Episode 42: Host Dan Shipper interviews Chris Pedregal, cofounder and CEO of Granola, an AI notepad that listens to meetings and generates notes and shareable transcripts, about building sticky AI products users love. The conversation covers how Pedregal uses intuition in product decisions, building products with "soul," developing product-thinking skills, when to trust your gut versus user feedback, why smaller user bases can advantage AI startups over big tech, and why founders should build specialized AI tools for professionals. Timestamps run from early product decisions at Granola (00:09:14) through product development philosophy, intuition vs. user feedback (00:19:24), and the company's outlook for the next year (00:56:52). # Channel Identity Observations — "The Secret to Building A STICKY AI Product - Ep. 42 with Chris Pedregal" ## Video Format & Series Evidence - **Episodic interview podcast format**: Title includes "Ep. 42," indicating a numbered, ongoing series. - **Host-led guest conversation**: The host is named **Dan** and identifies himself as running a company ("I've been running every for 5 years") and hosting the show ("Chris welcome to the show… I'm really excited to have you on the show"). - **Closing segment confirms show branding**: A promotional outro states: > "smash that like button and subscribe to **Ai and I**" and describes it as > "a journey into the future with **Dan shipper** as the captain of the spaceship." ## Explicit Self-Description (Creator Claims) - The outro makes direct claims about the show's content and quality: - > "it's filled with pure unadulterated knowledge bombs about **chat GPT**" - > "Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions insights and laughter" - > "It's not just a show it's a journey into the future" - **Claimed scope**: AI-focused content centered on ChatGPT and AI products, framed as forward-looking ("journey into the future"). ## Intended Audience (Observable Evidence) - **Founders, startup operators, and product builders**: Conversation centers on fundraising rounds, small-team building, product-market fit, hiring, and go-to-market — e.g., "you raised a big round… tell me about that decision." - **AI product enthusiasts and practitioners**: Discussion of model costs, context windows, transcription quality, and AI-native product design ("what's the perfect product for two years in the future"). - **The host self-identifies as part of this audience**: "we always build products that we kind of want ourselves," suggesting the show speaks peer-to-peer with builders. ## Claimed/ Demonstrated Scope - **Topic scope demonstrated**: AI consumer/product startups, product philosophy and intuition, competing with big tech, AI startup strategy. - **Guest type demonstrated**: Startup founders/CEOs in AI (guest is "co-founder and CEO of granola"). - **Tone demonstrated**: Long-form, reflective, philosophical conversation — extended discussion of intuition, "soul" in products, and personal reflection practices. ## Channel-Level Presentation Patterns (Observable, Not Inferred) - **Host discloses his own company context**: "we've raised a little bit of money… we're incubating these products," positioning the host as an operator, not just interviewer. - **Cross-promotion of guest products**: Host enthusiastically endorses the guest's product ("granola is like one of the first things that comes up… I use it for pretty much all my meetings"). - **Calls to action present**: Like/subscribe prompt delivered via scripted-sounding comedic outro. ## Boundary Notes - No mission statement, channel description, or explicit audience declaration appears beyond the outro claims quoted above. - Guest mentions his own channels (granola.bar, Twitter handles), which are **guest self-promotion**, not channel identity evidence for the show itself. # Delivery Observation: Ep. 42 with Chris Pedregal (host: Dan) ## Tone & Register - **Conversational, low-formality** throughout — filler words and hedges are pervasive: - > "um we've been working on it for a year before then and um we we basically had a version" - > "like I I I'm not great at social media" - The **host is effusive and complimentary** with the guest, repeatedly framing praise before questions: - > "you're such a great product thinker... you manag to make an AI product that's like not just the shiny bells and whistles thing" - > "so long-winded way of saying I think you're doing awesome stuff" ## Recurring Linguistic Habits - **"like" as an all-purpose discourse marker** from both speakers — extremely frequent, e.g., "it's like a hard thing like some some intuitions are bad," "it's like the fireflies bot which I find to be the most annoying thing in the world." - **Repeated word-restarts and stutters** ("we we," "it it's," "some some") — a stable pattern, suggesting unedited, naturalistic speech. - **The guest's hedging phrases** recur: - > "I I don't have all the right answers I'll just tell you what what I think" - > "I don't know if you get it perfectly right" - The guest's signature framing phrase, repeated nearly verbatim at the open and mid-episode: **"my product philosophy is"** / > "my product philosophy is um I think you need to make product decisions based on your own intuition." ## Teaching / Explanation Patterns - **Analogy as the primary explanatory device.** The guest repeatedly anchors abstract points in comparisons: - Granola looks like **Apple Notes**: > "granola looks like Apple notes... it looks like Apple notes during the meeting you type into it like a normal text editor" - **Slack vs. Teams**, **Notion's adoption curve**, **Photoshop vs. default phone editor**, **Superhuman** as a comp. - Marriage analogy for empathy: > "anyone who's been in like a marriage or like a longterm relationship like that can kind of uh you know attest to that" - **Concrete numbers and timeframes** to ground claims: - > "we had about 150 people using it" - > "12 to 18 months is a lot easier to imagine" - > "I'd like granola to take you 85% of the way there" - > "you're going to be running expensive products that will not be so expensive to run in the future" - **Rule-stating habit**: the guest distills lessons into maxims: - > "don't... solve problem that won't be problems 12 months from now" - > "if you don't want to build a product for a specific vertical make sure you diversify your user base early" - > "human laziness is uh something that I will always bet on as a product Builder" ## Interview / Hosting Techniques - The host uses **long multi-clause setups followed by a question**, often self-referencing: - > "I'll just like lay my cards on the table" - > "I'm just I'm just on this like intuition thing right now... I'm gonna just keep pushing on it until you tell me to stop" - The host **mirrors and expands** the guest's terms, turning them into follow-ups: - Takes the guest's "soul" concept and asks: > "what is a product in your head that has Soul" - Builds on "routine vs. travel" into a **computer-science explore/exploit analogy**: > "it's fractal on different levels" - The host **openly flags his own subjectivity**: > "I'm just I'm just making stuff up," "we use Discord so I'm not even up to date." ## Distinctive Moments (Isolated, Not Patterns) - The guest's **"soul" vocabulary** for products is his most idiosyncratic framing: > "I've tried to find a better word for it but soul is like the best one I've found." - A **self-deprecating deflection** when asked how he protects thinking time: > "poorly poorly at the moment is the answer." - The closing outro is a **sharp tonal break** — a hyperbolic, canned-style promo: > "you absolutely positively have to smash that like button" ... "I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you." This appears once and does not reflect the episode's register. - The guest's birthday-solitude ritual (Big Sur) and the host's Yom Kippur reflection form an unusual **mutual-introspection exchange** late in the episode — a one-off moment, not a recurring structure. ## Uncertainty Notes - The two speakers' patterns are intertwined in the transcript without full attribution markers; where speaker identity wasn't explicit, attributions above rely on address ("Chris welcome," "yeah it's interesting") and may be uncertain in a few short exchanges. - Frequency claims (e.g., "extremely frequent" use of "like") are qualitative; no counts were tallied. # Position Record: "The Secret to Building A STICKY AI Product" — Ep. 42 with Chris Pedregal ## Speakers - **Chris Pedregal** — co-founder and CEO of Granola - **Dan Shipper** — host (per transcript context; final plug names him) --- ## Chris Pedregal's Positions ### Product philosophy: intuition over process - Product decisions should be based on **your own intuition**, informed by as much relevant context as possible — "it's less about... you write down exactly what they say and then go and do exactly what they say." - **Against pure design-in-isolation**: he does not subscribe to "don't even talk to users," because "it is unfathomably hard to put yourself in another person's shoes" — invoking the analogy of marriage/long-term relationships. - **User tests are valuable** because they quickly confirm or falsify implicit assumptions: "usually very quickly you're like, oh yeah, my mental model was right or it's completely wrong." - Prefers **FaceTime over written feedback**; a small set of frequent contacts over Slack and periodic calls; office shadowing is logistically hard but "super valuable." - **"Soul" in products**: you can tell whether a product has soul; without a founder perspective, a product is "empty" — it just chases whatever users say. Products can also *lose* soul as organizations scale and the essence gets distilled away. - **Example of soul**: Snapchat circa 2015 — "you don't focus group your way to Snapchat"; it was teenage-native, fast, and confusing to older users. ### Space for product thinking - Intuition requires **space**: "when you get busy you actually lose the space to actually do product thinking." Cites Google PMs with fully packed schedules as "zero time for actual product thought." - Distinguishes product thinking from project management. - On whether he achieves this at Granola: "**poorly, at the moment**" — playing catch-up after unexpected post-launch attention; trying to hire thoughtfully to reclaim that space; admits his view "might be totally different" in a few months. - Much of product is asking **"how did this make me feel"** — you must "replay the emotions" in slow motion. ### Granola's product evolution - Launched **May** (2024 implied); team of four at launch; ~150 beta users for a year before. - **Original core interaction**: real-time AI invocation with keyword typing during meetings — "really cool... made for a great demo" but **distracting in actual meetings**: you read what the AI writes, want to fix it, and stop paying attention to the person. - Current interaction: notes typed during the meeting, transformed post-meeting — reached only after iterating through several paradigms and **cutting ~50% of features**, because in AI "it's very easy to build a demo version... but a lot of work to build a great feature that works consistently." - Granola does **real-time transcription** rather than asynchronous because of a bet that real-time quality will become good enough, and immediate notes are better. ### Users and market positioning - Current users: **startup founders and investors** — "people who need to make high-leverage decisions on the backs of meetings." - **Pigeonhole risk**: building for VCs is "notoriously a bad signal" (small TAM); you must **diversify your user base early** to avoid getting stuck. - Early-adopter focus is fine for a while: early adopters evangelize, and there may be a "changing of the guard" (Notion example: startups adopted it and grew big with it). - **Against going mass-market too early**: "you lose what makes you special." ### Fundraising rationale - Raised **$20M** term sheet shortly after launch; his "natural tendencies" are small team / don't raise much. - Rationale: AI's **"middle passage"** — products are expensive to run now, will be cheap in two years, but winners will be defined by then; volatility; uncertainty about the world 12–18 months out; desire to scale a nerve-striking product. - VCs being users made fundraising "less of an analytic exercise." ### Big companies vs startups - **Two-stage view**: startups vastly outperform at **discovering new product categories**; the Slack question is about the **second stage** — defending "once the eye of Sauron turns on you," which is "a totally different question." - Rejects Slack-as-failure framing: Slack was "both a commercial success and a product success" (~$30B acquisition, per his recollection, which Dan roughly confirms). - "Product by itself doesn't get you very far... plenty of great products that aren't great businesses." - Anyone claiming to have a perfect strategy against Microsoft "is lying"; **luck** plays a role. Notion's moat: it was weird enough early that no one took it seriously — "an interesting type of moat" investors would dismiss. - **Startup advantages in AI**: few users means you can ship frontier-model features and ignore cost, betting costs will plummet ("trust in the forces of capitalism") — build the perfect product for two years out. - Advice: **don't solve problems that won't be problems in 12 months** — models will fix them; "one of those moments where it's really important not to listen to your users." ### Specialization vs generalization - Competing tensions: **convenience/habit** ("human laziness is something I will always bet on") vs **specialization for experts** (Photoshop vs default photo editor). - **Bullish on tools for professionals/experts**; less worried about consumer tasks where general chatbots win by habit (Google analogy). - Granola must be in the specialist category: meeting notes are a **stepping stone** toward being the "Figma for relationship-centered work" — "make you a 10-times better version of yourself." - Roadmap: phone support, team features; **80% of future value** from helping with tasks/workflows spawned by meetings. - **Anti-full-agent stance**: "that's not the view we're taking at Granola" — remove busy work, take you **85% of the way**, but "the work should always come from you... it should have your spin." Full automation "is not really what you want because it's not coming from you." ### Personal reflections - Can only be good at **two of three** — dad, husband, CEO — at any time; must rotate or the neglected one "gets in trouble." "I wouldn't have it any other way." - Loves **travel** as breaking routine; annually goes somewhere remote the day before his birthday (Big Sur) to "zoom out and feel small." --- ## Dan Shipper's Positions - **Granola praise**: one of the first answers to "who's doing AI right"; dislikes Fireflies-style bots; favorite feature is sharing transcripts others can query ("don't bother me with the questions"). - **Lean capital preference**: likes building with little money and small teams; curious about the opposite approach. - **Personal work habits**: no meetings before noon, Tuesday–Friday; values emotional space, not just calendar time; credits years of hiring so others own day-to-day areas. - **Critique of Lean Startup misapplication**: going in without a perspective "evokes blankness" in users — "you're presenting blankness"; interaction with users co-creates the problem space. - **On Yom Kippur**: practices solitary reflection with notebook, phone off, fasting; finds fasting gives mental clarity and a taste of others' experience. - **Explore/exploit**: applies the CS trade-off fractally to lives, weeks, and companies ("breathing in vs breathing out"); mismatching mode causes errors (e.g., post-exit entrepreneurs stuck in exploit mode). - **On big companies**: believes they "always fumble the bag" — limited by **risk appetite** and legacy user expectations (Salesforce example), not data or compute; bolt-on AI chat in big products "all suck" because they're afraid of saying the wrong thing. - **Against "startups are over" AGI narrative**: even with high intelligence, using it well — right knowledge, perspective, task — remains complicated. - **Pascal's-wager framing**: build a great company in case big companies don't achieve AGI dominance; you can't "hold out for UBI and AGI." - Notes he **doesn't use Granola's core interaction** (never takes notes in it; just records) — a tension he raises explicitly against Granola's designed interaction. --- ## Unresolved Tensions / Qualifications Preserved - Pedregal repeatedly flags uncertainty: "I don't have all the right answers," "no one really knows" the 5-year AI outlook, "whatever I can't predict the future," and "we might have gotten lucky" on technical bets. Cost of transcription trending to zero is "still to be determined." - Pedregal's admission he's doing the space-for-thinking thing "poorly" while calling it a "big priority" stands unsmoothed. - Disagreement pattern: Dan pushes "big companies always fumble"; Pedregal agrees but reframes as a "disconnected point" — startups win discovery, not defense. - Dan's non-note-taking usage of Granola vs. Pedregal's designed note-taking interaction is left as an open divergence, not resolved. # Speaker Attribution & Provenance Record **Video:** The Secret to Building A STICKY AI Product — Ep. 42 with Chris Pedregal **Video ID:** `01a0f15b-04a5-7eb0-ae85-d8b1d3f30133` ## Speakers & Roles ### **Dan Shipper — Host / Creator** - Identified as host ("Chris welcome to the show"; promotional outro names "Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship"). - Also founder running a company ("Every," ~5 years), discussing his own product/incubation approach. - Attributable statements include: comparison of Granola to Superhuman; Slack vs. Microsoft Teams framing; explore/exploit "breathing" analogy; skepticism that big companies' data/compute advantages will dominate; "experts" framing of specialization vs. generalization. ### **Chris Pedregal — Guest** - **Co-founder and CEO of Granola** (explicitly stated by Dan and confirmed by Chris). - Claims attributable to Chris: product philosophy of intuition-based decisions; "soul" in products concept; Granola launched in May with a team of four; ~150-person beta for a year prior; $20M round raised; core interaction redesign (removed real-time AI interaction); Slack/Microsoft framing rebuttal; "don't solve problems that won't be problems in 12 months"; prior startup **Socratic** (built for teenagers, ~2015, New York); future roadmap (phone support, team features, 85%-there workflows). ### **Promotional Voice — Outro Segment** ⚠️ *PROMOTION FLAGGED* - The closing block ("smash that like button… Dan I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you") is a **promotional segment** for the show "AI and I," delivered by an unnamed narrator/promo voice, not interview content. ## Uncertainty Notes - **Name discrepancy:** Chris's handle is stated as "CJ pedal on X" — likely a transcription error for his actual handle; role identity (Chris Pedregal) is otherwise consistent. - Outro refers to host as "Sam" once ("thank you so much Sam") — likely a transcription error for "Dan." - Transcript only; **no curated metadata supplied** — no verified speaker bios, cited-source list, or comment availability info beyond the transcript itself. ## Referenced Third-Party Products / Claims (no endorsement verification) - **Granola** (granola.bar; @meetgranola on X) — guest's product - **Superhuman, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Notion, Snapchat, Zoom, Discord, Salesforce, Figma, Photoshop, Google** — used as comparisons/examples in discussion - **Fireflies** bot — characterized negatively by Dan (his opinion) - **ChatGPT/GPT-3/GPT-4, Claude, Whisper, OpenAI** — referenced as industry context - Chris's prior startup **Socratic** — historical claim by guest ## Availability Limits - No curated metadata on comments, sources, or fact-checking was provided. - Claims about Granola's funding ($20M), user counts, and roadmap are **guest self-reported** and unverified in this source. my product philosophy is I think you need to make product decisions based on your own intuition cuz 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 one I've found 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 perspective then it it's kind of empty right it's like whatever they say you you'll just like run off after that thing whereas some products you can 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 uh 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 um whenever people ask me like what is the like who's doing it right in in the AI consumer business product world I'm like granola is like one of the first uh things that comes up um I use it for pretty much all my meetings so basically it just like sits in the background on my computer doesn't like join Zoom or it's like the fireflies bot which I find to be the most annoying thing in the world um and it just records everything and then it turns it into um a transcript and um and then has some like automated notes which is really cool but one of my favorite features is um 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 operating in a scale now inside of every where I can't be in every meeting other people can't be in every meeting but there's always questions about like what do this person say what do 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 uh thanks so much that's great and you just raised a huge round so uh 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 uh granola launched in may we were a team of four when when it launched um and we uh we ended up signing a term sheet not not that long after launch um I guess it's it's helpful if you build a product that a lot of VCS use um because they can actually you know it's it becomes less of an analytic exercise or 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 who who are the people that you think it strikes a nerve with like what are the characteristics of those kind of people yeah uh so it's I think there's two way two way s that in terms of job title it's a lot of Founders like startup Founders specifically both small startups and big startups and um a lot of investors right now um 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 I maybe pause there that's really interesting um and and I'm what one of the things I'm really curious to diing with you is is you raised you raised a big round you said you built the first version with like a very small team I assume the team is still fairly small um tell me about that decision because I'll just like 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 in a much smaller team um and I think for me just like as a personality like uh that I like that because I I haven't really wanted to raise a lot of money we've raised a little bit of money forever 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 tell me about that decision and and and how you think about building a company in this environment yeah great question so my normally I'd say my um natural tendencies are similar to yours right which is small team don't raise too much money um we found ourselves in an interesting space so AI is kind of nuts for for a few reasons one is um 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 the leaders or winners will already be defined so there's this like Middle Passage this middle period here where it's like um 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 um the other one is just it's such there's so much volatility it's really hard to predict the future uh things are moving really quickly um and we had an opportunity to raise capital and we decided to take it basically to protect ourselves against uh those like that that volatility or like we 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 um also it's like uh you know 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 to scale the user base pretty quickly which will 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- wedged 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 um where I think they were like the hot SAS thing for like any 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 um yeah how do you think about uh moving from the cohort of people that seem to like love this today to like whatever the ne the next step is yeah that's a great question I 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 feel like the real danger is to get pigeon hold in a vertical that you don't want to get pigeon hold in right so it's interesting it's like a building products for VCS is is notoriously like a a bad signal because for investors they say the Tam is so small right they're like sure they um 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 um 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 uh 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 and their teams um and I also think there is with some of these tools that just might be like a Changing of the Guard like I remember when notion came out right 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 come establish it's easier to get companies switch but I I don't think you need to um 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 I 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 um and the reason I can tell is because like you manag 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 and 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 hypy 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 it I guess the the short answer is that it took a while um like I I we launched in we launched in May and things have I think we've gotten a lot of attention since launch but um we've been working on it for a year before then and um we we basically had a version of granola for a year we had about 150 people using it and giving us tons of feedback uh I can't remember you might have been one of them I actually can't remember if you were in that that beta group or maybe you s using it after launch I don't think so I think I I think I tweeted you and then you didn't respond and I was like this guy it sounds like me I'm I'm I'm not great at social media all right so if you weren't part of the original 150 I guess like uh a few things one is um 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 flushes stuff out it adds points you didn't write down um 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' be writing writing notes and um that interface that interaction was really cool like it looked cool it made for a great demo like it it made it it look completely different to anything that came before um just turned out to be really distracting in actual meetings right because like what would happen is if if you were 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 the short of it like we went through a few different interaction paradigms um until we finally like settled on on the one that's in Granola now and um and once we did that we cut out like 50% of the features we had built um not not because they aren't stuff will build one day just because they weren't good enough like 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 reliably and that people love so uh that was a big part of it I think as we cut out a lot of the stuff that didn't work and we just try to do one thing really well which um 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 and it's like doing the realtime transcription which is like a really cool like wow thing and then you did a bunch of iterations and you realized that this much 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 um I just record and then get the get the notes um so it's really interesting that and I think that actually is getting to my question which is like um I think a lot of people myself included but um I think I've gotten a little better over over time uh a lot of people are like okay but how do you know who to listen to um how are you getting that feedback and then sorting through it right like um you know you have that you have that UI you have that like user interaction um and when you say it's distracting like are you paying attention to yourself using it are you um 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 I guess my um it's hard I don't know I don't know if you get it perfectly right my product philosophy is um 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 is possible so to me it's less about okay you you talk to a user you write down exactly what they say right and then you go and and do exactly what they say I think uh we're lucky with granola where we actually use granola ourselves right um we we don't have the same experiences like an investor would or let's say like a salesperson directly but we do do sales calls so you know we can kind of empathize there um I think the most important thing is basically to build your internal mental intuition model of like what feels good or bad um 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 uh sorry over slack and then with periodic uh 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 um 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 um it's implicit rather than explicit and it's sort of like about trusting trusting that to some degree um and and informing it and and having it evolve over time like so what does that feel like like what does it feel like when you're um 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 um so I I do think there's like an anger 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 because you can be like okay this this is what I want or this is what feels right to me and I think um 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 cool 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 uh and the reason I just subscribe to that is because it is um unfathomably 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 longterm relationship like that can kind of uh you know attest to that which is like it doesn't matter how well you know the person's so freaking hard to to put yourself in someone else issue so what what I find is that when like I love user tests I love putting a piece 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 um 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 um or like okay it maybe it didn't hit exactly the bar but it's it's generally there we're getting there yeah yeah I I mean I I really agree with that um 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 um that like kind of get out of the building mindset that um 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 um your users and your customers and sort of like find out like what are their needs and what are their problems so you can solve them or whatever and I think what people don't realize about that is if you go in without a perspective um you evoke that lack of perspective in the other 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 um 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 um or a specific perspective it's much more valuable for figuring out like what's working or 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 uh yeah I guess that made me think of two things one um in my last startup Socratic we were building for uh high schoolers teenagers right which um 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 figur this out um on Tuesdays and Thursdays so we were building this startup in 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're they're kind of honest and then on Thursdays it was a a new group of kids who had never seen the product before and um 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 want right they've grown up with a very different technology they've grown up with very different cultural norms like what how does that work for them um 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 soul or not I've tried to find a better word for it but soul is like the best one I found and and I think if it it it when you're building a product you should absolutely absolutely React to what people are saying but you if you don't have an opinion or perspective then it's kind of empty right it's like whatever they say you 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 uh over time like oftentimes organizations will scale or grow and and something that that really you know captured in essence gets distilled until he not really there anymore but I think that's a good test you can kind of look at most products and be like is is there is there like a human like element at the core of this that that feels um coherent what what is a product in your head that has Soul well maybe it's because I was just talking about Socratic but I this was in like 2015 and we're talking to teenagers and at that time Snapchat felt like it was full of it you know full of Soul like you could tell it had like a real perspective it really there was a lot there that was um uh you don't focus group your your way to Snapchat right that like it felt very teenage native in 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 had 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 um they 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 because like I had to look at it really closely um because I was designing for teenagers and that was where at that point Snapchat Snapchat was dominant and um 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 um but like for older users they' try to use snapchot and they 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 you and I'm sorry you can tell me to stop asking you about how you feel but uh 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 I'm gonna 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 um you you realize that underneath like any scientific Advance is typically like a lot of creative intuition um 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 grown in Building Products is learning to recognize um 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 uh 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 um and there's something it's a sort of um like I think when we talk about like knowledge in the west like you're pretty much talking about um 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 um we don't talk about enough so I'm yeah I 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 um I think what what's time made me think of something that's really challenging is that like I you need space for it right it's not something you can kind of look at I mean you perhaps it's not that different from writing I don't know right where it's a it's a creative act but you need to to focus I think it's um 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 um 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 you're pushing stuff forward 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 um it's interesting what you're saying about listening to yourself or noticing when you're listening to what you feel or what other people are thinking um 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 and slow motion to see what's actually happening you have to like replay the emotions like like because like I'll 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 going to it's not always going to be easy for them to talk about it but I think that's the end of the day that's a lot of what building a great products about it's just hard to get to the answers of that but if you can yeah yeah I I totally agree with you and I totally agree with about the time thing and it's not just about timeing your schedule like you can have no meetings for a couple hours but it's also about um 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 thing for me like I have kind of over the I mean I've been running every for 5 years so like over the last year or two I've like started to like really just be very um mindful of my schedule like I really try not to do meetings before noon uh Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday um and um 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 my mind roam which is really am um you're kind of like in the very you're in the belly of the Beast right now um and I'm curious like how you're how you're doing that for yourself like how do you think about if if as you're saying like this kind of int 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 I'm thinking is now and uh might have checking in a couple months it might be totally different I think um different companies are going to win off of the different strengths right and and I think um I think for granola there's a lot of things we're going to have to do right uh to be successful right but um I guarantee that if we mess up the product right if we mess up that so then we definitely won't be successful so I do think it's a it's a big priority and and um we definitely got uh more attention um after our launch than than we expected so I think we've been we've been playing some catch up there and now I'm I'm active I'm trying to be really thoughtful about hiring hiring the right folks um so that I can I can have that space to do product and and a bunch of other things as well but um 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 uh 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 I 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 um yeah no I think I think that that makes a lot of sense um 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 um that have kind of informed that intuitive side of uh how you make decisions and how you build products interesting uh product wise or just just generally I mean what whatever wherever you want to go with this is totally fine whatever is exciting to you like let's say there's like 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 you 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 in trouble right and I think that's the sad reality I don't know it's like a startups startups take a lot and um I wouldn't had it any other way I've had other jobs and uh I'm not happy in those um so the right trade-off for me but um they do take a lot and I I 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 kind of give given up or F maybe I'll pick them pick it up one day uh in the future the things that have stuck around I guess are um uh I just love travel travel is a really big one for me and just being in um uh being in a different like changing environment I I just find to be really really helpful um the other thing I do which uh I don't know I when I was younger thought it sounded super weird but maybe my friends have gotten weirder over time so now I think it's more normal um 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 I 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 and and I think it it's kind of one of these uh 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 need to break that cycle and zoom out and feel small it's like I I do this pilgrimage I just go to like big sir 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 red Woods it just makes you feel like you're like this tiny little speck which is like I think a really helpful perspective to get um periodically I love that I mean first of all I think um that's one of the most emo things anyone's everever said on this podcast um but also um I I feel the same way and one thing that I like I I I've not done that on my birthday but um I'm Jewish and um uh we have a holiday called y kapor I don't know if you're Jewish or not um but um basically you like it's the day of atonement so you know you're you're supposed to reflect on all your sins and 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 um and I just like sit by myself I turn try to turn my phone off um and just um I have a notebook there and I'm just like thinking about my year and you know you know like things I didn't do or did wrong or people I heard or whatever but just more generally like um 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 time and so like you you're kind of like you're getting 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 emo stuff on no I want I want the emo stuff but um but um but that makes sense I like we can we can talk about uh we can talk about travel too like um uh what do you think it is like about those experiences that informs your taste or like kind of scratches that piure like what have you taken away from those experiences or maybe tell me about one in particular that stands out to you yeah it it's interesting it's um 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 um an intellectual one it's just um being in different places I think it's all about just that breaking that like the routine routine is great right routine is how you get stuff done right um 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 uh just one of those things where I I don't know I think I think most people know whether travel is like a like a a COR thing for them are not from an early age so a lot of people who aren't you know tempted to or or they interested in like seeing a lot of the world when they're kids and there 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 um there's some some personality type that like some personality type system that um 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 um and uh people it hypothesizes that people that have a a little bit more dopamine forward leaning uh uh brains uh just like travel uh they're called they in the in the system is called explorers um what's dopamine forward like they're they they dopamine tricker happy or yeah like if if you had to pick a um 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 norrine and like one other one if you had to pick one um traveler people are more dopamine um who knows if it's real but what you said like reminded me of um like this routine versus travel which always reminds me a little bit of um uh in computer science there's like um this this trade-off in algorithms between exploring and exploiting um and I think that that 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 um and for me I I often just think of it like um breathing in versus breathing out um so like breathing in is is explore and breathing out is um exploit and um and knowing where you are as a person in your life in your week cuz like weeks you can days have Explorer exploit like it's fractal on different levels and knowing where you are as a person and as a um as a uh 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 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 um uh 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 uh if you approach an explore task with an exploit mindset I mean you're gonna you're going to discover some really crappy stuff yeah um 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 couple years or whatever so you just have to like put yourself back together and that's that's kind of hard um uh okay how how far do you think you can get with a great product so an example would be uh 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 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 focused founder product forward founder let's say um what do you think about that and how far do you think you can get with a good product um yeah it's interesting I mean um the the sock example is is an interesting one and I think from uh 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 short has been around a while but I feel like the way we we do um you know like real- time chat with teams and the workspace was invented by slack in in my mind in terms of like that modern um version of it and what were they acquired for like 30 billion right is some something like that something like that I mean CH change compared to Microsoft's like whatever but yeah I mean they were require for a lot yes it's a good outcome sure sure agreed but I I feel like I feel like that that producted I think it was both a commercial you know a commercial success and uh and and and a product success so I wouldn't I wouldn't choose that as a negative example I think um I think maybe the question's a bit misleading like I don't think product by itself is is is going to do like product by itself doesn't doesn't get you very far right there are plenty of great products that aren't great businesses I think um 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 the dominant players will 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 was slot right um and and that's like uh I mean that's that's a hard one right and that's that's one where it's like uh 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 won't won't be able to do this or or copy or whatever 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 EXs in the world and then I think you need to be really Savvy and strategic about how you you go and 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 Mo 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 uh which is like an interesting type of Mo I think if you tell most investors that that's your boat they'll be like what um but uh but yeah I mean it's you still interesting to see how that will play out right the that's the the slack notion Zoom you know they're all the they're all the like like the contenders trying to go against the big folks yeah that's interesting um first of all I love the way that you just like rejected the premise of the question great answer second of all uh I I actually have a slightly different take I'm curious for perspective which is that um 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 um uh 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 atite it just has to be a lot lower and there's has to be many more levels of people being like this this such a good idea and if you're a four person team you can just deal like weird that like big companies can't do um 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 um 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 both on chat will be fine you know um and so that's kind of what I think is like there's going to just be a lot of um small companies doing weird stuff that um that it feels a lot more AI native that early AI early adopter really like people who are have already been using chat claw 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 the bolt-on chat experiences and all these all these big comedy 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 answer are not good um yeah what do you think about that oh I mean I completely agree with all of that but I I think that that doesn't I think that's kind of a disconnected point I think basically like what what tends to happen is that uh 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 B companies are like oh this is a big deal you know we should like invest in this and then that's that's like for sure startups are going to vastly outperform in that first stage I think the the the slot 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 um 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 um in the AI space because a lot of times people you know you might say like okay every has access to the models right the big companies are clearly um 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 um you don't have a lot of users right which is amazing right uh what that means is that you can um 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 GPT for like GPT 4 level intelligence to its billions of users it's like like physically not possible today right U and then the other thing you can do is if you don't have that many users is you can just um 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 player 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 l 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 that many uses right and it's going to take a while to scale your user base and you just trust in the forces of capitalism and whatever the equivalent of mors 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 um 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 um I think if you if you be like hey Chris what's uh what's the world going to look like in five years like what's I going to be able to do I you know there's a wide spectrum of answers I don't like no one really knows right um some people might be more informed than others but um I think 12 to 18 months is a lot easier to imagine right there might be some step changes um uh 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 of it when we started granola there are a lot of things about it that um like like context window sizes wen'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 uh on device for like most it's only the latest version of mechos 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 yeah they're starting to they're starting to now but yeah anyway but like we sat down we basically like what's going to happen and we might have gotten lucky like we we try to do this periodically we're like okay we think we think cost of inference is going to go down we think Contex windows are going to get much bigger um we think uh the cost of transcription will Trend toward zero over time that one's still to be tobc but like with whisper and things like that I think we're we're on the right path um and and we just kind of be like okay if we're GNA 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 um granola does realtime transcription as opposed to you know you know asynchronous transcription after the meetings ended because we're like one day real 10 transcription will be just as good as asynchronous or 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 um and I think I think to your other to your to your earlier Point interest 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 and and learn I I think you know when gbt 3 and four were coming out and chat gbts first came on the scene there was this like thing that was like stups 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 um and it seems like uh 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 um there's so much involved in giving the AI the right knowledge and the right perspective and the right task to do that um 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 yes STS are over and it's so interesting to see that kind of um fantasy get pulled away and you start to see all the nuances of like even if you have this incredible tool like how complicated is it actually is to like use it well and make something good with it you know um it's really interesting to me yeah it'll be interesting to see how that one plays out my I the way I think about this is I think that there are two kind of competing tensions um one is um convenience and accessibility are very real right and like if people built a habit going to chat GPT or Claud or whatnot for eight out like eight out of their 10 tasks then it's a lot easier for it them to you know use it for their ninth and tth task right I think that's like that's like one like human laziness is uh something that I will always bet on as a product Builder right I think the competing tension is um specialization uh for a problem right um and like when when the experience or the output or the quality really matters to you um and 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 um I think you don't have to worry about about like the the the you know open AI taking over the world I think if you are building um something for consumers and it's a a task where the consumer doesn't it's a bit like Google right there could have been lots of um Niche specialized search engines but the reality is that most of the time people just like uh use the thing that they use for everything else even if it's not the best search engine um so I think about that a lot I think the other thing for a uh startup Builder perspective is like if you know whatever one of these big companies do get AGI and take over then 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 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 gonna 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 um one thing about that though is um uh which I I think this is a good piece of advice it served us well but it's basically like don't like when you're building your product or your company like don't solve problem 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 users keep asking for this our product doesn't do it well whatever the the models aren't good enough so I'm GNA spend a bunch of time fixing it and and and it always takes longer to fix things then 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 I think that's like a 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 is very short so you yeah you got to make sure you're uh you're riding that you're riding that tsunami of technical Innovation you know that wave uh rather than and trying to like paddle in front of it I think that's great I want to go back to your specialization versus generalization Point um which if I had to reframe it it would be like for startups like the sweet spot or like a a a um a pretty a good bet is like if you're specialized in a particular thing um you're not going to get blown out by the open AI of the world like you'll be really good at like the doctor chat or I don't know I'm just like figur I'm just I'm just making something up um 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 chaty BT is like really hard um and you have to be like really really useful 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 make a point there when I say uh specialize I mean in the type of work or task that you have so I guess uh like an example here is like uh 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 phun Pro or what whatever the like the thing that's used by experts that are trying to be the best at their of their domain um I think I think grol needs to be in that category right like like I think right now and we've always sto us 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 um I don't know I think like designers like product designers spend a lot of time in figma Engineers spend a lot of time in um in Visual Studio or whatever ID they choose and I I don't think there's an equivalent or there hasn't been an equivalent until now for people whose jobs center around um other people like relationships whether it's meetings or emails or 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 um and that you know that's that's very much in our site uh 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 of 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 granilla which just not we just need you 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 set aside 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 um and we don't yet know what that looks like exactly but lots of different prototypes in term like my belief is so there I think there's a a view out there which is we're going to create these AI agents and they're going to do all these things for you right and I think that's like a 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 um 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 um 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 in like okay I need to send a follow-up email and describe what we've done or scheduling another meeting and um but 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 unne unnecessary clicks like granola should do but ultimately the tasks the work should always come from you um and and it should have your Spin and I think that's what people want uh to be honest like I think I think uh I think if you Daydream you're like oh yeah wouldn't it be great if my you know my AI agent did all my work for me but I think if you actually think about it carefully it's it's not really what you want because um 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 um I love that version of the future and um um I think you know uh I'm rooting for you to achieve that I can't wait to try what you make next um this is a this is a really great conversation uh I I had a lot of fun I love the product thank you so much for coming on thank you so much Sam this is a and just felt like we were chatting look what do it would be like to to listen to this that's that's the goal um so for people who um want to find out more want to uh find granola or follow you on whatever social platforms or whatever where can people find you online yeah so uh granola.bar coming um and then you can follow me on Twitter or you can follow granola on Twitter it's meet me granola on Twitter X um and I'm CJ pedal on on X and uh 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 um cool thanks Chris thanks to 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 chat GPT every episode is a roller coaster 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