The Story of Gated: Building the Future of Attention Management

Email overload can drive even the most seasoned tech executives to their breaking point. For Andy Mowat, who had scaled go-to-market motions at unicorns like Box and Culture Amp, the deluge of incoming messages sparked an idea that would evolve into something much bigger than email filtering.

“I was just getting hammered by emails, so I hacked together Gated,” Andy explains in a recent episode of Category Visionaries. What started as a personal solution quickly resonated with others drowning in digital noise.

The initial product was elegantly simple: senders who weren’t connected to a recipient had to make a small charitable donation to get their message through. This approach proved remarkably effective, with reply rates soaring from the industry standard “one to 2%” to “above 50%” for messages that came through Gated.

Word spread quickly through Silicon Valley’s tight-knit sales and marketing community. “I go to a party in San Francisco around anything sales and marketing related and everyone’s like, ‘oh my God, that’s the tool, I know it or I’ve heard of it,'” Andy recalls. The product gained thousands of users and was filtering close to 10 million messages monthly.

But viral adoption wasn’t enough. Despite users saying “I’d pay for this thing. It’s great, it’s amazing,” Andy and his team realized they needed to think bigger. “Holy crap, we build something that impacts tens of millions of people a month, but it still isn’t going to change the world in the way we needed to change it,” he reflects.

This realization led to a pivotal decision. Rather than simply filtering email, Gated would evolve to address the broader challenge of attention management across all digital channels. The timing couldn’t be more critical – as Andy explains, “AI is going to just overwhelm us on every channel. If you thought it was easy before to send 100,000 emails… if you thought you were only suffering in email, you’re going to suffer on LinkedIn.”

The new platform shifts focus from filtering messages after they’re sent to influencing what conversations people initiate in the first place. Instead of just blocking unwanted communication, it helps users clearly signal what types of conversations they’re open to having.

This evolution aligns with Andy’s belief that the current approach to digital communication is fundamentally broken. “Right now, you don’t control your own attention,” he explains. “The manifesto talks about anyone can reach us and they can send us whatever the heck they want and they can do it. And automation increases that.”

Looking ahead, Andy envisions Gated becoming what he calls a “universal gate” – a single intelligent system that users can adjust to control incoming communications across platforms. “You have a single intelligent gate that you control. You can tighten up or loosen as much as you want. And through that is where you focus on new connections and new conversations.”

The platform will leverage AI to help users manage these connections more effectively: “There’s this message coming in, it’s around a focus area that you’ve articulated. Looks like it’s pretty relevant or looks like it’s not at all.”

This vision extends far beyond the original email filtering tool. As Andy explains, “We’re after building the universal Gate, we’re not trying to get in the middle of existing conversations.” In a world where AI-driven communication threatens to overwhelm every digital channel, Gated aims to give people back control of their attention – not by building walls, but by creating smarter gates.