IAM2389 – CEO Focuses on Conversational Analytics to Facilitate Better Customer Experience

LinkedIn: Krish Ramineni

Previous Episode: iam229-ceo-focus-on-conversational-analytics-to-facilitate-better-customer-experience

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Krish Ramineni Teaser 00:00

So with this enterprise platform, which is our first product, if you've ever called up customer support and get that message in the beginning that says this call is being monitored for quality and training purposes.

Well, in reality, most companies are just sitting on a treasure trove of call data and never really tapping into that goldmine of information.

So what we're able to do is process all that information, put it into your CRM and provide helpful insights.

Intro 00:24

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:51

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Krish Ramineni of Fireflies.ai. Krish, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Krish Ramineni 01:00

Hey, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Gresham Harkless 01:04

Definitely pleasure is all mine. And I want to read a little bit more about Krish so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing and he's building.

Krish is the co-founder and CEO of Fireflies.ai. Fireflies is a San Francisco-based AI startup focusing on conversational analytics.

Their platform records, transcribes, and analyzes thousands of sales and support calls. Chances are you've been on a call that their system has analyzed.

Prior to Fireflies.ai, Krish was one of the youngest product managers at Microsoft in Seattle, where he led projects around user and customer experience analytics.

I think my boss said he was one of the youngest in the company's history, but don't quote him on that.

Krish graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and currently resides in Pleasanton, California. Krish, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Krish Ramineni 01:52

Yeah, let's do it.

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Gresham Harkless 01:53

Awesome. Let's do it. So the first question I had was to hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story and what led you to start your business.

Krish Ramineni 02:00 

Great. I think it starts back to even just being as a kid, I was always engulfed in technology growing up in the Silicon Valley backyard here in California.

My dad was in software. I was literally working and playing around with computers and software just growing up.

That was something that was a big part of my life. It's funny because I remember in fifth grade, I wrote a letter to Bill Gates as part of a class project while he was leading Microsoft.

And we did this whole presentation on the impact of personal computing and how Bill Gates not only brought successful technology to everyone.

But also was able to nail the go-to-market strategy by putting Windows in every single hardware device back then.

Funny enough, I got a letter back from them about a month later. It was a large envelope with a bunch of information, some free software.

And then there was also, I think what was more of a canned letter that said, hey, this is great that you're young and you're pushing yourself in the fields of science and engineering.

And it was like, one day maybe I'd be able to work for Microsoft. And exactly a decade later, I was a product manager there at Microsoft and I was around 21 when I started a few years back.

And while working at Microsoft, I had a chance to interact with many people around NLP and data science.

And we usually hear about this as like the frontier tech, but people were actually really solving hard problems at Microsoft at a large scale.

And I was fortunate enough to work with things related to customer feedback and this started getting my brain thinking.

So I actually left Microsoft and I was going to go to grad school at Cambridge in the UK. So that was the initial plan. I loved my time at Microsoft.

But this idea of conversation tracking, doing this voice analytics, you know, just kept going through my mind.

So I flew out to Boston to meet a friend of mine who was graduating from MIT at that time. And he was doing a bunch of deep learning and machine learning stuff.

We started talking and what turned out to be kicking things around turned into like, you know what, I'm going to just do this full time.

So we moved out to San Francisco, where I was originally from. And we've never looked back since in the last three years.

Gresham Harkless 04:03

Nice. I absolutely love that story. And you just kind of going for it. Most people are so afraid to maybe even write that note to Bill Gates.

And you just wrote it. And next thing you know, it kind of manifests itself into you working there, being one of the youngest people there.

I don't know if your boss at Quotashoot was Bill Gates, but if it was, I mean, I'm sure it was an incredible environment there. I wanted to hear, I guess, a little bit more about what you're doing with Fireflies AI.

Krish Ramineni 04:23

Great. Yeah. So what we focus on is specifically for B2B or enterprise businesses. Our team is working on a voice intelligence platform that's able to record, transcribe, and analyze a lot of these salient conversations and meetings and calls that are happening.

We have two core product lines. One is for enterprise sales and customer support organizations.

So with this enterprise platform, which is our first product, if you've ever called up customer support and get that message in the beginning that says this call is being monitored for quality and training purposes.

Well, in reality, most companies are just sitting on a treasure trove of call data and never really tapping into that goldmine of information.

So what we're able to do is process all that information, put it into your CRM and provide helpful insights.

One, this helps reps not have to deal with data entry anymore. This, so they can focus on the conversation.

You probably called up customer support many times and had to repeat the same things over and over again.

We're able to help facilitate that experience so that the customers have the right information and are able to answer or get the answers that they need.

We can also start identifying critical situations like when a customer asks about pricing or where they dissatisfied.

You've probably called up customer support for any service you're using and say, hey, I'm not happy with the service. I want to cancel my subscription.

And then you have the support rep hesitating, not knowing what to do. In these situations, Fireflies can provide feedback and help mitigate those situations for the rep and also provide indicators to the manager to help coach them to do better.

And this works both in that support use case as well as sales. Because in many B2B situations, a lot of the things that are being done is being sold through inside sales calls, right?

You're hopping on demos, you're scheduling meetings to go buy software or buy any sort of thing.

So telesales, all this stuff, there's just a lot of conversations happening. In fact, I would say we're spending more than maybe 60% of our time in some form of conversation or meeting, right? So that's pretty big.

And then the second platform we have is for more internal collaboration and workflow. So if you're in a conference room or have a conference line meeting.

Our AI is able to join that meeting, automatically take notes and transcribe everything and put it, put stuff in a system that you and your team can search back to later.

So those are the two core product lines, but it's all focused around, let's go to where people are having conversations.

And there's gold inside conversations is the key premise. And then unlocking that and providing a light or shining a light into those parts of your workflow that we previously were not able to do.

Gresham Harkless 06:50

That was great that you guys are building and kind of helping to give eyes to those opportunities and those conversations that people are having.

And you might've already touched on this, but I wanted to ask you for what I call like your secret sauce.

And this could be for you or for Fireflies, but it's something that you feel like makes you or your organization unique.

Krish Ramineni 07:05

Right. So we've been fortunate enough to work with some large organizations, telecom companies, and our platform has really trained on over millions of different data points.

The advantage of AI is that it's compounding. It gets smarter as it learns over time. And so we're able to start deploying different solutions for different state or insurance company would be using.

And so these are some of the things that help us compound and train the AI to identify and recognize different voices, different unique words, unique vernacular.

Because your domain or industry might be talking about certain words and topics that are not familiar in other industries, right?

So being able to really personalize that experience, that's something that helps us when we get in front of the larger customers and are able to demonstrate the value prop to them.

Gresham Harkless 07:50

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I definitely think that's a huge value. And like I said, to both sides of the coin, because, again, you really have that opportunity to do something you couldn't really do before.

Or maybe it was always there, like you mentioned earlier, but we just didn't necessarily know how to or have tools to be able to kind of distill that down and translate that. Right.

And I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. And this might be an Apple book or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Krish Ramineni 08:16 

Sure. I have a couple. I think about this all the time. So one is I live on Slack. We have a global team.

It's important to work across different time zones. And for me, when I'm scheduling my one-on-ones or when I have times, I use Slack as a proxy for that.

So I have these mini conversations with different teammates before our sync-ups, and that's really helpful for me to be able to stay on top of everything that they're doing without having to micromanage.

The other thing that I like to do is, I front-load my meetings for one or two particular days of the week.

And then I try to leave the rest of the week with as little meetings as possible. It's funny, we're building a meetings platform, but we all agree that there's just way too many meetings.

And it's better if we have more concentrated meetings on particular days so that it doesn't disrupt our workflow.

So typically, I like to have Thursday where I have no meetings at all, and I can just catch up on all the other work that I need to do.

Third thing that I like is I use an app called Zapier. It lets me plug in two different tools and be able to automate repetitive tasks.

So when someone sends an invoice or when someone books a meeting on my calendar, I get all these notifications in Slack.

I'm literally able to bring all the different tools I use into Slack and that makes it really easy to use Zapier.

Gresham Harkless 09:30

And now I want to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And you might have already touched on this, but this is a word of wisdom or a piece of advice, or if you can happen to a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Krish Ramineni 09:39

I think for being a CEO, a manager, any of the folks in leadership roles, one thing is you can read about it in a book, but it's another thing actually doing it.

You're going to be put into situations that you aren't familiar with. And that's the beauty of it. You have to learn to problem-solve.

And you'll start off as an individual contributor and all of a sudden, you're managing a group of people.

I honestly think that step is not that hard. Because if you're a good individual contributor, you will have to learn some different skill sets to be able to extract the best from other people.

Because just because you were able to do something really well in a particular way doesn't mean everyone else has to do it in that particular way. You have to be able to let go of that preconception.

But if you're able to do that, as an individual manager, you're going to do well by being able to give people the ability to go and execute and support them.

The other step function is when you now start having to manage managers, right? So that's the transition I've had over the past year.

And it's very different because now I don't just talk to my managers about how they're doing right and how their team is delivering on expectations.

But I have to teach our managers to start interacting with their individual contributors in a manner that is appropriate, right?

Are they motivated? Are they engaged? Are they actually happy? Are they enabling them? Are my managers setting aside time to coach their reports?

So these are different things where you now have to look one, two step functions down. And what that also forces you to do is sometimes you can't be in the weeds with everything, right?

You're working with sales, you're working with marketing, you're working with product, and then you're working on two layers of management.

It becomes very hard to stay connected all the time into everything that's happening. And sometimes that is okay, because you have to let a few fires burn.

But if you're able to set the entire team on this larger vision of this is what our principles are, this is what we're looking to achieve.

And these are the goals that we want. And if you hire competent people, they'll be able to work within those principles without feeling constrained.

So that's the biggest thing I've learned is if you're a great individual contributor, you'll have this natural tendency to become a micromanager and you can't do that.

You might be able to get away with it when you're having two or three reports, but once you're having six, seven, or even after that, you're having managers that have other reports, it becomes very difficult to scale things up.

So you need to be able to let go of that micromanaging tendency. That's something that I've had to learn and build over the past couple years, but doing that has just been very, very helpful for me.

And that's something I tell all my other colleagues and other folks that are starting their own businesses or, you know, just got promoted. This is the thing to think about.

Gresham Harkless 12:19 

Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO.

And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Krish, I wanted to ask you, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Krish Ramineni 12:28

CEO, I believe, is to be an enabler for both your team and your customers. Ultimately, a CEO has to listen to what the customer is saying.

I go back, I sit on all these calls, I learn about what our customers are actually asking for and seeing how that's getting translated into business requirements and how our team is executing on that.

I might not be able to get into the day-to-day of every single thing that happens, but I still need to be the best that I can be at representing both our customers as well as our employees.

And enabling them is very different from doing it yourself. So as a CEO, you are an enabler of those two different functions and making sure that you understand how to do those functions extremely well.

And as a CEO, you might not be the best salesperson to be honest, right? You'll have dedicated all-star salespeople.

And you might at some point in time have to let go of the product management capabilities that you were dealing with to other folks on the team.

But being able to see across all these different functions and then tie it back to what is the customer asking for?

What is our team delivering on? Are we on the right road-map? And are we achieving or pushing towards the right north star metrics?

So to do this, you can't do this alone. You have to be an enabler and be able to make sure you are keeping everyone on the same page there.

And sometimes it gets repetitive. And, people tell me like, it was actually a good thing. You keep saying some of the same things over and over again, because that brings us back on the same page.

And the other thing as an enabler that you want to be able to do is clear roadblocks and obstacles for them there should be no politics.

There should be no Hesitations when an employee wants to be able to do something extremely well, they want to innovate they want to experiment they want to take risks being able to clear those roadblocks for them to be able to achieve those goals.

And then grow in their careers is absolutely important because it's those type of people that are willing to take the proactive approach or the ones that are going to be more appreciate are going to be able to appreciate what you're doing for them and stay around longer.

Gresham Harkless 14:38 

Absolutely. And it makes perfect sense that you have to be able to have that vantage point and be able to see all those things so that you can make decisions based off of that and make sure all the stakeholders involved, whether that be employees or clients or whoever that is, are getting as much benefit as possible.

So Krish, I appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time that you took with us. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic just to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know.

And then of course, how they can find out about Fireflies and all the awesome things that you're doing.

Krish Ramineni 15:04 

Great. I thought this was an awesome conversation to be able to chat about just some of the things that, pop into our minds on a day-to-day basis.

The other thing I would tell CEOs to watch out for even as early as five employees, six employees, is to stop silos from forming.

And what I mean by silos is when one function is doing something on their own, like marketing is doing something on their own, and then sales is doing something on their own, and then engineering is building their own road-map, silos, build up very quickly, and it becomes very hard to tackle.

As the team grows and as the company grows so if anything try to bring a layer of visibility and transparency into what conversations your teams are having.

And then being able to share those across your different teams is absolutely vital so that you're not doing redundant work or you're not building the wrong products for your customers.

You can visit us at fireflies.ai. If you're interested in using the platform or wanting to learn more, you can reach out to team@fireflies.ai. That's our email address.

You can find me on LinkedIn as well as Twitter and my hashtag is Krish_Ramimeni. So those are the typical places you can find us both me and our business.

Gresham Harkless 16:15

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I appreciate it again, Krish, and we'll make sure to have those links in the show notes so that everybody can follow up with you. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Krish Ramineni 16:22

Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me here.

Outro 16:26

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase. It's a community.

Check out the latest and greatest apps, books, and habits to level up your business as CEOhacks.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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