Andrew Lee

Andrew Lee is co-founder and CEO of Shortwave, an AI-native email client built on Gmail. He co-founded Firebase in 2011 and sold it to Google in 2014, according to his own site, then returned to email because he sees it as a rare open communication protocol.

Learning to Program Before Rose-Hulman

Lee was born and raised in Minnesota, where he learned to program and did gymnastics as a child, he writes on his blog. He double-majored in computer science and electrical engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana, graduating in 2006, then moved to California and from 2007 started several companies with his Firebase co-founder, James.

Leaving Firebase for Email

After Google bought Firebase he ran or helped run the product for three years, and he left Google in December 2017, he writes. "We'd sold Firebase, it was doing great, lots of people using it, but it was now in Google's hands and I wanted to build something really big and meaningful," he told his brother Timothy B. Lee on Understanding AI. He then spent time as an active angel investor and has backed more than 45 companies, according to his site.

In a Letter Two interview he said Shortwave 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. Reporting from the Hong Kong protests 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. He then asked former Firebase colleagues whether they would "do justice to email," Letter Two reported, and they said yes.

Rebuilding Shortwave Around AI

Shortwave first tried to revive Google Inbox habits, then hit what Lee calls the Excel problem: an email client needs most of the product before anyone will switch. Large language models changed that. AI, he told Letter Two, "reopened the Pandora's Box of new things to try" after twenty years when everything in email had already been tried.

Shortwave already kept mail on its servers to support live sync, an approach carried over from Firebase. That made it easier to add embeddings, vector search, and GPU-backed features such as an inbox assistant and autocomplete. Lee wants people to see Shortwave as "the new upstart that's AI-native."

Betting the Company Against Gmail

On Gmail's AI push he argued that a product with two billion users has to move cautiously, because a privacy or design mistake could "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."