How does Nylas view its initial focus on email and its expansion into communication and other adjacent services?

Nylas is focused on not just expansion, but meaningful expansion. Adding in another communication channel just for the sake of doing it is nice, but we want to add new communication capabilities to our platform that exponentially increase the value of the previous ones. 

Email is a great wedge and it's always going to be one of the best places, because email is the most unkind environment. With a text message, at least you know what's going to be in it, but an email could literally have anything. It can be a notification from Nextdoor about what your neighbors are saying. It could be a receipt, an email from an old friend, or even one of those same form sales emails you get every single day.

At Nylas, what we’re really doing is not just creating the ability to receive those, but actually creating the ability to extract meaning from them. Is this a bounced email? What's the sentiment of this message? Was this sent by a human or a machine? These are currently pretty hard to figure out, for example. These are very complex things, and in order to turn on those features, you'd have to basically create three new departments in your company. Now it's just a skill you have out of the box.