Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to our podcast, From the Ground Up, where we interview startup founders, exploring their journeys, their successes, challenges, and lessons learned. We hope you'll be inspired in discovering what it takes to build a thriving startup. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal, and here with us today we have Krish Ramineni, the co-founder and CEO of Fireflies.ai, a $19 million venture-backed startup that's changing how we go about taking notes in meetings. With over 10 million meetings now taken, they're taking the world by storm and changing our lives. It's a fascinating story. So first and foremost, Krish, welcome to the show.
Krish Ramineni: Thank you. Thanks for having me and I'm excited to be here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. So a little bit more about Krish. Uh, he is the co-founder and CEO of Fireflies.ai, an AI meeting assistant that transcribes, summarizes, and analyzes meetings. Named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, Krish graduated from UPenn. He was one of the youngest product managers at Microsoft leading projects in customer voice and growth. He has guest lectured at Stanford on machine learning and holds patents in workflow automation. Krish is a thought leader in SaaS AI and an active startup advisor. A lot going on. Krish, looks like you've done a lot at a young age.
Krish Ramineni: Thank you. Uh, it's been an eventful couple years, but nothing as eventful as starting Fireflies and uh going through the full roller coaster ride as the founder.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, let's dive in here a little bit. Um, Fireflies automates meeting notes. We're going to talk to you about the market opportunity and what you're building. Before we do that, uh, let's dig a little bit deeper on you. Tell us where you're from originally and how did you get into computer science and really the whole startup world.
Krish Ramineni: So I'm originally from the Bay Area, so I grew up around tech. Family was involved in startups or software. Uh, I myself thought I wanted to be a doctor and have nothing to do with tech, but long story short, I found myself back to it. I went to school on the East Coast, uh, was at UPenn. Um, had a good time there. What was interesting there is you see tech-enabled businesses. Uh, in the West Coast, you saw pure software companies that were building uh really deep infrastructure and tools and all of that.
I was a PM at Microsoft after college. So straight out of college, I graduated early and ended up uh joining Microsoft. Uh worked on a couple really exciting initiatives there, but also got my first foray into how large organizations work and how uh they are able to structure themselves and get things done. And one of the common themes is a lot of meetings. Uh everyone wants to have a meeting. So from there I ended up uh realizing that, "Hey, there's probably so much knowledge and information buried inside meetings, how can we go capture that?" Um, I was supposed to go off to grad school at Cambridge, but decided to take a little break, uh spend time with my friend, at the time co-founder, um in uh Boston, MIT. And then we said, "Hey, at the end of the summer, I have two options. I can go to grad school or do this." Uh, he had the same options. And we both decided, let's go full-time and start this company and uh work on Fireflies. So we moved out to San Francisco, uh and that's where the journey really took off.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Yeah, you know, one of the most important decisions you make as a person in life is choosing your partners, whether it's the ones you work with, the ones you marry, uh different ventures in life. Choosing the right partner is critical. A friend being a partner really makes a lot of sense if it works out. If it doesn't, you kind of lose two things potentially, a a co-founder and a friend. What was it that led you two together that you felt this could be a good, a good synergy?
Krish Ramineni: Yeah, surprisingly, Sam and I had met very few times in person. Uh we actually met through mutual friends. Uh we worked on a lot of different hackathons and projects while we were in school. But it was interesting that we were passionate about the same things uh when it came to work. Um and the fact that we were able to just keep going at it even though we were fully distributed in a remote environment. So that was something that we found uh to be a common point between us. Um and then meeting in person after working for almost like two years in college on different projects, uh it just was a natural extension of what we were already doing.
Um I think both of us had a chip on our shoulder. We both wanted to go out and prove something to the world, uh that we wanted to be our own bosses and we wanted to create something from scratch. Um we are also folks that like, believe that if you're aligned around a mission and a goal like around values, all the other things tend to sort of line themselves up together. So we weren't very worried about what we were working on in the early days because, quite honestly, the version of Fireflies that you see today, this AI notetaker that joins your meetings, it was very different in the early days. We worked on almost seven different projects, uh many that didn't take off, uh before we uh doubled down on the current version of Fireflies. Each time, the funny thing is we said, "Oh, this could be the next big thing, this works," like, so you have to have that optimism.
Um but the only reason we were able to keep going at it was we had this bigger vision and bigger cultural drive about wanting to do something on our own and not looking back and giving up. Um so that was not an option really. And so I think in any sort of situation where you're able to work with people where you have that trust and drive, um you know trust is so important um in any sort of relationship, partnership, uh business uh related things. So if you don't have that, that's like having a car without fuel, you can't get anywhere.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I totally agree. I like that idea that trust has got to be there and also there's no looking back when you look to go into a venture together. Oftentimes it's, you know, take the island, burn the boats and let's figure this out. As a company, when you took a look at the product set or the problem really that you're looking to solve, you went through sounds like multiple pivots and iterations of it. What was the initial view of the market when you started looking at meetings? Cuz like you, I worked at a big company, I was at Oracle for seven years and I know it was back to back to back to back meetings and you could just never get everything done you really needed to get done. And and lastly, making sure that you recorded all those meetings so that you could remember what you just had got through and the next day execute on it. So I understand that problem. It's a big problem to take on, but through technology if it works well I'm sure it could be done the right way. What, what was the initial thought behind getting in that space?
Krish Ramineni: Yeah, it's funny you mention Oracle because my father works at Oracle right now. Uh so yeah, he's been there for quite some time. And uh like the full evolution from on-prem to cloud oh to all the AI stuff that's going on. So uh they've seen everything, uh they've been around for a little while. Yeah, for us really it's about looking at where the market is going um and where we are at. So the enablement of Fireflies is possible because of a couple core factors. One was that transcription got really accurate and the cost went down, so the idea of even capturing and transcribing all of these meetings became possible. Because in the past that was very expensive. An hour-long meeting is going to cost someone $60. Uh so a two-hour long meeting is going to cost you $120. Uh with that subscription, you get a year-long subscription to Fireflies today and you're transcribing almost unlimited meetings.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.
Krish Ramineni: All of a sudden you flipped the economies, scaled the cost barrier on its head. Um and that's that's something that's really powerful. Like if you think about the distribution of iPhones and smartphones, like only like maybe 5% of people had them when it first came out, now everyone has a smartphone. So that's the power of technology, the power of Moore's Law, is that there is going to be democratization of tech. In this case, we took it upon ourselves to democratize AI and we didn't want to keep this as like this exclusive thing. We wanted to make it accessible and affordable to everyone. Um so that was a big play.
Another big play that happened was COVID and the pandemic. So we launched in January 2020. A few weeks later the pandemic occurs, everyone is going remote, everyone's having video conferencing calls, everyone's having meeting overload and they need a tool that helps them organize all of their meeting notes and conversations. So that helped us get that initial spark uh to get the product off the ground and get that initial traction, which was uh uh really a timing thing that you couldn't plan for. Um and the third wave is this generative AI and LLMs and OpenAI wave. Um we've been around for a while, we've established ourselves and today Fireflies is growing faster than at the peak of the pandemic because we've been able to uh continue to make the product better. Whatever vision we promised at the launch, we finally made that a reality. Like the notes are almost humanlike. Um the quality is really accurate. Um it works seamlessly across dozens of different platforms. Uh and we've fulfilled on that vision of being this like personal assistant, chief of staff to people. Um but all three of those phases were foundational to the growth of Fireflies and uh they were accelerants more than anything else. You still have to execute, you still have to do all the right things, uh you still have to learn from your mistakes. But the idea of what we're doing seemed impossible just 5 years ago. Now it seems inevitable.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know, note taking in the business I'm in... and we're in the people strategy business where we we sit down with companies as they get funded, we help them scale, we find the right people in the right places locally, internationally, but it's really interviewing and storytelling. It's a lot of note taking and it's a lot of conversation. Um I've interviewed 20,000 people in the last 13 years as interviews for roles in companies they want to work for. If I'd had something that could transcribe and save the data and then you could look back at the patterns of what worked well during interviews or what were the things that could be used for teaching or education of others, it would be like really cracking the code of how you operate as a interviewer in recruitment. What's your product look like in that space?
Krish Ramineni: There's a lot of different use cases for Fireflies: sales, recruiting, customer facing roles, client management, um operations. And for each type of role, like it comes down to this core principle that you want to be attentive during those meetings. You want to listen to the voice of the customer, the voice of the candidate, the voice of like your colleagues, really truly understand them. And one thing that Fireflies enables you to have which technology previously couldn't is give you perfect memory, perfect recall over all of your conversations. So if I'm visiting this call again a year from now and we're meeting one year from now and I'm able to just go through a five minute like recap with Fireflies, I have like perfect memory of what we discussed down to the particular minute and seconds. And being able to search back through that knowledge base... People take notes all the time all right, whether it's by pen and paper or typing it in different systems, but how often do they actually go back to it and search through it and organize it? So in a way, Fireflies is your second brain. It's organizing all the information, all the conversations with the most important people in your day-to-day life at work uh into this knowledge base, this notebook of information.
The other powerful part of this is it's not just your knowledge, but your team's knowledge. So you can invite your teammates and their meetings get stored in this central repository and now your entire organizational knowledge is all available inside Fireflies. It starts with consistent note taking and a habit right, it's about consistency. But the thing is, it's hard to be consistent at something. Fireflies says, "Don't worry, I'll take care of the notes so you don't have to. I'll take care of the organization so that you don't have to, and I will make it easy for you to search back through all your information and standardize everything." So I'll tell you who you talked to, when you talked to them, what you talked about, uh what were the action items, what were the next steps, what were the objections, what was the sentiment. And it's like that perfect second brain, I guess, that you can think about and then now apply to any use case. If I'm interviewing candidates, uh I want to know which is the right person to hire, how do I compare two candidates I interviewed back to back? I now have a way to like pause, sit back and reflect. Uh if I'm helping a client and I need to capture a lot of the things that they're saying so that I can come up with a strategy and then pitch and then help them put together a project, I have that information to go back to. Uh so all of that is super important. Like, you have all that information available and now with all this LLMs, AI, generative AI stuff we can make some real magic from that knowledge.
So one thing I can do is after this meeting, if Fireflies captures it, I say, "Hey Fireflies, please turn this into a blog post template because I want to write an article about what we just discussed." Or, "Can you send a follow-up email to Jake and thank him, um and put in a few personal notes based on our conversation? Can you add some tasks to my to-do list or Asana uh based on the action items that came up from this meeting?" I genuinely believe all work starts from conversations. It's only after you have a conversation with someone that an email gets sent out, a document gets written, um and any sort of work gets done. So we said if we can go straight to that source of truth and then actually help people do their work, we've done our job.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's amazing. There was an article that came out today from Bill Gates that said with AI today and the evolution of it, he feels that in 5 years it wouldn't be unthinkable that everyone would have their own AI that's going to help them throughout their day, whether it's, you know, setting their appointments or responding to messages or getting that dinner scheduled amongst your friends. Being able to really hear what you're thinking, saying, and knowing what you do and act like so that it can start to preempt some of the activities that you typically would have to think about doing, and it will kind of collaborate with you as you go about your day. Um that to me sounds amazing and it almost sounds like we're not ready for that yet, but it seems like it's moving so fast it, it very well could be the case. Um when you look at your company, you got, you got funded by Khosla Ventures and the thesis that you brought to the table then seems like it may have pivoted or maybe changed a little bit with all of AI out there in the future and everyone knowing about it. What's been the relationship having some company like Khosla Ventures fund you and what's their view on how things are going with AI and do you collaborate with them much still on topics like that?
Krish Ramineni: I think uh the folks at Khosla Ventures are betting on deep tech things that are on the frontier that's going to change. Like if the problem is easy, um that's boring, right? So you have to go after the hard problems and they've uh consistently invested in hard problems where maybe the success rate is small, but if it does succeed, not to be cliché, it can change the world. So that's what a lot of philosophy goes around and we wanted to be uh working with folks that are going to drive tech enablement, uh champions of innovation. Um yes, like you need to build a business, you need to generate revenue, you need to grow. And I I think their philosophy is that if you build something truly game-changing for the market, um and you're able to create value for the world, a lot of the other stuff, the score takes care of itself. And that's been our DNA as well um at Fireflies is, build an incredible product, create a way for people to use it, make it affordable and uh let the score take care of itself. Uh what I think that they got right um is they definitely were early investors in OpenAI and we were able to collaborate with OpenAI as a result. Um so they got to see a few steps ahead in terms of technology and the world uh as it's changing. But something I also say is that it's very hard to predict what like the future will look like.
Um I'm sure before the iPhone came out people didn't predict what a the world would look like a decade from when the first iPhone released to what we're able to do now. Right? We all have the, the power of this like incredible uh information system in our pockets. Uh when the internet came out and how you're able to communicate or video call people across long distances. So I think that's the beauty of tech is it can connect people and move at a pace that is rapid. Now with AI, the changes are really quick and instead of happening in years it's happening in like weeks and months, like every new update that comes out and so forth. So on one hand I'm excited. On the other hand I feel like the world has to learn to adapt to these changes. Like what does it mean for the job, for, or like the workforce? Uh what does it mean for automation? What does it mean in terms of maybe um jobs, uh employment income, universal income? Like what role does government play uh in all of this? So there's also bigger geopolitical uh macro elements to AI that may not have been as obvious with some of the other technologies that have come out.
Um but as I think through that and understand like what is available, what is possible, um I also think that in the realm of where I work, in the workplace, the future of work, AI is going to make the workplace so advanced and so streamlined um that it's going to allow people to do their best work. So that's the vision we're trying to build towards and help build that work assistant. Um I do believe that general AI is going to be possible um and consumers are going to have assistants like Bill Gates said, um but there's a lot of surface area to cover um because consumers have a lot of different needs and I don't know if it's going to be one platform that rules them all or it's going to be a fragmentation of solutions. Uh but it'll be an interesting world to look at and we're having that second wave. Similar to when the iPhone came out, we're having this new AI wave or when cloud came out. So I'm excited to see what happens but this is the most exciting time to be in this space and working on this stuff.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, we're talking to you know I say kids because they're 18 and 19 years old that are dropping out of Yale and MIT and Harvard to launch AI companies that are you know, they're based in Silicon Valley, they grew up in Silicon Valley and you know the question that I had for them was "you know your parents spent you know a lot of nurturing to get you to a point where you got into some of the best schools and you're taking a step out, you're dropping out to launch your own company. Why now and what's what's really driving you to do that?" And the responses across the board have all been that "this is a transformational time with AI, we're prepared for it, we've been waiting for it, we think it's the right time to really innovate and it may be another 5, 10 years before that next big thing comes." So it seems like technology is really continuing to, to bring the right people into the industry at the right time, even even younger and younger as we go here. Um, you yourself are young, you came out of... you graduated in three years and you know, you're building this company. Uh has is this your first startup or is this... kind of walk us through that.
Krish Ramineni: Yeah, this is my first startup, first time founder, um but I knew I always wanted to build something, uh a business, maybe not even in tech. Something that like was in real estate or something that was uh completely different. Um even when I wanted to be a doctor I knew that I wanted to start my own practice, right? So like this idea of uh building something from the ground up and creating a team around it always excited me uh since I was a kid. Even like some of the video games I used to play as a kid... I always talk about this example. I used to love playing this game called Age of Empires where you're building a civilization, building all these resources and stuff. So like that was how my brain was wired as a kid. Uh it was all about like business and entrepreneurship. And it was not something that someone taught me or imbued into me. I didn't go to uh leadership classes or get an MBA. So I just think if you're so passionate about the problem um and you have initiative, you can start making things happen. Um you have to be also lucky to have the right resources and be at the right place. But if you keep showing up, uh I think you start to create some of that luck for yourself.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Um, as you look uh at your company today, how big are you?
Krish Ramineni: We're about a hundred people today. And uh we're across 20 countries, 40 plus cities, fully remote. Again, atypical of Silicon Valley, like everyone wants you back in the office. We're like saying "no, we're going to continue being remote."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: What's been the the biggest challenge of managing a remote global team?
Krish Ramineni: Time zones. Overlap. Uh I think that's definitely uh challenging. So uh but the good part of that is by the time some folks are logging off, other folks are logging in. So we run on a 24/7 clock.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: And as a company, as a product, uh what's the customer base look like for you today? Are you hundreds of thousands, are you 50,000, 10,000? Kind of what, what's that look for you, what's that look like for you?
Krish Ramineni: Yeah. Fireflies has taken notes for over 10 million people uh across 200,000 organizations. Lots of teams, uh lots of users as well as people that have received notes across 70% of the Fortune 500 today. Um in just this past year, Fireflies has probably done about 5,000 years worth of meetings. So if a human had to attend every single meeting Fireflies had to attend, it would take them 5,000 years to cram that one year.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's amazing. For for other listeners that are building their startups or thinking about building a startup, what's been a strategy that you look back on and say "you know that really helped us get into the market" or "helped us scale faster than we thought we could" or "just got in front of customers that you know, we wish we would have known something before we figured out a solution to get you know, present with them?" What what's some insights you could share?
Krish Ramineni: You really don't know if something's going to work until you get that in front of customers and elicit a reaction. That is the most important thing. You can pontificate, you can strategize, you can think of all of the pricing, packaging, go to market, but at the end of the day, the faster you get out to market and see if people will actually use it and are willing to take out their card and pay for it, that's the ultimate validation. It's not some advice from an investor, it's not even advice from someone who's been there and done it. I think that helps, but at the end of the day, the market you're serving, the customers you're serving, the product that you're building is so unique to the challenge that you are facing. You can learn from everything that others have done but you're not really going to get a taste of what's going to work or not until it's out there. So if you can ship within two months, do it. If you can ship within six weeks, do it. Um because that's going to teach you the hard lessons. Uh getting rejection and pain and feedback from customers will make you a lot stronger than any sort of advice from any mentor.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great advice. You know, as an entrepreneur people look at getting different values out of it. They do it for different reasons. Um what is it that you do it for? It's a different question for different people and what you're trying to achieve. Like some people want legacy, some people want recognition, some people want to build a big business, some people want to make money. Um...
Krish Ramineni: I do it for the sole purpose of autonomy. And I want people to have more autonomy and freedom at work from mundane, redundant tasks. Like if that's something that I, you can build your life mission around, like that's something I said I I would be willing to work on that problem every day. And then autonomy for ourselves so that we can build the company, the culture, the team in the way that we can control um our destiny. I think that's really important for us. It's cool you go join another company where the rules are already written, but it's different when you can write those rules yourself and set up a culture um and do things that you want to do. Um and so uh I like keeping the team small, I like giving each person on the team autonomy. Um and that's, that's probably like the most important thing. It's about the autonomy, the time, um and the freedom to work from wherever in the world. So those are the things that are important because if you're spending a majority of your life doing work and all you're doing is waking up and having to force yourself at 6:00 a.m., eat breakfast, uh run to your car, be stuck in traffic, show up at the office, impress the boss, small talk until it's like noon, then try to get lunch and then go through the afternoon crash and somehow power through till 5:00 p.m., then drive back through traffic... like there's more to life. And you can absolutely be someone that detaches life from work and saying, "Oh, that's just work. That's what I do to pay the bills." Totally fine, that's what most people do in life. But if you do get that opportunity to where you actually have fun at work and you're able to do it in your own way and freedom... and not many people have that opportunity. That is a luxury. That is a privilege, uh especially if you're in the tech world where you don't have to be on site. If you're building rocket ships, yeah, you're going to have to be on site, right? If you're building cars. So because I'm so grateful and fortunate to be in an industry where you can be remote, um and you can do things, um and you can ship code from anywhere in the world, um I want to create that culture for other people too that join Fireflies.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I love that. The key word that you mentioned was freedom. And I believe that's one of the key reasons why a lot of people become entrepreneurs, to have the choice and the autonomy to, to build what they want to build and the way they want to build it. And you know, put themselves out there and hope for the best, but also you learn a lot. You're, you live one time at least here and hopefully you can, you can take that risk and experience what that, what that freedom is like. You know, you spent some time um lecturing at Stanford. What's been surprising that you've learned from the students that you've spoke to that is, is, is something you didn't think you would learn?
Krish Ramineni: The amount of excitement and interest in AI specifically, practical machine learning, deep learning. It's amazing how motivated can someone be when they understand the applications of AI, right? No one's going out there and trying to build ML models for the sake of building ML models because they love stats and they love uh doing all of these computational problems. I think the average hobbyist, the average person that wants to build something, wants to create some sort of utility. And uh that's the, that's the crazy thing, is that you don't have to be a PhD or a rocket scientist to now go build some of these technologies. It's a line away. It's an API call away. If it was only that hard, then AI and ML would only be stuck in academia. Uh and we need to break that mold and realize that if there's 19-year-old kids out there building AI companies, uh resources are available, uh that's something that's powerful. And so seeing these folks who are maybe much later on in their careers taking these classes and want to understand uh AI and ML and how it can be applied in their day-to-day life uh and what products they can build from that... I think that's the most exciting thing. Like "Practical Application" was the name of the lecture too. Uh so that's that's something that I think gets more people involved, even the non-technical folks.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Well, I love the journey you're on and the product you're building. If someone wanted to learn more about uh Fireflies.ai and and find you, where would they go?
Krish Ramineni: Definitely visit fireflies.ai to sign up and start using our AI meeting assistant for all your meetings. We also have a mobile app now, so uh people want to record their in-person meetings and transcribe it for free, that's available. Um and then you can follow us on LinkedIn. Uh we uh have a lot of updates and stuff, announcements. I'm also actively available on LinkedIn. Uh the handle is Fireflies AI. And then if you want to follow me, it's Krish Ramineni, whether that's on LinkedIn, Twitter, or IG.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well, Krish, thanks so much for joining. A big shout out to you for taking your time. I know you're on a lot of podcasts and you're running a company. You're busy. So appreciate that. And also to the listeners that are listening today. I appreciate you spending your time with us today. My name is Jake Aaron Villarreal, I'm the host of our podcast. I look forward to catching up with you all on the next episode. Until then, take care.
Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that have joined to make this podcast possible, and for all the listeners for listening. It means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal, signing off for now, but can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.
This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market and they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.
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