Entrepreneurial lessons learned, with Fireflies.ai CEO Krish Ramineni

Measure Success Podcast

As an entrepreneur, there will almost always be fires to put out. But prioritizing which ones get your attention—and when—is a huge component to growing and scaling companies (and not burning out as a CEO).

In this episode, we revisit our most popular interview to date, with Fireflies.ai co-founder and CEO, Krish Ramineni — with a few new updates, including why Krish found himself on the phone at 4 a.m. with his team recently to put out one of those fires. We also revisit our conversation from a few months ago, where Krish shared some of the biggest lessons he’s learned along his entrepreneurial journey.

Krish Ramineni is the co-founder and CEO of Fireflies.ai, an AI meeting assistant that helps transcribe, take notes, and complete actions during meetings. After graduating from UPenn, Krish started as one of the youngest product managers at Microsoft, where he also led projects around customer voice and growth engineering. He’s previously guest lectured at Stanford on deep learning and ML and now serves as an early-stage startup advisor.

Tune into the full conversation for more on the evolution of Fireflies.ai, the advice Krish got as he was founding the company (and the advice he ignored), the ways in which customer satisfaction can measure the success of a company, how to know when to say no as an entrepreneur, and more.

Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Learn:

• An update from Krish on how Fireflies has progressed and what’s changed at the company since he recorded his initial interview with the Measure Success Podcast
• How to know which fires to put out and why that prioritization is such an important piece of the entrepreneurship journey
• More about what Fireflies.ai is, and how it can help business owners
• The backstory of how Fireflies.ai started and developed over the past few years
• The value of Fireflies.ai, and why that value extends to such a variety of people and functions across industries
• How the Fireflies.ai tool can help to eliminate or reduce conflict and confusion in business
• Some potential future features you could see from Fireflies.ai
• How Krish measures success at Fireflies.ai, including the benefit of simplicity when it comes to customer satisfaction
• The benefit of experiential knowledge — and why it’s not always necessary for entrepreneurs to learn lessons from a textbook or class
• How Krish and his Fireflies.ai co-founder actually went against some of the common advice they received as they were starting the company — and why that paid off
• What Krish thinks is one of the most important things an entrepreneur can learn if they want to succeed

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Fireflies.ai
• Fireflies.ai on LinkedIn
• Krish Ramineni on Twitter
• “Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies” by Reid Hoffman
• “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future” by Peter Thiel
• “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu
• 40 Strategy
• Contact 40 Strategy
• Carl J. Cox on LinkedIn