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

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

What initially attracted you to laptop science and machine studying?

My attraction in the direction of laptop science and machine studying was extra of a method to an finish. I began with an issue that I confronted in my very own life and considered how I can remedy it.

That’s after I realized I wanted to study laptop science and ML to attain it. I used to be very obsessed with constructing software program that will save time and enhance productiveness.

I wished to have the ability to simply press a button and have some form of magic occur that will affect thousands and thousands of individuals. And ML and laptop science simply occurred to be these instruments that might assist remedy fascinating issues and construct nice apps.

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

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

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

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

We pivoted 5-6 instances earlier than attending to the place we’re as we speak.

Once I first met with my co-founder Sam, it was in school, and we labored on completely different hackathon initiatives. We did a number of artistic initiatives, akin to constructing drones, meals supply apps, and crypto wallets. That was initially only for enjoyable; there was no thought or objective to show that into an organization.

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

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

Voice is a blue ocean as a result of you may simply look again on the e mail you despatched two years in the past, however for those who had a gathering two hours in the past, you most likely would have already forgotten every little thing that was mentioned. So, it’s essential to file, transcribe, and make these conferences searchable.

May you focus on a few of the challenges behind constructing a 24/7 tradition for software program that’s worldwide in scope?

The primary problem is getting folks to work throughout completely different time zones, so we now have to rent throughout many nations. Now we have constructed a remote-first, global-first group with a 24-hour presence as a result of folks have conferences across the clock.

At present, we’re virtually 100 folks throughout 15 nations in a number of completely different time zones. Irrespective of whenever you log in, work is at all times taking place at Fireflies. There’s at all times some degree of overlap and handoff between folks. Totally different teammates are working at completely different instances from completely different areas.

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

There are literally so much.

We will transcribe notes at very excessive accuracy, then generate assembly summaries. We will additionally instantly present the motion objects, questions, and dates and instances mentioned throughout calls with one click on.

We will routinely log the assembly notes inside your core purposes like CRMs, undertaking administration methods, Slack, and Notion. We’re additionally capable of analyze calls to supply completely different insights, akin to how a lot you’re speaking, what number of filler phrases you utilize, and how briskly you’re speaking.

Our core objective is that will help you overview a one-hour name in lower than 5 minutes

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

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

In contrast to Wiki paperwork and different stuff that get stale over time, your voice conversations are at all times self-updating. Fireflies helps create a information base to your whole group.

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

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

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

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

Now we have many extra thrilling issues on the roadmap. We’ll additionally provide a worldwide search quickly, which implies you may search throughout all your conferences, not simply inside a person assembly. However I’m actually thrilled about international languages as a result of that naturally will have the ability to open up the market exponentially to extra folks.

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

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

There are nonetheless so many organizations the place persons are copying and pasting the identical form of issues into completely different spreadsheets, transferring recordsdata, and doing a number of tedious, low-value organizational duties.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel it’s necessary to know how costly conferences actually price and the way a lot time is wasted in conferences. In accordance with a survey, 40% of individuals mentioned their conferences are unproductive. They’ve so many redundant conferences that might have been emails.

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

Now we have a large mission of constructing conferences extra productive, which could possibly be value billions of time and power saved, and serving to organizations make higher selections.

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