IAM229- CEO Focus on Conversational Analytics to Facilitate Better Customer Experience

Krish is the co-founder & CEO at Fireflies.ai

Fireflies is an SF 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 I was the youngest in the company's history but don't quote me on that)

Krish graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and currently resides in Pleasanton, California.

• CEO Hack: (1)Slack (2) No meetings on Thursday to focus on the Workflow (3) Xavier to automate repetitive tasks
• CEO Nugget: (1) Give people the ability to execute, let go micro-managing (2) Learn but also act
• CEO Defined: Be the best you can be and enabler of your staff and clients

Website: https://fireflies.ai/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/firefliesai

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Transcription:

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:26

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

Krish Ramineni 0:37

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

Gresham Harkless 0:40

Definitely pleasures 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?

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Krish Ramineni 1:29

Yeah, let's do it.

Gresham Harkless 1:30

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 1:36

Great, I think it starts back to you know, 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, and I was literally working and playing around with computers and software just growing up. That was something that was, you know, 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 you know, 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 about 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, you know, 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 frontier tech. But people were actually really solving hard problems at Microsoft on 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 gonna 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, you know, 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 3:39

Nice. I absolutely love that story. And you just kind of go 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. And so you working there being one of the youngest people there. I don't know if your boss said quote, or she 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 4:00

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 the 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.

While 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've 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 end 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 are dissatisfied, you know, you've probably called up customer support for any service you're using and said, Hey, I'm not happy with the service, I want to cancel my subscription. And then you have the support rep hesitating and 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 are being sold through inside sales calls, right?

You're popping on demos, you're scheduling meetings to go by software, or by 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 6:27

Absolutely, absolutely. It's a beautiful day and age when you're able to kind of see so many things that you couldn't see before. So it's 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 have already touched on this. But I want to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. So this could be for you or for fireflies, but it's something that you feel makes you or your organization unique.

Krish Ramineni 6:46

Right. So we've been fortunate enough to work with some large organizations, and telecom companies, and our platform has really trained on 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 states or insurance companies 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, and 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 larger customers and are able to demonstrate the value prop to them.

Gresham Harkless 7:31

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I definitely think that's a huge value. Again, like I said, you know, 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,

Krish Ramineni 7:48

Right.

Gresham Harkless 7:49

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

Krish Ramineni 7:58

Sure, I have a couple I think about this all the time. And so one is, I live on Slack, we have a global team, and 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 have, I use Slack as a proxy for that. So I have these many conversations with different teammates before 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 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 few 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 when I have no meetings at all. And I can just catch up on all the other work that I need to do. The 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 9:11

And now I want to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And you might have ordered a session 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 9:21

I think for being a CEO or 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 know, 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 are 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 Have 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 or 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 of years. But during 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 just got promoted. This is the thing to think about.

Gresham Harkless 12:00

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 want to ask you what being a CEO mean to you.

Krish Ramineni 12:10

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 to all-star salespeople, you might not be the best engineer after some point in time, and you don't know what's happening in the codebase. 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? Are we on the right roadmap? And are we achieving or pushing toward the right Northstar 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 you know, people tell me like, no, it's 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, you know, 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, and 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 types of people that are willing to take the proactive approach are the ones that are going to be more appreciative, are going to be able to appreciate what you're doing for them and stay around longer.

Gresham Harkless 14:19

Absolutely, 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 on 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 the 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 14:46

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, you know, even as early as five have employees, six employees is to stop, you know, stop silos from forming. And what I mean by silos is when one function is doing something on its own, like marketing is doing something on its own. And then sales is doing something on their own. And then engineering is building their own roadmap silos, you know, 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. And for contacting us, you can visit us at @fireflies.ai. If you're interested in using the platform or want 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 Twitter. And my hashtag is krish_ramineni. So those are the typical places you can find us, both me and our business.

Gresham Harkless 16:00

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, I appreciate it again, Krish, we'll make sure to have those links in the show notes so that everybody can follow up with you and connect with you on Twitter or LinkedIn. And again, thank you so much for your time, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Krish Ramineni 16:10

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

Outro 16:14

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