The Secret to Building A STICKY AI Product- Ep. 42 with Chris Pedregal

My product philosophy is I think you need to make product decisions based on your own intuition.

Because intuition is like a hard thing. Like some, some intuitions are bad, some intuitions are good. Like, what does it feel like to you?

I basically think you can look at products and you can kind of tell whether they have soul or not. I've tried to find a better word for it, but soul is like the best on my phone. And when you're building a product, you should absolutely, absolutely react to what people are saying. If you don't have an opinion or a perspective, then it's kind of empty, right? It's like whatever they say, you'll just like run after that thing. Whereas some products, you kind of tell if they have soul and you can also tell when they lose it.

Chris, welcome to the show.

Hey Dan, thanks so much for having me.

Really glad to have you on the show. So for people who don't know, you are the co founder and CEO of Granola, which is actually one of my favorite pieces of AI software. Whenever people ask me like what is the like, who's doing it right in the AI consumer business product world, I'm like, granola is like one of the first things that comes up. I use it for pretty much all my meetings. So basically it just like sits in the background of my computer. It doesn't like join Zoom or any. Isn't like the Fireflies bot, which I find to be the most annoying thing in the world. But um, and it just records everything and then it turns it into a transcript and, and then has some like automated notes which is really cool. But one of my favorite features is you've got this thing where I can send the chat, I can send the transcript to someone else or the Granola meeting to someone else and then they can ask questions of it because like, you know, we're, we're operating at a scale now inside of everywhere. I can't be in every meeting. Other people can't be in every meeting. But there's always questions about like, what did this person say? What did that person say? And just like being like, don't bother me with the questions. Here's the whole thing. You can ask questions of the actual transcript is like really nice. So long winded way of saying I think you're doing awesome stuff and I'm really excited to have you on the show.

Thanks so much, Dan. And you've been giving us feedback for a while, which I appreciated from day one, so thanks so much, that's great.

And you just raised a huge round. So 20 million bucks. Tell me, like, where, where are you right now in the business? What's going on? What's in your mind?

I mean, we're, we're honestly super early. We were so Granola launched in May. We were a team of four when, when it launched and we, we ended up signing a term sheet not, not that long after launch. I guess it's, it's helpful if you build a product that a lot of VCs use because they can actually, you know, it's, it becomes less of an analytic exercise where it's actually they can use the product and see if it's like a useful thing. Um, so we're, we're super early. We're still very, very much focused on the product on, on growing it. Um, we seem like we have, we definitely seem to have struck a nerve for some, some users like yourself, like the early adopters. And, and I just think we need to grow from there.

Hmm. Who, who are the people that you think it strikes a nerve with? Like, what are the characteristics of those kinds of people?

Yeah, so it's, I think there's two way to, two ways to answer that. In terms of job title. It's a lot of founders, like startup founders specifically, both small startups and big startups, and a lot of investors right now. And I'd say it's people for whom they need to make high leverage decisions on the backs of meetings and really care about the quality of their like, judgment and. Yeah, maybe pause there.

That's really interesting. And one of the things I'm really curious to dig in with you is you raised a big round. You said you built the first version with a very small team. I assume the team is still fairly small. Tell me about that decision because I'll just lay my cards on the table. One of the things I've been playing with is like you can get a lot more done in AI land with like much less money and a much smaller team. And I think for me, just like as a personality like that, I like that because I haven't really wanted to raise a lot of money. We've raised a little bit of money for every, but not a lot. And we're incubating these products and we're kind of like seeing how far we can get with only a little bit of money. And I'm always interested in the total opposite perspective. So like, tell me about that decision and how you think about building a company in this environment.

Yeah, great question. So my, normally I'd say my natural Tendencies are similar to yours. Right. Which is small team. Don't raise too much money. We found ourselves in an interesting space. So AI is kind of nuts for. For a few reasons. One is it's quite expensive to run a lot of these products today, but it won't be expensive to run them in two years. But in two years the leaders or winners will already be defined. So there's this like middle passage, this middle period here where it's like you're going to be running expensive products that will not be so expensive to run in the future, but you need to make it through that period. The other one is just it's such. There's so much volatility, it's really hard to predict the future. Things are moving really quickly and we had an opportunity to raise capital and we decided to take it basically to protect ourselves against those like that volatility or like we don't know what the world's going to look like 12 months from now, 18 months from now and we otherwise would need to raise again. Also it's like, like I said it's early but I do think granola kind of struck a nerve. So I do think we have the opportunity to scale the user base pretty quickly which will involve. Involve money.

That makes sense. And how do you think about. You know there's this double edged sword we actually think have this too at every. Because we always build products that we kind of want ourselves. And there's a double edged sword to that because like you can get immediate adoption with the like founder VC crowd but then expanding beyond that is like, it's tricky. You know, it's like I. A good, I think a good comp is like maybe superhuman. Where I think they were like the hotel SaaS thing for like any VC or any founder to use for. For a while and I think they've had some success breaking into the enterprise but it's certainly taken a long time. Yeah. How do you think about moving from the cohort of people that seem to like love this today to like whatever the next step is?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think there are two parts there. I think what you want to be careful of also. I, I don't have all the right answers. I'll just tell you what what I think. Right. And what we're trying to do.

That's what we're doing here. No, no one has all the answers. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, cool. Proceed at your own risk. I like, I feel like the real danger is to get pigeonholed in a vertical that you don't want to get pigeonholed in. Right. So it's interesting. It's like building products for VCs is, is notoriously like a bad signal because for investors they say the TAM is so small, right? They're like, sure, they high willingness to spend but there aren't that many of them. So you know, you can't build a really big, big business there. So I think it's, I think it's really important that you protect against that. So if you don't want to build a product for a specific vertical, make sure you diversify your user base early so you get signals. Otherwise if you go too far down that path too early, it'll be really hard to switch. I think the focusing on early adopters, I think you can do that for a while because two things will happen. I think one, if you get early adopters to really love you, they will evangelize you to their friends and their teams. And I also think there is with some of these tools that just might be a changing of the guard. I remember when notion came out and it's not like big companies were switching to notion. Like I think what happened is that they got all the startups, all the scale ups using it and some of those companies have become really, really big and then, you know, over time they've become established. It's easier to get companies to switch. But I don't think you need to. I think it would be a mistake to try to go after like a, like a mass market product too early because you, you lose what makes you special if you, if you do that.

That makes total sense. I totally agree with that. Um, I'm wondering like that the place where my mind goes. I just think you're such a great product thinker and the reason I can tell is because like you manage to make an AI product that's like not just the shiny bells and whistles thing, it's like actually useful. It's a useful product that includes AI and it also sort of, it's not like a bolt on, like it does something that would only uniquely be possible in the AI world. But it's not like this weird hypey demo that you use once and then you just never look at again. So like how did you think about making those decisions? How did you get into granola and how did you think about the initial product decisions?

Yeah, I guess the short answer is that it took a while. We launched in May and things have, I think we've gotten a lot of attention since launch. But we'd been working on it for a year before then, and we basically had a version of Granola for a year. We had about 100, 150 people using it and giving us tons of feedback. I can't remember. You might have been one of them. I actually can't remember if you were in that beta group or maybe you started using it after launch.

I don't think so. I think I tweeted you and then you didn't respond. And I was like, fuck this guy.

It sounds like me. I'm not great at social media. All right, so if you weren't part of the original 150, I guess a few things. One is.

We.

It took us a really long time to figure out what the core interaction would be in Granola. So the core interaction right now is basically granola looks like Apple Notes. For those who haven't used it, it looks like Apple Notes. During the meeting, you type into it like a normal text editor. It's transcribing real time. It's listening to the conversation. And then the moment the meeting ends, you kind of see this bar go down and it transforms your notes into, like, really nice notes. It fleshes stuff out, it adds points you didn't write down. It took us a long time to get to that. That's not at all what we thought the product was going to look like. At the beginning. The core interaction was real time. During the meeting, you'd be invoking the AI and typing keywords, and it'd be writing, writing notes. And that interface, that interaction was really cool. Like, it looked cool. It made for a great demo. It made it look completely different to anything that came before. Um, it just turned out to be really distracting in actual meetings. Right? Because, like, what would happen is if. If you were. And any kind of AI augmentation that happens real time, you can't help but read what the AI is writing, and if it doesn't get it exactly right, then you can't help but want to fix it. And then you realize you've stopped paying attention to the person you're talking to. So we actually took us a long time is. Is the short of it. Like, we went through a few different interaction paradigms until we finally, like, settled on. On the one that's in Granola now. And. And once we did that, we cut out, like, 50% of the features we had built. Not. Not because they aren't stuff we'll build one day just because they weren't good enough, but, like, you know, this with. With AI, it's very, very easy to build a demo version of a feature, right? Like the. The Happy Path, but it's actually still a lot of work to build a great feature that works consistently and reliably and that people love. So that was a big part of it, I think, is we cut out a lot of the stuff that didn't work and we just tried to do one thing really well, which is it's hard in AI. It takes a good amount of discipline. Right. Because you can do so much so easily.

Yeah. I guess the thing that I imagine people are wondering, and I'm sort of wondering it too, is, okay, so you had like, the original thing, and it's like doing the real time transcription, which is like a really cool, like, wow thing. And then you did a bunch of iterations and you realized that this much simpler interaction pattern that's like maybe a slightly less of a wow, especially while you're in the meeting, it like, turns into a wow at the end. What's really funny, actually, before I go there, is like, I don't use it that way at all. I don't ever take notes in it. Sorry. I just record and then get the. Get the notes. So it's really interesting that. And I think that actually is getting to my question, which is like, I think a lot of people, myself included, but I think I've gotten a little better over. Over time. A lot of people are like, okay, but how do you know who to listen to? How are you getting that feedback and then sorting through it, right? Like, you know, you have that. You have that ui, you have that, like, user interaction. And when you say it's distracting, like you paying attention to yourself using it, are you, you know, just watching lots of different users and like, listening to some group of them? Because I imagine there's some group of people that really maybe liked the distraction. I don't. I don't know. I'm just making stuff up. So, like, how are you, like, sorting through all that stuff?

Yeah, I guess my. It's hard. I don't know. I don't know if you get it perfectly right. My product philosophy, I think you need to make product decisions based on your own intuition, right? And you want to inform or give your intuition as much of the relevant context as possible. So to me, it's less about, okay, you. You talk to a user and you write down exactly what they say, right? And then you go and do exactly what they say. I think we're lucky with granola, where we actually use granola. Ourselves. Right. We. We don't have the same experience as like an investor would, or let's say like a salesperson directly, but we do do sales calls. So, you know, we, we can kind of empathize there. I think the most important thing is basically to build your internal mental intuition model of like what feels good or bad. And then the best way to do that is to get. I find FaceTime. FaceTime with users, like written feedback is like, you know, it's, it's a data point. But I think it's when you talk to the human and you can kind of see the human in their full context that it becomes a lot easier. So what, what's worked best for us and it, it's harder as you scale is to have a few people you talk to a lot. And, and we do that basically with over chat. Sorry, over slack. And then with periodic calls like this. Ideally you go into their office and. And like shadow them for a day, which is logistically really hard to pull off. But whenever we've done it, it's been as super valuable.

Yeah, I love this. So I mean, I think you're saying like, there isn't like some list of rules or set of processes. There is like some data gathering, but ultimately like, it's about having a perspective. And that perspective or that sense of taste is like, it's implicit rather than explicit. And it's sort of like about trusting. Trusting that to some degree and informing it and having it evolve over time. Like, so what does that feel like? Like, what does it feel like when you're, when you're making a decision and you're letting the. Because intuition is like a hard thing. Like some, some intuitions are bad, some intuitions are good. Like, what does it feel like to you? Like when you're kind of aligned and you kind of, you're getting into the intuition of like, this is what I want to do.

So I, I do think there's like an angry. This is just sound generic, but it's like, like deep down you need to believe in something. Like, you need to be like, okay. And it's easiest when you're building for yourself. Cause you can be like, okay, this. This is what I want, or this is what feels right to me. And I think that should, that should always be there, that anchoring. Because otherwise there are lots of products you could build in the world. Right. The one that you're anchored on is the one that, that you care about. What, what I find. So there's another school of thought which is like, you know, don't even talk to users. Just pure design. Just, just follow, follow your, your truth. Um, I, I don't subscribe to that. And the reason I just subscribe to that is because it is unfathomingly hard to put yourself in another person's shoes. Right? If, if you try to do it in an abstract way, uh, you're like, okay, I'm, I'm like, what does this person think or feel? And I think perhaps anyone who's been in like a marriage or like a long term relationship, like that can kind of, you know, attest to that, which is like, it doesn't matter how well you know the person. So fricking hard to, to put yourself in someone else's shoes. So what, what I find is that when, like I love user tests, I love putting a piece of or like a feature in front of users and seeing how they react. And like, usually it's not like, it's not the, the small things that you notice along the way. Like, usually very quickly you're like, oh yeah, my mental model was right, or it's completely wrong. And you know, you feel that very quickly. Right. There are lots of different people out there. People have different preferences, so there's a lot of noise. But like, usually you're like, oh, I had this implicit assumption I didn't realize I had and that thing is wrong and therefore everything downstream is going to be a piece of crap. Or like, okay, maybe it didn't hit exactly the bar, but it's generally there.

We're getting there. Yeah, yeah, I, I mean, I, I really agree with that. I mean, I do think you can make products for people that are not like you, and sometimes that's necessary. But like, there's something about that, like, kind of get out of the building mindset that I think, I think people miss or people like misunderstand or misapply, which is like, and I've done this too. Like there's that whole like over the last 10 years, it's like the lean startup and like you want to treat business like a science or whatever. And so you want to like objectively study your users and your customers and sort of like find out like, what are their needs and what are their problems that you can solve them or whatever. And I think what people don't realize about that is if you go in without a perspective, you evoke that lack of perspective in the other person. Person. Like, they don't, they don't have the answers. They don't like, know what their problems are. And to some degree, like in your mutual interaction, you are like creating the world that like, has potentially has a problem or doesn't have a problem. And there is some reality there. But like, it's, You're. You have to evoke it in the right way. And so when you come in with a product or a specific perspective, it's much more valuable for figuring out like, what's working or sort of training that intuition versus like going in with just like. So like, what kind of product do you want? Or like what problems do you have or whatever? Like, you just are going to get blankness because you're presenting blankness. And that's like a very subtle distinction that I think is really interesting.

Yeah, I guess that made me think of two things. One, in my last startup, Socratic, we were building for high schoolers. Teenagers, right. Which, I mean, this is a little while ago, but they're completely different for me. Right. So I couldn't trust a lot of my, like, my intuition to what I would want to do as, as a user. And what made a. It took us a while to figure this out, but what made a huge difference was after I don't know, maybe two years, we figured this out. On Tuesdays and Thursdays we were building this startup in New York. So on Tuesdays and Thursdays we would have high school kids come into the office and spend time with us. And on Tuesdays it was the same group of kids so that we would get to know them and they would trust us. And, you know, teenagers have been trained to tell adults what they want to hear from like an early age. So it took a while to break through that before they were. They're kind of honest. And then on Thursdays, it was a new group of kids who had never seen the product before. And getting that kind of FaceTime week in, week out made it made a tremendous difference because there was constantly, like, I can't trust what I want. Right. They've grown up with very different technology. They've grown up with very different cultural norms. Like what. How does that work for them? And then the second thing that made me think of is this is like a, like a weird terminology. But you're talking about if you come in with that perspective or not. I basically think you can look at products and you, you, you can kind of tell whether they have sole or not. I've tried to find a better word for it, but SOL is like the, the best one I found. And, and I think if it. When you're building a product, you should absolutely, absolutely react to what people are saying. But you, if you don't have a, an opinion or a perspective, then it's kind of empty, right? It's like whatever they say, you'll, you'll just like run after that thing. Whereas some, some products, you can kind of tell if they have soul and you can also tell when they lose it over time. Like oftentimes organizations will scale or grow and, and something that, that really, you know, captured in essence gets distilled until it's not really there anymore. But I think that's a good test. You can kind of look at most products. Is there like a human element at the core of this that feels coherent?

What is a product in your head that has soul?

Well, maybe it's because I was just talking about Socratic, but this was in 2015 and we were talking to teenagers. And at that time, Snapchat felt like it was full of it, full of soul. Like you could tell it had a real perspective. A really. There was a lot there that was. You don't focus group your way to Snapchat, right? That like, it felt very teenage native and at that time.

And is that like the original Snapchat where it's like mostly the like disappearing pictures or were there other parts of it that like they'd added on at that point? I just don't remember, like where in its evolution it was at that point.

Yeah, it was just like, honestly, the whole, the whole interface was so different. Like everything was. And there are disappearing pictures. Stories were out. There are these kind of what felt like to me, like canonical new types of media that they had like come up with and they had come up with. But if you looked at it. Cause like, I had to look at it really closely because I was designing for teenagers and that was where at that point Snapchat. Snapchat was dominant. And a lot of the interaction patterns that teenagers expected came from Snapchat. But if you looked at it very carefully, it was like, it was thoughtful. It was like the fastest way to take a photo and share it. Right. Or the fastest way to go through lots of photos. But like, for older users, they'd try to use Snapchat and they'd be like, I can't figure this thing out. It's, you know, it's too confusing. It's. It's too different.

Yeah, that makes sense. I want to, I want to go back to. And I'm sorry, you can tell me to stop asking you about how you feel. But, but I'm just, I'M just, I'm really just on this like, intuition thing right now. You're like, you're really speaking my language. So I'm going to just keep pushing on it until you tell me to stop. But like, I think for me, one of the interesting things about intuition, because I was definitely on a very, like, more rationalist, like, more like finding rules, doing science kind of like path. And I think if you go down that path and you are really serious about it, you. You realize that underneath, like any scientific advance is typically like a lot of creative intuition and a lot of stuff that's inexplicit. Um, and just. That's a sort of necessary thing. Um, so I think for me, one of the things that has been really interesting as I've kind of grown in building products is learning to recognize the feeling that I get when I'm like, paying attention to like, other people and other. How other people feel or what other people expect or what I think I should be feeling versus, like, what I actually feel and when that's happening versus when that's when. When it's sort of out there versus, like when I'm too confused and I'm like, there's too much signal and I'm just like, I'm a. I'm a mess basically. And there's something. It's a sort of like, I think when we talk about like knowledge in the west, like, you're pretty much talking about like sort of scientific knowledge. And this is like a sort of different type of knowledge that we don't really talk about too much. Um, and I'm trying to explore for pe. For people who are like, I think, like you who. I mean, you're talking about soul and products and intuition or whatever. I think you have something there that we don't talk about enough. So, yeah. I'm wonder is this. Does this experience resonate with you or like, how does it feel for you or, you know, what is that for you?

Yeah, I think, I think what's that made me think of something that's really challenging. Is that like, you need space for it. Right. It's not something you can kind of look at. I mean, you perhaps not that different from writing. I don't know. Right. Where it's a creative act, but you need to focus. I think it's a hard thing about product is that you get busy. Right. And when you get busy, you actually, you lose the space to actually do product thinking. And we can kind of talk about what I think product thinking is a lot of the time. But like, I remember I. At some point I was looking at Google PMs and Google PMs were. Their schedules were packed with meetings, like from start of the day to the end of the day. And I was like, you literally have designed an org where there is zero time for actual product thought, right? And there are different types of roles, right? Like project management. That is like you're pushing stuff forward. You know, you need to do that. But I think a lot of the product thought that, that where you come up with something good, you. You kind of need to get at that space. And yeah, that, that's one point. It's interesting what you're saying about listening to yourself or, or noticing when you're listening to what you feel or what other people are thinking. It's not always easy to do this. But I find that a lot of product is actually very simple. Like, what you're really trying to do is say, how did this make me feel? Right? And a lot of that subconscious or it happens so quickly that, you know, it's like you almost have to like replay the video in slow motion to see what's actually happening. You have to like replay the emotions. Like, like, because like, I look at something, I'll be like, I feel something. Why? Right? And then, and, and going back and figuring that out and then asking the question to other people, right? Like, what, what, what does this make you feel when you see it? And again, people aren't always gonna. It's not always gonna be easy for them to talk about it. But I think that's at the end of the day, that's a lot of what building a great product's about. It's just hard to get to the answers of that. But if you can.

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with you and I totally agree with about the time thing. And it's not just about time in your schedule. Like, you can have no meetings for a couple hours, but it's also about like emotional time or emotional space. Like, if you're just like so stressed about like the 50 things you have to do, like, even if you have a couple hours, like, you're not going to have the, the time to like, really figure out how you feel about something. For me, like, I have kind of over the. I mean, I've been running every. For five years. So like over the last year or two, I have like started to like, really just be very mindful of my schedule. Like, I really try not to do meetings before noon Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And, and I also like I'm lucky enough. Like I have a lot of people on my team who are doing a lot of the like more day to day stuff so I have time to do stuff like this where I can kind of like let mind Rome, which is really amazing. You're kind of like in the very, you're in the belly of the beast right now and I'm curious like how you're, how you're doing that for yourself. Like how you think about if as you're saying like this kind of into intuitive thinking is so important or feeling is so important but you can't do it if you're too busy. But also you're running a startup and like startups are crazy. Like how are you doing that?

Poorly. Poorly at the moment is the answer. I, I think, I guess where my, my thinking is now and might have checking in a couple months, it might be totally different. I think different companies are going to win off of the different strengths. Right. And, and I think, I think for granola there's a lot of things we're going to have to do, right to be successful. Right. But I guarantee that if we mess up the product, right, if we mess up that sold and we definitely won't be successful. So I do think it's a, it's a big priority and we definitely got more attention after our launch than we expected. So I think we've been, we've been playing some catch up there and now I'm actively and trying to be really thoughtful about hiring, hiring the right folks so that I can, I can have that space to do product and a bunch of other things as well. But a bit inspired. Actually. We, we talked a couple months ago and you told me about how you've done a really good job hiring different, you know, different people can own different areas. And I, I, I heard that and I was like that sounds amazing. I'm going to have to try to try to replicate that.

I love that. Um, hopefully I can. It took me like five years to do that, so hopefully it saves you a little bit, a little bit of time. Yeah, no, I think, I think that that makes a lot of sense. Another thing on the sort of intuition point, like there's the, there's the part of intuition where you're sort of training on the current project that you're on. So it's like how are people liking granola or not liking it or whatever. But then there's also just like being a fan of different things and like really kind of like in your day to day life like just loving this particular kind of thing and like getting deep into how it works and like all that kind of stuff. Like what are some things that you love that have kind of informed that intuitive side of, of how you make decisions and how you build products.

Interesting product wise or just, just generally.

I mean what, whatever, wherever you want to go with this is totally fine, whatever's exciting to you.

Like let's say there's like, oh, I try to be a good dad, right. I try to be a good partner husband and I try to be a good CEO and I, I think I can be two of those three at any given time. Like I don't, I don't think it can be great all three. And I think the trick is to rotate it, right? Because I think if you, if you stay too long with the same two then that third one gets in trouble, right? And I think that's the sad reality. I don't know. It's like startups, startups take a lot and I wouldn't have it any other way. I've had other jobs and I'm not happy in those so they're the right trade off for me. But they do take a lot. And I think one of the, in terms of the things that I love a lot of, I think interests I had when I was, when I was younger, I've kind of, I've kind of given up or found maybe I'll pick them, pick it up one day in the future. The things that have stuck around I guess are. I just love travel. Travel is a really big one for me and just being in, being in a different like changing environment I just find to be really, really helpful. The other thing I do, which I don't know, when I was younger it sounded super weird but maybe my friends have gotten weirder over time. So now I think it's more normal or maybe because I'm so busy now that it's more necessary, I will go off by myself like periodically. Like I would like every birthday. Like the night, the day before my birthday I'd go off somewhere super remote where there's like no one around and just like be stuck in my thoughts. And I think it's kind of one of these, one of these reactions to the day to day can get so hectic and you can get so reactive and every, you know, I think you periodically need to, you know, break that cycle and zoom out and feel small. It's like I, I do this pilgrimage, I just go to like Big Sur. I don't know if you've been there, Dan. But it's like. It's like a place that's like, oh, man, it's one of those places. Everything about it is just almost like. It's just. If you want to feel small and insignificant, it's like that place. It's like huge cliffs, the ocean, you know, stars, redwoods. It just makes you feel like you're like this tiny little speck, which is, like, I think, a really helpful perspective to get periodically.

I love that. I mean, first of all, I think that's one of the most emo things anyone's ever said on this podcast. But also, I. I feel the same way. And one thing that I like, I. I've not done that on my birthday, but I'm Jewish, and we have a holiday called Yom Kippur. I don't know if you're Jewish or not, but basically you, like, it's the Day of Atonement, so, you know, you're. You're supposed to reflect on all your sins and repent, basically. And you fast. And I will often, like. And you're supposed to go to synagogue, but I don't really do that. And I just, like, sit by myself. I turn. Try to turn my phone off and just. I have a notebook there, and I'm just, like, thinking about my year and, you know. You know, like, things that I didn't do or did wrong or people I hurt or whatever. But just more generally, like, it's. It's sort of a way to step back. And it's also. It's really interesting to, like, do that because you're fasting, and that gives you a little bit more mental clarity, which is interesting. But also, like, you walk by restaurants and people are eating, and you're like, I can't eat. And that puts you in a totally different place than normal. And there's a lot of people who feel that way all the time. And so, like, you. You're kind of like, you're getting a. Like, a very, very slight taste of that. Anyway, it just. You just get into this completely different frame, and I always find that I feel different after that. So I totally. I totally resonate with that.

Cool. Let's move on before I say more email stuff on your podcast.

No, I want. I want the email stuff. But, but, but that makes sense. I. I like, we can. We can talk about. We could talk about travel, too. Like, what do you think it is, like, about those experiences that informs your taste or, like, kind of scratches that picture? Like, what have you taken away from Those experiences or maybe tell me about one in particular that stands out to you.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's, you know, you can, you can try to talk about travel opens your horizons and like makes you more aware of the human condition. And you know, you can build products better because of that. But like, just like an emotional reaction, it's not, I don't think it's like an intellectual one. It's just being in different places. I think it's all about just that. Okay. Breaking that, like the routine. Routine's great, right? Routine's how you get stuff done. Right. There's something really nice about it. But I think it's also. Time goes by really quickly when you're in a routine. It's almost, it's, you know, and that's kind of the beauty of it because there's, you don't notice all the details because your brain has already ingested all the details and kind of like it cancels that out so you can just focus on the thing in front of you. And I think when you're traveling all those details kind of rush in and that, that breaks you out of your mold and that, that gives you perspective. But for me it's just like I, I love it. I just, just one of those things where I, I, I don't know. I think, I think most people know whether travel is like a, like a, a core thing for them or not from an early age. So a lot of people who aren't, you know, tempted to, or interested in like seeing a lot of the world when they're kids and there are others that they know that from an early age it's, I don't know, maybe it's like a, maybe it's like a human, like a core human type or something.

Yeah, yeah. I think there's there's some, some personality type that, like some personality type system that includes people. It's sort of, it's like neurotransmitter based and who knows if it's actually like scientific or whatever, but that's not the point. And people, it hypothesizes that people that have a little bit more dopamine forward leaning brains just like travel, they're called they in the, in the system. It's called explorers.

Um, what's dopamine forward? Like their, their, their dopamine trigger happy or.

Yeah, like if you, if you had to pick a, a neurotransmitter that's like more dominant. So like dopamine versus serotonin versus like I can't remember what the other ones were? Um, probably norepinephrine and like one other one. If you had to pick one. Travel or people are more dopamine. Who knows if it's real? But what you said, like, reminded me of like, this routine versus travel, which always reminds me a little bit of. In computer science, there's like this, this trade off in algorithms between exploring and exploiting. Um, and I think that, that this, that's reflected also in just like creative lives, which is like, sometimes you're in explore mode, sometimes you're in exploit mode. Same thing in companies. Like, sometimes you're in explore mode before product market fit, and then you're in exploit mode when you're in product market fit. And for me, I, I often just think of it like breathing in versus breathing out. So like, breathing in is, is Explore and breathing out is exploit. And, and knowing where you are as a person in your life in your week because like weeks you can days have Explore Exploit. Like it's fractal on different levels. And knowing where you are as a person and as a, as a, as a company or in your product, I think is like, really important because you're often like in, for example, like you're in explore mode, but then you're looking at other people who are in exploit mode and you're like, I should be doing that. And it's like, no, you absolutely should not be doing that. Um, that doesn't work. Um, so that's, that's what it brought up for me.

I love that. I think that's, that's a. I think what you said about knowing in which mode you are and being like, prescriptive about that, I think is so important because they're completely different. You approach those two worlds very, very differently. Right. And if you approach a, if you approach an Explore task with an exploit mindset, I mean, you're going to, you're going to discover some really crappy stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's why, like, you know, after you sell your company, it's often hard for entrepreneurs because you're like, I'm used to the exploit mode. And like, sport mode only happens like once every, you know, a couple years or whatever. So you just have to like, put yourself back together and that's, that's kind of hard. Okay. How, how far do you think you can get with a great product? So an example would be people always sort of like, point to like, Slack versus Microsoft Teams, and it's like, Slack is like, clearly a great product or better. At least a better product than teams. I don't, I mean now they've been acquired so like, I don't know, we use discord. So I'm not even up to date on the current happenings with Slack, but like for a while, certainly Slack was a much better product and teams just like kind of ate their lunch. So like as a product for focused founder, Product forward founder, let's say. What do you think about that and how far do you think you can get with a good product?

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean the, the sock example is an, is an interesting one and I think from a, from it's a kind of thing that investors bring up right. When they're trying to see how, how big an opportunity can be. And I mean I think of Slack as a huge success. Right. Like there's like basically this new paradigm. Yes, sure, chat's been around a while, but I feel like the way we, we do, you know, like real time chat with teams in the workspace was invented by Slack and in, in my mind in terms of like that modern version of it and what were they acquired for? Like 30 billion.

Right.

Is some, something like that, Something like that?

I mean chump change compared to Microsoft's like whatever. But yeah, I mean they were acquired for a lot. Yes, it's a good outcome.

Sure, sure. Agreed. But I feel like that product did. I think it was both a commercial, you know, a commercial success and a product success. So I wouldn't choose that as a negative example. I think maybe the question's a bit misleading. Like I don't think product by itself is going to do like. Product by itself doesn't get you very far. Right. There are plenty of great products that aren't great businesses. I think, I think there is this overarching question which is in the world of, in the world of AI where data is so important and context is so important, right. Will the dominant players, will there natural advantage with both, you know, having all your company data and all the users, like is that impenetrable or not?

Right.

And I think that's like a, that's the real question with Slack. Right. And, and that's like, I mean that's, that's a hard one.

Right?

And that's, that's one where it's like if anyone who is starting a company today is like, okay, I know the, I know the, the perfect strategy to make sure that Microsoft but you know, won't, won't be able to do this or, or copy or whatever. I, I think I Think they're lying, right? I think you, I think you just have to believe that you have some product that you believe desperately needs to exist in the world. And, and then I think you need to be really savvy and strategic about how you, you go and do that. And some of it is just up to luck like that. That's my, that's my personal view. I mean I think the, I think the notion guys did an exceptional job of this. There's no technical moat right in notion. I think it like their advantage is that it was, it was out there enough when they started working on it that no one really took it seriously or could wrap their head around that this was like a real thing, but which is like an interesting type of moat. I think if you tell most investors that that's your moat, they'll be like, what? But, but yeah, I mean it's, you know, still interesting to see how that will play out right there. That's the, the slack notion. Zoom. You know, they're all the, they're all the like, like the contenders trying to go up against the big folks.

Yeah, that's interesting. First of all, I love the way that you just like rejected the premise of the question. Great answer. Second of all, I actually have a slightly different take. I'm curious for your perspective, which is.

That.

Big companies like always fumble the bag and the, the limits to performance or the, the way to maximize the performance of, of products on dimensions that customers care about are not going to end up being like really usually limited by like data or compute or I mean maybe distribution is a little, a different one, but like data or compute, like which the big companies have, it's going to be like about risk appetite. And if you're, if you're releasing software to like hundreds of millions of people or tens of millions of people like who are used to it working a certain way, your risk appetite just has to be a lot lower and there's has to be many more levels of people being like, is this such a good idea? And if you're a four person team, you can just do like weird shit that like big companies can't do. And especially because I think a lot of their users will keep them in the paradigm that they're used to. Like a lot of people have invested like their whole careers in Salesforce working a certain way. Salesforce can't just be like, no, it's actually this other thing because it's like there's a small group of AI early adopters that want that, but everyone else is like bolt on chat will be fine, you know, and so that's kind of what I think is like there's going to just be a lot of small companies doing weird stuff that, that feels a lot more AI native, that early AI, early adopters really like people who are, have Already been using ChatGPT and Cloud for forever and are just like, okay, now I like I'm ready for like the new thing that like big companies are not going to be able to do because it's going to be too weird for their users. And like even the, even the, like the dull bolt on chat experiences and all these, all these big company products, like they all suck like because they're, they're so afraid of saying the wrong thing that it, it's usually like the answers are not good. Yeah. What do you think about that?

Oh, I mean I completely agree with all of that, but I think that that doesn't, I think that's kind of a disconnected point. I think basically like what tends to happen is that startups are way better at discovering new product categories, right? Because they can explore and test stuff out and then usually there's like a seven year period right before like the big companies are like, oh, this is a big deal, you know, we should like invest in this. And then that's, that's a, like for sure startups are going to vastly outperform in that first stage. I think that the slack question is in that second stage, right? Once it's clear that this is like, you know what the product is, you know what the need is and Microsoft like the Eye of Sauron turns on you, will you be able to defend yourself against that?

Right.

And I think that that's like a totally different question. Something you did say though. Like I, like, I think an interesting topic here are like, what are the, what are all the advantages in this in the AI space? Because a lot of times people, you know, you might say like, okay, everyone has access to the models, right? The big companies are clearly taking AI very seriously, right? And they're trying, they're trying, they're shipping AI features left and right. So like what's your advantage as a startup? And like, like one of them is you don't have a lot of users, right. Which is amazing, right? And what that means is that you can, you can ship features that use like frontier models, right? And you can figure out what works and what doesn't work because Google can't do that. Like Google can't ship something that uses like chat. GPT4 like GPT4 level intelligence to its billions of users, it's like, like physically not possible today, right? And then the other thing you can do is if you don't have that many users is you can just do this even if it's really expensive, right? Because like, like my, my view is like, if you're building an AI startup at the app layer, like I actually don't know anything about building like a like AI startup where you're training your own models right from scratch or something like that. But if you're building up the app layer, I think your job is basically to say what is the what what? Like figure out what's the perfect product for two years in the future. And then what that means is you, you use like the latest models, you don't worry about how much it costs because you don't have many users, right? And it's going to take a while to scale your user base and you just trust the forces of capitalism and whatever the equivalent of Moore's Law is for, for AI intelligence, that AI costs are going to plummet right in, in that time. And when that happens, you'll have a product that is like, that is AI native and, and exactly what users want and also financially viable at that time.

And how do you know what like what the perfect product is in two years? Like put aside the cost question.

Yes, I think, yeah, that's a great question. I think so. I think one of the really hard things about building the space is that the technology is changing so quickly, right? And I think, I think if you, if you would be like, hey Chris, what's, what's the world gonna look like in five years? Like what's AI gonna be able to do? I, you know, there's a wide spectrum of answers I don't like. No one really knows, right? Some people might be more informed than others, But I think 12 to 18 months is a lot easier to imagine, right? There might be some step changes in there and I think what you can do, like when we started, so it's interesting, like granola, like is not, not weird now. Like the idea that when we started granola, there are a lot of things about it that like, like context, window sizes weren't like big enough, right? They were super slow. The intelligence level wasn't there. The quality of transcription wasn't really good enough. Um, you couldn't even capture audio on device for like most like it's only the latest version of macOS.

I think it's still weird because of that. No one's doing that, you know, the on device audio.

Yeah, yeah, it's true. They're starting to, they're starting to now, but yeah, anyway, but like we sat down, we were basically like, what's going to happen? And we might have gotten lucky. Like we, we now try to do this periodically. We're like, okay, we think, we think cost of inference is going to go down. We think context windows are going to get much bigger. We think the cost of transcription will trend towards zero over time. That one's still to be seen. But like with Whisper and things like that, I think we're on the right path and we just kind of like, okay, if we're going to assume these things are going to happen, we're going to build a product based on that premise. It's like one of the reasons why Granola does real time transcription as opposed to, you know, asynchronous transcription after the meeting's ended. Because we're like, one day real time transcription will be just as good as asynchronous or good enough. And then it's clearly better to have your notes immediately at the end of the meeting, not five minutes or 10 minutes after after the meeting ended.

Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. And I think, I think to your other, to your, to your earlier point in just us talking about big companies and, you know, not having a lot of users and that being a good thing for startups to sort of be able to take risks and learn. I think, you know, when GPT 3 and 4 were coming out and ChatGPT first came on the scene, there was this like, thing that was like, startups are over because like, big companies are just going to have the AGI that just like figures out like exactly what the customer wants and you're just never going to be able to like compete. I think that that's just totally wrong. And it seems like even when you have a lot of intelligence at your disposal, there's like so many different ways to use it and there's so much, there's so much involved in giving the AI the right knowledge and the right perspective and the right task to do that even as they're getting smarter. I don't think it, it's. We kind of like posited a God and then we're like, and the big companies are going to use the God. And then it just like, it was just like, oh yeah, startups are over. And it's so interesting to see that kind of fantasy get pulled away and you start to see all the nuances of like Even if you have this incredible tool, like how complicated it is, it actually is to like use it well and make something good with it, you know, it's really interesting to me.

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that one plays out. My, the way I think about this is I think that there are two kind of competing tensions. One is convenience and accessibility are very real, right? And like if people have built a habit going to ChatGPT or Cloud or whatnot for 8 app, like 8 out of their 10 tasks, then it's a lot easier for it them to, you know, use it for their 9th and 10th task, right? I think that's like, that's like one like human laziness is something that I will always bet on as a product builder, right. I think the competing tension is specialization for a problem, right. And like when, when the experience or the output or the quality really matters to you and I think those are at odds. So I actually, whatever, I can't predict the future. But my view, like I'm kind of, I'm bullish on anybody who's building tools for professionals or experts. I think you don't have to worry about, about like the, you know, OpenAI taking over the world. I think if you are building something for consumers and it's a task where the consumer doesn't, it's a bit like Google, right? There could have been lots of niche, specialized search engines, but the reality is that most of the time people just like use the thing that they use for everything else, even if it's not the best search engine. So I think about that a lot. I think the other thing from it, a startup builder perspective is like, if, you know, whatever one of these big companies do, get AGI and take over them, like what are you going to do in the meantime, right? Like shouldn't you. It's like Pascal's Dilemma, right? It's like, shouldn't you try to build a really great company or product in case that doesn't happen or they don't dominate? Because if they do, otherwise you can sit around and like twirl your thumbs and then if, and then they fumble the ball, you're going to be like, damn it, I should have been building the startup the whole time.

You can't just like hold out for UBI and AGI. You know.

One thing about that though is which I, I think this is a good piece of advice, observed us well, but it's basically like, don't like when you're building your product or your company, like, don't solve problems that won't be problems 12 months from now. Right? That's just like, it's very easy to do that. You're like, ah, shit. Users keep asking for this. Our product doesn't do it. Well, whatever. The models aren't good enough. So I'm going to spend a bunch of time fixing it. And it always takes longer to fix things than you think. And it always takes longer to grow your users than you think. And then like 12 months go by and like the next version of the model, as you predicted, solves it for you. And that was all wasted effort, whereas you could have spent that time on something else. And I think that's like, that's one of those moments where it's really important, I think, not to listen to your users right now because the shelf life of that, of that fix is very short. So yeah, you gotta make sure you're, you're riding that. You're riding that tsunami of technical innovation, you know, that wave, rather than trying to like tattle in front of it.

I think that's great. I want to go back to your specialization versus generalization point, which if I had to reframe it, it would be like for startups like the sweet spot or like a, A pretty, A good bet is like if you're specialized in a particular thing, you're not going to get blown out by the open AIs of the world. Like you'll be really good at like the doctor Chat or I don't know, I'm just like figuring I'm just, I'm just making something up. But then if you're, if you're doing the general thing, then you're really playing with the big boys and like maybe you can win but like it's at least you know, getting the mind share to be the thing that people type in instead of chatgpt is like really hard and you have to be like really, really useful. And how do you think for yourself? Like where, where does granola fit in on that? Like generalization versus specialization. Like Continuum.

Yeah, yeah. And, and just to, to, to make a point there, when I say specialize, I mean in the type of work or task that you have. So I guess like an example here is like, like Photoshop versus like the default like you know, photo editing thing on your, on your phone.

Right?

Like I think if, like there will always be something like Photoshop, right? Or Final Cut Pro or whatever, whatever the, like the thing that's used by experts that are trying to be the best at their, at their Domain, I think, I think granola needs to be in that category. Right. Like, I think right now. And we've always thought this like, like meeting notes are a stepping stone, right, to actually helping you do all the work that you need to do. Right. It's like, I know, I think like designers, like product designers spend a lot of time in figma. Engineers spend a lot of time in Visual Studio or whatever IDE they choose. And I don't think there's an equivalent or there hasn't been an equivalent until now for people whose jobs center around other people, like relationships, whether it's meetings or emails or things like that. But I do think, I think granola needs to move much further down that line where it's like, how do we make you a 10 times better version of yourself when it comes to that type of work? And that, you know, that's, that's very much in our sights. I think right now you look at it and it's, it's like, okay, meeting notes, maybe you really like it. Maybe there's lots of reasons to like us, but like, I think the, we need to go further down the specialization.

What do, like, if you know, I don't know what you feel like you can share, but like, if we're looking to the future, the next year or so, like, what are some of the things that are on your mind that like people should be, maybe what are you, what are you thinking about? Like, what does that mean for you in the next year or so?

So I think there, there's some obvious things about Granola which is not. We just need, we just need to do it like right now it's just on your computer, it should be on your phone right now. It's single player. It should, it should work with your team. So that, that's a facade, I think, I think in the future, 80% of the value that users are going to get from Granola are, is going to come from Granola helping them do like the, the tasks or the workflows that get spawned in a meeting. And we don't yet know what that looks like exactly, but lots of different prototypes internally. Like my belief is. So there. I think there's a view out there which is when you create these AI agents and they're going to do all these things for you. Right? And I think that's like a valid view and I'm really curious to see what products or experiences come out of those. That's not, that's not the view we're taking at Granola. The view we're taking at Granola is one where, same thing with the notes, we want to remove the busy work so that you can better apply your judgment on the stuff that matters. And I think, you know, if you come out of a meeting and right now we're just thinking about one meeting at a time, but I think we'll be more expansive in the future. You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of like busy work and like, okay, I need to send a follow up email and describe what we've done or scheduling another meeting and, but I, I, the way I see Granola is like, I'd like Granola to take you 85% of the way there. Right. Anything that involves a lot of unnecessary, unnecessary clicks like Granola should do. But ultimately the tasks, the work should always come from you. And, and it should have your spin. And I think that's what people want, to be honest. Like, I think, I think, I think if you daydream, you're like, oh yeah, wouldn't it be great if my, you know, if my AI agent did all my work for me? But I think if you actually think about it carefully, it's not really what you want because it's just not coming from you. No. Like it's never going to do it like you would. Right. I think what you want to do is you want it, you want it to be a better version of yourself.

I totally agree. I love that version of the future and I think, you know, I'm rooting for you to achieve that. I can't wait to try what you make next. This is a, this is a really great conversation. I had a lot of fun. I love the product. Thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you so much, Dan. This is, and it just felt like we were chatting. Like, I wonder what it would be like to listen to this.

That's, that's the goal. So for people who want to find out more or want to find Granola or follow you on whatever social platforms or whatever, where can people find you online?

Yeah. So Granola AI Check out the website. It's a Mac only app for now, but more things are coming. And then you can follow me on Twitter or you can follow Granola on Twitter. It's meet, Meet Granola on Twitter X and I'm CJ Pedregal on, on X. And we really need to up our LinkedIn game, but we haven't done that yet. So don't follow us there or do that. Don't have high expectations.

Excellent. Cool. Thanks, Chris.

Thanks. Have a great one. Oh, my gosh, folks, you absolutely, positively have to smash that, like, button and subscribe to AI and I. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard, but instead of gold, it's filled with pure, unadulterated knowledge bombs about ChatGPT. Every episode is a rollercoaster of emotions, insights, and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat, craving for more. It's not just a show, it's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. So do yourself a favor. Hit, like smash, subscribe, and strap in for the ride of your life. And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely, hopelessly in love with you.