Krish Ramineni, CEO of Fireflies.ai, discusses building a billion-dollar company by focusing on solving real problems, viewing capital as a tool,.
Krish Ramineni, CEO of Fireflies.ai, discusses building a billion-dollar company by focusing on solving real problems, viewing capital as a tool, and prioritizing consistent progress over polished presentations. He emphasizes the importance of focus and building without waiting for external validation.
Focus beats optionality. Complexity kills clarity. And you don't need permission to get started. I think the most important thing is building something that people actually want. That's easy to say but hard to actually achieve. [Music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the Dealmaker Show. So today we have an amazing founder, you know, joining us. Uh we're we're going to be talking, you know, quite a bit about the stuff that he's up to. I mean, 20 million users, you know, that are using what he's built, uh him and his team, obviously, but I mean, it's definitely something that you guys are probably, you know, customers of and it's going to really resonate the story. We're going to be talking about you know the whole uh building the scaling the financing the contrarian thinking about uh work about you know building the team about raising money about how AI is going to change things
how it's going to change to the way that people are working nowadays again I think that the conversation is going to be quite inspiring and without further ado let's welcome our guest today Chris Ramine welcome to the show >> thank you for having me I'm excited to be So originally you were born in India but you came to the US quite early. I mean you were literally 5 years old. Uh I think that your your father was in tech so obviously you know it's not a surprise that California was the way to to land but but give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you? >> My father came here in 1999 right around the dot era the dot boom in California. He worked in tech ever since then. I was 5 years old when I moved out here and it was a very interesting experience growing up where so many friends and family members and relatives all worked in tech. I come from a very
traditional South Asian background where you're either a doctor or you're an engineer. There's no other choice. And growing up, I thought I would be a doctor. That's what my mom wanted me to be. She had gotten into medical school, didn't end up going, and uh that was something that she wanted for me. But once I got into college, I realized that I felt more of a love for entrepreneurship and starting something. It didn't even have to be in tech. It could be manufacturing. It could be in hardware. It could be anywhere. But I wanted to start something. That's something was very like passionate. I was very passionate about. So, uh, ended up switching to doing things completely outside of medicine. Uh, focused on engineering, learning how to code, and the rest is history. >> That's incredible. I mean, in your case, you know, you literally went to UPUPEN and then right after you joined
Microsoft, but it wasn't long until you felt the itch, right, of uh really taking ownership of your own future and destiny. So literally only one year in. I mean I'm sure that your your parents you know were like what's what's happening? I mean you were already thinking about wrapping up and becoming an entrepreneur. So give us you know a little of a sense of what happened. What were the sequences of events that needed to happen for you to to really bring let's say Fireflies to life and and really you know get into the venture world. >> Microsoft was a great experience. I had never worked at a big tech company before. I got to learn a lot about their process, their approach. I felt that if I had my own team, what could I do? How can I move faster? And so it happened very organically. I didn't think Fireflies would be where it is today. At that time, I said, I just want to go try
for one, two years, build something on my own and see what that gets me. And if that doesn't work, I'll go back to grad school or I'll go back to another large company. I spent a year at Microsoft and then my co-founder, he had never worked at another company before and he said, "Why don't you come out to Boston and spend the summer here before you go off to graduate school?" And we started working during the summer. Loved working every day, waking up, spent almost 12 to 15 hours every day working. That's all we did. Uh write code, talk to customers, build product. And then at the end of the summer, we said, "This is fun. Let's go full-time on this." And the rest is history. Move. My only condition was I wanted to move back to California. I didn't want to be in Boston. And we started building the company. To be honest, we were naive 21-year-old kids that didn't know how hard it is to
actually build a business. We had just watched the TV show Silicon Valley. We hear about Silicon Valley and read the TechCrunch articles. You think that's the world, right? You raise a big funding round, you make a big splash announcement and you hire a bunch of Stanford kids and the rest is easy. Nothing could be further from the truth. So reality hit quite hard once we got started working on this stuff and yeah, it was it was a long long journey and it took us several years before we were able to raise our initial round of capital. Well, I guess for the people to get it, you know, what ended up being Fireflies? What's the business model >> today? Fireflies is an AI meeting assistant, AI teammate that joins your meetings, takes notes for you. You can talk to Fireflies on a meeting. You can have it assist you quietly in the background. You can also have it do work after a meeting.
And in the future, you can just have Fireflies go take meetings on your behalf. You don't even have to attend them. I know that sounds very sci-fiish, but we were very excited about that what we're building here. But it took a long time to get there, one step at a time. And the way we built our business is user by user, meeting by meeting. We have a premium product as well as a monthly subscription product that people pay for. And we've been able to scale it to millions of people that are using Fireflies on a daily basis. And we have large large companies, small small teams everywhere in between uh using the product today. >> Now obviously you guys are now on this rocket ship but it took some time to get there and you guys had to fail get up multiple times. I mean >> how was it like you know until what was that journey to get to product market fit? I always like to say
comfort kills ambition. And if you are too comfortable doing what you are doing today, you're not stretching yourself. So I can say in the early days, we were not comfortable at all. It was painful. Every day was painful. We had systems breaking every other day. We had to be up at 2 a.m. trying to fix things. We got a lot of rejections from investors. That builds character. When you get said no to so many times, it gives you a chip on your shoulder, it makes you want to prove the world wrong. And I think that's been the driving forces for my co-founder Sam and I to go out and say, "Hey, there's all these people betting on us not being able to do this. Let's go prove them wrong." And I think the hardest lesson we learned early on is it's not about networking. It's not about going to the fancy founder startup events. It's not about the sexy conferences. It is not about chasing the hype.
It's about focusing on customers. And a lot of times you don't have an option. Especially if you are low on capital and don't have a lot of funding. You have to be very very resourceful. So for us being profitable was not optional. It was mandatory. It was proof of success. So that's how we decided to build our company. We were fortunate to raise $20 million along the way, but it was not something that would have like happened magically. So, we weren't banking on the capital to save us. So, we had to build it brick by brick. >> What was that moment like when you were like, "Oof, I think that we may be into something here." Well, the first aha moment for me was when someone went to our website, put in their credit card, and paid for it without talking to any of us. They said, "Hey, I heard about this from a friend. I signed up. I'm paying for it. I like it. Keep up the good work."
That was all the motivation we needed when we were very low on spirit. And that changed things for us. We said, "If we can make one customer happy, I'm sure we can make 10 happy. If we can make 10 happy, I'm sure we can make a 100 happy. And if we can make 100 happy, I started to build that self-confidence that we can make a million people happy. And you don't notice that while you're on the journey, but when you look back, you'll see that holy crap, like we've uh we we've gotten to this place where you've created your own brand. And the best form of marketing is when people tell others about Fireflies, and they're doing a lot of that hard work on our behalf. I know that you have some contrarian, you know, views when it comes to fundraising work. You know, why don't you share those with us too, Chris? >> Yeah. One, fundraising is not a strategy. It is one of many things you can do,
but just…