Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Krish Ramineni, CEO of Fireflies.ai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In building your company, I’d like to understand how you sell. You’re getting leads through different parts of the company, but who buys your product? Is it Head of HR or Head of IT?

Krish Ramineni: Our model is 100% self-service. It could be an individual swiping their card to pay or it could be a team manager. If the department really likes it, their procurement or Head of IT will purchase. We sell to customers the way they want to purchase.

Sramana Mitra: It’s 100% self-service?

Krish Ramineni: Yes, very much like Atlassian.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. What metrics do you track? How many customers? How many users?

Krish Ramineni: For us, value is about how much people are utilizing Fireflies in meetings. We look at and understand how much they are using it and how they are using it. Obviously, you have your regular metrics. What we like to focus more on is the time-to-value. How long does it take for someone to experience Fireflies and see the magic moment. The beauty of Fireflies is that can happen even before you sign up. If you’re a participant in a meeting, you get to see it, talk about it, and get a recap afterwards.

For us, a lot of the focus is around getting customers time-to-value. Everything else is a lagging indicator based on that. Like Slack, you get a certain utilization on the free tier. As you get more value, you will naturally hit a wall. There’s a lot of companies that are doing that really well like Calendly and DocuSign. People want to try before they buy. Sometimes, we need to fill out security questionnaires for them. These are natural progressions.

Sramana Mitra: I see that you’re using this in the background. That’s how you work. You’re going to send me the transcript and establish value through that.

Krish Ramineni: It depends on the settings. I can send it to everyone or only to me. If users want to share with their participants so that they don’t have to send a long follow-up email, it helps.

Sramana Mitra: What financing strategy have you used?

Krish Ramineni: We’ve raised a seed round back at the end of 2019. Recently, we raised a Series A. Our seed round was led by Canaan Partners and our Series A was led by Khosla Ventures. Till then, we were pretty much bootstrapped. We wanted to build the product and see it in the hands of customers before we raised money.

What we eventually realized is that the VOIP space is extremely intense. All props to companies like Zoom who’ve been able to scale. The infrastructure needs and demands are intense. A lot of people think about AI and ML. We have to have maybe 40 to 50 engineers just on scaling infrastructure because Fireflies is a very real-time product. We realized that it would be great to continuously bootstrap. The TAM was so wide that if we didn’t bring capital to the table, we would have been overwhelmed.

Sramana Mitra: Did you have paying customers by the time you raised your seed round?

Krish Ramineni: We hadn’t built the paid product. We were giving it as a free product. We had very good adoption and stickiness from our existing cohorts. Then we dived into use cases and looked at how people are using the product. From that point in time, revenue was an afterthought. We aligned ourselves with investors who were thinking about derisking the product and market.

Sramana Mitra: Before the Series A, what came together?

Krish Ramineni: We had this massive uptick because of the pandemic. We were adjusting and scaling. We weren’t even planning on raising the A. A lot of investors who see us on meetings want to learn about it. It was a lot more inbound. There was also a lot of uncertainty during the pandemic. It’s a very frothy market right now. People are raising Series A and B before they’ve even finished building their product. We started seeing appetite for the platform.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise?

Krish Ramineni: $14 million. We also have angel investors at our seed stage including the Chief Product Officer at Slack and Chief Marketing Officer at Salesforce. We’re very fortunate and grateful for those angels.

Sramana Mitra: Congratulations! Very nice to meet you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Krish Ramineni, CEO of Fireflies.ai
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