The First Customer - Shedding Light on the Future of Meeting AI with Fireflies CEO Krish Ramineni

 [00:00:27] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to The First Customer podcast today. I am very lucky to be joined by, I was just telling him I use this product before I met him, I think he's the first person that's happened to, Krish Ramineni, Penn state grad CEO and co founder of fireflies at AI. A very cool platform that's been around for a little while now, man.

It's great to have you on. Thanks for being on Krish.

[00:00:47] Krish: Thanks. I know that people get this, but I went to UPenn, but yes. Yeah.

[00:00:51] Jay: You Penn. Sorry, that's my fault. all right. So where did you grow up and did that have any impact on you being an entrepreneur later in life?

[00:01:00] Krish: I grew up in Silicon Valley, spent most of my childhood there, elementary, middle, and high. And then afterwards, went to UPenn for undergrad, then spent time in Seattle, working at Microsoft as a product manager there. so I've been around and then, went to Boston where Me and my co founder started working on some stuff during the summer at MIT. then we moved back to San Francisco and basically set up roots there. So been back and forth between the West coast and East coast.

[00:01:31] Jay: Got it. And did you have anybody in your family or anything that started businesses or were you around it at all? Or did it just kind of come later naturally?

[00:01:39] Krish: Yeah. I would say like for my dad's side of the family, like. Very entrepreneurial family. Back in India, they were in the film business, real estate, doing all sorts of things there. so grew up with that. My dad here was working in tech, right? So Silicon Valley, all the tech companies that are there, have extended family that have done startups or been part of startups.

So growing up as a kid, learning about tech companies was just something that happened on a day-to-Day basis. I actually went to school thinking I'd be a doctor, but you know, life has different plans and, I ended up, switching over to the side, being tech enabled entrepreneur and, that, yeah, I never looked back since.

[00:02:22] Jay: So what was the first business you started?

[00:02:25] Krish: One of the first businesses that I got the chance to work on was in college. So after my freshman year summer, me and a friend said, Hey, let's start just building something that college students can use. And at that time, it was just some function of a way to track all the events that are going on campus and then see who's attending them and deciding if you want to go to them or not.

This was pretty like Facebook events blowing up. We thought there could be like a little social media platform built just around events on campus. Very niche use case, right? and then, yeah, so some semblance of like Eventbrite or some of these other meetup. com type. ideas, but it was a great experience learning how to build writing code, getting into production, getting people to use it, thinking about edge cases, all of that stuff as we went through that process and then hiring like, folks to come on board as ambassadors to help promote the product, on each of those campuses.

It taught us a lot about ourselves. I ended up going and doing a bunch of hackathons as well. just got really hooked on the idea of going and building things. so that was really, what got me going. And then while I was at Penn, Wharton had this venture initiation program. There was a startup coming out of that in the healthcare space. it was just the two founders and then I joined them and got the product up and running working on it. It was a lot of fun. and then the company ended up getting acquired. so that was also cool, just to kind of see the evolution of it. and how things went there. But yeah, those are like my first initial experiences that I can think of.

[00:03:57] Jay: What's the biggest thing from that kind of phase in your life business wise that you learned that you carried into Fireflies?

[00:04:07] Krish: I think having that desire to build something from scratch was very strong. And so even as I was looking at job opportunities from college. I wanted to be in a place where I can own a road map and build things. So when I discovered product management, I felt like a lot of the skill sets were relevant because of to be a PM, you are still like the CEO of your feature, right?

Or functionality. and I hadn't known that existed, but once I got in there, I really liked it. There's other folks that prepare for PM interviews. Using prep books and other stuff. But for me, it was just more of leaning on like experiences from me actually doing things practically. and I think that's what made that interviewing process really fun. Got a few offers, decided to go to Microsoft, at that time. yeah. And I also just felt like it was just such a fun place to do things and explore and just be able to. You know, I don't have a lot of autonomy, that, that was the real thing at that time that I discovered that I didn't have to go down the cookie cutter route of, trying to, like, prep and, do these things, it's just like, you're real, like, when you really do it, you don't need, like, a book to prepare.

[00:05:19] Jay: Right, right. did you start the idea and kind of the Kick off for this while you were working at Microsoft or was this kind of just confused that I'm leaving Microsoft I'm going to go build something

[00:05:31] Krish: Yeah, so I actually left Microsoft planning to go to grad school. So there was no idea of doing the startup.

I just had a few weeks before I flew off to London and starting this semester at Cambridge. So I decided to go to Boston, spend some time with a friend who I had worked on various projects with in the past. we decided to just start working and a nice VC was able to give us some office space, in Seaport, and we just go every day and treat it like a job and then go have fun and build products and then test things and talk to other folks and users. And by the end of the summer, I'm like, this is way more fun.

I'm going to learn a lot more doing this. So I. Said no to Cambridge, which was obviously for my parents, a big deal at the time. and then I flew to San Francisco and we just started working. So it was just a very spontaneous decision that happened at that point in time. But I'm also someone where if I made something spontaneously and I really believe in it, I go hard a hundred percent. So that, that kind of led to the semblance or origins of Fireflies.

[00:06:36] Jay: And what was the problem that you were? Solving that you were so passionate and felt so so much that it was enough to you know, not go to Cambridge for

[00:06:45] Krish: At the time we were doing something slightly different, but the thesis was always the same. It was about how do you unlock knowledge buried inside conversations, right? So we were building tools on top of email, on top of slack. And then we decided voice was this incredible space where, why is it that I can remember an email I sent? Two years ago, but I can't remember a conversation I had two hours ago and meetings are so important. I remember having a lot of meetings, sometimes like 67 meetings in a day at Microsoft, and having to go back and write recaps and send follow up emails. It's just too much, right? So building fireflies was a way to help us, make sure that we're more productive.

And I felt like that there's so much value locked inside conversations. And meetings are expensive. Shopify did this whole study that like, one hour meeting is going to cost your org a couple thousand dollars. So that all of that, and that was recently, and we knew that back then. So all of that helped us say, like, okay, let's go do this and, let's see how this would look like.

And we were naive enough to, you know, not realize how hard of a problem it is that we were trying to go out and solve. But we just went about building it layer by layer, brick by brick. and we had a semblance of a product. by 2019, we were doing some beta testing. We raised our, seed round at the end of 2019.

And then we launched in January, 2020 at

[00:08:10] Jay: Now the prevalence of those types of services like Firefly the You know, recording and, transcription and maybe categorization. All those seemingly, and maybe just because I'm the target audience more now than I was before. I've seen a ton of them and I've used a bunch of them. how, and maybe you guys went in and not knowing how competitive it was, maybe you did.

What was your thought around, like, what was there then and what you're doing to address that now? Like, how are you guys standing out?

[00:08:43] Krish: the time we were starting, it was a hard problem to solve. So I don't think there were too many companies, but we see these sort of waves where these companies come. they go out and then other companies come. So we've seen probably two or three waves. I think it's really about building a product that works seamlessly and then it gets a little bit better over time, each day, each week, each month. there's no silver bullet like on day one, Fireflies isn't like this perfect product. and even today when people say really awesome things about fireflies, I know we still have a lot of work to do. So just like that continuous focus on continuing to make the experience better. And I do hear from folks like, like you said, like I've tried a lot of different products. Firefly seems to be like really popular. and I see a lot of people talking about it and it got me to convert and start using it. So as I go through that journey, I realized like unique differentiator really is. Those that really understand their customers well are going to be able to build a better product that is going to be making customers happy. So that's how you win customers. And, I think over the span of the last two years, it became more obvious. And as other people saw Fireflies become more prevalent, they felt like maybe they could emulate some parts of it. but we just don't think as much about competition. I think it's important. It's healthy to know if you're missing something. but we always felt like let's make Fireflies really affordable, easily scalable, easy to use. So you just plug it in really friendly for teams and, just give a ton of integrations and value out of the box. And let the customer decide for themselves, right, how they want to use the platform and how they want to experience it. there are some other products in the space that are more like, before you can use it, you have to talk to a salesperson. You have to pay lots of money up front, platform fees. And we want to get rid of all of that friction along the way and just let you experience and enjoy using Firefly.

[00:10:34] Jay: So who was the first customer for fireflies?

[00:10:38] Krish: I would say it was probably someone within our network, within our friend group or our,our professional network that started using it. And we slowly started building a pool of folks. People started discovering it, look up fireflies and start using it. and then it's just through that like kernel of like 20 or so customers that other people get to see fireflies on meetings and they ask, Oh, what is that? And that's really cool. Can you send me the recap afterwards? They experienced the recap and they're like, you know what? I want to sign up for it. So that word of mouth is really the key to unlocking Firefly's growth, because it's much more powerful if Jay uses Firefly's, brings it to a meeting and explains it, to the folks, and then later they're like, Oh, you know what?

I need to check this out. versus us going and doing marketing and saying why Firefly is the best. So we always felt like customer evangelism is the best form of marketing. you don't need to beat your own drum. let customers say good things about you and just making sure that customers are really happy.

[00:11:36] Jay: Are you guys going after partnerships and like the business to business model where you want to roll this out across teams is more of a B2C thing. Is it both? Like, how do you guys see how your strategy for this is going?

[00:11:50] Krish: Most of our focus is around working with teams. There's just so much you can do to build a product that's meant for teams, whether it's like integrating with your CRM, integrating with other tools. And then the features and functionality that a salesperson needs versus a recruiter would need versus, you know, a marketer would need or a product person would need, we don't really go and focus as much on like the consumer use cases.

We do have a lot of, like, students and other folks that use fireflies, podcasters too, but like, I think there's a lot of work for us to do around, teams and organizations. I think there's something analogous here to Slack. It's a great product and they could have easily turned it into a consumer product if they so chose, but they kept focusing on business communication and messaging.

So that's the same thing for us here at Fireflies.

[00:12:36] Jay: So beyond the kind of obvious viral, you know, natural success you've had from word of mouth, what do you guys do to market fireflies?

[00:12:46] Krish: Yeah, it's actually just been that we haven't spent a dollar on paid marketing. most of it is either through people that experienced Fireflies. Or people that are able to, share fireflies on social media and then get excited about it. Recently, we released an affiliate program where people can get incentives for, sharing fireflies, but we haven't done any like conventional ads. or your typical type of stuff. Even some of the PR has really been organic, and earned rather than us doing anything special to like, go get like coverage. We've actually been relatively pretty low key, in terms of how we've gone about it. And, Yeah, maybe till a year ago, like there was probably, no outreach that we did.

It was just purely, just under the radar, continuing to build.

[00:13:34] Jay: Wow. that's impressive. So as a, as a. QA agency owner, I always have to ask, how do you guys. Kind of keep product quality at the forefront and as having used fireflies. you can feel the difference between. Platforms that kind of focus on that user experience and like, it being kind of as flawless as possible and, You know, maybe not a million bells and whistles, you know, all sorts of weird extraneous stuff that you see in some of these, It does a lot of really good stuff. Well, how do you guys focus on quality? Like, how do you get that feedback loop from customers? And is there like some official way you guys do that?

Or is it just organic?

[00:14:10] Krish: We log all the telemetry and make sure that like, if there's issues that we address it quickly, cause that's how product development should happen. iterative. I think the other thing that's been extremely helpful for us is. We look at every piece of feedback. So every time a customer says something positive about fireflies or rates a summary or, leave some feedback when they churn, I read everything. so for my belief is. It's not enough to have 90 out of 100 people that say good things about you. I really care about the other 10 and why they are detractors or why they might not have had a good experience on Fireflies. and continue to learn to optimize and solve for that. So you have to have that mindset that there's always something different, something better that you can do. And, quality assurance directly comes from the word of the customer because we have so many. Folks using fireflies on a daily basis, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of folks. it helps us,really like tune in. And, you know, recently we crossed a million, signups. So it's an awesome way for us to just keep track and understand what everyone's saying about the product.

[00:15:17] Jay: Wow. Congrats. That's a big milestone. how do you manage your personal brand versus firefly flies brand, right? I mean, you're not out trumpeting fireflies. It's kind of this organic word of mouth kind of deal. How do you think about personal brand and like how that associates to the business and maybe did it change After you guys started to have success as a business and like you're more focused on that brand than your own brand Like how do you feel, you know, your personal branding has been for you, as it's going on

[00:15:46] Krish: I think my personal brand is very closely tied to fireflies tied to this. Notion of being an entrepreneur, people automatically equate you to being some sort of SAS expert or AI expert or, generative AI LLM expert. I really just think that it's a function of doing what you're really passionate about speaking wholeheartedly about it. And, you know, at the end of the day, if you have some piece of input or feedback or advice that you can give to people. So when I advise other startups and so forth, I try to come in from the lens of what I learned at Fireflies. I'm not going to give some form of advice or some talking points that I haven't experienced myself.

I think that would be disingenuous. So I think personal brand is really a function of experience. And some people like the way that I communicate, the way I deliver and how transparent I might be. So, that also helps. and so the personal brand has really been tied to, sharing my lessons and learnings from Firefly so that other entrepreneurs don't make the same mistakes. and really just helping the SaaS community grow and thrive. Because at the end of the day, I really am a believer in the space and, everything that's going on. so whether I do interviews with the press or whether I go on a podcast or, whether I'm doing any sort of thing, it's really been a function of that. so I really do enjoy it. There, there's also the opportunities. It's really fun when you go out and, you know, they're like, Hey, we want to do a photo shoot or we want to do this. And that's awesome. Like that's fun. But that's only like 2 percent of the work that I actually do because 90 percent of the work is really spending time with the team and customers.

[00:17:24] Jay: how did you Grow the network and this advice would be to somebody who's having trouble Or doesn't have a great natural network of people like if they're trying to get I mean, is it business groups? Is it, you know, community organizations? Like, what is the way for somebody to grow their network if they're having trouble doing that?

[00:17:45] Krish: I felt that having a few very high quality relationships will eventually lead to more introductions from those existing folks. So a lot of the folks that we've met, whether it's new investors, other firms. Have come from talking to existing folks that we knew within our network and continuing to show them progress, right? If you connect with someone month zero versus six months later, if you are not making progress or showing some sort of incremental changes, then that's a problem, right? Like people like to value action. And if you're able to say like, Oh, wow, since the last time I met this person, they did this and this. Let me see if I can lean in. So initially they might not, right? Like the first couple of meetings, but if you're persistent about showing progress and how you're evolving as a person, and as you're evolving, as you build your startup, more people will want to reach out and help I'm less inclined to help someone that. Has this mentality that I can't do anything. I need someone to carry me and, everything's too tough. you know, everyone has problems, right? But if you're able to show progress, more people are willing to lean in and help you grow your network. so it really comes down to like you as a person.

[00:19:03] Jay: Yeah, I agree. Makes a lot of sense. well, what's next for Fireflies? What's the big, you know, thing we should expect in 2024 and beyond?

[00:19:13] Krish: Yeah, 2024 is already around the corner. Can you believe it?

For us, 

[00:19:17] Jay: my friend, I cannot.

[00:19:18] Krish: it's time flying. So I guess time flies when you have fun. for us, we're looking to do something big on mobile. So that's coming very soon. So you'll be able to use Fireflies, not just for your video conferencing calls, but also your in person meetings. so I'm really excited about that. we are also launching 18 new languages. So Fireflies can support more than just English. So Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Japanese. Portuguese, so many languages that are coming out, which gets us super excited, continue to add incredible value on top of the platform.

So if you want fireflies to take notes in a particular style for board meetings versus sales meetings versus, you know, your candidate interviews, you'll be able to do that. You can customize fireflies more. So a lot of really exciting things that are on our roadmap that,I'm really excited to get out to customers.

[00:20:10] Jay: That's awesome, man. all right, one non business related question, probably my favorite question, nothing to do with fireflies, just with Krish. If you do anything on earth and you knew you couldn't fail, what would it be?

[00:20:25] Krish: on earth that I could do and that I knew I couldn't fail. Does it have to be related to entrepreneurship? Does it have to be related to something that I wish that I could have, that I could work on, like problems? Like

maybe it'll 

[00:20:38] Jay: Anything. Anything. any, if you want it to be entrepreneurial, that's fine. Just the reason why I have that caveat is because most people would say to grow my business, to be the biggest thing in the world. And so I, after enough of those answers, I said, I'm more asking about you specifically non business related, it could be altruistic, could be, you know, a physical thing, whatever it is,what would you do?

[00:21:00] Krish: There's a few things. I'll start with one that I'm really passionate about, which is education and the way that education is delivered to people. And I feel like if we can change that archetype of how you go to a university and you have to sit down and you learn in a class and you regurgitate that information.

That I think there's a better way, better delivery mechanism for learning. So I don't like school at all. since I was a kid, I remember when I went. And my parents dropped me off at school. I would run outside the classroom and wait by the gate. Cause I just hated being inside a classroom. It felt like a prison to me. And I realized school is not the same as learning and school is not the same as education. I love learning now and I love to be educated and like learn things and explore topics that I don't know about. but it's just the delivery mechanism was so boring for me. That's probably the reason why I graduated in three years from college. you know, I did pretty well at school and, but I always joke with my parents. I go to school for you, not for me. I'm getting this degree for you, not for me. Cause you know, coming from a Indian household, like education is required really highly, especially when you have family members that are like doctors and PhDs and so forth. and I just feel like there's so many people out there that have a lot of innate talent, practical skills. But maybe don't enjoy school or don't want to go through the traditional path or incur a crazy amount of debt from paying all of the educate, like all those educational institutions. I think there's a way we can change education, and that will make our country and our society as a whole a lot better because we need to be competitive against the world.

It starts with having really good education, access to education, and that is like the most important thing, especially as we go into this world of AI. Like, we need to be well informed, well equipped, critical thinkers, STEM, problem solving, all of those sort of things. I think the biggest way you can have an impact on an entire generation starts with, like, education. So, I'd probably want to do something different there, or help contribute to a place where making learning more accessible. I think that would be really cool.

[00:23:07] Jay: Beautiful answer. and I'm right there with you. Krish, where can people find fireflies? There's a fireflies. ai.

[00:23:14] Krish: Yeah, that's our website, fireflies. ai. you may even see it on one of your Zoom calls or, Teams meetings at some point in time. And then you can sign up and try it out for free.

[00:23:25] Jay: And where do people find you if they want to get in touch with you directly?

[00:23:28] Krish: I'm on LinkedIn. definitely like the mess inbox is probably very inundated, but feel free to try to reach out there if it's, you know, something you want to chat about, also now starting to be more active on Twitter and then have my own Instagram, all under the same, handle Krish Ramineni.

[00:23:46] Jay: Beautiful. All right, man. Well, it was great having you on. I love the product. I have people check it out and just wish you nothing but the best brother.

[00:23:53] Krish: Thank you. Thanks so much, Jay.

[00:23:54] Jay: Have a good rest of your week, man. I'll see you.

[00:23:56] Krish: See ya. 

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