Chris Pedregal
speaker
154 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Chris Pedregal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Here are the notes. There are tons of micro decisions that I'll map to that idea.
This 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 is
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 leaning into these tools and those who aren't.
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. Yeah. 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.
We made the, 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. There are 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 like 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 huddle and slide. We don't want you to have to think about it. An 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, being an app on your computer. It's so much more immediate and in your control, and it's so easy to get to. Basically, the way people use Granola, which 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.
Yeah, 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. It's a really cool demo. It felt kind of magical when you used it.
I'd say something like, Mac app. You'd type in Mac app and hit tab, and then you'd write this. Like, Chris was really glad that he 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 but 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, they were 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.
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 moats, 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 will 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.
Something we're pretty explicit about is knowing when we're working on a feature, are we in exploit mode or are we in explore 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?
Showing 81–100 of 154 · page 5 of 8
← Previous
Next →