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 can be designed to automate your group’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 way to an finish. I began with an issue that I confronted in my very own life and considered how I can resolve it.
That’s once I realized I wanted to study laptop science and ML to attain it. I used to be very keen about constructing software program that will save time and enhance productiveness.
I wished to have the ability to simply press a button and have some type of magic occur that will affect tens of millions of individuals. And ML and laptop science simply occurred to be these instruments that might assist resolve attention-grabbing 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 varied groups at Microsoft, together with the Workplace, Skype, Bing, and NLP groups. One of many tasks I labored on was known as ‘buyer voice,’ the place we have been capable of analyze and quantify customers’ in-app suggestions offered by MS Workplace. This received me within the NLP facet of issues.
However what impressed me to start out Fireflies had much less to do with the merchandise I labored on at Microsoft than the variety of conferences I had. Again then, the frequent factor for everybody was simply to say, “Hey, add that to my calendar. Let’s schedule a gathering.” Simply doing conferences again and again turned my life, and I wished to alter 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 method?
We pivoted 5-6 occasions earlier than attending to the place we’re right now.
After I first met with my co-founder Sam, it was in school, and we labored on totally different hackathon tasks. We did a number of inventive tasks, comparable to constructing drones, meals supply apps, and crypto wallets. That was initially only for enjoyable; there was no concept or objective to show that into an organization.
Our first severe foray into pure language processing was after we constructed a to-do checklist that will routinely be generated primarily based on the conversations. For instance, suppose I messaged somebody saying, “I’ll ship you this by subsequent Friday” or “Let’s meet up for espresso tomorrow” on LinkedIn, Slack, or different messaging channels. In that case, Fireflies might detect if I or somebody I’m talking to is promising to do one thing and add it to my to-do checklist. I’d get up each morning and take a look at my routinely generated to-do checklist.
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 an enormous space we should always deal with.
Voice is a blue ocean as a result of you possibly can simply look again on the e mail you despatched two years in the past, however when you had a gathering two hours in the past, you in all probability would have already forgotten all the pieces that was mentioned. So, it’s essential to report, 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 individuals to work throughout totally different time zones, so we’ve got to rent throughout many nations. We’ve got constructed a remote-first, global-first group with a 24-hour presence as a result of individuals have conferences across the clock.
At present, we’re virtually 100 individuals throughout 15 nations in a number of totally different time zones. Irrespective of whenever you log in, work is all the time occurring at Fireflies. There’s all the time some stage of overlap and handoff between individuals. Totally different teammates are working at totally different occasions from totally different areas.
What are a few of the core functionalities which can be presently provided by Fireflies?
There are literally lots.
We will transcribe notes at very excessive accuracy, then generate assembly summaries. We will additionally instantly present the motion objects, questions, and dates and occasions mentioned throughout calls with one click on.
We will routinely log the assembly notes inside your core purposes like CRMs, venture administration programs, Slack, and Notion. We’re additionally capable of analyze calls to supply totally different insights, comparable to how a lot you’re speaking, what number of filler phrases you employ, and how briskly you’re speaking.
Our core 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 all the time 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 need to find out 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 matters.
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, concentrate on the conversations, and be extra current in conferences.
Fireflies is engaged on releasing a number of recent options, might you focus on some what’s presently on the roadmap?
We hope to assist a number of languages quickly and have simply rolled out the video seize and recording function. We lately launched channels so you possibly can arrange your conferences throughout many various departments extra succinctly.
We’ve got many extra thrilling issues on the roadmap. We’ll additionally supply a worldwide search quickly, which implies you possibly can 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 be capable of open up the market exponentially to extra individuals.
What’s your imaginative and prescient for the way forward for work?
My imaginative and prescient for the way forward for work is that we are going to have a number of workflow automation and instruments to auto-complete duties in order that we will spend extra time on value-add stuff slightly than mundane, repetitive duties.
There are nonetheless so many organizations the place individuals are copying and pasting the identical type of issues into totally different spreadsheets, shifting recordsdata, and doing a number of tedious, low-value organizational duties.
I believe a number of these repetitive jobs will get automated, and other people can have an opportunity to work on extra inventive, value-add stuff uniquely positioned for people.
Fireflies has succeeded in rising exponentially even with little or no advertising spend, what do you attribute this success to?
We constructed a product-led development firm, that means we begin with the tip customers in thoughts, and that’s how adoption grows over time. We’re very clear—our pricing is accessible on the web site.
We cut back friction; any particular person, whether or not a single guide or a thousand-person group, can get began shortly. We’ve got 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 awesome dialog and will get extra individuals . Or when the individuals obtain the assembly recap afterward, they’re like, “That is superior. I wanna join Fireflies.”
Is there anything that you just wish to share about Fireflies?
I believe it’s essential to grasp how costly conferences actually value and the way a lot time is wasted in conferences. In line 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. If you get 5-6 executive-level individuals for a gathering, that’s extraordinarily costly when it comes to the time and alternative value of what they may have been doing in any other case.
We’ve got an enormous mission of constructing conferences extra productive, which may very well be value billions of time and power saved, and serving to organizations make higher choices.
Thanks for the nice interview, readers who want to study extra and check out some implausible enterprise AI instruments ought to go to Fireflies.ai.
