Transcript
A (0:02)
This tech Tools miniseries is brought to you by Prezi, the presentation tool that makes your ideas easy to follow, hard to forget and faster than ever to create. With Prezi AI, the best investment is in the tools of one's own trade. At Think Fast, Talk Smart, we're taking this quote by Benjamin Franklin, the famous US inventor and founding father, very seriously. As you know, our show strives to share tips and techniques to help you hone and and improve your communication and careers. These practices and approaches can be augmented with tools and technology. I'm Matt Abrahams. I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this Tech Tools miniseries of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. In this multi part miniseries we'll introduce you to tools we use at Think Fast Talk Smart to help us be better at our spoken and written communication. And you'll learn best practices from the founders who created them. Taken. We hope these communication tools will help you find new ways to think fast and talk smart. I am excited today to speak with Max Litvin, who is one of the co founders of Grammarly. Max, welcome. Thanks for being here. I always love to learn. What was the origin of Grammarly? What led you to create it?
B (1:19)
First, my co founder Alex and I previously ran a company that did plagiarism detection and we often had to answer a question, why so many people plagiarize and actually staggering number of people plagiarize. In our user interviews we learned that actually the biggest reason for plagiarism is the difficulty and even perceived difficulty of just taking thoughts from your head and putting them in writing. So many people, most people who plagiarize, they actually knew what they want to say and it just putting it in writing was the barrier that they couldn't overcome because of lack of time or lack of confidence or a combination of things. And they resorted to plagiarism. So that gave us an idea. Why don't instead of policing plagiarism, we just create a tool that makes it much easier to take your thoughts and put them in writing. But in addition to that, we looked at where humanity and technology were going and we saw that people make fewer and fewer things and more and more knowledge. What's knowledge? Knowledge is essentially communication. When you write a book, you're communicating. When you make a video, you're communicating. Pretty much any knowledge we create is communication. And how do we create knowledge? In process of creating knowledge, we collaborate through communicating as well. So communication is both the process and the result. If we can improve that by even a fraction of A percent for couple billion people. It's tremendous impact on humanity level. And that seemed like a very compelling idea.
A (2:50)
It is incredibly compelling and so important. I find it really exciting and that you're doing the work that you're doing to help people in this information based world to communicate better. Personally, I think it's great that rather than just building a better plagiarism detection tool, you actually said what's causing all this plagiarism. Turns out people aren't comfortable writing or feeling competent in doing it, so you work to help them. Some of our listeners might not know yet what Grammarly is. Can you share what your product is using the elevator pitch structure I teach my MBA students. What if you could so that for example. And that's not all.