75% of Fortune 500 Uses This AI Meeting Tool | Krish Ramineni | Fireflies

0:00 Three out of every five startup unicorns in India are using Fireflies. Honestly, I was just out here trying to build like a fun tool for myself. >> the early days like? >> It was really tough time between 2016 to 2019 cuz there was almost zero progress and every time we launched a product, it would fail and we'd have to go back to the beginning and we were going to run out of money and my friend from college wrote a check for $25,000 and that kept the lights on. One year before the rest of the world got access to ChatGPT, the note Kosla connected me with Sam Altman.

0:26 The rest was history at that point because the truth is we barely touched our series A money before we became profitable. >> How are you helping companies become more efficient? >> Built this note taker, it's used across more than 75% of the Fortune 500. 20 million people a month where Fireflies is taking notes for. I was invited to Parliament. Fireflies was being used in Parliament and in fact when the king had a annual speech, uh they used Fireflies to take the notes and the transcripts.

0:51 We are in over 100 countries. We now support over 100 different languages. >> What's the magical outcome that you hold for Fireflies moving forward? >> So instead of you having to go to AI, AI will go do the discovery calls for sales. Before I go to a meeting, Fireflies preps me about the person I'm about to meet. This is what you guys talked about last time. Here's what he's doing with his company. We're taking all the lessons we learned from building those first five, six products that failed and now bringing Fireflies into truly becoming this like personal assistant for work. The India that I grew up in versus the India now, it's light years apart. It's turning out incredible startups, the rate of innovation, the digital adoption that's in India. So India is in such an incredible place right now.

1:26 >> From running out of classrooms as a kid in India to building a billion-dollar AI company with just 19 million raised. My guest today is Krish Ramineni, founder of Fireflies. The tool that is quietly become the note taker for 75% of the Fortune 500 and 20 million people a month. We talk about failure, staying profitable in an era of fundraising madness, and what's next for the future of meetings. Now I bring you Krish. Krish, so excited to have you on the 1947 Rise Show.

1:57 Hi Shuba, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Man, I've been a long time fan of Fred at Fireflies. I've been a I've been a user for a long long time. I love it. It's very helpful. It's It's making me more productive. And as we know, Krish, you were the pioneer in building a you know, a company which is really around note-taking. And today Fireflies is profitable. You've only raised $19 million and you all are valued over a billion dollar.

2:36 Before we get into that, Krish, I want to go back a bit. Who was Krish when he was growing up in India and then we'll transition into you know, your your move to the US and what was the life like? Yeah, I still remember a few things from growing up in India. I moved to America when I was five. Before that, I had spent time in India. I grew up around my grandparents. I definitely I think was pampered quite a bit. And I think my parents were worried that I wouldn't amount to anything cuz I was getting spoiled and not really motivated about studying or academics. So, my early trajectory probably wasn't the greatest.

3:21 I hated school growing up. I didn't want to go to school. I would like to run out of the classroom when I was a kid. So, I never found education to be fun. Things changed when I got to America. I tried to apply myself a lot more. But I think my formative years in India when I was there versus when I kept going back for summer holidays, so much has changed and India is in such an incredible place right now. It's churning out incredible startups.

3:50 The rate of innovation, the digital adoption that's in India. So, the India that I grew up in versus the India now, it's light years apart. So, uh, but it was definitely something where it kept me close to my culture, close to the language, the movies, all of that stuff I still hold near and dear today. Mhm. Uh, you know, dad got a job at Oracle. That was the reason of you guys moving to US. And Chris, you know, again, like we are really a byproduct of environment. What really shaped you the most, you know, from age five to until, you know, college days and until you started Fireflies?

4:34 I grew up in Silicon Valley, the heart of the Bay Area, where there were a lot of people in technology, a lot of Indians that moved during the dot com bubble, the early 2000s. So, I was a byproduct of that. Everyone I knew, every uncle, uh, every relative, every cousin, they all were working in tech. So, it almost felt inevitable that you would end up going into technology. My parents hoped that I would be a doctor, and I let them down, disappointed them in that direction. I didn't see myself going into tech or engineering or any of that stuff, but one way or the other, I fell in love with building products, entrepreneurship, when I was in school.

5:18 And instead of going into other career tracks, I got pulled back into this. The other thing was, when I was in university, I realized I wanted to be back in California, and I thought California would be the place to be if you want to build a generational company. And I also wanted to be close to home. So, that was also a motivating factor, I would say, at that time. And growing up, being in a very competitive environment, I went to a public school, just a normal public school, but the level of talent and smart people at that school, uh, there was a high Asian population. Everyone just was academically really, really good. And I looking back, I would say that my high school was more difficult for me than my university. And that too, I went to Penn. It was an Ivy League. Uh, you have kids from Wharton. You have kids in engineering who are incredibly smart.

6:11 But there was something about going to that public high school where you're really competing. That's where I learned a lot. That's where my work ethic was developed. And when I went to college, it was a lot easier. So, I am a byproduct of my environment growing up in Silicon Valley, being surrounded by technology companies. And that familiarity might have, one way or the other, led me into going into the startup world much later. Mhm. You became one of the youngest product manager at, uh, Microsoft.

6:44 Chris, uh, tell us how did that happen? What was the story behind it? And what did you learn at Microsoft? One of the things that was interesting, as I said from my childhood, was I did not like school. And I couldn't wait for the day that I graduated school. Uh, I had this unique opportunity where I got a full-time job by the time I finished my sophomore year, my second year in university. And I went to my counselor and I said, "Hey, I don't want to study for 2 more years, but I can't drop out either. My parents will kill me. So, I need to figure out how to graduate. Uh, I need to do 2 years worth of courses in 1 year." So, I ended up taking 7, 8 courses a semester. Uh, I was also applying for full-time opportunities and flying out to different places. That's when the Microsoft opportunity came up.

7:33 So, by the time I graduated college, I was 20, maybe 21. And when I applied to Microsoft, I wasn't even very serious about it because I said, "Look, I want to be back in California. I already have a job offer lined up in California." But, when I went to that interview, it was really low pressure, low stakes for me. I said, "Whatever happens, happens." So, I had a very um free-flowing interview process, and I said, "Okay, it's fine if I don't get selected." What ended up happening during that interview process was after my first three rounds, um I was just very confident, almost like answering questions before the interviewer was even asking them. I would be like, "Hey, I know you're going to ask me this next, so let me just tell you the answer now." So, I was just a little overconfident, I would say. And uh for my last interview, they said, "Hey, we're not going to have you interview with the guy you're scheduled with.

8:25 Uh we're going to have someone else interview you." And I thought, "Man, I must have messed up. Maybe I was a little bit too uh cocky, a little too overconfident." And then the person that ended up interviewing me was a vice president at Microsoft at the time, and I had no idea what his role was when we were interviewing. And uh we had a really healthy conversation. Um and uh I got I heard back, and uh Microsoft said, "Hey, we'd love to hire you. There's a couple other candidates, but you're our first choice."

8:55 Uh and then they gave me an offer that I couldn't ignore at the time. And they doubled my stock options, and I was just very excited to say yes. So, finished school in 3 years, and then I didn't really have a vacation or summer vacation after I graduated. In fact, I didn't even go to my graduation ceremony. Uh to this day, my parents are unhappy that I didn't inform them that I was graduating early. I didn't tell them till a few weeks before I graduated uni.

9:22 And uh when I flew back home, my mom was very skeptical. She was like, "Did you really graduate university, or uh are you lying to me? Uh where is the diploma? Why aren't you at your graduation ceremony?" I'm like, "No, I don't want to go to my graduation ceremony. I don't want to sit there for 4 hours and waste my time. They'll mail the diploma, so don't worry. Uh so they were worried that I had dropped out of school. Uh but yeah, just thinking about all these other fun times.

9:47 Uh ended up working at Microsoft working on one of their first growth and analytics teams for Office. Got a chance to work on so many different surface areas there while I was uh working with teams. I was a product manager uh at the time. Again, being 20 21 working with people in their 40s, 50s, veterans that have been around for 20 plus years. It was a transformative experience. I had nothing but great things to say about Microsoft. Um and in fact, like I got promoted within the first 8 months. Uh things were great. Back then, the Microsoft stock was $40 a share. Uh I think recently it was as high as $500 a share. So, I had to make a hard decision at that time where I decided to leave Microsoft and then go end up doing my startup. Uh and we kind of did the math of what I left on the table, like the amount of shares and the money. So, had I stayed at Microsoft, those shares would today be worth a million dollars.

10:49 So, technically I left a million dollars on the table. Don't tell my parents that, but that was a a decision that we made at that time and then I never looked back. Uh but I really told myself, "Look, it's not about the money. What's more important to me in my 20s is I want to optimize for learning. You can't do this stuff again uh when you're older. So, might as well take the risk." And I told myself, "I'm going to give myself 1 year to go do this startup." That 1 year turned into 3 years. Uh there were a lot of trial and error, a lot of failure along the way, uh a lot of questions from my family about what are you doing? You left a six-figure job. Uh you were on track. You could have bought a house.

11:29 You were checking all of the immigrant dreams, right? Moving to America. And here I was sitting at home trying to get the startup off the ground, failing, not getting any customers. Uh so, it was really tough time between 2016 to 2019 cuz there was almost zero progress and every time we launched a product, it would fail and we'd have to go back to the beginning. So, yeah, it was a it was a long complicated uh journey. Uh but, I think I made the right decision looking back now. I know hindsight is uh 20/20, but at the time it didn't seem like the right decision. Uh but, today I can say that because things worked out, but you know, worst case I would have said, "Okay, I'm going to go back and get a a job at a tech company." At a tech company. Krish, let's talk about those 3 years. Uh let's begin with how did you identify your co-founder? And and, you know, what were those uh the what what were the ideas that uh you worked on and and and and, you know, they kind of like didn't take off?

12:32 Yeah, well And and another one I would say uh Krish, uh and what kept you going, man? It was hard. Like there was pressure going on, one startup is not working, family is not happy they're unhappy, and what kept you going? When we were in school, uh my co-founder and I had met. He went to MIT, I went to Penn, we met through mutual friends. We had worked on a couple interesting consumer products. One was like this drone delivery product. One was like a crypto uh product where you can buy and sell stuff.

13:04 Almost like a Venmo using crypto at the time. So, we tried a lot of different things. We wanted to build some social product at the time cuz right, the best thing to do was, "Wow, Snapchat, look how big of a company it became. Let's go try to build another consumer type product." And then after a consumer type product, it was like these marketplaces like Airbnb, Uber, uh food delivery apps like DoorDash. So, we wanted to do something like that. We just followed the trends. We didn't know any better.

13:29 Uh but that was just college and there whether it worked or not didn't matter cuz we were just doing it for fun, applying to hackathons, and uh submitting our projects. We won a couple thousand dollars from uh doing all those uh things. So, I thought this was just really really fun. And then what ended up happening was that summer after I left Microsoft, I went to Boston. Uh my co-founder Sam had just graduated from MIT at the time. We started uh working on a couple different things. I thought it was just going to be something for the summer and then I would go off and go to grad school. I had gotten into Cambridge. I was literally getting my visa ready uh to go go to Cambridge and I always wanted to live in the UK and go to London. So, this was my opportunity. It was like a little break before I figured things out.

14:14 And uh we started working on a few things. We talked to some VCs. We just kind of went through that summer and said, "Hey, this could be a really interesting opportunity. We should go start a company." We had no conviction of what to build other than we need to start a company. That's that's that's it. And uh I had one condition, which was if we're going to start a company, we need to be in San Francisco. We need to be in the Bay Area. My selfish reason was I could be back home, but the other reason is that's where the venture capitalists were, that's where the funding is, and that's where we need to be. So, we went back to California um and then the initial couple products all were actually around AI. Again, this is 2016 to 2019. There was no chat GPT.

14:57 There's no LLMs. AI was considered basically a place where you burn money and you don't get any real products cuz a lot of companies, the closest thing you had was like chatbots, right? So, we started building uh for the AI space and our first couple products were all around like going through your emails, going through your uh messages, and helping you organize all of the information in those chats, right? Like that was the core product. And then the other product we were trying to build was like a way to summarize all of the documents and chats and all of that stuff in your organization. Uh we built this really cool Chrome extension which would track whenever you're having conversations on like LinkedIn or on Gmail and whenever there was some work that would come up from that uh conversation, it would create an automatic task manager and track your tasks. So all of this stuff was novel at the time.

15:53 We applied to YC three times. We got rejected all three times. We got to the final round interviews twice and the feedback was usually YC says you need to dream big, you need to go big. And I think the feedback from them was you're aiming too big. This technology is not really feasible today. So come back when it actually works reliably, which is fair at that time uh the feedback that they were giving. But uh yeah, like no one really thought AI could be a thing. And then finally, we know as we were trying to do all of this stuff, we said, "Look, AI might not be perfect today. So we need to find a use case where it can still work even if it's not perfect."

16:31 And the use case we ended up picking was had to be something that people did every day, which was having meetings. And so we ended up uh saying, "What if we could create a way to search back through all of your conversations? Imagine if you could remember what you said one year ago, five years ago." That was the problem statement we were trying to solve. We weren't trying to solve perfect transcription. We weren't trying to solve notes because the technology wasn't good enough. In fact, transcription was not accurate and it was very expensive. So what we wanted to do was a way for you to search through your conversations similarly how you can search through your Gmail, right? Or your chats on WhatsApp. So that's what we started building and uh that was the use case that we started to build around. And then as we started building it, we realized all of this knowledge that exists inside an organization was never captured before. And it is the true knowledge cuz you can have documents, you can have wikis, you can have your notion, but all of those are stale.

17:31 The only thing that is accurate and up-to-date all the time is the meetings and conversations you have with your teammates because you could have made a decision 6 months ago, someone could have written a notion document, but then you could have changed your decision six times along the way in different meetings, but if a new hire comes in and they read the notion doc, they think the old decision was the one that is what's accurate. So, what our vision turned into was first building this knowledge base for your organization built around conversations.

18:00 And then we ended up working with OpenAI. That's when we got early access to their GPT-3 at the time, so 1 year before the rest of the world got access to ChatGPT. Our investors at Costla Ventures who did our series A, Vinod Khosla connected me with Sam Altman, and the rest was history at that point because everything we had wanted to do now became possible because the technology was good enough, the costs were going down, and transcription was becoming good enough.

18:31 So, not only did we build this really great searchable archive of your past conversations, but we could actually build really good transcripts, really good meeting notes, really good summaries, and then we built all these integrations and then we started building a traditional, you know, SaaS B2B company. And here I was when I started the company in 2016, I didn't even know what Salesforce was, I didn't even know what a CRM was, to being now one of the largest integrators into all the CRMs in the world from Zoho to Pipedrive to FreshWorks.

19:04 So, I grew a lot as a person and then the technology really became a reality. Chris, you know, I I've heard early days at Fireflies, basically, uh you know, you and your founder your co-founder, you pretended to be an AI bot, which was called Fred. So, maybe tell us like, you know, what were the early days like and then in you know, the first few years post chat GPT, uh the the API that you got through OpenAI. And then we'll get into uh you know, what's the magical outcome that you hold for Fireflies moving forward.

19:49 Well, at the time, we had built five products. We did the engineering first, and then when we launched it, it just didn't work out. So, this time around what we said is before we write any code, we need to validate the idea. So, we reached out to 10 of our close friends and said, "How much would you pay if you had a personal assistant that could take notes for you and give you an engine where you can search back through conversations?" So, we had used transcription engine, but then what they really wanted was not just a way to search back through the conversations, but they wanted notes.

20:20 And so, we had a human in the loop process where we would take notes for like our close friends. They'd be paying like $100 to $150 per month. We validated the idea. And now the problem was the opposite. There is demand. Now we need to figure out how to build the technology for it to be legit. So, before we raised any money or did anything at scale, we said we need to solve the technology problem. And so, we spent almost a year building out the technology, removing all the human elements, and then that's when we launched to our beta users. Once we started getting feedback, um we went out to raise funding. We did our seed round, which was about a four to 4.5 million dollar round.

21:03 So, I think there's some misconception online that maybe a people are writing notes even today and I'm telling you like you can't have humans write billions of meetings worth of notes today. Fireflies is fully automated. It has been fully automated since like the end of 2018. And yeah, it was like a proof of concept thing that we had done at the time and the people that we were working with knew that we were having like a human in the loop almost like a gig economy type thing, right? Like that was the sort of playbook we tried to do at the time. In fact, some investors told us maybe you should just do an executive assistant as a higher service where you use some technology and some humans, but that was not a business I was interested in.

21:46 I wanted to be fully automated and I wanted to have SAS margins. So we ended up building out the full tech, but yeah, it was a long journey, a lot of trial and error. Yeah, yeah. Uh Chris, maybe talk about uh you can give few examples how are you helping companies become more efficient uh and also moving forward would this be only a note-taking company or what what would it become eventually?

22:18 So we're going through a very interesting phase at Fireflies where we built this note-taker. It's used across more than 75% of the Fortune 500, 20 million people a month where Fireflies is taking notes for. So we've really nailed that use case and we thought about what else can Fireflies do that can really drive value for our customers. So as a result, we're building multiple new products here at Fireflies, some related to meetings and some beyond meetings. One of the first products we rolled out is voice agents where the AI can go and take meetings on your behalf. So instead of you having to go do the screening interview or the job interview, the AI will go interview the candidates or the AI will go do the discovery calls for sales or the AI will go do the customer interviews, customer testimonial stuff that you have to do. Who knows, maybe the AI can also do podcast interviews at some point in time. And the beauty of this is a lot of our customers have the same repetitive calls over and over again, and can get tiring. Fireflies can understand those and then go ahead and take those calls for you. So, that's a new product we've rolled out this year, and I'm very excited about that. We've also started working on making Fireflies have more skills than just taking notes. In fact, Fireflies now has 200-plus skills where it can write emails, it can create reports, it can score your candidates, it can analyze all of your sales calls and tell you where the deals are going to fail.

23:46 So, it does all of these sort of things. And some of the top skills that we have, we bundled into what we call a personal assistant. So, one is Fireflies goes through all my meetings, all my emails, all my Slack messages, and every morning gives me a daily digest. Before I go to a meeting, Fireflies preps me about the person I'm about to meet. It goes and does research online about the person, looks at my past calls, our previous agendas, and tells me, "Hey, you're about to meet Shiva. This is your connection. This is how you got introduced. This is what you guys talked about last time. Here's what he's doing with his company." So, it's almost like, you know, your personal secretary, your personal assistant. Another one is, remember that original idea I told you about tracking tasks from conversations?

24:25 So, we're building a task manager that goes through all my meetings, all of my e- all of my Slack messages, and all of my conversations that I've had and emails, and it starts creating like a task manager log for me. And then it starts assigning those tasks to different people based on what I said in those meetings. So, if I said, "Hey, can you do this for me?" it'll automatically track it for me, and I have my own like AI-powered task manager. So, these are some of the things we're doing. We're taking all the lessons we learned from building those first five, six products that failed, and now bringing Fireflies into truly becoming this like personal assistant for work. And I'm really excited about that. So so many more products coming out this year.

25:05 But we're also making sure that the core meetings product still remains world-class. So one of the common feedbacks we would get from people is hey look, I love Fireflies. I love the notes. I love the integrations. You guys have an API, MCP, everything is great. But there is a certain number of customers where I want Fireflies where I don't have the meeting bot in my meetings. And initially we were hesitant, but then we doubled down and said okay, let's build a desktop app where Fireflies can take meeting notes for you without having a bot in the meeting. So we just rolled that out to our early set of customers and I am so excited by the feedback and the amount of usage and stickiness. So that also is a really compelling thing. So whether you are using Fireflies in person, you can use our mobile app. Whether you're using it in a Zoom call, you can use our bot or you can have the desktop app take notes. So we're making sure that the core product stays fantastic while expanding into multiple products. And this is a different ballgame now for me as an entrepreneur because a lot of people are one-trick ponies.

26:06 They can only build one product and make that successful. And that's fine. You can build a massive business around that. But now I have to evolve. I have to grow. My team has to change the way we work to build multiple products and build a suite of tools that people can use. And that's going to be an interesting journey for us over the next couple years. Yeah. Chris, maybe we can talk about few of the testimonials that you've gotten, you know, from your customers and and you know, after seeing those testimonials you were just pumped for the future.

26:39 Yeah. There's this thing that I felt like are we building something that's actually important for people? Do people actually care? Is this a painkiller or is it a vitamin? And when And got feedback from some people where they're saying, "Look, I can't go to a meeting without Fireflies. Like I will panic if the Fireflies note-taker is not invited to that meeting cuz I am so reliant on the notes that come afterwards. Like it gives me a sense of security, assurance that everything I'm being is that's being said is being turned into notes afterwards." So, that puts a lot of responsibility on us to never miss a meeting, to be really reliable, and it's hard to build this sort of technology at scale to do billions of meetings and conversations over and over again, and we are in over 100 countries. So, it has to be up during America time zone, but also India and like Europe and Africa. So, like the Middle East and that has been like just absolutely like a very big responsibility for us.

27:40 Another thing is like we've helped companies save millions of dollars because they had Fireflies in the meeting when they were working with vendors, negotiating contracts, they have disagreements. Fireflies becomes their final arbiter of truth, which ends up helping them in many ways in terms of, you know, winning contracts and then making sure that the deals are happening smoothly. I was recently in London and I was invited to Parliament by someone that worked there and they told me that Fireflies was being used in Parliament sessions. And in fact, when the King had a conversation where he does a speech annual speech, they use Fireflies to take the notes and the transcripts and he was able to get access to that by the time he went back home, which was insane and they thought it was like magic because it would usually take a week and you have human transcribers and note-takers and it would have to go through multiple revisions. And people actually thought that the script that they got must have been like some pre-made script of like the King's speech.

28:45 But they were like, "No, no, no, we never had a pre-made script. This is literally from the conversation that just happened 30 minutes ago." So, that was a really game-changing use case for us and I'm like, "Wow, like it's getting noticed in so many places." Um, the thing that I've also realized that's been super game-changing for me and it's also relevant uh, for India is we now support over 100 different languages and there are companies where people speak English, Hindi, Spanish, French, there's so many different languages and Fireflies can now work seamlessly across all of those languages and it's starting to reduce barriers and silos, uh, which is amazing because if you can solve the communication gaps that people have inside an organization and the knowledge that's lost from those conversations, you will ship faster, you'll move faster, you're going to have a better hiring culture, you're going to close more sales. So, there's something really powerful about all of these conversations and communication that's happening in an org and if you can bridge that gap with both the note-taking and the uh, transcripts and the search, um, you can really change the trajectory of a company and so I didn't think about all this when I started the company, but seeing these like pieces of feedback and use cases from customers, uh, it got me excited and honestly, I was just out here trying to build like a fun tool for myself uh, and it turned into something that people literally run their business on.

30:09 Talking about India, Krish, uh, you know, India seems like a massive market for you in terms of both uh, customers and uh, you know, product and engineering coming out from India for Fireflies. Maybe talk about that. You've been a global company right from the beginning. What was the thought process like? Uh, you know, who told you or what made you to hire product folks and engineering folks and how was the journey uh, when it comes to selling to customers in India?

30:47 Fireflies is a testament and proof that there is incredible talent across the world, whether it's in India, whether it's in Latin America, whether it's in Europe, whether it's in the Middle East. Uh we wanted to build a global company from day one. And there is incredible talent I feel like sometimes there's just so much bias towards Silicon Valley and that you can only build a company in Silicon Valley. Even when I started, I thought the only way we could build a company was by being in San Francisco.

31:14 We've broken every one of those stereotypes over the last five to six years where we built a global company, incredible talent across like engineering, across product, across sales, customer success. And India became a cool crucial part of our journey. Well, one is we couldn't really scale up in Silicon Valley because we hadn't raised that much money. Like who was going to join Fireflies at the time, right? Like I don't know if someone that's working at Google who has a comfortable cushy job would want to come join a startup like ours, right? There's too much risk. Uh so it took a lot of belief for people to initially join Fireflies. Now it seems obvious that like it were a billion-dollar business and we've scaled, but at the time in the first three four years, they're taking a big risk. Like they're leaving these other jobs, these stable jobs at big tech companies to come here. So I like to say Fireflies isn't like the best place for you to work if you work at a big tech company. If you like startups, if you like hustle, if you like uncertainty, and you like a roller coaster, that's when you come and join Fireflies.

32:18 Um and really the credit goes to our team who had that conviction, especially our first 20 30 hires, where they literally took a leap of faith to join the company. You know, India plays a big part of that. And not just in terms of our team, but the amount of customers we have in India is really incredible. My team had told me that three out of every five startup unicorns, so three out of every five startup unicorns in India are using Fireflies, which is amazing to see that one, there's so many billion-dollar companies in India, and to have those people as our customers or have users from there is amazing. And I also think there's advantages to building a global team because we've had situations where there will be a customer come in and they'll need the demo in another language, but someone on our team who speaks French can handle that demo. And they're not even a salesperson, they're in engineering. So we all come together, we all like work together, and that's something that's been really refreshing. The only challenge is you have to work across like 10 plus time zones. So sometimes I'm up at 2:00 a.m. having meetings with my team so that we can all meet in one place, uh but that's manageable. That's something I can uh deal with.

33:29 Yeah. Uh Chris, you've been uh you know, working with India both in terms of uh customers in India and of course your team in India. What's something that excites you the most about India's tech ecosystem or in other words, what's something still underweighted at the moment? Well, one of the things is the amount of engineering graduates that are in India and the number of people you give tools like Claude Code or Cursor to, they're going to be 10x more powerful. So the amount of talent that's available that is all engineering oriented and minded is fantastic. You know what's an interesting story? There are people on our sales team, customer success team, our head of HR, even in our marketing team who all studied engineering in school. So I like having an engineering DNA, engineering mindset across my org, not just for the people that write code, but all of our functions. So that's something that India does really well. I know a lot of people wonder why am I going to school and studying engineering when I'm not going to ever use it, but it's a really a way of thinking and it's a way of looking at the world. And even if you study engineering, but you go into sales or marketing, you are going to have a unique skill set, unique problem-solving skill set. And I think India has a large pool of incredible talent that has that equipment.

34:56 And they say, you know, India is brutal when it comes to paying for product. Chris, how much of your revenue, or you could say, you know, uh how big of a India market for you in terms of customers among other countries? Yeah, in terms of like paying customers, maybe in the top five. Yes, it's true that in India customers are having a lower propensity to pay. But for me, we have already a very generous freemium product. And if people are finding value, they'll naturally upgrade. So, for me getting those people to pay wasn't the first thing that I thought about. The first thing I thought about is I want everyone to use Fireflies. If people think about a note-taker in India, I want it to be Fireflies. If people are thinking about a note-taker in the Middle East, I want it to be Fireflies, right? That's more important to me.

35:52 I care less about the margin and the revenue that's coming. Initially, all I care about are do people use it? Do they love it? Do they recommend it to their friends? I want us to be the standard thing that they use. And then we start having these network effects. And eventually, if we deliver enough value, people will pay. Right? Some people might be more stingy, but at the end of the day, if you want to unlock the full potential of Fireflies, you probably need to upgrade at some point in time. But that's okay. So, I'm okay playing the long game. But the most important thing to me is I want every single person to count on Fireflies as the number one AI note taker for themselves and their organization. Yeah.

36:30 Yeah. And this uh you know narrative is changing as you mentioned Krish. Uh you know, India is uh at least top five uh markets for you uh when it comes to uh customers. Uh I think for OpenAI it's uh second largest market for Entropic second largest, ElevenLabs uh second largest. And I I guess it all comes down to if you provide uh the right value, uh people will pay. Uh Krish, you know, you built the company uh uh you know in a very different way. So, what that means is, you know, we live in a world where AI companies are raising $500 million without having a product. And you're the opposite way where you only raised 19 million and you're profitable and you're a billion-dollar company. You know, what what was the mindset uh around it, Krish? And I also saw a LinkedIn post where, you know, uh the company could have kind of like almost uh went out of business, but one of your friends invested in you. That kind of also uh changed your mindset around uh you know, building a company where you're not uh you know, you're not uh dependent on others.

37:49 Yeah. So, for me, fundraising was very difficult in the early days. And I always thought that oh, people would want to fund me. Like, you know, we have an MIT grad and a U Penn grad, ex-Microsoft. We're working in a hot sector. Of course, people want to fund us. Nothing comes close to the truth. It's not that easy. And there's a game to fundraising for some people where you have to aim really big, right? And you have to tell a great story. Uh you have to be well connected. You have to have a nice network. If you are a Stanford dropout or if you were an ex-Google engineer, it's going to be easier for you to raise and it's also determined by who you know, right? Especially at the seed round, they don't really care about the product, they care about like uh is this person legit, right? They're betting a lot on the founders. There's nothing wrong with that. But, there weren't many signals for people to go off to bet on us. So, we had to do the hard work of building the product, getting customers, showing proof that the technology can work before we could raise any sort of money.

38:53 And in the early days, we were getting small checks from angel investors and that kept us afloat between 2016 to 2018. Very small checks. And even then, we had a few employees at the time, a few teammates who were working on a contract basis and we were going to run out of money. And my friend from college wrote a check for $25,000 and that kept the lights on. And this happened after a couple of VCs agreed to fund us and then pulled back after I flew back uh from Boston. And that's when I realized I never want to put my arm out and like ask someone for money again. And so, we tried to be very, very practical in terms of never raising funding if we didn't need it. All of the other times when we did raise funding, it was because the product was doing well and people came to us and said uh hey, are you interested? And then we could raise money on our own terms. So, we raised the 4.5 million uh with a seed. And then to be honest, we would probably wouldn't have even raised the series A, but because COVID happened and there was a lot of uncertainty and we had a good offer on the table and it was a good firm like Khosla Ventures, we ended up raising that $14 million. But, the truth is we barely touched our series A money before we became profitable. So, I honestly think we wouldn't have even needed that money in order to get to to Uh and my team and I said, "Look, the only way to build this business is to get to profitability and then control our own destiny, right?" So, I care a lot about that. And we want real revenue. We need to be able to take care of our team. We want to pay our team well. And we want to uh have the flexibility to survive if there is some sort of AI apocalypse and funding starts drying up because all these AI companies go bust because they're not legit. Uh, they don't have a real product or real revenue. We want to be in control of our destiny even in the worst-case scenario.

40:51 So, that's like my approach to building a company. And it works for us because we're not a foundation models company, right? If you're uh OpenAI or Anthropic, you're going to need billions of dollars to build the models and stuff. So, as an application layer company, I don't think it makes sense for us. What I find interesting though is there's a lot of these application layer companies who pretend to be like these uh um model companies and they are raising insane amounts of money which they don't even need. And everyone thinks fundraising is a win. But what ends up happening is you have to justify the valuation in your next round.

41:26 Otherwise, you're going to have a down round. And uh if you don't live up to expectations, your investors are going to be breathing down your neck. So, some founders like to swing big and go for broke, but I'm not that for person where uh I want that sort of stress. And also, it limits your thinking and you start making short-term decisions. So, if I want to play the long-term game, just like how I answered your question about it's okay if the people in India are not paying, I'm playing for the long-term game where I want everyone to be using Fireflies. Uh, it's the same way here where because we're not constantly strapped for raising money like every 6 months, I can take longer-term bets which is actually going to be the best thing for our customers, for our employees, and then also for the company.

42:11 Uh, Chris, over the years, uh, during your professional career in, uh, you know, in US, what's the kindest thing someone has done to you during your journey? I think there were several people along the way who've helped me when I didn't know what was the right way to go about things. Like, how should I talk to investors? Uh, how much money should I raise? Like, what should I do about hiring, uh, certain types of people? So, having other founders that have gone through the journey who paid it forward was really, really helpful for me because I think very few people can actually give you advice that is relevant. And I found the advice from other founders who've gone through the journey to be the most valuable. Now, there can also be bad advice from people who've never actually done anything, but they got lucky because they joined a company early, uh, or they were an angel investor in some company, and then they blew up and they got a lot of money. Uh, but I really respect and value operators, people that were there, founders or early employees who've actually done the job. And those people have helped me, uh, in making a lot of important decisions. Part of the thing is, Silicon Valley startups, it's like a secret, right? Like, on how to build a company. At least before YC it was definitely a secret, uh, because it was like a closed network, uh, at least 5 6 years ago. It was very different. And now the rest of the world is trying to see how you break into startups and stuff. But back then, I had to learn all that on my own.

43:46 Yeah, got it. Uh, one last one, uh, you know, my my co-pilot, as I, you know, warned you, uh, in the beginning, uh, Alfonso in the back, he wants to get in. And he's wondering, uh, Chris, when the laptop is closed, who is he? Who is he outside of work? I'm trying to think when I do close my laptop. Uh, you know, I think I like working, as funny as it is. I work 7 days a week.

44:16 When I'm not on my laptop, I'm checking my Slack messages and my emails. So, I'm always connected and I've been doing that for 8 plus years now. Uh, there are times when I take a break, but every time I take some time off, it gets me more energized to go back and work. Uh, when I'm in the shower, I'm thinking about Fireflies in the business. When I'm walking and listening to a podcast, I'm thinking about how can I apply this to our business. So, almost everything I do, I try to think about how can I apply it to what I'm doing.

44:45 So, I love uh, watching movies whenever I get a chance to completely disconnect. I'm big on Bollywood movies. I watch crickets. I'll try to catch some of the IPL or the or the World Cup at some point in time. Uh, I do tend to travel a lot for work now to meet the team and for projects. So, that's been really fun. Uh, yeah, and then also, I've been more active on like podcasts and building out the personal brand uh, in recent times.

45:11 So, that way I get to be more creative. So, that's also been fun. Uh, but yeah, that's how I spend my time usually. Like, travel, uh, working out, movies, uh, and cricket. Love it, Krish. Uh, thanks for doing it. Uh, really appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks for having me and it was uh, a fun conversation.