Episode 71: The AI Assistant That Summarizes Meetings with Krish Ramineni, CEO at Fireflies.ai
In the latest episode of Subscriptions Scaled, we speak with Krish Ramineni, CEO at Fireflies.ai.
In the episode, we learn all about Fred, the AI assistant that joins your meetings and transcribes, takes notes, and summarizes them.
Keep reading to learn more about Fireflies, Fred, and how the software works.
About Fireflies
Fireflies is an AI meeting assistant and conversational intelligence platform. It includes an AI assistant named Fred that follows you around during your meetings. That includes meetings on Zoom, WebEx, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and other major conferencing providers.
The AI assistant, Fred, joins your meetings and transcribes, takes notes, and summarizes them. You can search back through your discussions for analytics and insights, too.
The goal of Fireflies is to help people be productive and not have to take notes during meetings.
Fireflies connects to your calendar, so it knows when you have a Zoom meeting. It will join automatically, or you can manually invite Fred, the AI assistant. It’s like having your own virtual secretary that follows you around.
Then Fred joins the meeting as a participant. It captures everything. It will send out meeting recaps in an email so you don’t have to, saving you plenty of time.
Fred, the AI assistant, can also save things into Slack for you. If you’re on a sales call, it will know who you’re speaking with and this will go into the CRM under that record. With Fireflies, you don’t need to do post-meeting data entry as a salesperson.
Everything built around Fireflies is around a vision of being tied to a person’s workflow. This is so you don’t have to go out of your way to do something else or use another tool or widget; it’s all integrated.
Developing the concept of Fireflies
Krish started Fireflies in 2016 when he left Microsoft. He was supposed to go to grad school but started working on different projects instead.
The idea of Fireflies goes back to Krish’s days working as a product manager at Microsoft. He worked across the collaboration suite across Office and had the chance to interact with different teams, including the Skype team.
Back then, there weren’t any tools like Fireflies. But what Krish noticed was how many meetings people had and how challenging it was coordinating all these meetings and remembering everything that happened during meetings.
Krish realized that if you have five back-to-back meetings in a day, you’re not going to remember each one unless you take a pen and paper and make notes for each. But in that case, you’d spend a lot of time writing meeting notes which can distract you from participating in the meeting properly.
That’s where the idea of building a system of recording meetings came from. Krish wanted to make meetings more actionable and started diving into building the AI system.
From there, Krish and his team questioned how they’d get someone to use the software. They thought it would have to be integrated into their workflow for it to be successful.
In the early days of Fireflies, the team was consulting, bootstrapping, and contracting out. It built chrome extensions, among other projects. There was a three-year period when the team experimented with machine learning, chatbots, and natural language processing. The team fell in love with the voice space and decided to focus on that.
The version of Fireflies known today was established closer to 2019 and rolled out in 2020.
The pandemic and remote work
When the pandemic came about, everyone started using video conferencing, and Fireflies became highly successful.
Of course, the team at Fireflies didn’t anticipate everything closing down and companies going remote during the pandemic. However, the team has always been a firm believer in remote and has observed companies like Zapier and GitLab, that have been remote since day one.
Even though Fireflies is based in San Francisco, Krish and his co-founder have always been remote. So they built a remote company even before the pandemic. As such, there wasn’t much operational change when the pandemic occurred.
When Krish and his team first built Fireflies, they thought with a remote-first mindset because they were remote themselves. They used to ask themselves how they’d want to use Fireflies themselves.
When the pandemic happened, many big corporations and companies had to switch to remote work. The amount of time people spent on video conferencing rapidly went up.
Krish had demo tested Fireflies before the pandemic and people already used it. Fireflies could join as remote participants in a conference room, for example, because they’re all tied up to conferencing systems like Zoom. As such, people were using Fireflies even when they had meetings in person before the pandemic.
The team didn’t initially think of exclusively building Fireflies for the remote use case. Instead, they just thought it would be predominantly used in a conference room.
Scaling up was difficult during the pandemic, even though it was a good problem to have. Many nights, the team was pulling all-nighters to keep the system up and running. There were only around ten people on the team, so it was a struggle.
Because of the pandemic, Fireflies have been able to grow rapidly and it hasn't needed to spend any money on marketing ads or anything similar. Its growth has been mainly thanks to organic word of mouth, people seeing the software at meetings, and people talking about the tech.
Through that process, hundreds of thousands of organizations are using Fireflies. Millions of people each month are collecting meeting notes and summaries from Fireflies.
It’s been quite the journey for Fireflies. The team takes inspiration from products like Calendly, which also grows quietly without making too much noise. Like Calendly, Fireflies is out there, people are talking about it, and the customers love the product.
For the team at Fireflies, it’s all they could ask for.
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