YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Pedregal

lines on the record: 57
first: 2025-02-25
most recent: 2025-02-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The most honest answer to that is that it's a very personal thing. I am happiest when I am trying to build something that I believe in and that I think is important. And I'm pretty unhappy when I'm not. I'm just wired that way. And I don't know. I think Abbas I had early in my career, what does philosophy? And it's like an Aristotle believed in the active realization of human potential, that phrase stuck in my mind. When do I feel like my time is well spent? Do I feel like I'm actively trying to realize my potential, but also humanity's potential? And I think that comes for me primarily through my work, but also as a parent, which is something I didn't expect, but kind of makes sense now that I'm on the other side.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a much more honest assessment of myself. People talk about first principles, and I think that phrase gets overused. It's easy to hide behind justifications or philosophies to feel good about something. But I think oftentimes the reality is pretty straightforward. I can hold his voice in my head quite often, which is interesting. He never wasn't an entrepreneur. He never worked in tech. None of that stuff. But the amount of times I hear his voice being like, that sounds like bullshit. Maybe it's push I'm telling myself, or is something someone else is saying? It's in there a lot.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My dad spent a lot of time giving me a lot of feedback on things, oftentimes critical. I always felt very loved and supported, but oftentimes quite critical. And now that I'm in his shoes with my kids, I realize just how hard and tiring that is. And there's not a lot of upside for you as an individual to do that. Sometimes something just needs to be said to someone and there's a lot of upside for the individual gets the feedback and only downside for the person giving it. I appreciate just how hard that must have been and how kind that was because it was really all for my benefit.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. Here's a very real example for us. We just made our first customer experience higher. We have lots of people writing in and we interviewed a ton of candidates. And I'm pretty convinced that you're going to be able to look at a company and say, was there customer experience department created before or after 2025? Maybe this is the year. And the ones post-2025 are going to look completely different. They're probably going to be a lot smaller in terms of people, the way they use tool. Like what those people do will be very different. I think the departments that were created before will have trouble. They're much harder to change something that's existing than to build something from scratch on a new paradigm. We're very ambitious at Granola. So I think we're going to need a lot of people, but I think it might be you read about these companies that have thousands and tens of thousands of employees, the world in which that's necessary, granola seem very small.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The beginnings of photography is almost impossible to take a photo, right? If you just had a camera, that's it, you're winning. And then Canvas became more accessible, but they're still expensive and it's spent a lot of time to get good at it and different lenses. And then everyone has like a phone in their pocket. In a lot of ways, okay, everyone's a photographer, and it's amazing what people can do. At the same time, I feel like there's a premium on taste now. If you actually are really great and you can stand out in that, it's almost like you're more valuable. I'm curious what you think. What's going to happen with software? What's going to happen with apps? Is that it? It's like.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, it's kind of crazy we can get away with 50,000 examples. And even if it's a very expensive data type to get, 50,000 is not that hard. I'd think about what kind of data is ungettable. So I don't know. I guess I'm kind of split. This idea that soon anyone is going to be able to build apps, I think that's going to happen and I think that's going to happen relatively soon. It's less clear to me what the effects on the world are going to be. I've been thinking about historical examples. Does that make people who really good at building apps less valuable or more valuable? And I don't actually know.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of this data is you don't need that much of it anymore. And getting a little bit of data is not that expensive or not that hard. The way the world's going is you get these foundation models that can understand the world and kind of do a whole bunch of different things. And then with a little bit of data on top of that, you can really hone it into a use case. Whereas before, like in old machine learning paradigms, you'd need.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Holy Grail in ed tech is basically building one to one tutoring. There are all these studies that show if you have a one-to-one tutor, the medium student actually performs the top five or 10% percentile student. And that's kind of been true in history. A lot of the great people we read about in history books had like, was it like Peter the Great had Aristotle as a tutor? I mean, of course, you're going to do well. That's an unfair advantage. So I think that's like the Holy Grail. Everyone wants to have a one-on-one tutor. It should be free. It should just be an open source model. It should be free. Everyone should build on top of it. It's just better for everybody. I don't want to build a business there. The incentives around making money in that space versus, I think, what we kind of want for society aren't super aligned. And I think you're also going to get competition from the generic systems. As you're asking before, like what kind of use cases are going to get eaten up by the chat GPTs of the world? And I think most of education will fall under that category.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With my kids, you can actually turn the camera on there. And they were playing hide and seek with ChatGPT, which is kind of nuts. My kids are five and seven. They were like hiding behind the table and then peeking out. And she would be like, oh, I can see tutoring is one thing or what's going to help you get good grades. But that interaction was something that caught me off guard. I just haven't seen an interaction like that between a kid and technology. I don't know what the product would be, but there's definitely a there there. And I think the way you design that really matters.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started GNOLA, I was thinking about what I should start. My previous startup was in education, AI education app called Socratic. And everyone was like, oh, why don't you go into education? And I was like, oh, I think there are a whole bunch of reasons why I don't want to start another education company or an education AI company. But I've been playing with GPT-4 voice mode. You know, the one where you can, the Scarlet Johansson voice thing.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out their usage or like product behavior in the space that they've thought about. Maybe Granolok gets right or we get wrong, that really makes me pay attention because if something's hot, you just get inundated with messages. My inbox is hard to manage right now. And that's just because, yeah, it's exciting right now. It may not be exciting tomorrow. And what at least I want when I partner with an investor is I want a partner I'm going to work with for a very long time. And I want us to agree on an outlook on the world and how we think about a problem. All the specific executions, all of that's going to change to adapting world, but do you have a similar worldview on how you should go out and solve problems? I know that's a very generic answer, but I have that with my investors. I think they're great product thinkers and I think they can engage at a bunch of different levels, which is a huge unlock.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not an investor, so it's hard for me to give advice to investors. I can tell what speaks to me. So the same way I talked about when you're building a feature, you need to know is this exploit mode or an explore mode? I think AI as a whole is an explore mode problem. No one knows what the right thing is. I think maybe foundation models are like now more in an exploit mode, but everything else, especially at the app layer, total explore. When you're in an explorer mode, you need to have a certain sensibility there, which is, in my opinion, very product-centric and a certain exploration and depth of thought around what's actually going to be a good product or good for people. And not many investors talk about that or think in a deep way. The stuff that stands out from the noise for me, there have been some really good ones. But if I get a cold email and they write a very specific insight about”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's good to separate the reality today from what's a reality that will persist, what's the limitation that will persist in the future. It is surprising to me how unpersonalized any of these models feel today. If you ask it a question, because I ask it a question, the answers are going to be identical or almost identical given we're X number of years into this cycle. I think that's really surprising. This is a small thing we do at Granola that people like, but if you were using Granola in, let's say, a meeting and I'm using Granola in that meeting, your notes and my notes would look completely different. And that's just because we built it that way. We're like, okay, the things that matter to Patrick in this meeting, we think are this, the things that are going to matter to Chrace are this. But the low level of personalization is surprising to me.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would be projecting on the wall imagery that was related to what we were talking about, but slightly divergent. He was using this from like a burning man creative experience. But you could imagine something like that in a work context where it's like it's helping you think out loud. It's also extending and bringing in ideas or useful information that you wouldn't have had otherwise. I think doing that in a way that's helpful and not distracting is actually really, really hard. And there are a lot of these ideas in sci-fi that sound fantastic and then in practice don't work for really silly tactical reasons, like the notes being written for you in real time being distracting. I think there's like a lot about the human experience that defines what works and what doesn't. I can talk about this for hours. I gosh on it. I just think it's such an incredible moment to be alive and to be building things.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's real danger there. So the tool that I would want would be one that right now we have so many silos of information and so many silos of where knowledge or inspiration or information comes from. And oftentimes I'm only really looking at data information from one of those silos when I'm thinking about a topic. And what I want is a tool that will pull out the most relevant and best stuff in my personal life and my context, but also out there that humans have figured out and present that to me dynamically on the fly in a way that I can interpret and make use in real time. What that looks like, I don't think anyone knows. I saw this amazing demo a friend of mine made is this microphone hooked up to something like Midjourney, but it was running at something like, I think, five or eight frames a second. And what it was.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want tools that make us more human and better humans. And by that I mean tools that kind of unlock our creativity, unlock our ability to just basically do all the things that humans are incredible at that no one else can do. And I think the people who are building tools with AI need to be very intentional about that because I think there's a fine line where you want to outsource all the rote work, all the boring stuff, the mindless stuff, but you really don't want to outsource the judgment. When you were talking about generating ideas and you're asking AI to generate 100 different ideas and you can choose the right ones, that's great. There's a danger though that that's what everyone was doing. And now we're only looking at the ideas that are coming from AI. And that's just one example, but that trickles down to everything. It's like, oh, okay, well, this idea of writing is thinking. And if AI is doing the writing for you, well, a lot of that writing is just wrote work. There's no value in any way. But some of it is where you do your thinking. And if you're not careful about what you ask,”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How many of them were built by startups? And I think it's surprising number of those were built by startups, even though every big tech company is out there investing a tremendous amount of money to build AI features. So does that get figured out over time? Maybe startups are oftentimes the R&D wing of all the big tech companies. And then once something's figured out, they can incorporate that to their large user bases. But generational companies, they figured something out earlier and they were able to leverage that into becoming something massive.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“View on this is you're going to worry about a million things. You should choose selectively what to worry about because there are very few things out of your control. And the competitor that we have chosen to worry about at granola is the one that hasn't launched yet. It's the startup that can look at what we figured out, what other people figured out, and start at that point and execute on that more quickly than us. That's what we're thinking about. I was surprised at how quickly the big tech companies reacted to AI. Like there's this moment, I think like ChatGPT kind of went mainstream and then you saw every big tech company pivot and try to adapt to that strategy. So I was impressed by the leadership there. I think just because you choose to do something doesn't mean it's easy for you to execute on it. So one of our investors, he has this thing, which is if you list out all the AI features that you use on a daily basis, how many of them were built by big tech versus?”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't just be building a fantastic product in the future. You need to be damn useful at a very specific thing today. And every step along the way, you need to be super useful to people. And I think there's a real tension there, which is how much time do you spend building the next obvious five things that are going to be real useful to people versus you take the big swing. And for us, we want to move from a world where use granola for nodes to use granola to do most of your work. If you're writing a document or a memo, it should be way easier to do that in granola because of all the context that we have about the work you're doing that's related to that. But that's a really big swing. Getting that right is going to take a lot of work and a lot of iteration.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I asked myself if we're doing this correctly every day. Sam and I, when we started playing with LLMs, we became convinced that all the tools for work that we use are going to be rebuilt or reinvented on top of LLMs. And we became convinced that there's going to be like this new class of software in the same way that if you're a developer, you probably spend all day in cursor or Visual Studio, like some IDE, we think that there's going to be a new class of software. It doesn't have a name yet where people like you and I will spend all day and we do our work with folks whose jobs revolve around people and communication and projects and meetings and all that, there's going to be a new workspace for those folks. And that's what we set out to build from day one. And that's exactly what we're setting out to build now. I think the interesting question for us is it's really important if you're not an open AI or an anthropic that you are really, really good at a use case today.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your ability to change direction with the product until you have a lot of confidence that you're in the right direction. And how do you manage that while also moving in a really quickly, in a fast moving space? I mean, that's the whole challenge.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shipping something crappy to people, and you ticked it off. You're like, oh, we shipped it in two weeks. This is great. But actually, you didn't actually solve the problem to be solved. The thing you did was you shipped as opposed to figure out what is a great solution for people and do that. And interestingly, I'd say that as extra important in this space because there's so much pressure to move quickly that every now and then taking the extra time to think about how to do this is really important. A good example is we were working on granola for a year before we launched and we're so late to the AI note-ticking game already. We were seven years late when we founded Granola. We didn't launch for a year. You know how I talked about that interaction. We completely changed the core interaction of the product. If we had launched that publicly, we never would have been able to switch it. There's no way because users would have learned a new behavior. Users would have said, oh, this is cool. The ones who we would have retained would have liked it. But we wouldn't have retained that many users. That would have been it. I think that's very important kind of protect.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're pretty explicit about is knowing when we're working on a feature are we in exploit mode or are we in explorer mode? Because you need two completely different approaches to that. So what that means is do we know what needs to be built here? Is there a clear idea? And it's just about executing it as quickly as possible. Or do we not know what the answer is here? Is this like an unsolved open problem where you need to do some exploration first and then figure out what the right solution is? For the one where you know what you need to build, at least from our experience, it's the basic advice that everyone hears, which is build the minimal thing as quickly as possible. Give yourself deadlines where you will ship it to real humans, maybe not to everybody, to real people, and then try to increase the shipping iteration speed as quickly as possible. I think we've gotten in trouble before, and it's easy to, is you don't know what mode you're in and you use that philosophy to the open-ended problem. And then what ends up happening is you end up”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the only answer here really is you need to build something better than other people faster. In this space, there are switching costs. There are small modes, but I think the only way you win is you need to consistently build better stuff than other people faster than they're building it. And doing that in a space that's moving this quickly, it's not a small feat. Something we talk about as a team all the time. I think something like granola, there's an inherent switching cost because the more context granola has, the more useful it's going to be for you. So something have to be much better, I think, for someone to switch off of granola. But I think you get complacent for three months. You're in trouble in this space.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Editing the notes. And then they realized they had not been paying attention to the person speaking. And it was just really bad. So we ended up completely changing the interaction pattern to being something way more mundane, which is during the meeting, it works just like a regular text editor, like a notepad, you type stuff. And then all the magic happens at the end, which means that the magic moment, the value of granola, you only realize after you've used it for a whole meeting, which is not great. Ideally, when you're building a product, you want that magic moment to happen in the first 20 seconds. It just made it a way better product. Like I said, we spent six months trying to make this wrong thing work until finally we kind of accepted that there was a better way to do it.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out. So when we started off building granola, we had a completely different interaction pattern in the app. So the thing we pitched and the first version we built was very different. You would type in a keyword or two in granola in real time, and you'd hit tab. And then granola would write the full note for you in real time. So really cool demo. It felt kind of magical when you used it. I'd say something like back app. You type in MacApp and hit tab and then you'd write this like, Chris is really glad that you made the decision to build a Mac app. And then we basically spent six months trying to make this work and we just couldn't. What we found out was that no matter how great the notes we wrote were, if a computer is writing notes for you real time during a meeting, you can't help it read it. And what ends up happening is it's incredibly distracting. The whole point of granola is you can be more present in the meeting. And what was happening is the exact opposite was going on. People were just looking at the notes. And if they were not exactly how they wanted their.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More immediate and in your control. And it's so easy to get to. Like basically the way people use granola, which is I'd say is quite intimately, I think is largely a function of the fact that it's an app on your computer rather than a tab lost within 50 other tabs on your website that you have to find. So I think we can take a little bit of credit for that, but I think that was a way better decision than we realized at the time.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least with granola, we made the decision early on to make granola a Mac app, like an app that sits on your computer rather than a bot that joins meetings or something on a website. Lots of different ways you can build it. And that was a huge pain in the butt for a whole bunch of reasons. Like when we started off, it was only possible to do what granola does for users who are on macOS 13.4, which was, I think, 15% of Mac users at the time. And the reason we did it, again, was this idea of we want it to be like a notebook and a pencil. We want you to be able to grab granola and use it no matter where you are, whether you're on a Zoom call, in-person meeting, on a how to own slide. We don't want you to have to think about it. The important thing about a tool is that it is reliable and it works in a consistent way so you know how to use it. There have been so many downstream great things about being a Mac app of being an app on your computer. It's so much more.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the weird things I remember when that happened was so we launched granola in May. So it was like eight months ago, nine months ago. And I've been building product for a long time. This was surreal, though. We launched it. We were happy that some people tweeted about it. It wasn't like a crazy big launch or anything. And we just expected to keep building. And then a few weeks later, these really famous CEOs who we did not know just started tweeting and then DMing me on Twitter a whole bunch of product feedback that they wanted. It clearly resonated with a very specific type of persona and then that persona was really loud on social media. My Twitter direct messages basically became a customer support channel for CEOs of like big tech companies, which is like a really weird experience.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is actually pretty interesting, and it might have implications. The people who use us are the people who are AI forward. So it's folks who are leaning into these new tools, these new ways of doing work. That interestingly maps to a ton of founders, a ton of investors, and a ton of people across all disciplines that are working in the AI space. So the number of AI startups where the marketing person is using Granola is extremely high. It's interesting. It's interesting how there's a very stark line between the people who are leading into these tools and those who aren't.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Granola specific one is all about giving the user control. Granola is a tool to make you better, which means you drive the tool. And every decision we make ties back to that in one way or another. Even the most basic one, it is an editor. Most AI apps that generate notes, they don't generate the notes in an editor where you can edit them. They give you a PDF kind of thing or like an email. Here are the notes. There are tons of micro decisions that I'll map to that idea.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just ask them that question over and over. And I think when you do that, you realize within the first, I don't know, 500 milliseconds when you look at a product, you feel like 10 things. And oftentimes those things tell you exactly, oh, it's too complicated. It's too cluttered. I don't know what to do. It makes me feel insecure. There are so many emotions and they go by in like a flash of an instant. There's an emotional recorder and you could play it back in slow motion. That would tell you all you need to do to make your product great. So there are lots of other things that matter, but I feel like that one question is an incredible guiding force.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My personal approach, you can boil down most great product thinking and design to a very simple question, which is when you use a product, when you look at it, really ask yourself, how does this make me feel? And just keep asking yourself that question and really, really, really listen to the answer. And then once you've done that a hundred times, put that same product or UI or button in front.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, high frequency use case where your output needs to be really, really good. And that's basically the power tool quadrant. There'll always be that pro tooling for the people who really want to do a fantastic job at something. I think that's where GNOLA sits. And you might be like, oh, but why can't the general system do that as well if the model just gets smart enough? And my answer there is not a question of intelligence. It's actually how great is the UI optimized for this use case. And I think that if you have a product that is solely dedicated to being phenomenal at that use case, it will be a better experience than a general tool will be. So I think the limitations there would separates that is really around the product design and optimization of the user experience, not of the underlying technology.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I don't have a crystal ball here, but here's the way I view this. There may be two axes here that matter. One is how common is this a use case for me? Is this something I do like once a month or twice a month? Is this something I do 500 times a day? And two, how great do I need to be at this task? And I think everything that is low frequency where you don't need to be great at it will be eaten up by the general system. And I'd say most consumer use cases actually fall in that quadrant because it's basically impossible to build a habit to use a new tool on a low frequency use case. And if it's something where you just need it to be like pretty good, then a universal assistant like Claude is perfect. And actually, the more you use that, the better that assistant will get for you. I think the other end of that quadrant is basically”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. I think eval is not simple, but what you described is exactly what we do. We don't view it just use one model in one place. We use lots of models and lots of different ways inside of granola, but we will switch to whatever the best model is on any given day.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the best thing ever Fantastic. I fully support him. For us, we build on top of foundation models and the speed at which models have gotten better over the last three years is incredible. And I believe that companies like Granola benefit tremendously from the competition between the providers. And as a result, I think users are benefiting tremendously.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open and I'm taking notes in there because of that. That's probably the biggest surprise. The other behavior change I think I mentioned this before is that when people go back in granola, less and less they read the notes that are there and more and more they ask the granola chat what they're looking for.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are a few things that have jumped out one is the variety of use cases people use it for. So we built it for work meetings very quickly. People started telling us, my partner has cancer. We have all these meetings with doctors. Granola has become absolutely invaluable in that process. I actually don't know. I would have managed it before. There's the use case thing that was unexpected. Then the other thing is people are finding creative ways to get more context into granola that is just not designed for. And this is the I am brainstorming brainstorming an idea. And I'm just going to create a meeting granola, like a note in granola and just talk to myself or I need to plan out my day. So I'm just going to talk about the different things going on and then he's granula to help prioritize what I'm doing. Or I'm watching a YouTube video on a subject I'm trying to learn.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Larry Tesla basically went on a vendetta to change this. So now it's actually you should be able to type and delete and copy and do all that fluidly without entering different modes. And that was unthinkable before we made that jump. So it's kind of hard to imagine what that's going to be for AI. I guarantee it'll feel completely different than what we have now. I think granularity of control and speed of collaboration are the two things that are going to go way up. So it should be way more fluid.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on the tool, but right now it doesn't feel like you and the AI are working on the same canvas. It's like we're working on two separate canvases next to each other. This is a very basic thing. But when you're using ChatGPT or Claude, you can't go and edit the response that the AI gave you. You don't go in there and be like, oh, actually, you know, this point was dumb and let's change the language here. You tell it, please make it shorter as a command. And you hope that it rewrites it in the right way. That's just going to feel like madness not too long from now. I guess there's a historical parallel here. These things feel very obvious once they're invented. Early computing days, when you're in a text editor, the first text editors, there's this idea of modes. So there's a mode where you're like text insertion mode and you'd go in and you'd write some words and then you'd exit that mode and then you'd go into deletion mode or copy mode. You'd have to enter that mode and make that change. And then”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way we work with ChatGPT, I don't think chat's going away, but I think it will feel archaic and how little control you really have as a user. I was looking this up. I was trying to find an analogy for this. The first cars that came out, they didn't have steering wheels. They had basically a stick that you could turn like left to right. And it was fine if you were trying to go really slow. The moment you went fast, the stick was unusable. You'd move it too much and you'd crash off the road and it was a big security problem. And then finally, someone came up with a steering wheel and a steering wheel is a UI that gives you so much fine-grained control when you're trying to turn. And I think we still have to invent what the steering wheel is for when you're working with AI and collaborating with AI. Right now we have some very coarse controls and it's turn taking right now. It's like I write something. Then the AI does something. Then I react back to it. And I think it's going to be a lot more fluid and a lot more collaborative once we figure that out.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gathering the context, just getting all the data is not that hard. It's only a matter of time before you can plug in all your email into Anthropic or ChatGPT and all your nodes and all your company documents and all your tweets. And it'll have all that. I think there's a different question, which is which of that context is really relevant for the thing I'm about to do right now? And that may be a technical problem. That may be a UI problem. I don't know. So that's on the context side. I do think a huge blocker for unlocking the power of collaborating with AI is what's the UI? What's the interface for collaborating with UI?”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around how you use these tools and you build with AI? Perhaps in a similar way where the web came along and people pre-web wouldn't automatically default to using Google, they'd go elsewhere versus people who had grown up were young enough when that happened would always default to using Google. I think there's going to be a very, very, very similar divide here, which is basically the AI natives will just understand what context they need to give AI and how to work with AI. And actually, when in doubt, you should probably give it more context and see what it's going to say, as opposed to like assume you know, right? And I'm 38. I'm very happy the team is constantly pulling me. Like I'm literally at the forefront and thinking about this all the time. And I don't use AI as much as I should be using it. If that's the case for me, think about the general population.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Our CTO Voss, he has a goal basically minimizing the number of lines of code every engineer writes a Ganola every day is a goal of HIS. It's an active goal. We just did this off-site. And the theme was basically use AI everywhere for things you wouldn't expect to. Just push ourselves outside of our comfort zone. And there's this great example we were trying to barbecue some shrimp for the tea. We bought some shrimp. This was in Spain. I've never barbecued shrimp before. I'm typing into ChatGPT like, okay, how do you barbecue shrimp? And Voss was like, no, give it the right context. So he's like, take a photo of the barbecue and take a photo of the shrimp. And you're totally right. So it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Give it the context. So I did this. Turns out the shrimp was already cooked. We didn't realize it because it was in Spanish. We didn't have to cook it at all. We just need to heat it up, which never, ever would have figured out if I had just typed it in. An interesting point there is there's just a completely different intuition you need to have.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all of a sudden, granola needs to do something very specific to make that feel seamless that you never would have thought of until you built it and you realize it felt crappy if you didn't do that. We use as many AI tools as possible for as many things as possible inside of Granola. But some of the tools, at least on the development side, aren't quite there yet. We're so close to take that end to end. So we still have to do a lot of work there. Again, I hate doing time horizon guesses here because it's basically impossible to know if you fast forward us three years. I think the way we would work and what we would be able to outsource to AI would be completely different.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The two defining characteristics that are different about this space in this moment are one, the speed at which the technology is getting better is nuts. And two, where Greno is built on top of LLM. So it's an app layer product. We hit so much benefit from writing these incredible technological advancements that are happening at the LLM layer. We spend a lot of our time really thinking about what makes a great user experience end to end. And if we weren't building on top of this foundational technical layer like LLMs, we'd need a massive team to be able to do what we're doing today. So we really do benefit from that. That said, a lot of what makes granola great is sweating the details of all these technical edge cases. So stuff you'd never think of. It's like you're in the middle of a meeting and you take off your AirPods and it's on a Zoom call that has multiple chats.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is listening to everything. I know in Silicon Valley, that's one of the visions for the future. And I personally don't like that vision. I think in a work context, the phone is great because you basically put it down on the table and it is an easy social contract with the people in that meeting of what's happening. That's how we do work at granola. Basically, every meeting at granola, it's very clear if there's a phone out and whose phone is taking notes. I think the social contract really matters. It's up to the individual to manage this as it's up to the individual to manage everything in the work environment. I think if you put the phone out and you're upfront about it, everyone benefits. And I think that change will happen. I think much faster than you expect. Whereas I think in social circles, it will be very different.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our iOS app is launching soon. Sam and I, my co founder and I, we built this because we wanted it ourselves. We thought it would be useful. We thought it was interesting. And quite frankly, we were really surprised by how it took off and by how once someone starts using Granola for all their important work calls, you basically are outsourcing some of your long-term memory to Granola. You start to have this expectation that you can go back and look up these important things from any conversation. Some of the most upset emails we get from users are saying exactly what you're saying, which is, hey, a third of mine meetings are in person and I'm flying blind. I'm like naked in those meetings. I desperately need granola in person. I'm speaking about granola right now because that's what we're building. Maybe it'll be used. Maybe it was someone else, but I guarantee you a tool will be used by everyone basically in this context. As soon as the norms are going to be, I personally hate the idea of a hidden pendant.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lives will be very, very different than in the workplace is my guess. I don't know exactly where that will end up, but I see a pretty stark distinction between in the workplace setting. Most people want all these things captured because the AI can provide so much value to the user. Whereas in our social surroundings, I think that'll be a very divisive issue. We'll see how that goes. I could see it. I remember when Google Glass came out, there was a huge backlash. I could see a similar backlash.”
2025-02-25 · Invest Like the Best · Chris Pedregal - Building Granola - [Invest Like the Best, EP.412] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source