Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Krish Ramineni, CEO of Fireflies.ai (Part 1)

Krish discusses how he used completely organic go-to-market strategies to disseminate an AI-intelligent note-taking assistant product.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you as well as to Fireflies.

Krish Ramineni: The journey goes back a couple of years. When we started Fireflies, our mission was different. We were solving the same problem in the AI space, which was around understanding conversations and deriving meaning from those conversations. The platforms that we were doing this on were different. Today, Fireflies is an AI meeting assistant that joins meetings and transcribes it, generating notes and summaries.

When we first started, we were looking at different sources of conversational data for AI to utilize, which was emails and chatbots. It’s been quite a long, arduous journey. Over the years, we eventually landed on the voice space because we saw an acceleration of adoption as well as improvements in natural language processing and voice recognition.

Sramana Mitra: Let me get a bit of your background. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised?

Krish Ramineni: I grew up in California. I spent almost all my life here. I went to school on the East Coast. I was at UPenn. I graduated early and ended up going off to Microsoft. I was a Product Manager across the Office suite. Having grown up in Silicon Valley, I’ve always been fascinated by startups and technology. The markets have drastically been different.

I remember when we were just moving to the cloud when I was growing. Then you have mobile and shared economy apps like Uber and Airbnb. I’ve seen the shifts and was always curious about it. Post-Microsoft, I had this intuition that we’re doing a lot of things with data, but can’t we do that same analysis around conversations.

Me and my co-founder, who is a college friend of mine, ended up spending one summer working on different projects. After the end of the summer, I had two options. One was to go to graduate school at Cambridge or to start a startup. I took this route instead and haven’t looked back since.

Sramana Mitra: Your co-founder from MIT is the technologist?

Krish Ramineni: Yes, he’s the CTO.

Sramana Mitra: You’re both now in San Francisco?

Krish Ramineni: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about Fireflies.ai. What are you doing specifically and how are you going to market?

Krish Ramineni: We wanted to build an AI assistant that anyone can use and not just to have your own personal assistant. We had this notion of what if everyone could have their own personal assistant. Can we build a similar voice assistant for the workspace? We’re spending 30% to 40% of our time in meetings. That is a huge opportunity to reduce a lot of workload for people.

Most knowledge workers are spending a tremendous amount of time going back and forth between meetings, sending follow-up emails, and collaborating. We felt that was the right area to focus on. That’s what led to building Fireflies. We launched the first iteration of the current product in January 2020, right around the pandemic time. Within a few months, everyone was remote. There was an accelerated need technology like Fireflies.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Krish Ramineni, CEO of Fireflies.ai
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