Interview with Elie Steinbock, Founder of Inbox Zero

Elie Steinbock is an entrepreneur, full stack developer and founder of open source AI software Inbox Zero. 

He has also founded several other businesses and runs a popular YouTube channel teaching viewers about open source, Cursor and AI. 

Inbox Zero was the winner of the AI category in the 2025 FOSS awards, and Elie was kind enough to speak to us about how he got started, the future of the industry, and much more. 

Hi Elie, congratulations on your victory in the AI category of the FOSS awards, thanks for taking the time to speak to us. Can you tell us a bit about yourself? 

My name is Elie, and I am the founder of Inbox Zero. My background is as a full-stack developer, and I also have a computer science degree from Hebrew University. I’ve run a few different businesses. You can read more about me online here: https://elie.tech 

What inspired you to create Inbox Zero, and why did you choose to make it open source? 

I was running a previous business and spending too much time on email. I wasn’t going to pay for a human assistant, but I figured why not use an AI to do a lot of this repetitive work. 

I have a channel about open source where I teach people about the code for open source codebases. I’ve done a lot of projects over the years, and I always wanted one of my projects to be open, so I figured why not for this one. 

Being open means there’s more trust and transparency. It also gives a marketing boost. It also enables people to contribute if they want to, although we haven’t had too much benefit there as accepting contributions is quite difficult. 

How does AI in Inbox Zero differ from traditional email management tools? 

It’s not here to replace Gmail or Outlook. The intention is for you to continue using whatever you’re used to when it comes to email, but Inbox Zero will organize your email in the background and also draft replies in your existing email client.  

It is not a Chrome extension either, although we do have a Chrome extension which makes Gmail slightly better to use. But it’s not critical to use Inbox Zero. 

What were the biggest technical challenges in building an AI-driven inbox cleaner? 

Everyone uses email very differently, and email is really such a big mess. The big challenge is you want to clean out the mess but also you don’t want to get rid of stuff which is important for people. 

Also, the AI when I started the project around two years ago wasn’t strong enough, but the latest models have improved significantly, so it can do a much better job now. 

You’ve worked on blockchain standards before. How did those experiences influence your approach to AI projects? 

They didn’t have any real impact. I did create ERC-5507 to bring more accountability to Web3. Maybe the open source angle was impacted by doing things in web3, but there was no direct relation to what I was doing in that space to Inbox Zero. 

How do you see AI shaping productivity tools in the next 3 to 5 years? 

That’s a really good question. I think AI will continue to manage more and more of our lives. I wonder what the next big breakthrough is or if we’ve sort of plateaued right now with where we’re at. GPT-5 isn’t a major step up from GPT-4 and the previous models we had, so maybe things are just flattening out now. 

Having said that, things are moving insanely quickly, so I do expect to see a lot of changes in the years ahead. It’s a difficult market to navigate as a business because things are changing so quickly and it’s become so much easier for people to build their own products, so they don’t need to spend the same amounts on other people’s products and it also means there’s an insane amount of competition in the market right now for new products. 

What role does community feedback, particularly in areas like sustainability, play in shaping Inbox Zero’s roadmap? 

We try to get as much feedback as we can from users. Every customer call I’ve taken, I think I’ve learned something that’s helped improve the product. One of our big challenges was to make the product easier to use, and the community feedback has helped with that. 

What is the secret of your success? 

I enjoy what I do. 

What do you love most about what you do? 

Being able to work on your own things is always fun. You don’t need to deal with the messy code of other people. You define the product and how it’s going to behave, and there are some real challenges that need solving when it comes to email. 

It’s also nice to help people be more productive, but it’s an ongoing challenge, and yet there’s a lot of work still ahead for us and problems to solve.