What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
AI That Remembers So You Don't Have To
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
What if your meetings could remember everything so you don't have to? That's the promise behind Granola AI, the innovative note-taking tool designed to augment human capabilities rather than replace them.
In this revealing conversation with founder Christopher Pedregal, we explore how Granola differentiates itself in the crowded AI productivity space by focusing on what truly matters - fitting seamlessly into users' workflows and addressing the small "paper cuts" that plague our daily meeting routines. Unlike other solutions that deploy bots to meetings (creating what Chris calls an "uncanny valley" effect), Granola uses your device's microphone to work consistently across all meeting formats without storing potentially sensitive audio or video recordings.
The philosophy behind Granola stands apart in today's AI ecosystem. Chris articulates two competing visions for AI products: those that replace human capabilities versus those that augment them. Granola firmly commits to the augmentation path, giving users what he calls a "steering wheel for AI" - meaningful control over how the technology serves them. This approach recognizes that outsourcing busy work is valuable, but outsourcing thinking itself leads down a problematic path.
Most fascinating is Granola's evolution beyond mere note-taking. With their 2.0 release introducing team features, Granola is positioning itself as a comprehensive AI-powered workspace that understands your context and helps you work more effectively. As Chris explains, this puts them on a trajectory to compete not with other note-takers but with foundational AI providers like Anthropic and OpenAI.
For anyone interested in how AI is transforming productivity tools or entrepreneurs looking to build in this space, this conversation offers invaluable insights from someone at the forefront of reimagining how we work. Ready to let AI remember your meetings so you can focus on what truly matters? Granola might just be your answer.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everyone, fascinating chat today. What if your meetings could remember everything so you don't have to diving into the world of invisible AI? Today, with granolaai, chris, how are you? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, evan. Well, thanks for being here, really intrigued by your mission and vision. Let's start with the basics. What was the big idea behind granolaai? What problem were you trying to solve?
Speaker 2:So, for folks who don't know, granola is an AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings. So the idea is kind of the way you would take notes in Apple Notes or an app like that. You can do that in granola. The difference is that granola listens in the background, transcribes and then, when the meeting's over, it takes whatever notes you've written and then makes them great like fills in the stuff you didn't. You didn't write in terms of what was the original idea, the original idea.
Speaker 2:I came across gpt3 at the time this was maybe seven, eight months before chat, gpt launched and um I I was just fascinated by this technology. It felt like alien technology. It was like really smart. In some ways it could write a college essay, but it couldn't do basic math and it was really confusing and interesting and I started playing with it and experimenting. We use for work like knowledge, work, productivity, tooling. All of that is going to get reinvented on top of AI, on top of these large language models. So my co-founder, sam, and I we always envisioned okay, what is the AI native tool of the future to help us do work, and that's still what we're trying to build with Granola. We just decided to start with one very specific use case, which is helping you take notes during meetings.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. And before Granola, you founded Socratic, a great name, and sold it to Google. Tell us about your Google journey and how did that help you build Granola?
Speaker 2:So it's just so different to do a startup than to be in a big company. You know, I first I joined Google out of college. I was it's like my first job and then I quit it after four years and went to go to Socratic. And I did that for five years and then when I came back to Google, it had just become a much larger company on one hand and I had gotten used to working on a very small team on the other hand. So it's a bit of a culture shock.
Speaker 2:I think when you're building something from scratch, the types of problems you have are just very, very different than the types of problems like a Google or Apple or Microsoft have. When you're building something from scratch, the hard thing is to get people to care about what you're doing right, and I think the the problems with the the google's have to deal with is like okay, you know we already are getting a lot of stuff right, a lot of people trust us, a lot of people use us. How can we innovate or make changes without breaking what we already have or breaking people's expectations? It's just a very different world to navigate.
Speaker 1:I bet. So a lot of AI tools come and go. I know I use a dozen or so different tools and I have my favorite tech stack any given time. Granola seems to be sticking around. People are using it. Congratulations on that. So what's been a secret or the secret for keeping users happy and giving them what they actually want and value?
Speaker 2:yeah, I, I think in ai it's very easy to build an incredible demo and I think we see these all the time. It's like, oh my god, all of a sudden I can do this crazy thing for me and, and that's great and that's incredible. It's really hard to build something that's actually very useful day in and day out, and I think doing that has very little to do with AI. It's a lot about taking all the little paper cuts, all the little annoying things in people's workflows, and trying to fix those or to streamline those, and I think we've tried to do that with granola. We spent a lot of time on that.
Speaker 2:So it's a little bit when I describe granola to someone, it's like, oh, it doesn't sound that different from anything else out there and it's kind of hard to articulate why they should use it. But the moment someone uses granola they tend to say, oh my God, it was just so effortless, it just fit into my workflow, I didn't have to think about it and kind of did exactly what I wanted. And of course you know we try to stay up with the latest and greatest AI, which is changing day in and day out. But a lot of the things that make. I think granola have sticking power. Are things about quite thoughtful, by the the way notifications show up right and how when you use granola it's not invasive, and all the kind of small details that we had to do along the way.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, and you've talked about giving people a steering wheel for AI. What do you mean by that? Why is control important?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. I think there's two main ideas there. One is, I think there's a vision of AI where the AI kind of replaces you, in terms of you delegate a task and just the AI go and does it. And then there's a vision for AI where the AI augments you, so instead of replacing you, it just gives you superpowers, it lets you do the task way better than you would have been able to do it without AI.
Speaker 2:And that's the vision of AI products that we believe in, that we're excited about, that we're building towards products that we believe in, that we're excited about, that we're building towards um and and to be able to do that effectively, you need to give people the right controls and how to steer the ai in the way you want. And I think we are in the we're in like the caveman days of that in as an industry. Or maybe a better metaphor would be um, like like under Kirk Pothy, I think, used this the other day where he said like chatting with AI today feels like using the terminal, felt in like the seventies or early eighties, right Before like the graphical user interface came along. And I think as an industry, we've been giving this incredible technology and we still haven't figured out the most human uh way to let people interact and make the most of it, and it's one of the things we we spent a lot of time working on at granola.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. So many of us in business or enterprises are using team collaboration tools and have Slack or Zoom or Workspace etc. Etc. And you've come out with team features. I guess you call it Granola 2.0. What's changed? How does that work and how are businesses using your service?
Speaker 2:Yeah, when we launched Granola, it was very much a tool just for you as an individual and you're in control and the notes are bespoke for you. For example, if you use Granola and I use Granola on the same meeting, granola would generate completely different notes for you and for me, because I would think about what's most important for me to take away from the meeting versus what's most important for you to take away from the meeting. But the thing about meetings is that oftentimes information shared in meetings is inherently social and inherently relevant to, like, a group of your coworkers, of the people you work with, and we kept hearing from users that they'd take the granola notes and they'd share it with their team over slack. That works fine, um, but the moment you so that like something that's really powerful in granola is if you take a set of meetings and you start chatting with our ai across the set of meetings, like granola, like the underlying models are really good at pulling out themes or ideas across that set of meetings and, uh, well, you could, you couldn't, you couldn't do that in Granola 1.0.
Speaker 2:So we basically built the ability to share a folder, Like you can create a folder where you can put a bunch of meetings or files, whatever context is relevant to a specific project. Let's say and share that within your company and then everybody can chat with that set of meetings. I guess an example for us would be every sales meeting someone like Granola does goes into our sales folder that's public to the whole company and you can kind of go in there and be like, okay, what are customers asking for this week that they weren't asking for last week? Or whatever question you may have.
Speaker 1:Very cool, so I use a number of transcription, um, and they use bots to join meetings on my behalf. I recently showed up to a meeting and there were more bots sitting. People, yeah, and people it was a little strange.
Speaker 2:You don't use bots. Why? Two reasons. One is we want, like, granola is a tool, and great tools are very consistent in the way they work and they always work. So I want Granola to be as easy and consistent to use as a pencil and a pad of paper, right, and when you have a pencil and a pad of paper, you don't think to yourself, oh, is this meeting on Zoom and therefore can my bot join Zoom? But it doesn't work. If it's, you know, on a Slack huddle or you know, an iMessage call, or maybe it's just an in-person meeting, and there you know, there's no. Basically, I just wanted Granola to always work, and so what that means is we don't. There's no bot that joins the meeting. Granola uses your microphone and it listens to the audio on your computer, which means you can have an in-person meeting right, there's no Zoom link or anything like that and use Granola and it'll still work the same. So that's why we originally designed it that way.
Speaker 2:Uh, we found that, um, bots, bots, just they're in that uncanny valley, I think of technology, like you're, you're, you know if you and I are having a one-on-one conversation over zoom, but now there's like this black square on the screen and it's neither providing any value in the moment, but it's kind of making you feel like you're you're watched and recorded.
Speaker 2:Um, it just changes the, the dynamic of the conversation. Also, the, the ai note takers that had bots that, as far as I know, most of them record the audio and the video and they store the audio and the video from the, from the calls, which granola does not do. Granola does not store the audio, it only generates notes. Yeah, and that's by design, because I think what people want most of the time is they just want to have great notes, like the equivalent of if you just sat there and were furiously typing notes through the whole meeting, like that's kind of what you want. The audio that could be useful for sure, but again, that's an invasive act to record audio. That's like a different. It changes the dynamic of the conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well done. I guess the other concern might be that you know note takers that are AI driven will just make us less engaged, or you know tendency to zone out. How do you think about that, balancing, you know, ai and automation with keeping people engaged and present?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's. I think it's a really important question and I think I think our competencies as humans will will change here. I'll give you a great example. So, um, uh, there are a few cities I lived in before Google Maps came out on a cell phone.
Speaker 2:I'm old enough where I can remember this. You know there's a life pre being able to look up where the heck you are at any moment on your phone and post that and the cities I lived in before that you could. You could drop me in those cities today and I'd probably be able to navigate them fine, because I had to really learn my way around those cities and the cities I lived in after Google Maps on your phone came out. I don't have nearly as strong of a mental model of the city because whenever I was lost I could just look it up on my phone. So I do think there's like an there's an atrophy of skill whenever a new technology kind of comes out, and I do think that will happen with AI. I think the important question is are you outsourcing the busy work or are you outsourcing the thinking right? And I do think the way we design AI tools have a big impact on this.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I think there's a real danger that we design AI tools where people by default, start outsourcing their thinking to AI, and I think that's it's probably not the future society or vision that we want to live in. Right and sure, if you're outsourcing busy work, like if it's, for example, maybe today people are really good at typing very quickly during a meeting right, because that's just been a necessity to be able to take notes, and now in the future, people aren't able to type so well during a meeting because they don't need to, because there are things like granola that take notes. That's probably a fine tradeoff, right, because now people can be more present. If people stop paying attention when they're talking to each other, right, or thinking critically about the decision because they think AI will catch it for them, I think that's really problematic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what a balancing act.
Speaker 2:And just one point on that like we did design and again, this is just one step, but like a big difference between Granola and other note takers is when we launched is that Granola is still a notepad, it's still a place where you write your notes, so and and what the ai does is that it takes your notes and makes them better. So we're designing the product. So it's still a place, it's still a tool for thought for you, so you're still supposed to put your thoughts in there and the ai adjusts and um and improves what you do, as opposed to some of these other note-taking services where it's just the AI dissolving right and you just kind of trust that the AI gets it right, and then you outsource it and you don't think about it.
Speaker 2:And I do think that small detail. Actually, it really changes the way Granola feels and it really changes the way the notes that Granola generates feel.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. The way the notes that that kernel generates feel brilliant. Speaking of other ai note takers, you have lots of competition which has pluses and and minuses. Other note takers you know big tech companies. What do you see as your competition now? In the future, what does the landscape look like?
Speaker 2:yeah, when. So when we, when we entered the meeting note-taking landscape, it was already incredibly saturated. Companies like otter and fireflies I think they're eight or nine years old at this point.
Speaker 2:We've been at it for a long time, and there are lots and lots of other companies out there doing that, as well as the googles, the zooms and the microsoft's. Um, that's not when I think about competition. That's not what I, what I think about. I think about so that, and to explain that, I probably just need to talk about the future of granola a little bit. So earlier I mentioned that with granola, we're starting off with meeting notes, but our vision had always been to be something much larger, which is the place where you do work with the help of ai.
Speaker 2:So we want Granola to be the place that has a lot of context about you knows about all the different things that you're doing, and we have that from your meetings. And then now, how can we use AI to help you actually do your work and your thinking? And I think that's the future of Granola. And I think when I think about competition, I think about who's, who's going to be building that, or who's gonna building tooling towards in that direction. Um, and from that lens, I think it's much more the anthropics and the open ais of the world, uh, that are going to be like a longer term competition for us, or or a brand new startup that hasn't launched yet. Right, the space is moving so quickly, um and and you see, like these really innovative startups pop up, so like those are the companies that I kind of think about because I think about the future vision.
Speaker 2:I'm less worried about note-taking, specifically, I think I think yeah, I know it's going to be commoditized, Like I think we have the best notes right now and hopefully that continues, but I think the thing that's really going to be powerful for people is this future tool that lets you do work five times better and five times faster than you'd be able to do without it.
Speaker 1:Wow, very thoughtful. You've integrated with many of the top AI models. How do you decide which AI model to use and do you see yourself building your own model in the future or leveraging open source or some of these amazing emerging?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we, we use whatever is the best model for our use case at that time we always try to use so, so one is the best model at any, given that changes frequently right within a matter of months. Sometimes you have one of the big labs launch one model and we switch to that and then another lab launches another model, so we switch to that and we always try to use the highest end uh model. So if you're using granola uh, you should be getting the the best possible premium experience, like on the market. That's possible today. Um, in terms of uh doing our own model, it's possible. We'll do it in the future.
Speaker 2:The pace of innovation of the foundation model layer has just been so incredible over the last few years. I expect that to continue. It's possible at some some point that fine-tuning our own model on. We have a lot of, obviously we have a lot of user data on like what are good notes, what are not good notes, like what's actually the most important thing for meetings, so like we could do that in the future. We found that that hasn't been, that hasn't been like the best use of our time. So far We've been kind of letting the models get better and therefore, granola getting better and we're spending our time on the user experience, the design, the actual product layer, because there's a lot to do there.
Speaker 1:A lot to do, indeed. And for other founders out there, builders just getting started or thinking of getting started in the AI space, what's your advice for them? You've seen it all. At this point, what would you give? Them for guidance or persuasion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think this space is changing faster than any other space that I can remember since I've been alive, and I think that has a few implications. I think one um, a lot of the historical advice or best practices might not hold true in this. In this, like the laws it's like the laws of physics have kind of changed. We're still all trying to figure out the new laws. So if you're a new builder, that's a great, that's an advantage in a way, because we're all kind of trying to figure it out together. So I think that's an opportunity. And because the space is moving so quickly, once you launch a product, once you're in the rat race, you just kind of have to be sprinting just to keep up right. It's like, oh, now this company has launched this feature, now you have to launch it. So everyone's sprinting. But when you're sprinting you don't have a whole lot of time to really explore and think deeply about a problem.
Speaker 2:So if you're like starting off right now, you might feel like, oh no, I'm being left behind. I need to immediately just choose something, work on it. I would say, actually take a breath and maybe choose a problem you care about and cherish that time and just really go deep and really try to understand it well and build your intuitions about what's important in that problem area or not, because once you launch a product, you probably won't have time to do that and there's so much value in being able to have that deep thought on a topic.
Speaker 2:So that'd be my second piece of advice.
Speaker 1:Wonderful advice. So what are you looking forward to the rest of the summer? What's on your radar? Any travel events or other plans heading into the fall?
Speaker 2:So we're based in London and summer in London is like a wonderful time of year. It's kind of like that yeah, it's the time of year, the winter I wouldn't recommend so much much, but the summer is really fantastic. So, uh, no, we just have a, we have a great set of. It's just a fun time. Like we have an office, we have a rooftop, like the team goes out there, we eat lunch there, we do happy hours there, um, so, yeah, just lots to build, um, and yeah, we'll be here wonderful.
Speaker 1:well, thanks so much for joining. Can't wait to try granola. Personally, maybe ditch my current transcription service and onwards and upwards Congratulations on all the success. Thank you so much. Have a great day and thanks everyone for listening, watching. Be sure to check out our new TV show, tech Impact TV, now on Bloomberg and Fox Business. Thanks everyone. Thanks, chris.