Krish Ramaneni (3:31)

Yeah, well, it's been quite a journey. Right. 2016 was when we started working on a whole host of things and I, I always like to say that we were a couple years too early to the market. So a lot of trial and error. The other big part of that journey was there were many products we launched at that time that were too early to market. Technology wasn't good enough, but now would be perfect. So we will be going back to those and building those into the larger Fireflies suite. Today people know Fireflies is the AI meeting assistant, joins your meetings, takes notes for you. But before the meeting assistant, there was an email assistant, there was a Slack assistant, there was an AI task manager. All those things was built in the pre LLM era. Today, as we've worked on meetings and scaled that up, our thesis has always been the same, that there is all this knowledge buried inside conversations. So we want to actually bring those things back and build for all of those different conversational streams, not just meetings. Like where are the other places you spend so much of your time outside of meetings, it's usually emails and slack. So those will be the first areas that we're planning to tackle. Someone said this as I was talking about, this longer term vision for our company is hey, you're essentially building this like cursor for conversations where you're capturing all these conversations, unlocking value out of it and like executing on those conversations. So, but yeah, the first couple years were very hard times. In fact, I'm curious, when was SAS stock like first started?

Alex Diemer (5:09)

2016. 2016. And yeah, so we, we were kind of, well, if you look at, I guess SAS dating back to year 2000. Right. But it did feel like we were or that era, 2016, you, you know, it was still quite early in SAS even though it was 16 years old. Right. And obviously we're early in AI. Right. So I wonder if that will play out similarly. But yeah, like the first Saasdock, we had like 700 people there flying in from all over the world. And you look at it today, it's you Know, three and a half thousand in our European event and our US will grow similarly. But certainly it's kind of ridden the coattails off, you know, the SASS wave. And then you look at the last 23, 24, there were headwinds in Sass, right?

Krish Ramaneni (5:57)

Yeah.

Alex Diemer (5:58)

And then we naturally sort of feel that. But AI, you know, which you know, and considering in it, and it is like, you know, certainly the application layer B2B software is bringing back this great tailwind, which I'm also very thankful for.

Krish Ramaneni (6:13)

Well, I have a really fun connection. When I first started Fireflies, I didn't know what SaaS was.

Alex Diemer (6:19)

Yeah.

Krish Ramaneni (6:19)

So I was literally going on YouTube typing in SaaS and one of the first videos I saw was SAS Doc. And I would keep watching those SaaS videos like throughout 2016, 2017, 2018, because we were trying so many different things and it wasn't working. And actually some of those videos from the conference were super helpful because when we first started we were going up market enterprise. And then this is not working. Like people are not adopting this stuff. And then I remember vividly I seeing a speaker talk at SAS talk about selling the SMBs, how they made it work, and they broke all these like conventional rules, which you typically have. As you need to have sales people, you need to do this stuff. And that actually set in motion a lot of how we build our company today. So awesome. It's a byproduct of.

Alex Diemer (7:12)

I'm trying to think, I mean like there, there's almost.

Krish Ramaneni (7:14)

There's like an accounting software company that was very prosumer. They, there was like Calendly, a bunch of these other founders that came and talked about their journey. And it was very different from all this other startup content that was out. All the literature in 2016 and 2017 was very much sales led.

Alex Diemer (7:36)

Yeah.

Krish Ramaneni (7:36)

Because all the people that were writing blogs and content were sales tech companies and marketing ops companies. And so you thought that's what you needed to do. You needed to set up a big inbound ABM organization, all these like sort of funnels. Whereas PLG wasn't being written about a lot yet you had great companies at the time already that have established themselves, like DocuSign and Calendly and Dropbox, all of those sort of companies. And I felt like in Silicon Valley it's a very much an echo chamber where in 2016, 2017, 2018, every person we talk to, every advisor, every every guru out there would be like, why aren't you selling top down enterprise sales? That's how you make money, you got to get high mid market or top down enterprise sales. And I said we're building something in a brand new category. This category doesn't exist. It may not even be a painkiller right now. It's a vitamin and we need to go to people that are going to give us valid feedback really quickly. So my gut was always telling me SMBs is the place to start and seeing some of your guys content actually helped.

Alex Diemer (8:45)

Oh that's great to hear. And I think like I guess kind of topical I remember and actually I was just whatsapping somebody who's looking at coming to sasdoc Europe which has taken place next month in October. He was asking me for some stats on the attendees and we saw that with our new data platform we can actually really capture a lot like understanding who the attendees are. And 55% of companies attending SAS stock are PLG. And I imagine this is, you know.

Krish Ramaneni (9:15)

It'S become the trend over the last.

Alex Diemer (9:17)

Two years, three years for sure. Like one year ago I didn't have this data and I was being asked by, you know, a long standing sponsor who had this perception that everybody was enterprise sales led. And I knew in my gut that actually I'm speaking to so many PLG founders there but I just can't share the data point because I didn't capture that information. So, so it's great, it's great to see like I, I guess kind of on that topic like I remember it's got to be like a couple of years ago it could have been 2022 when you first like maybe it was one of my sales guys or I was on a sales call when fireflies like pops up and you're like what is this doing here? Is somebody spying on me? Right. Oh, I don't like this. Right. Because it was, it was very new and quite often booting like the fireflies like do we need this? Right. And booting that out and I imagine because you know, that was a new experience. It's human behavior. There was probably, you know, some of these challenges that you were seeing or the feedback that you were seeing and then so I'm curious to hear about that. And obviously as you fast forward to today, you know, I was on a call yesterday with a colleague and you know, we've got note takers internally and I could see she's writing in her notebook. Why are you doing this? Right, yeah, you know, you just put the note taker on. So it's interesting to see how certainly in the space of a Couple of years. How certainly our behavior and human behavior has changed. Like how. How have you seen that and shaped that and how has that helped you with your growth?

Krish Ramaneni (10:50)

When I look at my own behavior, I realize how dependent I am on AI every single day, whether it's chatgpt, whether it's firefl or a dozen other tools. I actually make it a point to try at least two to three new AI tools every week. And maybe not directly in our category, but other categories. I am absolutely amazed by some of these video and image generation tools like Higgs Field and Nano Banana. Just so many great tools out there. Hey, Gen is another cool company, eleven Labs. We like to figure out how to scale our marketing. So I'm trying out all these tools. So there is definitely a proliferation of tools. But the hardest part is there is only a finite amount of attention that is out there and people are constantly overwhelmed with so much app bloat. And if you look at all the apps on your phone too, there's probably only like three or four that you use every day. So we were fortunate enough to start at a time where this was very novel. Today, in two to three weeks, anyone can build an AI note taker. Like, it's not that special. Back in 2016, 2017, 2018, we had to solve a hard technological problem. Transcription summarization. We were working on like neural nets, all of those sort of stuff, along with NLP classifiers. We had to do everything from scratch. Now it's just an OpenAI call for a lot of the things that you need to build. And transcription has relatively been a solved problem today. And now we're at the edge, right? Like if it's a noisy environment, a windy environment, how do you improve on that? So there's so much more things that you can take off the shelf and build. In fact, when we were raising money, people thought like, you couldn't build a company with off the shelf stuff. You need to build these like proprietary models. You need to hire these machine learning people from Apple and this is how you build a company. Obviously, as a small startup that was not going to be possible. Going back to your first question on even before, like, we had to solve all the technical problems. We launched in January 2020. A few weeks later, Covid happens. Everyone's hopping on video calls, Zoom and teams and Google Meet meetings. And all of a sudden it went from this vitamin to a painkiller because you're having zoom exhaustion. Like you don't remember what's happening on those meetings. And I always like to say that our marketing and our pitch was really about, today the transcription is not that great, but tomorrow it will be amazing. This is what we said in 2020 and today when we look at the customers and the feedback they leave, less than 5% of them complain about transcription quality. When we first started, the most common reason people would churn was, yeah, it's not accurate enough. Like, I don't think I can rely on this. So that's really betting on the tech. The other part was before ChatGPT came out and like the LLM APIs came out, I think around GPT 3.3.5. That's when we started using LLMs as a way to start summarizing the nodes. And we were amazed at how much we could stylize it, how much we could personalize it. And we had this dream in 2018. I remember reading a research paper that came out of Salesforce about neural nets and how that might be the new move instead of just using regular language processing. And I remember telling my co founder and CTO Sam, maybe one day AI will be able to write better than me and AI will be able to paraphrase and create notes better than me. Because us as humans, we get distracted on meetings. We don't remember everything. Our recall is really bad. So after a meeting, you probably forget automatically 50% of what was discussed. And then a couple hours later, after a few other meetings, you probably retain only 10 to 20%. So let's solve for that problem. And when people were starting to use Fireflies initially it was like, let's give you perfect memory. It might not be perfect transcripts, but you will have a really good enough notes, transcripts and a search component where you can search back through all of your conversations and remember what you talked about. And the use cases for that are infinite. Like what you can do that, it'll help you recruit better, it'll help you manage your relationships better. So all of those sort of things was very novel at the time. And we also had a different mechanism with, with which we were trying to build this company. And today they call it agents, they call these like browser bots. But back in 2017, 2018, we were already building this tech stack and we wanted it to be so seamless that you don't have to like go hop through 50 different steps to set this up. And the AI NoteTaker bot, we really pioneered, like a bot physically joining your meetings using rpa, like robotic process automation. And I always like to tell people that while Fireflies is an AI company, There's a whole lot of robotic process automation that we've had to build, like all this browser tech that we had to build to do what we do today. In fact, there's now, like an API that other companies provide just for you to build bots. Right. So everything can be done off the shelf. It's funny how what investors were concerned about almost seven, eight years ago are things that you can now pull off the shelf. Right? But on the social stigma part, it was definitely very challenging in the beginning because you have to explain to people, oh, why are you using this notetaker? What is it doing? Are you trying to catch me to say something? But today it has become more socially acceptable. And the one nice thing with Fireflies is at least it starts a conversation and you see the bot there. It's not like someone's secretly recording you in the background like some of these other tools do, which a lot of enterprises and a lot of larger companies don't like. The other part is that compliance piece where, hey, I'm using this to take notes and record my meetings. If you're. If you'd like, I'll send you the notes afterwards. And we had people that were strong critics turn into, wow, this is actually valuable. I want to start using it for myself. I think we've changed thousands of people's perception over the years from I would never use something like this to I can't live without it.

Alex Diemer (16:56)

You mentioned the proliferation, and there is this saturation now, and it probably will be even greater. Of all these AI tools and lots of different note takers out there, being first to market probably almost certainly has given you some advantage. But how do you think about it? From the defensibility, you know, from the moat, sort of like perspective when, you know, I don't know how many note takers there are out there now, but.

Krish Ramaneni (17:22)

There'S probably hundreds now.

Alex Diemer (17:23)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Krish Ramaneni (17:24)

Well, we've had a long time to work on this problem and continue to iterate on it. Like from the summaries to the transcripts, to the user experience, to administrative features, there's a whole lot that you can do to go really, really deep on these problems. In fact, we had a customer the other day that came to us and said, hey, there's this other company. They're like an AI CRM company, but they really started off as an AI notetaker. It's almost like the note taker is the entry point for you to build almost any other SaaS products. If you want to build a great CRM today you probably need to have an AI note taker or integrate with Fireflies so you have all of that conversational data. I feel like we add more value to CRMs than any other data source out there because we have all of this rich contextual knowledge about what's happening in the meetings with prospects and customers that actually make the CRM useful. Otherwise CRM is just going to be rows and columns, right? So when we look at all of this stuff, we go a lot deeper on integrations. We have 70 plus different integrations. We were the first meeting assistant to connect to Claude MCP as well as ChatGPT connectors as well as Devin. So that accessibility, we're probably one of the only note takers with a very robust API and that allows people to use Fireflies in a lot of different settings. We've also done so much work around teams because there's a lot of prosumer individual oriented note takers. But for teams you need different things, especially sharing, access controls, data retention, user groups, all of those sort of configuration stuff. Well, recently there was a note taker company that got in a lot of trouble and there was a lawsuit that's ongoing. I don't know the full details of it, but the general consensus was this note taker company is using our data to train our models, which is something that would make a lot of people squirm and I'm sure many other companies are doing that. Whereas our credit to our security team and our CTO for coming out proactively several years ago and saying we're going to take a no training on customer data policy first and foremost. So winning trusts, winning the right type of customers, integrating deeply and building for teams. So today Fireflies doesn't train on your data by default. We have a private storage offering for larger enterprises or even for small companies that want to store their data on their own servers. You own your data 0 data retention policies on like LLM models, training on your data. We don't have that. So we've had to do so many different things. And yeah, I don't think like you can do that in a matter of weeks where, okay, I'm just going to build like the note taker. You have to do a lot of these other things but we don't want to stop at the note taker at all. Like the bigger vision for Fireflies is that we want to help you unlock all of the knowledge inside your conversations. Meetings is just one data source. We want to bring that value to your emails, your slack and we Want to bring that value to all the work that you do. And till now we've just automated meeting notes. So I had this idea that what if we automated the meeting itself? So we're also building AI teammates that can go take meetings on your behalf. It's building like a full fledged platform. I'm just glad we picked one use case with the meeting note taker, which ended up being the defining gen AI use case. Like, if anyone wants to build a company Today in the SaaS space, one of the top three things that'll probably come up is building a meeting note taker. In fact, there was like a company that made a lot of noise on social media with their posts and controversies and skits and stuff, but eventually they all pivoted and ended up coming down to, oh, you're just another glorified note taker. So it's funny to see, it's interesting.

Alex Diemer (21:12)

And a couple of things you said there because as you described it, and you know, I'm thinking of like Fireflies as like a second brain. Right. And in, in some aspects of the AI tools that I've played with. Right. You know, with 11 labs, I've been able to clone my voice so I don't have to do podcast adverts necessarily. And it helps save me some time. We've got a. We're using a tool called RealFlow on our website where it's like videos of me, you know, kind of explaining, you know, the different products across our pages. But I think through using hey Gen, we've cloned myself so that if we need to do any future edits and updates that I don't have to sit there and do the recording, which I. The initial recording was like three hours, right. Of like reading scripts and stuff like that. So again, it's saving me time for.

Podcast Narrator (22:07)

Future.

Alex Diemer (22:09)

Cloning me so I don't have to do meetings. I mean, I love that idea, you know, if that's possible because I think a lot of people don't love meetings. You know, some meetings are like a sales meeting is. It's very useful and, you know, if somebody says, oh, you've got a sales meeting tomorrow, you know, I'll take that. A lot of the internal stuff, you know, sometimes it can be overdone and it's not the best use of your time. But finding a good way to clone, you know, person to do meetings, definitely very interesting. So I'd like, I'd like to see.

Krish Ramaneni (22:42)

That there's at least 20% of meetings that shouldn't even exist. Yeah, and some of them can be automated away, especially like screening interviews, the initial screening call, if you're doing the same call over and over again. Certain types of customer support calls that can be automated, even like sales, a rep, demo, discovery calls, a lot of these Q and A type things where you're gathering information, user interviews, screening interviews, these sort of things. I think we can literally automate out that first initial meeting. If you do that, think about how much time you would save for someone. Also, I believe that if I have to wait X amount of time to go, let's say I want to go try out this like software, but I have to book a demo with them and it will take me like two weeks to get on a call. I got to fill out all these forms and stuff. Whereas if I have like an AI sales rep that can give me the demo and I can ask questions right there, it'll do like 90% of the thing for me. I can make a decision a lot faster If I have 50 candidates that are applying to my open role. We have 500 candidates applying to an open role today. That's a lot. And it's going to take our recruiter to go through all those candidates weeks. Whereas we now have our AI recruiter that has interviewed hundreds of candidates in a couple hours and then run scorecards for all of them, stack, rank them, given some insights. Whereas like our recruiting team can now go through all of those screening calls and interviews and all that stuff and see who would be the right fit for us. Ultimately, the human recruiter is still making the ultimate decision. But like the information gathering part is done a lot faster through this on.

Alex Diemer (24:20)

The AI sales demo. You probably wouldn't be surprised that this technology exists. And we recently, through my My Fun Back Future, did a small investment in a company called Supersonic where it does exactly that. So creates the AI sales demos. And it's quite a wow moment sort of seeing that. But just to bring it into perspective of most companies are not using such tools yet. And I won't name the name, but I was looking at employer of record technology and going to the usual kind of suspects. And one of them, it took like two weeks to get a call. And during that time the call kept getting canceled by the account executive and sort of moved. I was like, do you not want the business? It was very frustrating, but you know, having to wait that time. But eventually I went with somebody else because, you know, in part because of that experience. But yeah, as you say, imagine the power of just going on the website and Just getting the demo there and then getting that information, having the conversation and signing up.

Krish Ramaneni (25:22)

You know, if you can respond, if you can respond to a prospect within five minutes, the likelihood of them going with you and closing them increases by like 50% just because of how quickly you're able to respond to them. You're catching people right when they need something. If you wait too long, they might be distracted. It just takes them one click to go to another website, to another competitor to find what they need. So we're constantly obsessing over how do we deliver value. And being a PLG oriented company, we really built that freemium trial experience so that you can try Fireflies and purchase Fireflies without ever talking to us. In fact, we have customers who pay tens of thousands of dollars, maybe even six figures, where they've never actually needed to have a sales call with us. Right.

Alex Diemer (26:12)

I think this year you guys reached unicorn status about evaluation. Right? Congrats on that. Imagine the virality of the product has driven large part of the growth. You're on a call, you see Fireflies, people wonder what that is, they start to use it themselves.

Krish Ramaneni (26:30)

Probably 80% of all of our growth came from word of mouth and the viral loop in the first couple years. Just this year we started to do some paid marketing. But till now you could say that the billion dollar valuation came fully on the backs of organic and viral loops.

Alex Diemer (26:49)

The 20% then where, like, can you shed some light into what was done there to make up that 20% and to help with the growth?

Krish Ramaneni (26:58)

Yeah, the 20% at least today where we're investing is we believe there is value in influencer marketing. PR is helpful. But today podcasts, being able to go to the right influencers, founder led marketing is something I've been doing and we've been scaling that up over the last couple years. Like just like on Instagram. I'm able to with a post reach tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people very, very quickly. LinkedIn marketing, those sort of things, the channels are that people thought were like, oh, these are just for fun. Like if you think about it like Duolingo got like a billion views on TikTok with their bird. Like marketing is changing and B2B needs to evolve for that. You can't be doing the same old boring case studies or put your email in and download this ebook. Sure it'll work if you're selling to top down enterprise buyers, but everyone is like, like evolving. And your buyer may not just be on LinkedIn or maybe not just be on Some listserv, they might be doing something on Facebook or Instagram or doing something socially and then you show up. So I think brand marketing is something that we've been thinking a lot about also at the company, at our scale. I used to think like, why would anyone waste money on brand marketing? Okay, performance marketing, I get you got to, you spend X, you make Y, you make the ltv, CAC and the ROI all make sense. But attention is really, really important. And people, because they see fireflies so much, whether it's in a meeting, whether it's in a video on Instagram or like a reel that I do or a podcast clip, it reinforces that, hey, these guys are legit, they are a big company. And when we did the fundraising or not the fundraiser, but like the unicorn valuation with the secondary announcement, I think it led to a lot of people saying, I knew you guys were big, I didn't know you were that big. So all of those sort of like social signaling and brand marketing is extremely important. That makes up the 20% of what we do.

Alex Diemer (29:00)

How much time do you personally spend on founder led marketing?

Krish Ramaneni (29:04)

I've been trying to do more of it today. I'm glad that we're building a team around it. Being able to do podcasts and stuff, this didn't come organically to me. Like in the beginning I wasn't like a natural at it. But I think I've been able to be very candid about my thoughts. I'm very unfiltered and I can share whatever I need to and that's worked really well. Like being on podcast, being doing things in person, as challenging as it is, I think those have been really, really helpful. The other stuff is I wish I could, literally, if I had nothing better to do, I would probably be able to just sit and tweet 50 times a day and then post like some inspirational posts on LinkedIn. But you have to have business to run and you have a lot of these other things to do. But I do feel that I'm trying to allocate at least 10 to 15% of my time to this. My team would like me to spend 30% of my time on marketing. So we're starting to figure that out. We're also hiring for a lot of marketing roles today. Product marketing, we're calling this brand marketing role vibe marketing. But someone that I think in Gen Z can connect to, like figure out how to tell our story in a creative, engaging way. I love some of the stuff that these influencers put out where they're like doing these skits and memes and corporate style skits which is really like great. I think we can tell B2B brand stories just like how consumer brands do it and we can do it in a very cinematic, fun, engaging way. That's an experiment we're trying to do. We actually just shot a couple commercials yesterday and so I'm looking forward to seeing how those turn up.

Alex Diemer (30:40)

Switching gears a little bit. Do you think we're in an AI bubble? Do you think that's going to burst? And what do you think the impact of AI is onto the future of SaaS?

Krish Ramaneni (30:52)

You don't even have to ask if it's a bubble. It's clearly a bubble when you're seeing companies raise at insane valuations. Like the seed rounds today are valued more than like many of the Series A Series B rounds back in 2016-2018. Granted there are some companies that are in hyper growth mode like lovable Cursor Devon. All of these companies are now in double digit billion dollar valuations. It makes you look at like what am I doing? And I'm so proud of everything we've accomplished and how hard we worked to get to our first million dollars of revenue and then 10 digits of revenue and then now scaling towards nine figures and beyond. Like that's. But it's been a long journey, it's been a grind and we've broken a lot of the SaaS like benchmarks but some of these companies are breaking those benchmarks 5x and you kind of look at yourself and it's like am I doing something right? We're in a very good position, we're profitable, we're scaling. But you see some of these companies out of the gate in six months to a year get to 200 million in AR like it's insane. And one there's probably a lot of appetite to the pricing models are changing like traditional SaaS. Companies that are doing seat based pricing. I think these, all these companies that are doing usage based outcome based pricing are able to extract a lot more revenue upfront and there is a propensity for people to buy that. And many of these companies are not only just selling to enterprises like you have lovable where it's hobbyists, prosumers, people that want to start like a new business and turn something into an app really quickly where they're paying you as much as what like a hundred seat or 200 seat license would pay you just one individual, one prosumer. So the unit economics are also changing. I think all of that is good. It creates a lot more opportunity. It makes, it democratizes AI. Ultimately, that's what we want, right? We, we want everyone to be using AI. It won't be like a place, where are you an AI enabled company? It's like asking someone, do you put your business on the Internet? You have to. Whether you're a mom and pop store or a restaurant, everyone's on the Internet. Everyone's going to be using AI. It's going to be plugged into every aspect of your life. Your customers are going to be interacting with AI. If you have a restaurant and you have people calling to make reservations or orders, AI is going to be able to handle those. So AI is going to permeate everything. And while we're in a bubble, while 90% of these companies may not make it, and while this bubble may pop, you're still going to have some incredible companies that come out of it. And the net net, the consumer is the one that's going to benefit. During the dot com bubble, absolutely. Valuations were crazy and stuff, but you ended up having generational companies like Google and Amazon. And then later, after the dot com bubble, even with like the 2008 recession, you have generational companies like Airbnb come out of it. So you'll always have like a few companies that make it out. It'll change the industry forever. Like from 2008 to now, the idea of I can just press something, order something, have it delivered to me, go take an Uber anywhere, be able to go to any country and then find a nice place to stay in all of those sort of things like happened in these bubble like eras where insane funding was needed to. Right. I work in the B2B AI work area. Right. Like productivity. So I think we're going to see some of the same sort of gains that we saw in. Probably right now the biggest gains are happening in coding and customer support. That's where these AI companies are taking off, getting insane valuations. The pro, the desire to make like coding more accessible to everyone. I would love to see that same sort of AI play out in AI, like collaboration, workplace collaboration stuff. So that's what I'm most excited about because there hasn't been that breakout company yet. And we would like to be one of those.

Alex Diemer (34:44)

You mentioned it's been a long journey so far, but it's obviously going well. But it is a grind, right? Would love to know like how, how do you look after yourself? How do you get through the grind? Right. How do you get through like, you know, there's always hard days, right? You know how, how do you manage that?

Krish Ramaneni (35:09)

Well, I, I hear like very popular people in this space that tell companies, oh yeah, if you're growing triple, triple, double, double, that's not good enough anymore. Think about how many companies are even doing that, right? So we, we did that, we exceeded that. We were happy. So don't always benchmark yourself against like the outliers. Like there's still companies to be built, there's still great opportunities to build in SaaS. You definitely need to be AI enabled and start with the AI first lens. There's still incredible businesses that can be built. Like it's not that everything has to be done by OpenAI, everything has to be done by Anthropic or one of these like sort of crazy companies. Like if you kind of think about it, eleven Labs is a great example of they picked one problem, text to speech or speech, speech to speech. And they went really, really deep on that and they built like an incredible business that's growing rapidly, fast. So pick a problem and go deep on it and don't listen to this narrative that oh, one AI tool is going to solve every problem, right. So that you need to get. Because a lot of that is also marketing hype and there's still incredible businesses to be built today for us. The best thing for my mental frame is I'm building for the long term. We are profitable. We don't need to go out and raise crazy amounts of cash at crazy high valuations even if they're offered, which allows us to stay focused on the mission, stay in control of the direction we want to take the company. Like if you're chasing 10 different directions, you end up nowhere. So that's like something really important that we have and we can navigate this over a longer period of time. I always believe the best companies aren't just growing the fastest, they're growing consistently for a very long period of time. It's not just about doing that hockey stick and then dying. Right? You have to be able to do that for decades. So if we want to build decade log companies, AI is something that you can definitely use and ride through. But I don't think it's like, it's to me where, oh, we have to like, we have to like we only have this six month window and then after that there's going to be this general AI that's going to take over the world and there's nothing we can do. I think that's a misconception. So once you have that framework you start to build for a lot more long term stuff. I personally enjoy taking care of my team, spending a lot of time and resources into making sure we have a world class team. Probably some of the mistakes I had made in the past were we had a job opening for a long period of time, so we lower the bar a little bit just to close it and that hire never ends up working out. We are really, really judicious in terms of keeping the bar high because if you end up having a bad hire, not only is that person adding more to like the overall management bureaucracy hassles, you end up having to do their work and then it ends up being double the pain. Right. So having good teammates is probably like the best thing you can do for your own mental piece. But yeah, for me personally, I definitely like to spend a lot more time, I'm traveling a lot more. I'm getting to do things outside of the office, like this sort of stuff, which is great. But I, I like to like really believe I work seven days a week and if I'm not working, I'm thinking about work. That's literally epitomizes Jensen Huang. And I've been doing that the same way in the last eight or nine years. I've only taken probably five days off.

Alex Diemer (38:44)

Really?

Krish Ramaneni (38:44)

Yeah.

Alex Diemer (38:44)

Well, I mean you, you look fresh, feel free. The energy is there. I mean, I can't imagine, you know, maybe this is a personal thing, me doing seven days a week, having five days off in the last nine years and actually still having, you know, the energy or being top of my game. So there's got to be, there's got to be some stuff that you do to, to, to help you with that. Like, you know, is there anything you can kind of share around that? Because I mean it's pretty remarkable.

Krish Ramaneni (39:12)

I try to have very little meetings. Yeah, that saves me a lot of time. I also don't fall into this like ethos that oh, you have to wake up at 5am if you want to be successful. I work till 2am I have a rule where I have no meetings before 10am I'll have days where I just cancel like the meetings on my calendar. So I have the ability. Yeah. I don't have to go around and like raise funding and then like have to deal with investors and like all of that stuff. That frees up a lot of time. So for me, the reason I'm able to do these sort of things is because I can allocate time to the two or three things that really matter. Product, engineering, design, Sales, marketing, like and I can think a lot deeper on that. So most of us need more time to think. But when you're in a, in the corporate grind, you're constantly like, go, go, go. Meeting to meeting to meeting. So the most important reason I'm able to do these sort of things is I can actually balance my schedule. Like I work very intensely, very hard for like bursts and then I have time to myself. Right. Like I need to be able to go out, exercise, go to the gym, go to the park, travel. I get to do all those sorts of things. Like it's for me, like if I have fun for two to three hours, I'm more energized to go back and work harder. And like, I don't follow this like 9 to 5 lifestyle. So I'm working all the time. But if I'm free like three to four hours in the middle of the day, that's great. I can do other things. And then I come back, I'm like, now I feel inspired or I learned something new that I want to apply. So that's been like the thing. I also would say that what I have done over the last eight, nine years, you know, you have to make trade offs. Everything in life is a trade off because I'm doing these things. I'm trading off on other things like dating and relationships and other stuff. But the most important thing is you can have it all. You can't have it all at once. So I know that by putting so much of my time and energy into this, I'm not able to do some of those other things. Like if you want to get married and have kids and you want to balance other stuff. I don't know how those founders do it because one, one of my founder friends, they have three kids and they're running a high scale series B startup. Yeah, that's more impressive than what I'm doing. I don't know how they're doing that.

Alex Diemer (41:19)

I mean it is. I'm not running a high scale series B company, but having kids is obviously one of the best things in the world, you know, and it, it, it also does present, you know, challenges and stresses when you're running a business. Because let's say running a business is not easy. Running a scaling business is not easy. You want to get the mindset right. You want to, you know, protect your sleep. You want to have that right energy and focus and you're ready to. And then all of a sudden it's just chaos in the mornings, you know, not every morning, but you know, the kids meltdown, so everybody's screaming at each other. And your day can, can start off, you know, really badly before you start, start work. And I think there's definitely that, that impact and not that I, I would ever give that up, but it definitely adds that layer of complexity when you have these, the challenges of the, the home life, you know, and then, you know, add it onto the layer of complexity of the challenges of running a business. So can definitely be tough some days, but then obviously majority of the time it's, it's great.

Krish Ramaneni (42:18)

Yeah. I think a large part of what I do and why I do the things that I do is because I realize what happens when you become complacent. And I've seen it in my own family with their family businesses and stuff where if you're not genuinely growing, learning, doing things better and you get complacent, like, oh, I've made it, I'm successful, I sit down, someone will come and take your spot. And that seeing that growing up in my own personal life with my grandparents and my parents on my father's side of the family, where they had it all, but they got complacent. I don't ever want to get that complacent. And AI is the worst place to be complacent because every week something new is coming out. In fact, I was telling my team it's hard for me to keep up and I'm in the middle of all of this, like the new tools, the new models, the new changes. I wonder what it's like for someone that is running a non tech enabled business. All this change looks like. So when we're building for our customers, we're not building for this Twitter echo chamber or Silicon Valley echo chamber. I'm thinking about what if there is some grandmother out in the Midwest starting her first company right and she needs to start selling her stuff and she has like a small operations, how would she be able to use our product? And is it easy enough for that person? Whereas if you look on Twitter and stuff, like it's a lot more of a technical crowd and they're trying like all these different things and they're nitpicking on these like all these like different things. What I want to do is make sure that the AI that we build for work is so easy and so simple that like any non technical person, any SMB can use it and there's a big market there for that. We have companies like HubSpot who built incredible businesses building for a large set of SMBs agencies, these sort of customers, companies like Zoho, where like a lot of their customers are under 100 employees. Right. So I think there's a greater mission for us beyond just building incredible AI tools that we can actually democratize AI to so many other businesses and make it simpler to do. You don't have to worry about what model is being used or what you want. Something like you can do it. I'll give you an example of one of the features we built where a common use case around all of these like sort of workflow tools like Zapier N8N is doing meeting prep or prospect research before you go to a meeting. That's kind of like one of this killer use cases that they like, show you that you can do. But if you want to build that, that's like a 10 step zap connector, you don't have to be a coder to do it, but it's a lot of stuff. Whereas with Fireflies, if you're using our assistant, you can just automatically will get a meeting prep before the meeting, right? And it's done all the work, it's looked at the Internet about the person you're about to meet, your past meetings, it's going to pull from all the different data sources and just give it to you. I think that's a much more elegant, simpler solution for a lot of non technical folks. But if you're asking someone to go use your workflow builder, N8N builder and do all that stuff, sure your technical crowd can do it, but I don't know how many other people are going to be able to do that that are not AI native. So we have to build for the people that are not AI native today.

Alex Diemer (45:41)

As we wrap up the podcast. I guess I didn't know this would be the case, but there is kind of going to be a little bit of a full circle moment in terms of. You mentioned in the early stage of your journey, you used to watch SAS doc videos, speakers on stage and that, you know, was helpful for you, you know, kind of back then, you know, 2016, 17 etc, April next year you'll be speaking on center stage yourself, creating, you know, then your own, you know, video which will go on YouTube of your talk. I guess because April is so far away and things are moving so fast. We don't know yet. You don't know yet what you're going to be speaking about. Right. Because the world could be a slightly different place then, but, but maybe sort of with that, what is one or two things that people could be doing when they, you know, visit Austin, you know, coming to sasdoc. A couple of top tips for, you know, from yourself.

Krish Ramaneni (46:41)

If you are a SaaS founder today and you should be thinking about how do I plug LLMs into everything that I am working on and what parts can I automate and simplify for our users from onboarding to the emails. So there's an entire experience part that can be done there. The other part is I used to really focus around cost and margin and as we're building this, right. Because voice and meetings and transcription, super expensive. If you are building a business that is usage based and you can justify the cost with incredible output, focus on high quality output first versus the cost because eventually the model cost will go down. Things will go down. You'll figure that part out. I have like a very good feeling that a lot of these like companies that are building these coding tools and other stuff are paying like 60 to 70% to the model providers. Right. I personally myself have invested in OpenAI and Anthropic and Perplexity and some of these other companies like AI companies like I have a small investment I put into these because I genuinely believe how big these companies are going to be and I would like to say that a lot of that revenue is coming from these developers building these products. So absolutely leverage it and it's, it's going to. Intelligence is only going to get cheaper. So don't like worry about only what the model can do today or how much it costs. Focus on building the best product and then those things will take care of itself. It sounds counterintuitive because I was a person that was like, oh no, this is too expensive. How do we give them a great output but then not like worry about the cost? If there is such a propensity for people to pay and you know that the costs are going down, focus on the quality of the output and when you're building these agents and other tools, you're going to have a lot more chance at getting successful and building a healthy business.

Alex Diemer (48:41)

Awesome. Last one for my benefit. Have you ever been to Interstellar Barbecue?

Krish Ramaneni (48:45)

I have not.

Alex Diemer (48:46)

You have not. I was going to ask for a top tip because they're over in London and I'm taking a few founders there and it looks like a lot of food.

Podcast Narrator (48:55)

Yeah.

Alex Diemer (48:55)

But I'm just wondering what things to maybe focus on.

Krish Ramaneni (48:57)

But I. The food scene in London here is great. This is a hot take. But I think some of the best Indian food I've had has been here in London restaurants are fantastic. The tech scene is definitely I'm amazed at like how many AI companies are coming out. We were talking about this before the show right? How many companies are coming out here and especially AI first companies. And there's something about London for sure that keeps drawing me to it 100%.

Alex Diemer (49:24)

Well thanks for coming to London. Thanks for doing the SAS Revolution show podcast in person. I've really enjoyed it. It's been a pleasure to meet you, learn from you. Looking forward to the Austin edition on stage again in person next April. Thanks so much Krish.

Krish Ramaneni (49:40)

Yeah, thank you.

Podcast Narrator (49:44)

Thanks for listening to the SAS Revolution Show. If you enjoyed this episode please leave a review and follow the show. It helps more SaaS and AI founders to discover the podcast and keeps us bringing you the leaders who are shaping the future of the industry. For more insights and to join the SASTOC community, head to SASTOC.com.