[ { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "If you believe AI is going to have a big impact, then you should try to stay close to it. Think about the core things that you are good at and figure out how you could augment those with AI." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "text": ">> This is Chris Pedreal, CEO and co-founder of Granola, the AI notepad valued at $1.5 billion. He built it in 3 years and turned it into a standout product in a crowded AI market. When it" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "comes to competing with big corporations, is there still opportunity to build something major in 2026? There are a lot of products out there, a lot of people trying to do things. It's" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "like, can you care more than everyone else? There's so much advertising that's happening that I think that if you don't have a product that itself can like pop out and get noticed and loved, it just" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "feels like a a losing proposition." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> If you had to start from scratch today, what would be your playbook?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> I would definitely build." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. I am so excited to be chatting with you because we've been using Granola for I think over 6 months now. I know you launched earlier, but when we discovered it and" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "started using it, uh it's an amazing product for our team. And what I'm going to do, I'm going to launch a task right now. So, it starts recording so that at the end of the conversation, we'll be" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "able >> to see >> to see how it actually works." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Yeah. Perfect. Back in 2024, you said it's so much easier now to build very specialized workflows for a small group of people versus earlier because now you can use AI. Your bet was that with" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "current AI tools, we can build something for a small group of people because we don't have to use so many resources, right? Uh because we can vibe code all stuff, we can ship faster versus like 10" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "years ago if you wanted to build something, you would need a huge team." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "So serving small group of people wouldn't really make sense. Do you think it's still the case in 2026 or we moved to a world where anyone can vip code anything so that you don't really need" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "to build a very specialized tool? What is your sense of the market right now?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> The one thing I know is that everything's changing and it's it's hard to predict the future. Just because people can vibe code things doesn't mean that we're only going to use vibecoded" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "software all the time. I think vibe coding, building tools from scratch is incredibly powerful if you're building like an internal tool that your team's going to use. I still think that there" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "are certain areas where you want to have the best possible tool and that takes tons of time and effort and care and continued investment. So, I I do think there will be lots of software out there" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "that exists, but it it's hard to predict exactly where the line of what will be vibe coded versus what will we pay for." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "Do you feel like it's much harder to build now because you have experience building in pre-ai era comparing that to building granola?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Harder now." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Yeah. Just because I feel like the market is so crowded like you see because anyone can become an entrepreneur. If 10 years ago in order to build something if you were not a coder yourself you needed to find an" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "engineer. If you were an engineer you needed kind of to find a product person." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "So you needed those resources. It feels like now there are so many solo founders and the market is really crowded." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> It's two sides of the same coin, right?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I think it's so much easier to build now. You don't need as many people, as many resources, which means more people are trying it. It's kind of like when digital photography uh became common. It" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "used to be really hard to get a camera, right? And then only a few people had cameras, there were photographers, and then um digital photography made it easy for everyone to take photos, right? It" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "doesn't mean that professional photographers aren't still needed and way better than your average person. So, I think it's the same thing with starting products today. There are a lot" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "of products out there, a lot of people trying to do things, >> a lot of them aren't that good, right?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And and I think uh that's what it's all about. It's like can you can you care more than everyone else and can you create something better? Like I what what I have seen in terms of the one" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "thing that seems to help an AI company break out from a crowded marketplace is just that the product actually works and is the experience of using it is better than than the alternatives. We see" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "people are more willing to switch for slight improvements in product now. So it's like people are very very attuned to the quality of the products that they're using. And in that sense I think" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "it's it's no different than before. It's like you still like it's just you have to fight for that and you have to you have to be really really focused on it." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> I really like how you said you have to care more. I feel like that applies to any niche where you competing anything that you're doing if you care more than others then this is kind of this helps" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "you um stand apart. Talk to me about launching a product in the AI era because you didn't do like a public launch. You started with a few users uh saw their reaction. If you had to start" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "from scratch today, what would be your playbook? Yeah, I think the the conventional startup wisdom before was launch as soon as possible, get feedback from real users, and then um iterate" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "your way to to something great. And I think because of precisely what you said before, there's so many people putting out slop, like putting out crappy products that it is actually a" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "differentiating factor, a differentiating approach if when you launch, when you come out into the world, your product is better. Uh, and so we we didn't have this whole strategy about building an AI. We were just like" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "our philosophy when we were building Granola was basically we'll do whatever it takes to learn as quickly as possible what we need to do to make our product better. And um, for the first year, uh," }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "the way we learned the most was literally by sitting next to someone, watching them try to, you know, install it and use it, figure out everything that was wrong, go home, try to fix" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "that, do it again the next day with a new person, and do that over and over and over. and we didn't need to launch publicly uh to learn what was wrong with the product because every day we would" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "see exactly what was wrong with the product by just watching one or two people use it. After about a year, it got to the point where was like it was actually pretty good for those folks." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And we said, \"Okay, it's it's now time to to launch publicly because then we'll learn at scale what's wrong with it, how we can make it better.\" Um, so that was the approach we took and I think that" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "really really made the difference. But like in a world where anybody can make software, the only thing that really matters is like how good of the is the software that you're trying to use. So I" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "would if you said if I was starting it from scratch, I would definitely uh build in private or closed beta until I felt really really secure that the product was meaningfully better than" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "than the competition." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Yeah. When it comes to picking out idea, was that your initial idea smart notes or did you have to iterate through ideas as well?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Yeah, ideas are are tricky, right?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Because it's like on one hand you want to be thoughtful from a strategic standpoint like if I build in this space, is it a dead end or is there a big opportunity there, right? And that's" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "kind of high level thinking. Um, and then on the other hand, really a lot of building is is it's better not to think and it's better to just put something in front of people and and and learn how" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "they react to it and and kind of uh follow that, you know, and um and I think when you're if you're trying to think about a startup idea, you want to do both of those things. You want to" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "make sure you're building in a space where there's uh there, you know, there's light future." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Yeah. There's a future. Exactly. But then it's sometimes better not to think too deep. like once you make that bet uh it's almost better not to think at a high level and an abstract level and" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "really just to like follow the scent in terms of what people like and um in 2022 I I came across LLMs for the first time this was about um 8 n months before chatt launched and I was immediately I" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "was like convinced I was like okay this I don't know what this new technology is but it's going to it's going to change everything it's going to change all the the tools we we use for work for" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "productivity I felt that very strongly and I knew um I knew that wasn't a space I wanted to build in and be excited about. But then when we had to figure out where to start, that's where uh we" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "put some prototypes in front of users in front of people and um they didn't care about most of them. But this idea of like a real-time note pad that would take notes for me and that I could" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "interact with. People's eyes really lit up when we put that in front of them." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Was it like a just word by word description of what you want to build or did you vibe codes? Well, >> voding wasn't a thing. Yeah, vibe coding wasn't wasn't quite a thing, but it was" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "more the vibe code. It was um I'm a big believer in prototypes, so like like >> cheap basic prototypes that let people actually mess around with a thing. Um I feel like you're going to learn a lot" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "from that. So my co and I built a few different prototypes and the the notes one was just it was just some JavaScript on an HTML page that that we threw together manually and but it was enough" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "to give you a a flavor of what it would be like if it if it worked properly." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> How did you select those first people who were evaluating your idea?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Friends, friends of friends. It was just people we had access to." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Was there any qualification criteria?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "Because now that I'm thinking about it, if I'm trying to build something I also wanted to put in front of the right people like people who are maybe paying for a lot of tools, people who are" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "working in a big corporation so they have access to, you know, some budget because just randomly asking because >> Yeah. No, that's that's a good point." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Maybe we're a little bit more thoughtful about it than that. Like we built Granola for ourselves and by ourselves we mean people who are like knowledge workers techsavvy um are using different" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "types of tools like live in tools like Slack and Linear and uh superhuman and Gmail. So the folks that we would talk to were oftent times folks working at startups of different sizes just because" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "that was kind of the the environment that we were in." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> What was your criteria of deciding whether to drop idea or continue working on it? Was just like somebody said yes or were you tracking something? I know." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "I was talking to uh Josh Woodward from Gemini and he said the way they test products at Google, they watch how eyes light up. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> When users start testing it, so they don't really have a metric. They're like they're relying on this intuition that they're seeing this kind of surprising for a company like Google, right? Where" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "you expect like a metric after metric." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Yeah, it was very very uh intuition and and qualitative. And in the early days, it was the opposite. I was watching a lot of people being frustrated and and and unable to actually like use the" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "thing the way they we wanted them to >> when it comes to competing with big corporations, right?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "Because we have Zoom who has AI like every product now has AI notes." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Can you walk me through your mindset, entrepreneurial mindset? Because when I'm building something and I see a large company releasing something similar, like my first thought is I'm done. But" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "then I'm like, okay, we're gonna make it through." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Yeah, things are moving so quickly and companies are launching things all the time. And I think now we've all gotten a bit more used to it. But maybe a year year and a half ago, it just felt like," }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "oh, the world's like just like the sky's falling and and the world's changing every 5 minutes. When we launched Granola, AI notetakers uh had already been around like the earliest ones had" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "been around for like seven or eight years. So there were tons of AI note takers. the Zooms and the Googles of the world, they already had AI notetakers." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Not as advanced as the ones they have now, but they they already existed. And when we would go and we'd interview people and try to understand like were they using them, uh were they being" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "useful or whatnot, it became really clear that uh they were only like marginally useful. Um and they weren't actually kind of doing the job that people wanted from a tool like that. I" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "guess what I'm saying is like we kind of did it to ourselves cuz we entered this like crazy saturated uh space and I think we were able to break out because even though Zoom or Google create notes" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "and granola creates notes the the the way we've designed granola the way we think about it is just very very different from those tools and granola is very much a it is your personal tool." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "It's like your personal notepad >> that you are in control of and you you can put notes in there. I can go into granola and I can basically chat with all my meetings from the past 2 years." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Um and as the AI models get smarter, the level of like insights or the level of uh conversations I can have across that corpus gets uh smarter and smarter." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "Yeah, I would love to talk to you about that later in this interview because uh this is like if a company's not recording their meetings, I think they're losing >> 50% of what they can build later with" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "all of these insights they're getting because this is their employees taste." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "This is the way they make decisions." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "This is the way they move. And the only way to teach AI how to mimic or enhance that is through the context. Yeah, it's it's just Yeah, it's the context." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "Exactly. All the data. I want to thank the sponsor of this video, Granola." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "Granola is one of the apps I use every single day. There is a rule that I made for myself. If a task repeats, and it's not the work that actually makes me money, I automate it. Cleaning up" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "meeting notes was one of the first tasks I actually automated with AI. Every call I take, strategy, partnerships, team syncs, intro chats, gets recorded and sorted. And because I've been doing this" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "for a long time now, at the start of every new call with the same person, I have a clean list ready. what we agreed on last time, what I still owe them, what they still owe me. It's not a bot" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "that joins your call. Nothing is really visible to the other side. You stay fully in the conversation and after the meeting, Granola transcribes everything and turns it into a clean summary you" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "can work with. And of course, at the beginning of the call, you disclose that you will be recording this with Granola." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "So, here's my real example. Last week, I was in a partnership call. We were going through financials, timelines, deliverables. There were a lot of moving pieces and my manager was not part of" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "that call, but I really wanted to send her a follow-up email. I felt really engaged in the conversation. I could focus on the person I was talking to without having to take notes of every" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "detail because I knew every number and every date would get captured. After the call, I opened the transcript and I just asked Granola to create that follow-up email, pull a list of deadlines." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "Drafting the email part took me about 25 seconds and I copied and pasted. That's it. As if my manager was on the same call with us. My team and I have been using this for a few months. We miss" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "fewer things, which really matters because with AI, the number of tasks we're tracking has actually gone up a lot. If you want to try it, use the code Marina and get three months free. The" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "link is in the description. And now, let's get back to our conversation with Christopher. for an entrepreneur who's starting today and thinking, \"Okay, I really want to build this tool, but I'm" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "afraid that a big company is going to release a similar I don't know if you've watched Google IO, but they release a very similar tool to whisper flow where it looks the same. The small bar appears" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "has the the but the difference is while you're talking to it, it also references all the files you have in Google Drive and Gmail.\" So, you can say like, \"Oh, by the way, insert a table using this" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "data.\" And it's going to do it. So, it's not only transcribing, it's also adding context. And I'm like, I can see how I'm still using Whisper Flow because I'm I want just the transcription, but I also" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "see how I'll be using more of that as well. Like, can you give advice to an entrepreneur who's building something, but again, constantly in this era when everyone's competing with everyone?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Yeah, it's a great question, right? And it's one of those things where it's and I think if anyone had a crystal ball and could say like okay there's there's an extreme world where we are only using" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "like there's only one tool in the future right and we use it for everything and there's a a different version of the future where we use even more tools than we have today and I think we'll end up" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "somewhere in the middle but you know it's hard to know exactly where we'll be. The way I would think about it is so it's basically it's a 2x2 matrix. It's basically how frequent is the use case" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "that you're going after and how important is it for the user. It's like if it's an infrequent use case, then I think it'll be really tough to compete with the the larger companies or the" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "larger tools that are more established." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I think the if it's an infrequent use case, people will go to the chatt or the clouds most likely, right? In the same way that >> you didn't see a lot of verticalized search engines in like the 2000s because" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "people are just going to Google and it's easier. or they have a habit and that's where they would go. So I think you have to choose a a a use case that's very common. Um because if it's common you" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "have a you have an opportunity to build a habit around it. And there the question is like is it a common use case that the user doesn't really matter if you do a much better job at or is it a" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "is it a use case that's really really important to people right and it's and I think you want to be in that corner where it's basically it's very important to people where if the product" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "experience is even just like 10% better like that's that's reason enough for people to switch to you and use it and if you're in that quadrant then I think it goes back to this if you care more" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "and that's the one thing you can do over the big companies is like you can just care more because they have to care about a lot of things, right? Um >> then you can build that better product" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "and I think you can you can compete." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Do you think we should add a niche to whatever you just said? Because I feel like if you're just going after a frequent use case for billions of people, then it's a big corporation kind" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "of playfield, but if it's a niche like for your product, it's like people who are >> fixed on their productivity, want to record, want to be more effective with their notes." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Yeah. Or you become a really big company one day. I think or that." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Yeah, we definitely want to have billions of people using granola at some point." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> And and you're moving into B2B. You started as B2C company and now you moved into B2B. How's how is that shift?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Well, yeah, it's it's a good point. Our strategy was to mimic uh like a Slack or Dropbox like those types of bottom bottoms up companies. So, it's basically a a productled growth. So the idea that" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "someone inside of a company uh discovers Granola, they fall in love with it, they tell their their colleagues, we kind of grow organically inside of the company, and then at some point someone in a" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "position of authority, maybe it's like the founder, maybe it's the the chief compliance officer, what have you, um legal officer, security officer says, \"Whoa, everyone's using the software. We" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "should uh we should probably like pay for it, have control over it, make sure we know where our data is going and all that stuff.\" And um that was always the plan. We always knew that we would be" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "selling to companies. Um >> but uh at the beginning we were just worried not worried. We just focused on just trying to build something people actually wanted and and and liked. Um" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "and that that worked. So Granola did spread like virally uh organically throughout companies. And now um we have some very very large companies who are on enterprise plans with Granola. It all" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "started either bottoms up where kind of it spread through the company virally or the founder or CEO was using like heard about it and was using it themselves and found it valuable and said actually" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "everybody should should be using it." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> I think it's a great B2B marketing plan when you started with a consumer. How did you get to those initial customers?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> We posted on Twitter um like that was basically >> by yourself like the founding team or >> Yeah. Yeah. I think we posted it for my account and I I didn't really have a Twitter following at all. Um, and I" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "think we just we got really lucky. It was um this idea the way Granola works is like it it looks like Apple Notes." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "It's a notepad and then at the end of the meeting it'll take whatever notes you wrote and it'll flush it out and there's this really nice animation where you see your your notes get like filled" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "in. And um we had a GIF of that and >> at the time I think a lot of the like the startup founders or leaders out there were really interested in new UIs or interactions around AI. And so we had" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "a few famous um like GMO from Verscell retweeted my tweet and then um and then Matt Freriedman also retweeted. So it's basically there somehow and I don't this like the universe made this happen like" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "it just caught a few people's eyes and um and they tweeted about us and then we just started growing like the first day I think we got 500 installs you know so it's like >> that's pretty decent." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> It's not bad. I mean, it was it's more than I expected, but it's also a drop in the bucket, right? And um and then it just started growing like little by little by little because we we weren't" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "doing any marketing. We um the crazy thing about Granola is all all the like old school AI noteakers, they're all super optimized for like growth hacking." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "They'll like the end of the meeting, they'll send notes to everybody who is in the meeting, whether they want it or not, whether you want it or not. And um Granola doesn't do anything like that." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "It's like Granola's like our only job is to serve the user and and give the user wings. The fact that Granola was uh entering a space that was super crowded and had zero growth loops built into it" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "and it still grew virally organically and kind of was able to to pop out and become really visible in that space. I think is a really there's something going on there. I think it's a really" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "strong testament that people are hungry for just better software and better software. Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Interesting. So basically all your marketing is based on >> people loving it and >> great product. Exactly." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> The whole company is based on that." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> That's amazing. So would it be your advice for any entrepreneur building something? Don't think about marketing yet. Just think about the product and people sharing." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> I think so because I think um to your point earlier, it's so noisy out there right now. there's so many people doing so many things and there's so much investment right so there's so much um" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "advertising that's happening that I think that if you don't have a product that itself can like pop out and get noticed and loved it it just feels like a a losing proposition by default I" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "always think about uh very userfacing products I think it's very different if you're going after customer support there it's I think all about having the right sales motion and and marketing is" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "a part of that but um but generally I think if you don't have a good product you're like it's the one thing that you can go and make better with a small team, right? And I think you should do" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "that up front rather than doing do that later." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> I have one final follow-up question here. How many initial users did you have? So, how much feedback were you collecting before pushing it out?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Yeah, we had about 150 active users after after that." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> That's your friends and that's like your inner circle." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Friends and friends of friends. And >> what were you tracking when you gave it out like because you couldn't see their eyes, right? Who were you tracking with the frequency of use?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Yeah. So, what we would do is we would um we would set up uh a first call. We we we do it in person if we could, otherwise we do a video call where we would ask them to share their screen and" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "then we would watch them try to install Granola." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Mhm." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> And try to use it without us saying anything. And then we would schedule a call in 3 days again, share their screen and walk through the the meetings they use Granola for and talk about what was" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "good or not. And that that was the highest signal. That's like the super qualitative um uh that's where you learn the most. But then once the product started getting good enough that people" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "would actually use it, then we track usage and um there's this uh there's this thing I had never heard about it before uh before Granola, but one of our mentors told us about it and it's a" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "thing called a dot plot. And a dot plot basically it's um think of it like a like a like a spreadsheet and every row is a user >> and every column is a day, >> right? So the default dot plot we had" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "would show the last 30 days and then in each cell you basically put for our case like how many meetings did they use granola for on that day >> and um and then you change the color of" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "the cell. So if they use it for like 10 meetings you should make it like dark green. If they use it for zero you should make it white. And then you can at a glance very easily see like the" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "patterns. And um >> and the idea is that you start with a dot dot plot when the product's not very good and then you iterate and you iterate and you and what you should see happen you should see it line up because" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "normally when you do analytics you get you you group all the usage together and you just get like a usage graph, right?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Which you're like cumulatively are people doing more meetings or not? But that's not actually very helpful in teaching you >> what's wrong with your product and is it working? Um and then adopt lot you can" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "see things where it's like oh okay like this person was using it a lot and then they stopped using it and then they like clearly remembered it existed and started using it again or like maybe" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "they went on vacation or you could be like oh actually there's a few people who started a little bit and then they had like one day where they uh they did like five meetings and from then on it" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "became a habit became hooked and you can be like oh how do we get people to get to have that kind of day? So it becomes like a very easy visual way to to get a to stay on on top of the pulse of what's" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "happening with your users." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Amazing. All right. Talk to me about your AI stack. What are you using apart from granola?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> So I struggle with this question because I try to use granola for as many things as possible. And I use uh we haven't launched it yet, but I just got this Apple watch and that is a that's a" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "really nice feeling because it's just here all the time." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Yeah. This is how I take my notes when I go to conferences. Either I >> What do you What do you What do you use?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Well, just voice notes >> and they go to my phone and then I use whatever we're using to transcribe. So, it's it's a journey." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> It's a few steps for my note." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Yeah. But in terms of form factor, I think the the Apple Watch is it just feels it feels very >> Oh, 100%. It it should be the form factor for all the conferences and everything." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um and then uh next I mean I use Claude, right? Claude's probably my second one. Um, and then one of the engineers, uh, at Granola set up this internal agent. We call it Nacho. I" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "actually don't know why we call it Nacho. Um, but it has like a little Nacho as the icon. And, um, we've connected basically all of our internal tools to this one agent. So, literally" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "every single data source that we have is accessible to this agent. And there's like an internal portal, but we also interact with it in Slack. And that one's really interesting. So for" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "example, I will often times what will happen is like I will notice something kind of weird in the product because you know that's my job and I'll post about it in Slack and then someone will ask" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Nacho to like >> be like hey can you look at the analytics for the last couple months and see if that supports like Chris's you know annoyance or whatnot and then that'll come back and then someone will" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "be like okay um here what if we change the way this worked and put uh put a a button here instead and then uh you ask Nacho Nacho goes and talks to cursor and like prepares like a change. So it still" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "kind of goes off the rails all the time and so we have to be like no Nacho like like that's not what I wanted or you think harder. You know you made some assumptions here that aren't right. So" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "there's still a ton of human back and forth but it's it definitely changed the way we've worked internally." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> So it's basically I'm trying to describe this role. What what is he's not like a C like a chief of staff. He's more like goes to analy. Does does he help you with strategic decisions or it's mostly" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "like pull me data?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> It's it's it's a lot of like pull me data. Do this thing that would have been like 30 clicks before, you know, or like opening up three tools and saving data into a file and uploading it somewhere" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "else." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Just do all of that for me. So, it's it's in some ways it's like >> maybe an intern would be the right, you know, it's like we're not we're not outsourcing big decisions. We're going" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "to be like, \"Hey, go pull up the data." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "go pull up this thing. Look at how those two connect. Okay, here's what we want to do. So, it's very much the ideas are coming from us, not not from Nacho, but Nacho is executing on it." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Did you use a tool for that or did was it like built from scratch? I wonder like cuz if you you can totally build this with Perplexity Computer or like >> Yeah, we didn't. So, I I actually have" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "to ask. We didn't use anything like that. It's something like Cloudbot, but it's not Cloudbot. I can't remember what it's called. Um, and we run it we run it ourselves. So that's why we're" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "comfortable with all that data, you know, going through this agent because we we run it and control it." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Okay. What what haven't you delegated to AI yet or what are you doing without AI?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> I think a lot of building great product, it's all about how does this make me feel, >> right? And a lot of it is human intuition based. It's trying to put myself in the shoes of another person" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "and and imagining how they how they'd experience that. I just don't use AI for that kind of stuff at all." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> What you're describing is something so uniquely human." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> We have some really young people uh on the team and they they just naturally default to using AI for everything. It's it's just like their like default behavior." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> And more often than not, I look at that I'm like, \"Oh, that's clever. I wouldn't have done that, but that's actually really smart and I should do it.\" I think the the product stuff is probably" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "it's probably one of the last things at least in in our immediate work that I think we'll get um I don't actually know if AI will ever kind of fully fully get in there because I think uh" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> I don't know the lived human experience is actually the one thing that we have >> totally totally >> um what what it can help uh do though is um so we'll get lots of feedback from" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "users right and then grouping classifying that basically making that feedback putting it into a form that's really easy for us to like build intuitions on top of and making decisions. Super useful for that. But" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "then actually what do you do with those intuitions? What changes you want to make that that's still very very >> very magical >> and it's a very foundary driven thing because you're like the soul of the" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "product has your vibes. So it has to have your feelings. I don't know if you can even >> uh put it into a product, but I love that. Do you have any >> I don't know I call them magic prompts" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "that totally change how you interact with AI? For example, uh I just asked my granola, can you identify bottlenecks in my company? And it went and analyzed my conversations like number one, and you" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "know it, you're the bottleneck." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> That was my number one. And then it came up with a few more things that we're currently fixing. Do you have any other prompts that anyone can use with their AI that's going to change their work?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> It all comes down to the AI needs to have enough context. So if you use granola in all your meetings, then it does. And then you can ask it some pretty incredible things. So, let's" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "let's just assume that the person's doing that. Um, >> the the things that really opened up my eyes and I was surprised at how good they were were um coaching level things like that really there's a there's one" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "recipe in granola which is called coach me Matt. What's kind of great about coaching is that >> harsh if you ask an AI for feedback and AI can give you harsh feedback and there's no person like it's not worried" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "about hurting your feelings, right? So that and it's an AI can say something to me and I think I can hear it better than if like let's say my wife said something to me I might be a little bit more" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "defensive if that makes sense. So uh anything around like deep coaching hey what are these like patterns you observe and how I do things that maybe I'm not aware of that are not helping or that I" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "could that I can improve. That's a really big one. Oftentimes I'll go into other tools. If I use chat bt or claude, they feel quite dumb to me compared to granola because they don't have all that" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "context baked in." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "text": ">> But you can connect now." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> I mean, >> no, no, I again uh but but what I mean by that is um so I have 2,000 meetings in in Granola. 2,500 meetings, right? So >> wow." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> When I ask Claude a question, it doesn't read 2,500 meetings, right? It'll it'll read 10 and it'll try to form a picture about me from those 10 meetings, right?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "So, I have a a recipe in granola which basically says, \"Look at my last month of meetings and write me five pages about who I am, what granola is, what's the granola product.\"" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Can we try that? Can you give me my granola? Can let's do it." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> I really like this pro. Let me let me see what what it tells me." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Perfect. So if I go here and then we just say I'm going to use chat GPT to do some work and I want chat GPT to understand who who I am, what I'm working on and what I try what I'm" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "trying to achieve so it'll have better context about me. So please look at um all my meetings from the last month and write three pages that I can paste into chat GPT so I'll have all the context on" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "text": "what I'm trying to achieve." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "text": ">> Wow. Oh nice. It even extracted some stats pushing cadence." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Yeah. Nice." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> So what I find is now if you take this and you can go to any AI out there, you can go to chatg, you can go to cloud, you can go to any anything and if you if you just say here's some context about" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "me and you paste this in >> and then you ask whatever you're going to ask, the AI will do such a better job answering your questions because it understands so much more about you." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "Exactly." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> So, because it's connected to my claude." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> How can I ask Claude to self update using this to like add context to all my projects?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Yeah. Well, I mean, there's probably some way where you could set a trigger where it does it every day or something like that. Or you could just wait for us to launch that soon because it would" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "that would be kind of cool, right? If this thing basically we're building a version of this where it will auto update every day." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Um, and then you could just use that context anyway." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Yeah. Yeah. That's this is fascinating." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "So I feel like you are building something like a virtual chief of staff based on >> moving towards >> based on on this data that you have. I also write a newsletter where I go deeper on AI tools that I use, career" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "strategies and things I can't fit into a 30inut podcast. It's free. Link is in the description. We've been talking for almost an hour, right? And I'm remembering some things, but there is" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "some details that I might be missing that are important to me. How does granola work in terms of picking out those details? Uh, how does it decide what to surface >> in the in the notes, you mean?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Yeah. So, >> Oh, nice. It gave me product strategy and crowded markets. I really like it." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "Building in the AI era, market dynamic dynamics, product strategy." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> What we realized early on is that what are good notes for you would be very different than what are good notes for me, >> right? So, like the point of notes is really uh dependent on who the person is" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "and what they're trying to achieve. I think we might have been the first to do this. It was basically notes are generated for each person and they're different for each person. And what we" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "do is we take as much about the person into account as possible. So I don't know if this was a calendar event, but let's say you you join a Zoom meeting um and use Granola. Granola will go and try" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "to do research and figure out who everyone in that meeting is and what their roles are. And then we'll use that to figure out what is what the meeting is about and like what should be" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "highlighted in those notes. If I tell Granola my goal for the next few calls is to >> I don't know make sure we follow up with everyone if we had agreed on a to-do list." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Would it be highlighting that for me in every meeting? Does it have like a universal memory of how I want my notes to pres to be presented?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Not an automatic one yet." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Yeah. So that's something you can go and set up a template in Granola. You can basically say you can have different templates and and so you can kind of say I want notes in this structure during a" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "call or during a meeting and be like hey granola make sure to say include this in the notes and it'll do that but it won't it doesn't have like a a memory about you said this in the last call so I'm" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "going to do it in the next call which is um you have to be careful with memory I think like memory is super powerful but with explicit instructions like that the reality is like um we underestimate how" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "much things change right what you don't want is you don't want an instruction that like >> from last You said something last month and like granola still thinks it's really important like" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> my Chad GBT still thinks I want to be an actress which is like two years ago." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> There's a guy on my team which was like I mentioned uh muffins you know like he like he had one question about muffins at Chachi PT once and like now like Chachi PT just keeps bringing up muffins" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "all the time. It's like as a muffin connoisseur, you know, it's like no, I just I just asked about muffins. And that's why you have to be a little bit careful with and that's the difference" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "if you use granola a lot. The the thing is is like there's just so much richness and context in in in our conversations." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "It's a little bit like um I don't know, think about your best friend and think how many hours you've talked to your best friend and like how well they know you. It's like very very different than" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "like if you're just chatting with something like Chachi PT or Claude. It's like a very very superficial >> granular. Yeah. Yeah, it's and but once we fix that, if we can make this dynamic" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "memory based on >> like asking AI to identify my priorities on a certain day, >> then this can become my chief of staff." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Mhm. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> If it can just pull those things like, oh, now Marina is focused on that." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> I'm going to help her in this meeting by suggesting these questions. I'm going to identify this process that's broken in her team clearly because I've heard it in other calls within her company. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> cuz for me like recording my calls is the way is a way to build a virtual chief of staff which we're trying to achieve." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Yeah. And I think almost almost what everybody in AI is trying to achieve really, right? Like like that's that's that's I think >> some level of autonomy cuz for now I feel like AI has made us much more" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "productive but it only means we're working more because we see all this productivity gains. We see how much better it is and we just work more. What I want the next step to be is like give" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "us some more free time. It's summer. I want to take a few weeks off. I can't >> I I Yeah, I think we kind of do that to ourselves though a little bit." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Oh, true. But this is our nature. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> And it's interesting like whether we're going to cross this period in time where AI is helping us with strategic decisions. So, we uh intentionally take more time." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> I don't see this happening now. um >> on the the point you were talking about a second ago, which is uh there's this interesting question of how are you going to um interact with this chief of" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "staff or this AI and how directive are you going to be like basically you going to be like oh always do this or give it instructions and it always follows that or I think there's a different model" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "which is like the AI is almost a little bit in invisible and it just observes what you do and then tries to infer from that like what it should be doing." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Yeah, exactly. That's what I wanted to do." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> What will Marina bring up in the next meeting based on her free speech?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Exactly. Yeah. So, because we a good example here, months ago, I tried building a version of uh Granola generating um follow-up emails. So, like you'll connect your Gmail and it will" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "just learn from your previous messages >> with that person or >> Yeah. No, both. Both. Uh and so so like an example there that's really important is for example let's say um often times" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "people will need to send a link to like an important doc like for example before this you sent me a doc saying here are some instructions right that doc might change like next month you might decide" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "to use a different doc >> and if it if you had to tell granola that you changed the doc you might forget whereas if it has access to your emails and it notices that oh you now use this new doc I'm going to start" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "using this new doc you don't have to think about it So I think there's I think a great model for AI is one where the best design things become invisible, right? And and I think that like the" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "best AI is going to be stuff that you don't even realize is there and >> self learning, self updating, learning from what's changing. This is exactly what you're describing." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> I try to get everyone at at Granola to think about product in the the same way." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And um when someone new joins the company, I basically paint them this picture where I want Granola to feel like a handrail. You know, when you have stairs, there's that that railing" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> and and people always look at me like like, \"What do you mean by that? It's like such a weird thing.\" And I'm saying, \"Well, handrails are basically invisible, right? They're on every" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "staircase. You never notice them, right?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Uh you don't pay attention to them until you trip, right? And then your hand shoots out and it needs to be like right there and it needs to like hold your weight and it's a really really" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "important thing and it needs to be like super intuitive. But then you go back to living your life and going up and down the stairs and and that's that's how I want Granola to feel. Like I want" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Granola to have your back >> to to in any moment of need like if you're tired, if you're tripping or whatever, it's like we're right there for you, but otherwise >> you're the star of the show. You know," }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "you're out there doing things. You're you're living your life." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> You know, whenever I post like I'm excited this company just launched this and I've been using this company for so long now I can do this." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "Oh, why are you happy AI is stealing your data? Oh, AI is going to replace you in three months. Oh, like corporations are just eating eating us, whatever." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> What would you say to those people?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> I think the world's going to change a lot over the next couple years. And I think whenever there's a period of a lot of change, there's going to be turbulence. That is just a reality. And" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I I don't think we're I don't think anyone knows exactly where we're going to end up. I'm excited about AI as a tool that augments us and enables us to do more and better things than ever" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "before. Um, and I think there's a lot of areas where where that's the case where actually AI is not going to replace people. It's actually going to let people do more." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And um, there are all these uh, examples in history where all of a sudden if something becomes more accessible, the demand for it goes up because now people can use it. Like Jeban's paradox, I" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "think it's called. Um, >> it's not going to be everywhere though, right? Like there's definitely going to be uh pockets of society where it's going to be very disruptive, right? And I" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "think um that's happened lots of times in history as well, but it's like change can change is can be exciting, but it can also be really hard. I think it's important to hold the excitement but" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "also the the reality of the downsides uh in our minds at the same time. Um because I I think that's what's going to happen." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> What do you tell yourself when you have fears about AI? if you ever have >> I so my my view there is I think about what I can control generally this is my like philosophy in life I think about" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "what I can control and the things I can't control and I don't worry about the things I can't control and I think uh about the things you can control is if you believe AI is going to have a big" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "impact then you should try to stay close to it and by that I think you should you should try to use it and I think that's really the only thing you can do >> honestly 100% and I think that um and" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I've seen I've seen because I think what's happening with uh engineering is it's like you can kind of see what happens in engineering and the same thing that's going to happen with coding" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "and engineering is going to happen in other sectors later. And I see again we have a guy on our team he's 20 and he's uh the way he uses AI is incredible and he's just able to do all kinds of" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "incredible things that I never would have expected. And so like I think the only advice I have to people is like don't shy away from it and and lean into it. And that doesn't mean you need to." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "There's a lot of like AI theater, productivity theater. It's like I think there's a lot of people >> there's almost like more talk about how AI has helped them then it's actually helping them be more productive, right?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I think I think we're in the productivity AI productivity theater phase. But I think we're going to come out on the other end of that where it just really does augment your productivity tremendously. But it" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "doesn't mean you have to spend 247, you know, like following every single launch. Like I that's that's not what I mean. What I mean is um think about the core things that you are good at that" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "you need to achieve in your job and figure out how you could augment those uh with with AI. And like we were talking about for product for me it's not oh how do I get how do I get chatt" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "to make product decisions but it's maybe how do I get AI to >> uh >> get all the data >> get all the data so I can better better informed to make better product decisions. And so that that's how I" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "would think about it. I've, you know, I have a six-year-old and an 8-year-old and and I think about >> what's the world going to look like when they're older and and I I don't know," }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "right? Um but um it's perhaps going to be a little bit easier for them because >> the world's going to change a lot over the next few years. So, well, I don't I mean, again, I don't know, but it's" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "they're going to they're already growing up in a world where >> where is normal, right? Whereas, I think if you are maybe in your >> mid20s right now, uh like early in your career and now there's all this change" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "that's happening. I think that's a that's perhaps a harder time, but again, maybe it's easier than if you're in your 40s. I don't know, you know, like it's hard to tell." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": ">> Yeah. Okay. And last advice for founders building in the AI era. What should they be avoiding?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> I think this has always been the case, but it's it's so much more extreme with AI. There's so much noise. Um there's so much FOMO. There's so much imposter syndrome. Like if if you were just if" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "you just look at Twitter, you'd you'd assume that everything is just like solved." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Companies are run by agents. Yeah, exactly. All that stuff. And um >> and I think the re the reality is very far from that. And I think ultimately the thing you can do again, what can you" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "control is you can understand a problem and a user better than anybody else in the world if you really wanted to and you can just care more about building a really great solution for those folks." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And you can have a peripheral awareness of of other stuff that's happening. I think it's good to understand directionally where things are going, but do not let it mess with your head" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "because it's so easy to obsess and to look at those things and to assume that they have it figured out and the shiny objects and it's like the what's the the fashion of this week versus that week or" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "what have you." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> But the underlying problem that you're trying to solve that probably hasn't changed at all in the last like two weeks, right? Or even the last two years probably. And so like that's that's what" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "you need to work on, right? That's your job. That's exciting, but it's also you have to you have to manage that mentally because otherwise you'll you'll >> you'll be too distracted and you have to" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "care more about your particular problem." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "text": "Love it. Thank you so much." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": ">> Thank you so much for having me. Thank you." } ]