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 are designed to automate your group’s workflow.
What initially attracted you to pc science and machine studying?
My attraction in direction of pc science and machine studying was extra of a method to an finish. I began with an issue that I confronted in my very own life and thought of how I can clear up it.
That’s after I realized I wanted to study pc science and ML to realize it. I used to be very enthusiastic about constructing software program that may save time and increase productiveness.
I needed to have the ability to simply press a button and have some type of magic occur that may affect tens of millions of individuals. And ML and pc science simply occurred to be these instruments that might assist clear up fascinating issues and construct nice apps.
Earlier than Fireflies you have been a product supervisor at Microsoft, might you talk about how this impressed the imaginative and prescient behind Fireflies?
I labored with 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 offered by means of MS Workplace. This obtained me within the NLP aspect of issues.
However what impressed me to start out Fireflies had much less to do with the merchandise I labored on at Microsoft than the variety of conferences I had. Again then, the widespread factor for everybody was simply to say, “Hey, add that to my calendar. Let’s schedule a gathering.” Simply doing conferences time and again grew to become my life, and I needed to alter that. I needed to make conferences extra productive and environment friendly; that was the inspiration behind Fireflies.
What number of pivots have been essential to land on the present formulation?
We pivoted 5-6 occasions earlier than attending to the place we’re at present.
After I first met with my co-founder Sam, it was in school, and we labored on totally different hackathon initiatives. We did a variety of artistic initiatives, similar to constructing drones, meals supply apps, and crypto wallets. That was initially only for enjoyable; there was no concept or purpose to show that into an organization.
Our first critical foray into pure language processing was once we constructed a to-do listing that may robotically be generated primarily based on the conversations. For instance, suppose I messaged somebody saying, “I’ll ship you this by subsequent Friday” or “Let’s meet up for espresso tomorrow” on LinkedIn, Slack, or different messaging channels. In that case, Fireflies might detect if I or somebody I’m talking to is promising to do one thing and add it to my to-do listing. I might get up each morning and take a look at my robotically generated to-do listing.
It was a cool concept that grew to become our segway into this house. We constructed e mail extensions, chatbots, and Slack bots. Ultimately, 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 should you had a gathering two hours in the past, you most likely would have already forgotten every part that was stated. So, it’s essential to report, transcribe, and make these conferences searchable.
Might you talk about 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 totally different time zones, so we have now to rent throughout many international locations. 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 international locations in a number of totally different time zones. Regardless of once you log in, work is all the time occurring at Fireflies. There’s all the time some stage of overlap and handoff between folks. Totally different teammates are working at totally different occasions from totally different areas.
What are a few of the core functionalities which are at the moment provided by Fireflies?
There are literally rather a lot.
We are able to transcribe notes at very excessive accuracy, then generate assembly summaries. We are able to additionally instantly present the motion gadgets, questions, and dates and occasions mentioned throughout calls with one click on.
We are able to robotically log the assembly notes inside your core purposes like CRMs, venture administration programs, Slack, and Notion. We’re additionally capable of analyze calls to supply totally different insights, similar to how a lot you’re speaking, what number of filler phrases you employ, and how briskly you’re speaking.
Our core purpose is that will help you evaluate a one-hour name in lower than 5 minutes
What are some examples of how Fireflies makes enterprises extra productive?
Fireflies is extraordinarily priceless 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 on your total group.
It’s a self-updating information base that helps you seek for any info you need 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 robotically fills out your CRM (and different apps), making you extremely productive. It additionally makes you extra educated and personable, permitting you to do fewer administrative duties, deal with the conversations, and be extra current in conferences.
Fireflies is engaged on releasing a bunch of recent options, might you talk about some what’s at the moment on the roadmap?
We hope to assist a number of languages quickly and have simply rolled out the video seize and recording characteristic. We just lately launched channels so you may arrange your conferences throughout many various departments extra succinctly.
Now we have many extra thrilling issues on the roadmap. We’ll additionally supply a world search quickly, which implies you may search throughout your entire conferences, not simply inside a person assembly. However I’m actually thrilled about international languages as a result of that naturally will be capable of open up the market exponentially to extra 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 variety of workflow automation and instruments to auto-complete duties in order that we will spend extra time on value-add stuff moderately than mundane, repetitive duties.
There are nonetheless so many organizations the place persons are copying and pasting the identical type of issues into totally different spreadsheets, transferring information, and doing a variety of tedious, low-value organizational duties.
I feel a variety of these repetitive jobs will get automated, and folks 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 and marketing spend, what do you attribute this success to?
We constructed a product-led development firm, that means we begin with the tip customers in thoughts, and that’s how adoption grows over time. We’re very clear—our pricing is obtainable on the web site.
We cut back friction; any individual, whether or not a single marketing consultant or a thousand-person group, can get began shortly. Now we have a freemium plan that anybody can attempt utilizing the free trial of our enterprise tier so that folks can use it, expertise it, perceive the worth, and swipe their bank card afterward and pay for it.
Conferences are additionally naturally viral and Fireflies displaying up on these calls helps begin an awesome 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 anything that you just want to share about Fireflies?
I feel it’s necessary to grasp how costly conferences really value and the way a lot time is wasted in conferences. Based on a survey, 40% of individuals stated their conferences are unproductive. They’ve so many redundant conferences that might have been emails.
Organizations are losing 20-30 billion {dollars} value of cash in having conferences. If you get 5-6 executive-level folks for a gathering, that’s extraordinarily costly by way of the time and alternative value of what they might have been doing in any other case.
Now we have a large mission of creating 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 good interview, readers who want to study extra and take a look at out some unbelievable enterprise AI instruments ought to go to Fireflies.ai.
