Krish Ramineni, Co-Founder & CEO of Fireflies.ai – Interview Sequence

Krish Ramineni is the Co-Founder & CEO of Fireflies.ai, a platform that transforms conversations into actions. They provide voice assistant and transcription instruments which might be designed to automate your crew’s workflow.

What initially attracted you to pc science and machine studying?

My attraction in direction of pc science and machine studying was extra of a way to an finish. I began with an issue that I confronted in my very own life and thought of how I can clear up it.

That’s after I realized I wanted to study pc science and ML to attain it. I used to be very enthusiastic about constructing software program that might save time and increase productiveness.

I wished to have the ability to simply press a button and have some form of magic occur that might influence tens of millions of individuals. And ML and pc science simply occurred to be these instruments that might assist clear up attention-grabbing issues and construct nice apps.

Earlier than Fireflies you have been a product supervisor at Microsoft, might you talk about how this impressed the imaginative and prescient behind Fireflies?

I labored with varied groups at Microsoft, together with the Workplace, Skype, Bing, and NLP groups. One of many initiatives I labored on was known as ‘buyer voice,’ the place we have been capable of analyze and quantify customers’ in-app suggestions supplied by means of MS Workplace. This received me within the NLP aspect of issues.

However what impressed me to start out Fireflies had much less to do with the merchandise I labored on at Microsoft than the variety of conferences I had. Again then, the widespread factor for everybody was simply to say, “Hey, add that to my calendar. Let’s schedule a gathering.” Simply doing conferences again and again turned my life, and I wished to vary that. I wished to make conferences extra productive and environment friendly; that was the inspiration behind Fireflies.

What number of pivots have been essential to land on the present formulation?

We pivoted 5-6 occasions earlier than attending to the place we’re right this moment.

After I first met with my co-founder Sam, it was in faculty, and we labored on totally different hackathon initiatives. We did loads of inventive initiatives, comparable to constructing drones, meals supply apps, and crypto wallets. That was initially only for enjoyable; there was no thought or aim to show that into an organization.

Our first severe foray into pure language processing was once we constructed a to-do listing that might robotically be generated primarily based on the conversations. For instance, suppose I messaged somebody saying, “I’ll ship you this by subsequent Friday” or “Let’s meet up for espresso tomorrow” on LinkedIn, Slack, or different messaging channels. In that case, Fireflies might detect if I or somebody I’m chatting with is promising to do one thing and add it to my to-do listing. I might get up each morning and have a look at my robotically generated to-do listing.

It was a cool concept that turned our segway into this area. We constructed e mail extensions, chatbots, and Slack bots. Finally, we determined that voice is a large space we should always sort out.

Voice is a blue ocean as a result of you may simply look again on the e mail you despatched two years in the past, however should you had a gathering two hours in the past, you in all probability would have already forgotten all the things that was stated. So, it’s essential to document, transcribe, and make these conferences searchable.

May you talk about a number of the challenges behind constructing a 24/7 tradition for software program that’s worldwide in scope?

The principle problem is getting individuals to work throughout totally different time zones, so we’ve to rent throughout many international locations. We now have constructed a remote-first, global-first group with a 24-hour presence as a result of individuals have conferences across the clock.

At present, we’re virtually 100 individuals throughout 15 international locations in a number of totally different time zones. Regardless of if you log in, work is all the time taking place at Fireflies. There’s all the time some stage of overlap and handoff between individuals. Completely different teammates are working at totally different occasions from totally different areas.

What are a number of the core functionalities which might be at present supplied by Fireflies?

There are literally lots.

We are able to transcribe notes at very excessive accuracy, then generate assembly summaries. We are able to additionally instantly present the motion gadgets, questions, and dates and occasions mentioned throughout calls with one click on.

We are able to robotically log the assembly notes inside your core purposes like CRMs, challenge administration techniques, Slack, and Notion. We’re additionally capable of analyze calls to supply totally different insights, comparable to how a lot you’re speaking, what number of filler phrases you employ, and how briskly you’re speaking.

Our core aim is that can assist you overview a one-hour name in lower than 5 minutes

What are some examples of how Fireflies makes enterprises extra productive?

Fireflies is extraordinarily useful for capturing your group’s voice and constructing a information base round it—that’s enterprise-level worth proper there.

Not like Wiki paperwork and different stuff that get stale over time, your voice conversations are all the time self-updating. Fireflies helps create a information base in your complete group.

It’s a self-updating information base that helps you seek for any info you need to find out about your prospects, the voice of your prospects, the voice of candidates you’re hiring, the voice of your colleagues, and what’s being mentioned in conferences and important subjects.

The opposite factor is Fireflies robotically fills out your CRM (and different apps), making you extremely productive. It additionally makes you extra educated and personable, permitting you to do fewer administrative duties, concentrate on the conversations, and be extra current in conferences.

Fireflies is engaged on releasing a bunch of recent options, might you talk about some what’s at present on the roadmap?

We hope to assist a number of languages quickly and have simply rolled out the video seize and recording function. We just lately launched channels so you may arrange your conferences throughout many various departments extra succinctly.

We now have many extra thrilling issues on the roadmap. We’ll additionally supply a worldwide search quickly, which suggests you may search throughout your entire conferences, not simply inside a person assembly. However I’m actually thrilled about international languages as a result of that naturally will be capable of open up the market exponentially to extra individuals.

What’s your imaginative and prescient for the way forward for work?

My imaginative and prescient for the way forward for work is that we are going to have loads of workflow automation and instruments to auto-complete duties in order that we will spend extra time on value-add stuff relatively than mundane, repetitive duties.

There are nonetheless so many organizations the place individuals are copying and pasting the identical form of issues into totally different spreadsheets, shifting recordsdata, and doing loads of tedious, low-value organizational duties.

I feel loads of these repetitive jobs will get automated, and folks could have an opportunity to work on extra inventive, value-add stuff uniquely positioned for people.

Fireflies has succeeded in rising exponentially even with little or no advertising and marketing spend, what do you attribute this success to?

We constructed a product-led development firm, that means we begin with the tip customers in thoughts, and that’s how adoption grows over time. We’re very clear—our pricing is offered on the web site.

We cut back friction; any particular person, whether or not a single guide or a thousand-person group, can get began shortly. We now have a freemium plan that anybody can strive utilizing the free trial of our enterprise tier so that folks can use it, expertise it, perceive the worth, and swipe their bank card afterward and pay for it.

Conferences are additionally naturally viral and Fireflies displaying up on these calls helps begin an excellent dialog and will get extra individuals . Or when the individuals obtain the assembly recap afterward, they’re like, “That is superior. I wanna join Fireflies.”

Is there the rest that you just wish to share about Fireflies?

I feel it’s essential to know how costly conferences really value and the way a lot time is wasted in conferences. In response to a survey, 40% of individuals stated their conferences are unproductive. They’ve so many redundant conferences that might have been emails.

Organizations are losing 20-30 billion {dollars} price of cash in having conferences. If you get 5-6 executive-level individuals for a gathering, that’s extraordinarily costly when it comes to the time and alternative value of what they might have been doing in any other case.

We now have a large mission of creating conferences extra productive, which might be price billions of time and vitality saved, and serving to organizations make higher selections.

Thanks for the good interview, readers who want to study extra and check out some improbable enterprise AI instruments ought to go to Fireflies.ai.