsepower. Lee wants people to see Shortwave as "the new upstart that's AI-native," catching feature parity while winning on semantic retrieval a sidebar Q&A bot and Copilot-style autocomplete can use.

Betting the company on AI

On Gmail's AI push he is blunt: a product with two billion users will take baby steps because a privacy or UX mistake would "nuke a business." Shortwave can take the risk. "I think we are betting the company on AI," he said. "If we're right, the right thing to do here is to go all in." The team dogfoods the product daily and refuses Slack so email remains the work surface they are trying to reinvent.