January 14, 2025 • 37 mins
Krish Ramineni joins the episode to share his entrepreneurial journey from Microsoft to founding Fireflies. He discusses the origins of Fireflies, its transformation into a meeting assistant product, and the strategies that fueled its viral growth. Krish offers insights on overcoming financial challenges in the early startup phase, balancing purpose and profit, and the importance of maintaining work-life balance. He contrasts corporate bureaucracy with startup innovation and emphasizes the value of building a lean team. The episode explores traits of successful entrepreneurs, leveraging AI, and learning from failures, with practical advice for young entrepreneurs seeking to create opportunities.
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(00:00):
Started the company with just $2,000.
Now we're generating 1,000,000 of dollars inrevenue.
What the heck do you do?
The idea is to give every person in theworkplace their own executive assistant.
You got to 16,000,000 users with $0 spent inmarketing.
The ultimate form of marketing is when Krish,you have a company that's generated 8 figures
in revenue that you started at just 20 yearsold.
(00:23):
What the heck do you do?
We're building AI for all the back office workthat people do that is gonna replace much of
the tedious tasks that you would have to do ona day in day out basis.
The idea is to give every person in theworkplace their own executive assistant, not
just the executives, not just the c suite.
(00:43):
When I was at Microsoft, that's what I thought.
Like, why are only the c suite people gettingthese, assistance?
What if we could do that where every singleperson has someone that follows them around,
gets work done?
And, we started with that idea as just an idea8 years ago.
And then after a lot of iteration and a lot ofinnovation that's happening in the AI space,
(01:07):
it's become a reality in the last couple years.
You mentioned Microsoft.
I really wanna understand exactly what you'vedone to end up where you are today.
How did you become one of the youngest peopleon the Microsoft team?
Growing up, I hated school.
It wasn't just the idea of school, but it'sjust being in an environment where you're
sitting in class regurgitating information.
(01:28):
I was always distracted.
That wasn't my favorite thing.
So I told myself that I would graduate asquickly as possible, took 7, 8 courses, myself
that I would graduate as quickly as possible,took 7, 8 courses a semester, and ended up
graduating.
From there, I had a few offers.
I ended up choosing the Microsoft offer, whichinitially wasn't even the goal.
Like, the goal was to come back to California,where I grew up.
(01:49):
But they gave me an offer I couldn't resist andended up going to Microsoft.
And I was a product manager there.
So this 20, 21 year old PM working with peoplein their forties and fifties, that was an eye
opening experience because you wonder, like,how seriously will they take this, like, kid
in, like, this work environment where they'vebeen working for several decades?
(02:12):
And I learned a lot there.
Speaking of going into the workforce thatyoung, it's it's such a big tech tech company.
I think there are a lot of people who might belistening to this wondering how they can end up
in a similar position.
I know there are a lot of students at my schoolthat are like, hey.
How can I get these internships?
And they're all going through the traditionalpath.
But I think if you're a college student,there's one thing that you can do to kinda set
(02:37):
yourself apart and get an internship within 90days.
I think if you follow a few key steps.
Curious to hear your thoughts on this, but Ithink first, similar to what you've done, you
create a list of the top 50 people that youwant to work for.
10 to 15 of them should be in an area that'slocal to you.
So for example, if you're in New York, find 10to 15 people in New York.
From there, just send them an email and justsay 3 things about you that make you important
(03:02):
and why they should talk to you.
And say, hey, these are the 3 things about me.
I'd love to buy you coffee or lunch and see howI can be helpful.
It's a very small ask and I think it opens upthe door quite early to potential larger
opportunities down the road.
Well, when I was a student looking forinternships, I didn't get any internships my
1st year after college.
So me and my friend decided to create our owninternship and start working on our own
(03:24):
project.
That was our game of playing a start up.
We ended up hiring a bunch of our teammateshave it, or from school who didn't also have
internships, have them tag along, and wecreated something, right.
We needed to put something on our resume.
When you apply for an internship and all youhave is coursework, no one's gonna take you
seriously.
Because a lot of these businesses are gonnalook at you and say, what do you have to offer?
(03:47):
What skill sets do you have to offer?
And again, it's unfair to ask a student to havetons of experience, but have you done projects?
Have you done things that make you lookresourceful?
So we had to be resourceful when big companieswere not looking at us because we were just
students.
So for me, building up my credentials by doinghackathons, doing all these, like, projects,
(04:09):
and then building a team shows responsibility,accountability, and that initiative.
And then I can go talk about those projects,the challenges I faced, the difficulties in
solving them, and you become a lot morerelevant.
So after my sophomore year, I ended up gettinga product management internship at a company
called Workday, a big ERP HR company.
(04:30):
And that was their 1st year doing a PMinternship cadence.
So that was really cool because a lot of theskills that I learned starting my own thing and
managing, our own team and then building theproduct, all of that stuff translated directly
into being what a PM is.
You have to take ownership and accountabilitywithout influence.
I think that was, like, the best way.
(04:51):
That's the secret.
And maybe things have changed now.
It's a very competitive job market.
There are very talented people with great GPAsin software engineering, studying computer
science where it's very tough.
They're applying to thousands of places.
But if you're applying to the same place or thesame way with the same resume, and it's not
working after like the first 20, maybe you needto change things up, Maybe you need to look at
(05:15):
your resume.
Maybe you need to get, like, a different set ofskills in order to go.
But sometimes we just try to do the same thinga 100 times even if it's not working.
So my best advice is try to look at yourresume, look at skills and things that you can
pick up that will help you stand out from thecrowd.
And that stint at Microsoft didn't last solong.
You quit pretty pretty quickly and you and yourcofounder Sam decided to start the business
(05:40):
that you have today, except there are manyiterations before that.
What gave you the conviction to go quit highpaying job and go start a business with, very
little money at the time, I believe?
I at least worked for a year.
My cofounder has no work experience outside ofan internship.
Internship, so he's never worked in a corporatesetting in a full time capacity.
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So we didn't even know the basics of building acompany.
I didn't have an MBA.
I did not know most of these things.
We learned it on the fly.
But what we did was we always questioned whythings were done the way they were.
If you're in a large company, people will tellyou, well that's just the way we do things.
When we got to build our company, we couldquestion every decision and say, I actually
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don't like that.
We're gonna do this differently.
Why do I have to be in the office 5 days aweek?
I don't like that.
We're gonna do it remote from day 1.
So we changed every piece of the puzzle when wegot to build it.
So we got to start with a blank slate.
That's the advantage, superpower that my cofounder Sam had.
For myself it was less about conviction andmore about I wanted to do something
(06:44):
interesting.
I felt when you are young that's the time whenyou get to experiment and you get to take on
challenges.
Because when you are married or have kids or afamily, it's a lot harder to take those risks.
I see that in my own family, with my parents.
And I'm grateful that they gave me thisfoundation.
But ultimately I felt like I can always comeback to a big tech job, and that's a luxury
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that we have in big tech is you can go try outthis entrepreneurship stuff, do a startup.
If it fails, you can always go back.
It's not looked down upon.
I wanna optimize for learning early in mycareer.
It wasn't about the pay.
In fact, when I started Fireflies, I was takingmoney out of my savings from the 1st year and
putting it into the business.
We started the company with just $2,000 and nowwe're generating 1,000,000 of dollars in
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revenue.
But I remember that time when it was just$2,000 and then I was paying for my own rent,
taking things out of my own pocket and livingoff my savings.
For my cofounder, it was even more criticalbecause he went all in.
He had probably a few $100 of savings after the$2,000 he put into the business.
So I put in 2,000, he put in 2,000.
(07:52):
That's how we got the business started.
So it was not about conviction, but it was thisidea of I wanna do something So it was not
about conviction, but it was this idea of Iwanna do something interesting.
I wanna work for myself, and
I wanna optimize for learning.
And it should feel like fun and not work.
You weren't making much money for the first 4years, I believe.
Why did you keep going?
You're trying out all these different apps.
(08:12):
Take me back to that moment in time.
What were you trying?
What wasn't working?
And and how did you land at what you havetoday?
2016, I left Microsoft, supposed to go tobusiness school, ended up turning that down,
went to Boston, I had a month of free time,spent time with Sam who had just graduated from
MIT.
A nice VC was giving us some co working spaceand said hey, you kids can just work out of
(08:34):
here every day.
And we went in every day, we worked, had abunch of ideas.
Nothing really stuck, but at the end of thesummer we were at a crossroads.
We had to decide if we were gonna keepiterating on a bunch of these ideas or we
should go off our separate ways.
Sam had an exciting grad school offer atStanford.
He had a upcoming job offer as well, and I justhad the business school after I left Microsoft.
(09:00):
So we said, you know what, this is way morefun.
Let's just give it a go.
Let's give it a year.
A year turned into 4 years of iterating andexperimenting.
So from 2016 to 2018, we were trying idea afteridea after idea.
We didn't have the money to get a office space.
We couldn't go out and raise large amounts ofcapital.
(09:21):
We didn't wanna take money from friends andfamily, because we ourselves weren't sure what
was gonna work.
So we went through all of these experiments,and I still remember we would go to this coffee
shop in San Francisco.
We'd order a coffee, and then get free WiFi forthe rest of the day.
And I know that that coffee shop owner probablylooked at us like we're occupying the space,
(09:44):
but we would just go back and order morecoffee.
I don't even drink coffee, so I'd get somethingelse.
But we would just be there and work, and thenafterwards we would just go coffee shop to
coffee shop.
And we did that for like 6 months.
And there were times when we would even go tothe San Francisco Westfield Mall, and we'd go
sit in the food court, plug in there, and thenwork from there.
(10:05):
So that was our first office.
We had to be very scrappy, very resourceful.
Afterwards, we were able to meet people whosaid, hey, we have a bunch of open space, and
you can come work out of our office space.
So in the history of Fireflies, we've now haveover a 100 employees.
We've never had an office space.
And the 1st year, 1, 2 years, we worked inperson before we said let's just go fully
(10:28):
remote.
It just did not make sense.
I see companies that are raising money, and thefirst thing they do is go spend tens of 1,000
of dollars a month on office space.
We said we're not gonna do that.
It's just not, worth it.
And I have my own take on remote work andversus in person.
I'm contrarian to what most people believetoday.
But yeah.
(10:49):
2016 to 2018, we started experimenting on lotsof different ideas, And ultimately, we ended up
deciding that we should pick an area thatdirectly impacts us every day.
And that area was meetings.
We take a lot of meetings.
And if we wanna build an assistant, we can'tbuild a general assistant for everything.
We gotta pick a use case.
And so we decided we're gonna build a meetingassistant that's gonna join my meetings,
(11:13):
transcribe stuff, and write down notes for me.
That's what, like, an EA does usually, is theyfollow you around, they take notes, they send
out emails on your behalf and action items.
So we started with that idea.
And when we started, most people said this isnot gonna work.
If it worked, big companies would have alreadydone it by now.
So you're wasting your time.
The technology is not good enough.
(11:34):
So you get all of these noes from investors,and you realize, okay.
We in order to prove them wrong, we have toactually build it.
We have to get real customers.
A lot of different failures.
There were times when we we just wanted to giveup.
But we told ourselves, look, we don't even needto make a lot of money.
We just need to make enough money to pay forrent, and we need enough money to, basically
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pay our basic expenses and we'd be good.
I remember my 2nd or third year, it was around2018.
I was living at home, in California and I wouldcommute into San Francisco.
I decided if if I really wanted to take thisseriously, I needed to be in San Francisco for
a year.
Well, I had to dip into my savings.
2 of my friends from college were getting aapartment, and SF apartments are incredibly
(12:22):
expensive.
This was like $4,000 or $5,000 per month, and Ididn't have that.
So what I what we did was we took the 2 bedroomapartment, and both of them took the 2
bedrooms, and then I converted my the livingroom into a makeshift bedroom.
And I would just, like, work, and I was stayingin Faizais.
So it was a 5, 10 minute walk, into the coworking space that we got for free, from
(12:45):
someone.
So it was super scrappy beginnings.
And I would get time to time from my, like,parents, you left a nice 6 figure job.
You could have bought a house by now.
What are you doing?
So and I felt for my parents, and, there wasthere was definitely a lot of pressure.
And then it wasn't until 2019 that we startedgetting our first customers that were paying.
(13:05):
A millionaire said this to me, and it gave mechills the other week.
He said, you want 7 out of 10 people to thinkwhat you're doing is a bad idea.
You want people to think that you're completelydelusional.
And the reason why is if you don't, then you'renot pushing the outer limits of your potential.
You got to 16,000,000 users with no marketingexpense, $0 spent in marketing.
(13:29):
And you said most of it was throughword-of-mouth.
And I hear this a lot, founders who might endup reaching a large audience will say, hey,
yeah, but we didn't actually spend any money onmarketing.
It was all through word-of-mouth.
What does that actually look like?
And how do you create a product from the get gothat can grow virally through word-of-mouth?
In the consumer space, the best products youprobably heard not through marketing, but
(13:53):
through word-of-mouth.
Google, YouTube, Gmail.
Just look at Google's entire product suite.
Netflix.
Yes, now you see some ads for Netflix, but manytimes in the beginning people just heard it
through word-of-mouth.
So most of the tools that people were usingthat you use every day, you heard it from
someone first.
Marketing is just a additional layer, but it'snot a replacement for building a great product
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that people want to share.
The ultimate form of marketing is when someonelikes your product enough to use it and then go
out there and recommend it to a dozen people.
That is the ultimate marketing.
That is what leads to virality.
With Fireflies, we were lucky because peoplewould see it in a meeting, then they would talk
about it, and the person would say, I shouldreally like using this for note taking
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purposes.
And the other person was, like, could you sendme the notes afterwards?
I'd love to see it.
So you were experiencing Fireflies before youeven become a user.
And when you're able to do that, that's themoment for people.
So just word-of-mouth conversations was the keyto all of our growth.
We're doing some marketing now, after we'vereached this level of scale, but that's just
(15:02):
more supplementary.
Like, it has to start with people wanting to beexcited about being associated with the brand.
Like, that's how these things are that's howcults are formed.
Right?
Cult products is because people are veryexcited about it.
You look at Tesla, they don't do any TVmarketing.
They don't almost do any advertising.
And you don't even have to go to the showroomto buy.
(15:23):
They can go on the website and buy a Tesla.
So they've created that sort of brand where thecustomers are the best marketers that a company
can ever ask for.
Yeah.
That's how I first came across Fireflies.
Because my former boss, as I told you earlier,I was on a sales call.
And I was basically just sitting there watchingin to kinda see what he does and how he
performs sales calls.
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And there's this little Fireflies AI window.
And after the call, I'm like, what is that?
He's like, oh, it just took notes from meduring the meeting.
I'm like, what?
Like, you didn't have to do anything?
He's like, yeah, I'll send you the notes.
And that's how I first came across it.
And, I think it's this part of it is thisnovelty.
And then the other part is, like, wow, thereare actually tools that can do things we never
thought were possible before.
(16:06):
Your company has raised up to $20,000,000 tothis point from pretty famous investors.
One of which is an investor of yours namedVinod Khosla, who's a billionaire entrepreneur.
What have you learned from him that's changedyour perspective on life?
Vinod is the master of long term bets.
What you described earlier, what people mightthink is silly and might not make sense now.
(16:30):
He will believe, well, if this were to work,how would it change the world?
So he's obviously made a lot of money, he'svery successful.
So he doesn't have to go after these smallerbets, the one x, two x wins.
He's going after things that will fundamentallychange the world.
And every time I go to the Khosla Summit whereall of the portfolio companies get together, he
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mentions that.
Right?
He wants to work on things that are going tochange the world in one way or the other.
He's done great work in the health care spaceand many of these other deep tech products.
So one thing that's helped me over the lastcouple years is once we got to a level of
stability and scale and profitability, what wenow start to think about is, what are where do
(17:16):
we wanna be 10 years from now?
And what sort of impact do we wanna be?
Like, you need to have that 10 year plan, andthen you need to work back to the next 1 month
plan.
So that's been really helpful to be able tothink about where we want to end up.
Obviously, you have to survive to get to the 10year period.
But if you can have that longer term vision,and then work backwards and build smaller
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milestones to get to where you want to, you canbuild a generational company.
And that's something that we've really beenfocused on over the last couple years, once
we've gotten to that scale.
Like what's next?
You always want to be there.
I'm someone where once you reach a certainmilestone, I don't wanna get complacent.
So I'll celebrate for maybe like a couple hoursor for that day.
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But the next day, it's like, what's next?
What's the next milestone?
If I don't do that, I will feel unsatisfied.
I'll feel incomplete.
So both myself and Sam are just so we're justdoing that for that excitement is always about
finding the next, big milestone for us to workon.
Do you
think you can ever feel fully satisfied andcomplete?
(18:22):
I asked someone who sold their company.
They made a lot of money, at a young age.
And they spent 6 months traveling the world,buying whatever they wanted, helping their
parents retire, all of those things.
But then they felt a void after 6 months.
At some point in time, you realize, what morecan I buy?
(18:43):
There's a limit to how much I can buy.
Again, if you your aspirations are to buy aprivate jet or a yacht, that's different.
Those are not my aspirations.
But at some point in time, all of your basicneeds are met.
You are in a comfortable position.
You can choose to work on whatever you want.
And I think the things that we need to value atthat point in time is time, who you spend it
(19:05):
with, and what you do.
So many people either completely get pulledinto their vices and they feel incomplete.
Now if money was the only form of happiness,money definitely brings people lots of
happiness.
I will not disagree with that.
But there are still rich people that are veryunhappy, because at that point in time, purpose
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is more important.
So a lot of these people go back, startsomething new, because they want a sense of
purpose.
They want a sense of belonging.
So to your question, I would have one day said,I can walk away from all this and, like, you
know, I I never have to look at tech again.
I have enough money in the bank.
I'd be totally fine with that.
I would have said, yeah, I I could have donethat.
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But now I'm at a place where working for asense of purpose is probably the most important
thing.
That's why the happiest people are alwaysworking late into their eighties nineties,
doing the things that they wanna do.
I'm not talking about going in and doing arepetitive corporate job.
Well, my take on corporate jobs is, they trainus to not be super creative and just follow
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commands.
But if you have the opportunity or the luxurylike these people are, why would you stop
working?
You should, continue pursuing moreentrepreneurial stuff.
100%.
There's this guy I interviewed a couple weeksago named Ankar Nagpal.
So he founded Teachable.
They sold that company for 250,000,000.
But before Teachable, he was working at Amazon.
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And he he and his team I think he was, like, 18years old, so very similar to your story, super
young working at Amazon.
He and a team of, like, 5, 10 other programmerswere working on this one page on the Amazon
seller website, super micro small page, andthat's all they were doing the entire time.
And I think he remembered telling me he waslike, yeah, one day I just didn't even show up
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for work and nobody even asked where I was.
And he's like, I felt like a cog in a machine.
That's why I decided to leave and and start myown business.
But we've seen this a lot with a lot of massivecorporate companies is they just sometimes hire
just to hire and not give people purpose andmission alignment.
I wonder if some of these big companies do thatwhere they take incredibly smart people and put
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them on these tiny, tiny problems and pay thema lot of good money.
It's golden handcuffs.
So again, the chances are they're not gonna gobuild your next competitor.
That could be potentially a reason.
Or the organization itself just becomes so bigand then drained in bureaucracy that, even the
people that wanna be creative can't be.
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So I think large organizations, not becausethey don't want to, it's just the nature of the
beast, the structure kills creativity.
The other thing is people always ask, hey, isAI gonna replace jobs?
And if so, what fields are, like, the most atrisk?
I always think that some of the skills that youare learning at universities and the things
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that you are trained to go do just followingcommands, being a cog in the machine, those are
the ones that are gonna be the most likely tobe disrupted and replaced.
So I think that we all need to strive to bemore creative and have a sense of purpose,
Because you're gonna be spending more time atwork than with your partner or your spouse,
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over, you know, 20, 30, 40 years.
So if you just feel like being a cog in amachine and doing the same thing every single
day, that's not happiness.
And again, we're in a place where we're veryprivileged to be saying that because a lot of
people in tech can choose what they work on.
But there are people that work in other rolesoutside of tech where they do the same thing.
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I I I met someone who works a admin officerole, who's been working in the same role,
doing the same thing for 20 years.
And, they have their same routine, and theylike that, because they have something else
outside of work.
Work is just to pay the bills, but they lookfor other things to they go to the ball game,
they go shopping, they spend time with theirkids, that's their happiness.
(23:11):
But doing the same thing over and over and overagain we're not machines.
So I think that those are the things that if wecan all strive for, that financial freedom or
independence, or working at a place where wegenuinely enjoy it, I think that that's the
ultimate prize.
It's It's not the money.
I would guess it's a bureaucracy issue morethan trying to stifle competition.
(23:34):
The only reason I say this is because I thinkit wouldn't be too difficult to set up a lab
component of the company where you just takethe top 1% smartest people that are interested
in building things and incentivize them tobuild things within the company.
And then any companies that spin out of thatare now intellectual property of the massive
corporation.
One of our clients is a venture firm calledPrimary Venture Partners.
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So they are a $1,000,000,000 seed stage fund oroil stage fund in New York City.
And once they got to that level of scale, theystarted building something called Primary Labs.
So they'll they'll incubate companies of theirown and just bring in top operators into the
businesses.
And then now they have a significant stake inthose companies.
They can just put the smartest people in theworld to kind of build those solutions out to
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those problems and and grow from that.
So that would be my bet, but who knows?
You think a lot about organizational structurefor your business.
You've kept your team pretty lean.
What frameworks have you built out whenbuilding out your team?
I just take a very first principled approachand look at how do we optimize, how do we be
(24:41):
more efficient, what can we replace, remove,strip down to the bare minimum, and then build
back up.
So that's how we build our organizations.
I believe generalists are fantastic for acompany of our size.
We don't need hyper specialists.
I don't overvalue experience as much as hustleand energy and potential to learn.
(25:01):
So we've hired engineers that were 19 years oldand who are now team leads.
So that's the other thing.
I don't believe in outside executive hiring asmuch as possible, because hiring in itself is
very difficult, but hiring executives is evenmore difficult, because as you get up the
(25:23):
corporate ladder, the better they are at lyingand presenting themselves as better than who
they actually are.
Whereas if you're hiring someone who's an IC,you can measure them on their work and their
results, and then you can grow them, grow theirtalent, and promote them.
That's what I like to do.
But I've seen I've I've burned my hands a fewtimes, doing this, and I've seen other
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companies who've made that regret, where theybrought in, like, a CRO when they didn't need a
CRO.
They brought in a VP that when they didn't needit.
There's a lot of advice out there, saying, oh,once you hire your VPs, once you have some
really good VPs, you can really step back andlet the business run itself.
Nothing is furthest from the truth in my ownexperience.
(26:06):
I feel you have to be deeply involved.
I'm not saying micromanaging, but you have tobe deeply involved if you want to move fast in
every aspect.
Nowadays people call that founder mode, butthat's just something that I've been able to
do, from day 1.
And by keeping the team small, we can eliminatebureaucracy.
And I'm just one message away from anyteammate.
My direct reports, my skip level reports, itdoesn't matter.
(26:29):
You mentioned advice earlier.
What's one unconventional piece of advice thatyou'd give to entrepreneurs starting their
first business today?
One advice I would give is don't do what isstatus quo just because it's the state, just
because someone says it is.
Question everything.
And I would honestly, like, ask yourself whywhen you start something.
(26:53):
So for example, remote work.
Beef when we started, remote work was notpopular at all.
And we said we're gonna do remote work from day1.
This is how we're gonna run our business.
Then the pandemic happens, and people say,you're a genius.
Remote work is like the way of the future.
Now we have a reverse trend where people say,no.
Remote remote work is horrible.
People are very inefficient.
(27:14):
You need to be back in the office at least 3times a week, at least 4 times a week.
So you have to question it.
Why is remote work bad if it is, in fact, bad?
Why is in person work better?
Could it be possibly because of the type ofpeople you hire?
Could it be possibly because of a lack ofmotivation, lack of accountability?
And maybe managers realize people are slackingoff when it's remote.
(27:36):
So maybe if you change your hiring practices,that's probably gonna be the right thing to do,
but it's much easier to just mandate everyoneto be back in the office so you can monitor
them.
So that's why ask the why and just don't followthe herd just because that's the conventional
norm.
You mentioned speed.
This has been a recurring theme on our show.
I've noticed some of the smartest andwealthiest people in the world operate with
(27:59):
speed.
I asked a 17 year old who makes $1,000,000 amonth with his app, why do you think you've
been so successful?
And he told me, because I operate with speed.
When I have an idea, I just go execute on itimmediately.
Meanwhile, our competitors might take monthsdeciding whether or not that idea is good.
By the time they figure it out, we already haveour product out into the market making money.
(28:22):
What are the defining characteristics that makean entrepreneur successful?
The best entrepreneurs take the unproven path,and they are the hardest workers.
The best ones are the hardest workers.
It's not about the glamour.
It's not about sounding smart.
It's not about having a PhD.
It's about, are you willing to keep tryingthings, keep getting punched in the face, and
(28:46):
getting back up and trying again and again?
Because there are maybe a dozen times in our 8year journey where we want to quit.
And, yeah, just being smart enough isn'tenough.
Yes.
Speaking of trying to sound smart, I've noticedthere's a reason why, for example, Warren
Buffett will write his annual shareholderletter in, like, a 6th grade reading level.
(29:08):
I never understood why because I was, like,he's a pretty smart guy.
I'm pretty sure he could use more complicatedlanguage.
And then I was listening to a podcast and Ieventually figured out if he writes, like, in
12th, 13th grade reading level, less peopleunderstand him, which means less people might
be compelled to invest in Berkshire stock.
But if he writes in a 6th grade reading level,he now can access a broader audience, allowing
(29:32):
more people to understand what they do and morepeople to invest.
And I've noticed some of the smartest people inthe world can actually distill really complex
ideas into super simple things that make itvery easy to understand.
I agree with you.
The better you understand the concept, thesimpler you can explain it.
So I think there's a direct correlation betweenintelligence and explaining it
(29:55):
in simple terms.
The people that don't know something will usebig complex words and make it even more
complicated than it actually is.
You spent years in AI.
Is there anything that the average personshould be doing to capitalize on the
opportunity that AI presents today?
My understanding of AI in the simplest terms isit can now do things that humans historically
(30:17):
are able to do.
I feel that there are certain repeatable,monotonous tasks that if you ask yourself, what
am I doing every day that's, like, tedious andrepetitive, and how can AI potentially solve
that?
So we go through these, like, sort of casestudies and examples.
I had a hypothetical discussion with a friendwho's a doctor.
(30:38):
And we sit down, and we ask this, like, do youthink AI is going to replace doctors?
Well, let's go through what a doctor does on aday to day basis.
Which of these things are unique to whatdoctors can do?
Well, if you think about it, AI can now speakto you, it can see you, and it can hear and
understand.
And it has infinite memory, meaning I can giveit infinite memory, meaning I can give it
(30:59):
10,000 medical journals and books, and it'llhave perfect recall.
Almost better than a doctor that has to go andGoogle things up.
Right?
And it probably knows everything about thedifferent medicines and how you will react to
it and stuff.
So in the long term case, AI will probably beable to look at x rays, can look at images,
MRIs, look at maybe the skin condition, thephoto, and probably give you, with 90%
(31:26):
accuracy, what the issue is and what thetreatment would be and what medicine you should
take.
And then the doctor will probably just need tosay, okay.
I agree with this diagnosis.
Let's go ahead with it.
If that were the case, think about how manymore patients that a doctor could, see, with
the help of AI.
AI is, like, automating 90% of it.
(31:47):
So instead of seeing 10 patients a day, theycan see a 100 patients a day, And health care
could become way more affordable.
Now we're gonna be in industries where they'llsay, we can't trust the AI.
We need a human to do all of these things.
There's gonna be regulatory capture, all ofthat stuff.
But what I'm saying is every role and function,there's some pieces of it that can be
automated.
(32:07):
Pick a role, and then how do you just break itdown to infinite, like finite tasks and solve
that?
And at the end of the day, when you go throughthis exercise, we'll all come to this
realization, we're not that special, and we'realso programmable in many ways.
So, that you'll get a weird sense of the worldwhen you go through this exercise, but you
(32:29):
realize that we're not special, and there's alot of things that AI can do that And
to wrap it up here, we have a couple of closingquestions.
What was your greatest failure, and what didyou learn from it?
My greatest failure was probably giving up oncertain ideas too soon, and we iterated 7 times
on 7 different, products.
(32:51):
But I'm sure at least 1 or 2 of them, if wekept with it, it would have been really
effective.
My other biggest failure is following the hypeand the crowd and realizing, okay, I have to go
to these conferences, I have to go to theseevents, I have to network with people in order
to be successful.
Nothing is further from the truth.
(33:12):
I don't believe in my industry for what I'mbuilding.
Maybe it's true in finance and other indersindustries.
I hate networking.
Even if I go into a conference, I'll do mypresentation or keynote, and then I will leave.
Maybe if I have some prescheduled meetings,I'll do it, but I cannot wine, dine, schmooze.
That's not me, who who it is, and that's justmy personality.
(33:34):
So there are too many entrepreneurs that overoptimize for that, and that's a problem.
And so instead, you should be building, notnetworking.
100%.
Those, I've noticed when I interviewed PejhmaunNossat from Per.
He was telling me some of the smartest or someof the most successful entrepreneurs that he's
invested in, they don't you will never see themat some of these networking events because
(33:58):
they're actually building things.
I've noticed this is very true because early onwhen I was in New York City during my gap year,
I would try to go to as many of thesenetworking events as possible because I
thought, hey, I need to do that to becomesuccessful.
I realized about 80% of them were completewaste of time.
Like, you just have a bunch of randos, like,not really knowing what to do or what they're
doing that are kinda burning your time andtheir time.
(34:21):
I'm like, okay.
Sure.
Networking is fine.
But the way that most people do it isoverrated.
Instead, just find particular people that youwant to meet and learn from or particular hyper
focused events that are super high caliberpeople, bring some of the smartest people in
your industry in the world in one place.
Outside of that, I won't go to any othertraditional networking events.
(34:44):
But those that's what I stick it to.
Second, what's the best piece of advice you'veever received?
Focus on one thing and do it really well.
It's easy to want to parallel process.
And this is the hardest thing for me, is Iwanna work on 10 different ideas, at the same
time.
But it's better to see one thing to completionbefore jumping to the next one.
(35:07):
Because the moment you take your focus awayfrom that one thing, it will stall, it will
move slower.
So you have to force yourself to do notparallel process.
And that sounds hard, but there is only onething, maybe 2 if you're if you're fortunate
enough, that you should be focusing on at onetime.
What's one rule you live by that most peopledon't?
(35:29):
I think time is the most important thing, inanyone's life.
So I want to focus on using that time to dothings that are meaningful to me.
I am learning to say no to things that make mefeel uncomfortable or is not, like, worth my
time, and is not what's gonna bring mehappiness.
(35:50):
So it's not about the material stuff.
Like, I would rather pay for things to help meoptimize my time to do the things that I love.
And I think as we get older, we realize time isbest spent with the people you care about, with
products and goals and projects that you arepassionate about.
Because when you look back, that's what's gonnabe really important to you.
(36:13):
So optimize for time starting early.
And if I slid you over a phone and you couldcall your 20 year old self, would you call?
And if so, what would you say?
I would say keep at it, don't give up, and donot compromise on settling, for what's
convenient.
(36:33):
I think throughout my life, I've always had tomake hard decisions that were uncomfortable in
the short term that caused a lot of sufferingand, pain, but it made me grow as a person.
And, I think some amount of pain and,stretching is good for us.
So don't get complacent.
Just because you have a nice job at this, like,cushy company, don't get complacent.
(36:59):
And, way too many people get, way toocomfortable with where they're in life, and any
ambition and goals they have slowly starts todie.
So don't ever get too comfortable.
Awesome.
Well, I think that's a great way to end it.
We'll have a link to Fireflies in the episodedescription down below.
If anyone wants to check it out, you can there.
(37:19):
And thanks very much for joining, Chris.
I appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
Started the company with just $2,000.
Now we're generating 1,000,000 of dollars inrevenue.
What the heck do you do?
The idea is to give every person in theworkplace their own executive assistant.
You got to 16,000,000 users with $0 spent inmarketing.
The ultimate form of marketing is when Krish,you have a company that's generated 8 figures
in revenue that you started at just 20 yearsold.
(00:23):
What the heck do you do?
We're building AI for all the back office workthat people do that is gonna replace much of
the tedious tasks that you would have to do ona day in day out basis.
The idea is to give every person in theworkplace their own executive assistant, not
just the executives, not just the c suite.
(00:43):
When I was at Microsoft, that's what I thought.
Like, why are only the c suite people gettingthese, assistance?
What if we could do that where every singleperson has someone that follows them around,
gets work done?
And, we started with that idea as just an idea8 years ago.
And then after a lot of iteration and a lot ofinnovation that's happening in the AI space,
(01:07):
it's become a reality in the last couple years.
You mentioned Microsoft.
I really wanna understand exactly what you'vedone to end up where you are today.
How did you become one of the youngest peopleon the Microsoft team?
Growing up, I hated school.
It wasn't just the idea of school, but it'sjust being in an environment where you're
sitting in class regurgitating information.
(01:28):
I was always distracted.
That wasn't my favorite thing.
So I told myself that I would graduate asquickly as possible, took 7, 8 courses, myself
that I would graduate as quickly as possible,took 7, 8 courses a semester, and ended up
graduating.
From there, I had a few offers.
I ended up choosing the Microsoft offer, whichinitially wasn't even the goal.
Like, the goal was to come back to California,where I grew up.
(01:49):
But they gave me an offer I couldn't resist andended up going to Microsoft.
And I was a product manager there.
So this 20, 21 year old PM working with peoplein their forties and fifties, that was an eye
opening experience because you wonder, like,how seriously will they take this, like, kid
in, like, this work environment where they'vebeen working for several decades?
(02:12):
And I learned a lot there.
Speaking of going into the workforce thatyoung, it's it's such a big tech tech company.
I think there are a lot of people who might belistening to this wondering how they can end up
in a similar position.
I know there are a lot of students at my schoolthat are like, hey.
How can I get these internships?
And they're all going through the traditionalpath.
But I think if you're a college student,there's one thing that you can do to kinda set
(02:37):
yourself apart and get an internship within 90days.
I think if you follow a few key steps.
Curious to hear your thoughts on this, but Ithink first, similar to what you've done, you
create a list of the top 50 people that youwant to work for.
10 to 15 of them should be in an area that'slocal to you.
So for example, if you're in New York, find 10to 15 people in New York.
From there, just send them an email and justsay 3 things about you that make you important
(03:02):
and why they should talk to you.
And say, hey, these are the 3 things about me.
I'd love to buy you coffee or lunch and see howI can be helpful.
It's a very small ask and I think it opens upthe door quite early to potential larger
opportunities down the road.
Well, when I was a student looking forinternships, I didn't get any internships my
1st year after college.
So me and my friend decided to create our owninternship and start working on our own
(03:24):
project.
That was our game of playing a start up.
We ended up hiring a bunch of our teammateshave it, or from school who didn't also have
internships, have them tag along, and wecreated something, right.
We needed to put something on our resume.
When you apply for an internship and all youhave is coursework, no one's gonna take you
seriously.
Because a lot of these businesses are gonnalook at you and say, what do you have to offer?
(03:47):
What skill sets do you have to offer?
And again, it's unfair to ask a student to havetons of experience, but have you done projects?
Have you done things that make you lookresourceful?
So we had to be resourceful when big companieswere not looking at us because we were just
students.
So for me, building up my credentials by doinghackathons, doing all these, like, projects,
(04:09):
and then building a team shows responsibility,accountability, and that initiative.
And then I can go talk about those projects,the challenges I faced, the difficulties in
solving them, and you become a lot morerelevant.
So after my sophomore year, I ended up gettinga product management internship at a company
called Workday, a big ERP HR company.
(04:30):
And that was their 1st year doing a PMinternship cadence.
So that was really cool because a lot of theskills that I learned starting my own thing and
managing, our own team and then building theproduct, all of that stuff translated directly
into being what a PM is.
You have to take ownership and accountabilitywithout influence.
I think that was, like, the best way.
(04:51):
That's the secret.
And maybe things have changed now.
It's a very competitive job market.
There are very talented people with great GPAsin software engineering, studying computer
science where it's very tough.
They're applying to thousands of places.
But if you're applying to the same place or thesame way with the same resume, and it's not
working after like the first 20, maybe you needto change things up, Maybe you need to look at
(05:15):
your resume.
Maybe you need to get, like, a different set ofskills in order to go.
But sometimes we just try to do the same thinga 100 times even if it's not working.
So my best advice is try to look at yourresume, look at skills and things that you can
pick up that will help you stand out from thecrowd.
And that stint at Microsoft didn't last solong.
You quit pretty pretty quickly and you and yourcofounder Sam decided to start the business
(05:40):
that you have today, except there are manyiterations before that.
What gave you the conviction to go quit highpaying job and go start a business with, very
little money at the time, I believe?
I at least worked for a year.
My cofounder has no work experience outside ofan internship.
Internship, so he's never worked in a corporatesetting in a full time capacity.
(06:00):
So we didn't even know the basics of building acompany.
I didn't have an MBA.
I did not know most of these things.
We learned it on the fly.
But what we did was we always questioned whythings were done the way they were.
If you're in a large company, people will tellyou, well that's just the way we do things.
When we got to build our company, we couldquestion every decision and say, I actually
(06:23):
don't like that.
We're gonna do this differently.
Why do I have to be in the office 5 days aweek?
I don't like that.
We're gonna do it remote from day 1.
So we changed every piece of the puzzle when wegot to build it.
So we got to start with a blank slate.
That's the advantage, superpower that my cofounder Sam had.
For myself it was less about conviction andmore about I wanted to do something
(06:44):
interesting.
I felt when you are young that's the time whenyou get to experiment and you get to take on
challenges.
Because when you are married or have kids or afamily, it's a lot harder to take those risks.
I see that in my own family, with my parents.
And I'm grateful that they gave me thisfoundation.
But ultimately I felt like I can always comeback to a big tech job, and that's a luxury
(07:06):
that we have in big tech is you can go try outthis entrepreneurship stuff, do a startup.
If it fails, you can always go back.
It's not looked down upon.
I wanna optimize for learning early in mycareer.
It wasn't about the pay.
In fact, when I started Fireflies, I was takingmoney out of my savings from the 1st year and
putting it into the business.
We started the company with just $2,000 and nowwe're generating 1,000,000 of dollars in
(07:31):
revenue.
But I remember that time when it was just$2,000 and then I was paying for my own rent,
taking things out of my own pocket and livingoff my savings.
For my cofounder, it was even more criticalbecause he went all in.
He had probably a few $100 of savings after the$2,000 he put into the business.
So I put in 2,000, he put in 2,000.
(07:52):
That's how we got the business started.
So it was not about conviction, but it was thisidea of I wanna do something So it was not
about conviction, but it was this idea of Iwanna do something interesting.
I wanna work for myself, and
I wanna optimize for learning.
And it should feel like fun and not work.
You weren't making much money for the first 4years, I believe.
Why did you keep going?
You're trying out all these different apps.
(08:12):
Take me back to that moment in time.
What were you trying?
What wasn't working?
And and how did you land at what you havetoday?
2016, I left Microsoft, supposed to go tobusiness school, ended up turning that down,
went to Boston, I had a month of free time,spent time with Sam who had just graduated from
MIT.
A nice VC was giving us some co working spaceand said hey, you kids can just work out of
(08:34):
here every day.
And we went in every day, we worked, had abunch of ideas.
Nothing really stuck, but at the end of thesummer we were at a crossroads.
We had to decide if we were gonna keepiterating on a bunch of these ideas or we
should go off our separate ways.
Sam had an exciting grad school offer atStanford.
He had a upcoming job offer as well, and I justhad the business school after I left Microsoft.
(09:00):
So we said, you know what, this is way morefun.
Let's just give it a go.
Let's give it a year.
A year turned into 4 years of iterating andexperimenting.
So from 2016 to 2018, we were trying idea afteridea after idea.
We didn't have the money to get a office space.
We couldn't go out and raise large amounts ofcapital.
(09:21):
We didn't wanna take money from friends andfamily, because we ourselves weren't sure what
was gonna work.
So we went through all of these experiments,and I still remember we would go to this coffee
shop in San Francisco.
We'd order a coffee, and then get free WiFi forthe rest of the day.
And I know that that coffee shop owner probablylooked at us like we're occupying the space,
(09:44):
but we would just go back and order morecoffee.
I don't even drink coffee, so I'd get somethingelse.
But we would just be there and work, and thenafterwards we would just go coffee shop to
coffee shop.
And we did that for like 6 months.
And there were times when we would even go tothe San Francisco Westfield Mall, and we'd go
sit in the food court, plug in there, and thenwork from there.
(10:05):
So that was our first office.
We had to be very scrappy, very resourceful.
Afterwards, we were able to meet people whosaid, hey, we have a bunch of open space, and
you can come work out of our office space.
So in the history of Fireflies, we've now haveover a 100 employees.
We've never had an office space.
And the 1st year, 1, 2 years, we worked inperson before we said let's just go fully
(10:28):
remote.
It just did not make sense.
I see companies that are raising money, and thefirst thing they do is go spend tens of 1,000
of dollars a month on office space.
We said we're not gonna do that.
It's just not, worth it.
And I have my own take on remote work andversus in person.
I'm contrarian to what most people believetoday.
But yeah.
(10:49):
2016 to 2018, we started experimenting on lotsof different ideas, And ultimately, we ended up
deciding that we should pick an area thatdirectly impacts us every day.
And that area was meetings.
We take a lot of meetings.
And if we wanna build an assistant, we can'tbuild a general assistant for everything.
We gotta pick a use case.
And so we decided we're gonna build a meetingassistant that's gonna join my meetings,
(11:13):
transcribe stuff, and write down notes for me.
That's what, like, an EA does usually, is theyfollow you around, they take notes, they send
out emails on your behalf and action items.
So we started with that idea.
And when we started, most people said this isnot gonna work.
If it worked, big companies would have alreadydone it by now.
So you're wasting your time.
The technology is not good enough.
(11:34):
So you get all of these noes from investors,and you realize, okay.
We in order to prove them wrong, we have toactually build it.
We have to get real customers.
A lot of different failures.
There were times when we we just wanted to giveup.
But we told ourselves, look, we don't even needto make a lot of money.
We just need to make enough money to pay forrent, and we need enough money to, basically
(11:56):
pay our basic expenses and we'd be good.
I remember my 2nd or third year, it was around2018.
I was living at home, in California and I wouldcommute into San Francisco.
I decided if if I really wanted to take thisseriously, I needed to be in San Francisco for
a year.
Well, I had to dip into my savings.
2 of my friends from college were getting aapartment, and SF apartments are incredibly
(12:22):
expensive.
This was like $4,000 or $5,000 per month, and Ididn't have that.
So what I what we did was we took the 2 bedroomapartment, and both of them took the 2
bedrooms, and then I converted my the livingroom into a makeshift bedroom.
And I would just, like, work, and I was stayingin Faizais.
So it was a 5, 10 minute walk, into the coworking space that we got for free, from
(12:45):
someone.
So it was super scrappy beginnings.
And I would get time to time from my, like,parents, you left a nice 6 figure job.
You could have bought a house by now.
What are you doing?
So and I felt for my parents, and, there wasthere was definitely a lot of pressure.
And then it wasn't until 2019 that we startedgetting our first customers that were paying.
(13:05):
A millionaire said this to me, and it gave mechills the other week.
He said, you want 7 out of 10 people to thinkwhat you're doing is a bad idea.
You want people to think that you're completelydelusional.
And the reason why is if you don't, then you'renot pushing the outer limits of your potential.
You got to 16,000,000 users with no marketingexpense, $0 spent in marketing.
(13:29):
And you said most of it was throughword-of-mouth.
And I hear this a lot, founders who might endup reaching a large audience will say, hey,
yeah, but we didn't actually spend any money onmarketing.
It was all through word-of-mouth.
What does that actually look like?
And how do you create a product from the get gothat can grow virally through word-of-mouth?
In the consumer space, the best products youprobably heard not through marketing, but
(13:53):
through word-of-mouth.
Google, YouTube, Gmail.
Just look at Google's entire product suite.
Netflix.
Yes, now you see some ads for Netflix, but manytimes in the beginning people just heard it
through word-of-mouth.
So most of the tools that people were usingthat you use every day, you heard it from
someone first.
Marketing is just a additional layer, but it'snot a replacement for building a great product
(14:18):
that people want to share.
The ultimate form of marketing is when someonelikes your product enough to use it and then go
out there and recommend it to a dozen people.
That is the ultimate marketing.
That is what leads to virality.
With Fireflies, we were lucky because peoplewould see it in a meeting, then they would talk
about it, and the person would say, I shouldreally like using this for note taking
(14:41):
purposes.
And the other person was, like, could you sendme the notes afterwards?
I'd love to see it.
So you were experiencing Fireflies before youeven become a user.
And when you're able to do that, that's themoment for people.
So just word-of-mouth conversations was the keyto all of our growth.
We're doing some marketing now, after we'vereached this level of scale, but that's just
(15:02):
more supplementary.
Like, it has to start with people wanting to beexcited about being associated with the brand.
Like, that's how these things are that's howcults are formed.
Right?
Cult products is because people are veryexcited about it.
You look at Tesla, they don't do any TVmarketing.
They don't almost do any advertising.
And you don't even have to go to the showroomto buy.
(15:23):
They can go on the website and buy a Tesla.
So they've created that sort of brand where thecustomers are the best marketers that a company
can ever ask for.
Yeah.
That's how I first came across Fireflies.
Because my former boss, as I told you earlier,I was on a sales call.
And I was basically just sitting there watchingin to kinda see what he does and how he
performs sales calls.
(15:44):
And there's this little Fireflies AI window.
And after the call, I'm like, what is that?
He's like, oh, it just took notes from meduring the meeting.
I'm like, what?
Like, you didn't have to do anything?
He's like, yeah, I'll send you the notes.
And that's how I first came across it.
And, I think it's this part of it is thisnovelty.
And then the other part is, like, wow, thereare actually tools that can do things we never
thought were possible before.
(16:06):
Your company has raised up to $20,000,000 tothis point from pretty famous investors.
One of which is an investor of yours namedVinod Khosla, who's a billionaire entrepreneur.
What have you learned from him that's changedyour perspective on life?
Vinod is the master of long term bets.
What you described earlier, what people mightthink is silly and might not make sense now.
(16:30):
He will believe, well, if this were to work,how would it change the world?
So he's obviously made a lot of money, he'svery successful.
So he doesn't have to go after these smallerbets, the one x, two x wins.
He's going after things that will fundamentallychange the world.
And every time I go to the Khosla Summit whereall of the portfolio companies get together, he
(16:52):
mentions that.
Right?
He wants to work on things that are going tochange the world in one way or the other.
He's done great work in the health care spaceand many of these other deep tech products.
So one thing that's helped me over the lastcouple years is once we got to a level of
stability and scale and profitability, what wenow start to think about is, what are where do
(17:16):
we wanna be 10 years from now?
And what sort of impact do we wanna be?
Like, you need to have that 10 year plan, andthen you need to work back to the next 1 month
plan.
So that's been really helpful to be able tothink about where we want to end up.
Obviously, you have to survive to get to the 10year period.
But if you can have that longer term vision,and then work backwards and build smaller
(17:38):
milestones to get to where you want to, you canbuild a generational company.
And that's something that we've really beenfocused on over the last couple years, once
we've gotten to that scale.
Like what's next?
You always want to be there.
I'm someone where once you reach a certainmilestone, I don't wanna get complacent.
So I'll celebrate for maybe like a couple hoursor for that day.
(18:00):
But the next day, it's like, what's next?
What's the next milestone?
If I don't do that, I will feel unsatisfied.
I'll feel incomplete.
So both myself and Sam are just so we're justdoing that for that excitement is always about
finding the next, big milestone for us to workon.
Do you
think you can ever feel fully satisfied andcomplete?
(18:22):
I asked someone who sold their company.
They made a lot of money, at a young age.
And they spent 6 months traveling the world,buying whatever they wanted, helping their
parents retire, all of those things.
But then they felt a void after 6 months.
At some point in time, you realize, what morecan I buy?
(18:43):
There's a limit to how much I can buy.
Again, if you your aspirations are to buy aprivate jet or a yacht, that's different.
Those are not my aspirations.
But at some point in time, all of your basicneeds are met.
You are in a comfortable position.
You can choose to work on whatever you want.
And I think the things that we need to value atthat point in time is time, who you spend it
(19:05):
with, and what you do.
So many people either completely get pulledinto their vices and they feel incomplete.
Now if money was the only form of happiness,money definitely brings people lots of
happiness.
I will not disagree with that.
But there are still rich people that are veryunhappy, because at that point in time, purpose
(19:27):
is more important.
So a lot of these people go back, startsomething new, because they want a sense of
purpose.
They want a sense of belonging.
So to your question, I would have one day said,I can walk away from all this and, like, you
know, I I never have to look at tech again.
I have enough money in the bank.
I'd be totally fine with that.
I would have said, yeah, I I could have donethat.
(19:48):
But now I'm at a place where working for asense of purpose is probably the most important
thing.
That's why the happiest people are alwaysworking late into their eighties nineties,
doing the things that they wanna do.
I'm not talking about going in and doing arepetitive corporate job.
Well, my take on corporate jobs is, they trainus to not be super creative and just follow
(20:12):
commands.
But if you have the opportunity or the luxurylike these people are, why would you stop
working?
You should, continue pursuing moreentrepreneurial stuff.
100%.
There's this guy I interviewed a couple weeksago named Ankar Nagpal.
So he founded Teachable.
They sold that company for 250,000,000.
But before Teachable, he was working at Amazon.
(20:34):
And he he and his team I think he was, like, 18years old, so very similar to your story, super
young working at Amazon.
He and a team of, like, 5, 10 other programmerswere working on this one page on the Amazon
seller website, super micro small page, andthat's all they were doing the entire time.
And I think he remembered telling me he waslike, yeah, one day I just didn't even show up
(20:55):
for work and nobody even asked where I was.
And he's like, I felt like a cog in a machine.
That's why I decided to leave and and start myown business.
But we've seen this a lot with a lot of massivecorporate companies is they just sometimes hire
just to hire and not give people purpose andmission alignment.
I wonder if some of these big companies do thatwhere they take incredibly smart people and put
(21:18):
them on these tiny, tiny problems and pay thema lot of good money.
It's golden handcuffs.
So again, the chances are they're not gonna gobuild your next competitor.
That could be potentially a reason.
Or the organization itself just becomes so bigand then drained in bureaucracy that, even the
people that wanna be creative can't be.
(21:40):
So I think large organizations, not becausethey don't want to, it's just the nature of the
beast, the structure kills creativity.
The other thing is people always ask, hey, isAI gonna replace jobs?
And if so, what fields are, like, the most atrisk?
I always think that some of the skills that youare learning at universities and the things
(22:04):
that you are trained to go do just followingcommands, being a cog in the machine, those are
the ones that are gonna be the most likely tobe disrupted and replaced.
So I think that we all need to strive to bemore creative and have a sense of purpose,
Because you're gonna be spending more time atwork than with your partner or your spouse,
(22:26):
over, you know, 20, 30, 40 years.
So if you just feel like being a cog in amachine and doing the same thing every single
day, that's not happiness.
And again, we're in a place where we're veryprivileged to be saying that because a lot of
people in tech can choose what they work on.
But there are people that work in other rolesoutside of tech where they do the same thing.
(22:49):
I I I met someone who works a admin officerole, who's been working in the same role,
doing the same thing for 20 years.
And, they have their same routine, and theylike that, because they have something else
outside of work.
Work is just to pay the bills, but they lookfor other things to they go to the ball game,
they go shopping, they spend time with theirkids, that's their happiness.
(23:11):
But doing the same thing over and over and overagain we're not machines.
So I think that those are the things that if wecan all strive for, that financial freedom or
independence, or working at a place where wegenuinely enjoy it, I think that that's the
ultimate prize.
It's It's not the money.
I would guess it's a bureaucracy issue morethan trying to stifle competition.
(23:34):
The only reason I say this is because I thinkit wouldn't be too difficult to set up a lab
component of the company where you just takethe top 1% smartest people that are interested
in building things and incentivize them tobuild things within the company.
And then any companies that spin out of thatare now intellectual property of the massive
corporation.
One of our clients is a venture firm calledPrimary Venture Partners.
(23:56):
So they are a $1,000,000,000 seed stage fund oroil stage fund in New York City.
And once they got to that level of scale, theystarted building something called Primary Labs.
So they'll they'll incubate companies of theirown and just bring in top operators into the
businesses.
And then now they have a significant stake inthose companies.
They can just put the smartest people in theworld to kind of build those solutions out to
(24:19):
those problems and and grow from that.
So that would be my bet, but who knows?
You think a lot about organizational structurefor your business.
You've kept your team pretty lean.
What frameworks have you built out whenbuilding out your team?
I just take a very first principled approachand look at how do we optimize, how do we be
(24:41):
more efficient, what can we replace, remove,strip down to the bare minimum, and then build
back up.
So that's how we build our organizations.
I believe generalists are fantastic for acompany of our size.
We don't need hyper specialists.
I don't overvalue experience as much as hustleand energy and potential to learn.
(25:01):
So we've hired engineers that were 19 years oldand who are now team leads.
So that's the other thing.
I don't believe in outside executive hiring asmuch as possible, because hiring in itself is
very difficult, but hiring executives is evenmore difficult, because as you get up the
(25:23):
corporate ladder, the better they are at lyingand presenting themselves as better than who
they actually are.
Whereas if you're hiring someone who's an IC,you can measure them on their work and their
results, and then you can grow them, grow theirtalent, and promote them.
That's what I like to do.
But I've seen I've I've burned my hands a fewtimes, doing this, and I've seen other
(25:44):
companies who've made that regret, where theybrought in, like, a CRO when they didn't need a
CRO.
They brought in a VP that when they didn't needit.
There's a lot of advice out there, saying, oh,once you hire your VPs, once you have some
really good VPs, you can really step back andlet the business run itself.
Nothing is furthest from the truth in my ownexperience.
(26:06):
I feel you have to be deeply involved.
I'm not saying micromanaging, but you have tobe deeply involved if you want to move fast in
every aspect.
Nowadays people call that founder mode, butthat's just something that I've been able to
do, from day 1.
And by keeping the team small, we can eliminatebureaucracy.
And I'm just one message away from anyteammate.
My direct reports, my skip level reports, itdoesn't matter.
(26:29):
You mentioned advice earlier.
What's one unconventional piece of advice thatyou'd give to entrepreneurs starting their
first business today?
One advice I would give is don't do what isstatus quo just because it's the state, just
because someone says it is.
Question everything.
And I would honestly, like, ask yourself whywhen you start something.
(26:53):
So for example, remote work.
Beef when we started, remote work was notpopular at all.
And we said we're gonna do remote work from day1.
This is how we're gonna run our business.
Then the pandemic happens, and people say,you're a genius.
Remote work is like the way of the future.
Now we have a reverse trend where people say,no.
Remote remote work is horrible.
People are very inefficient.
(27:14):
You need to be back in the office at least 3times a week, at least 4 times a week.
So you have to question it.
Why is remote work bad if it is, in fact, bad?
Why is in person work better?
Could it be possibly because of the type ofpeople you hire?
Could it be possibly because of a lack ofmotivation, lack of accountability?
And maybe managers realize people are slackingoff when it's remote.
(27:36):
So maybe if you change your hiring practices,that's probably gonna be the right thing to do,
but it's much easier to just mandate everyoneto be back in the office so you can monitor
them.
So that's why ask the why and just don't followthe herd just because that's the conventional
norm.
You mentioned speed.
This has been a recurring theme on our show.
I've noticed some of the smartest andwealthiest people in the world operate with
(27:59):
speed.
I asked a 17 year old who makes $1,000,000 amonth with his app, why do you think you've
been so successful?
And he told me, because I operate with speed.
When I have an idea, I just go execute on itimmediately.
Meanwhile, our competitors might take monthsdeciding whether or not that idea is good.
By the time they figure it out, we already haveour product out into the market making money.
(28:22):
What are the defining characteristics that makean entrepreneur successful?
The best entrepreneurs take the unproven path,and they are the hardest workers.
The best ones are the hardest workers.
It's not about the glamour.
It's not about sounding smart.
It's not about having a PhD.
It's about, are you willing to keep tryingthings, keep getting punched in the face, and
(28:46):
getting back up and trying again and again?
Because there are maybe a dozen times in our 8year journey where we want to quit.
And, yeah, just being smart enough isn'tenough.
Yes.
Speaking of trying to sound smart, I've noticedthere's a reason why, for example, Warren
Buffett will write his annual shareholderletter in, like, a 6th grade reading level.
(29:08):
I never understood why because I was, like,he's a pretty smart guy.
I'm pretty sure he could use more complicatedlanguage.
And then I was listening to a podcast and Ieventually figured out if he writes, like, in
12th, 13th grade reading level, less peopleunderstand him, which means less people might
be compelled to invest in Berkshire stock.
But if he writes in a 6th grade reading level,he now can access a broader audience, allowing
(29:32):
more people to understand what they do and morepeople to invest.
And I've noticed some of the smartest people inthe world can actually distill really complex
ideas into super simple things that make itvery easy to understand.
I agree with you.
The better you understand the concept, thesimpler you can explain it.
So I think there's a direct correlation betweenintelligence and explaining it
(29:55):
in simple terms.
The people that don't know something will usebig complex words and make it even more
complicated than it actually is.
You spent years in AI.
Is there anything that the average personshould be doing to capitalize on the
opportunity that AI presents today?
My understanding of AI in the simplest terms isit can now do things that humans historically
(30:17):
are able to do.
I feel that there are certain repeatable,monotonous tasks that if you ask yourself, what
am I doing every day that's, like, tedious andrepetitive, and how can AI potentially solve
that?
So we go through these, like, sort of casestudies and examples.
I had a hypothetical discussion with a friendwho's a doctor.
(30:38):
And we sit down, and we ask this, like, do youthink AI is going to replace doctors?
Well, let's go through what a doctor does on aday to day basis.
Which of these things are unique to whatdoctors can do?
Well, if you think about it, AI can now speakto you, it can see you, and it can hear and
understand.
And it has infinite memory, meaning I can giveit infinite memory, meaning I can give it
(30:59):
10,000 medical journals and books, and it'llhave perfect recall.
Almost better than a doctor that has to go andGoogle things up.
Right?
And it probably knows everything about thedifferent medicines and how you will react to
it and stuff.
So in the long term case, AI will probably beable to look at x rays, can look at images,
MRIs, look at maybe the skin condition, thephoto, and probably give you, with 90%
(31:26):
accuracy, what the issue is and what thetreatment would be and what medicine you should
take.
And then the doctor will probably just need tosay, okay.
I agree with this diagnosis.
Let's go ahead with it.
If that were the case, think about how manymore patients that a doctor could, see, with
the help of AI.
AI is, like, automating 90% of it.
(31:47):
So instead of seeing 10 patients a day, theycan see a 100 patients a day, And health care
could become way more affordable.
Now we're gonna be in industries where they'llsay, we can't trust the AI.
We need a human to do all of these things.
There's gonna be regulatory capture, all ofthat stuff.
But what I'm saying is every role and function,there's some pieces of it that can be
automated.
(32:07):
Pick a role, and then how do you just break itdown to infinite, like finite tasks and solve
that?
And at the end of the day, when you go throughthis exercise, we'll all come to this
realization, we're not that special, and we'realso programmable in many ways.
So, that you'll get a weird sense of the worldwhen you go through this exercise, but you
(32:29):
realize that we're not special, and there's alot of things that AI can do that And
to wrap it up here, we have a couple of closingquestions.
What was your greatest failure, and what didyou learn from it?
My greatest failure was probably giving up oncertain ideas too soon, and we iterated 7 times
on 7 different, products.
(32:51):
But I'm sure at least 1 or 2 of them, if wekept with it, it would have been really
effective.
My other biggest failure is following the hypeand the crowd and realizing, okay, I have to go
to these conferences, I have to go to theseevents, I have to network with people in order
to be successful.
Nothing is further from the truth.
(33:12):
I don't believe in my industry for what I'mbuilding.
Maybe it's true in finance and other indersindustries.
I hate networking.
Even if I go into a conference, I'll do mypresentation or keynote, and then I will leave.
Maybe if I have some prescheduled meetings,I'll do it, but I cannot wine, dine, schmooze.
That's not me, who who it is, and that's justmy personality.
(33:34):
So there are too many entrepreneurs that overoptimize for that, and that's a problem.
And so instead, you should be building, notnetworking.
100%.
Those, I've noticed when I interviewed PejhmaunNossat from Per.
He was telling me some of the smartest or someof the most successful entrepreneurs that he's
invested in, they don't you will never see themat some of these networking events because
(33:58):
they're actually building things.
I've noticed this is very true because early onwhen I was in New York City during my gap year,
I would try to go to as many of thesenetworking events as possible because I
thought, hey, I need to do that to becomesuccessful.
I realized about 80% of them were completewaste of time.
Like, you just have a bunch of randos, like,not really knowing what to do or what they're
doing that are kinda burning your time andtheir time.
(34:21):
I'm like, okay.
Sure.
Networking is fine.
But the way that most people do it isoverrated.
Instead, just find particular people that youwant to meet and learn from or particular hyper
focused events that are super high caliberpeople, bring some of the smartest people in
your industry in the world in one place.
Outside of that, I won't go to any othertraditional networking events.
(34:44):
But those that's what I stick it to.
Second, what's the best piece of advice you'veever received?
Focus on one thing and do it really well.
It's easy to want to parallel process.
And this is the hardest thing for me, is Iwanna work on 10 different ideas, at the same
time.
But it's better to see one thing to completionbefore jumping to the next one.
(35:07):
Because the moment you take your focus awayfrom that one thing, it will stall, it will
move slower.
So you have to force yourself to do notparallel process.
And that sounds hard, but there is only onething, maybe 2 if you're if you're fortunate
enough, that you should be focusing on at onetime.
What's one rule you live by that most peopledon't?
(35:29):
I think time is the most important thing, inanyone's life.
So I want to focus on using that time to dothings that are meaningful to me.
I am learning to say no to things that make mefeel uncomfortable or is not, like, worth my
time, and is not what's gonna bring mehappiness.
(35:50):
So it's not about the material stuff.
Like, I would rather pay for things to help meoptimize my time to do the things that I love.
And I think as we get older, we realize time isbest spent with the people you care about, with
products and goals and projects that you arepassionate about.
Because when you look back, that's what's gonnabe really important to you.
(36:13):
So optimize for time starting early.
And if I slid you over a phone and you couldcall your 20 year old self, would you call?
And if so, what would you say?
I would say keep at it, don't give up, and donot compromise on settling, for what's
convenient.
(36:33):
I think throughout my life, I've always had tomake hard decisions that were uncomfortable in
the short term that caused a lot of sufferingand, pain, but it made me grow as a person.
And, I think some amount of pain and,stretching is good for us.
So don't get complacent.
Just because you have a nice job at this, like,cushy company, don't get complacent.
(36:59):
And, way too many people get, way toocomfortable with where they're in life, and any
ambition and goals they have slowly starts todie.
So don't ever get too comfortable.
Awesome.
Well, I think that's a great way to end it.
We'll have a link to Fireflies in the episodedescription down below.
If anyone wants to check it out, you can there.
(37:19):
And thanks very much for joining, Chris.
I appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
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