When Krish Ramineni (‘12) graduated from Amador, he wanted to be a doctor. Like many prospective pre-med students, Ramineni entered college, ready to start a 10-year journey toward the career of his dreams.
One semester later, his plans changed.
With that shift, Ramineni embarked on a new journey centered around entrepreneurship. Today, that journey brought him to the Forbes 30U30 list and Entrepreneur Magazine as the CEO and co-founder of Fireflies.ai, an AI note-taking assistant used by more than 200,000 organizations.
After his freshman year of college at UPenn, Ramineni launched an app with his friends to help college students connect with events happening around their campuses. It was a simple idea, but it introduced him to entrepreneurship in technology.
“It was a great summer experience, and there, I learned about the joy of bringing people together and working on this, and we ended up launching [the app] on almost 20 campuses. We worked on it all the way into the school year, but then school got busy so we didn’t end up pursuing that,” said Ramineni.
Once Ramineni learned how to code, he participated in a college hackathon, a 24-hour full weekend competition where participants come up with a business proposal, build a prototype, and go through a mock-fundraising experience for their product.
“I tagged along with a few friends, and we were working on projects,” said Ramineni. “It made me just so excited. It didn’t feel like work, it didn’t feel like I was studying. It felt like I was just having fun. I didn’t know at that time, but I think that’s what I was drawn to.”
When Ramineni first created Fireflies.ai with co-founder Sam Udotong, it wasn’t known as the note-taking assistant you’d want transcribing meetings and creating summaries. At its creation, everything was completely different.
“[Udotong] went to MIT, I went to UPenn, and we worked on a bunch of different projects. One of the projects happened to be building autonomous drones that would do food delivery on campus. Drones at night look like fireflies, so we just stuck with that name for all our projects throughout college,” said Ramineni.
Upon graduating from college, Ramineni received an offer to work as Microsoft’s product manager — one of the youngest employees to receive this position in the company’s history. It was everything Ramineni was looking for, but it quickly became a lot for him to handle.
“I’m having 7, 8 meetings a day with dozens of people, and there’s just so much to remember. The executives and VPs all had a business admin or secretary that could help organize their calendar and attend meetings with them,” said Ramineni. “I’m just a newbie, but it’d be great if I had my own personal assistant. That was the inspiration behind building AI for work.”
Realizing how AI could help him organize his tasks on a personal level, Ramineni saw an opportunity to expand that organization capability to the corporate world.
“Meetings are a way work gets done. If you take 5 people and bring them into a meeting, that meeting can cost a thousand dollars at the corporate level. I can remember emails I sent 2 years ago, but I can’t remember a meeting I had 2 hours ago,” said Ramineni. “That’s when I think the lightbulb went off and we said, okay, let’s build something exciting for meetings.”
And with that, Fireflies.ai became a note-taking assistant. It’ll join your meetings, transcribe conversations, and write meeting notes with 90-95% accuracy. Although it was originally created for companies, many universities adopted it during the pandemic.
“We’re creating a perfect memory of all the conversations they’ve ever had. You can think of the value there for businesses to know every customer conversation they’ve had, but we just so happen to have a lot of students that use Fireflies. Instead of having to scramble through [lecture] notes you took in class, you can review them in a matter of seconds,” said Ramineni.
Although Ramineni graduated from Amador more than a decade ago, he developed a love for learning as a high school student. As the CEO of a startup, Ramineni prioritizes learning from the experience rather than chasing after numbers and accolades. It’s a mindset he credits to his growth at Amador.
“I think the amount that someone grows in high school is very significant. It sets the right habits for the rest of what you do. The energy and effort I put in at Amador made everything else seem a bit easier because there’s just so many bright students at Amador,” said Ramineni.
In addition to learning, Ramineni also prioritizes creating a sense of community within Fireflies.ai.
“There are people that are a lot older than me that are part of the team. [These people] report up to me. Every month when you run payroll and you’re paying people’s salaries, you realize that,” said Ramineni. “You’re having an impact on a lot of people. They have kids, they have families, they have lives of their own.”
Within a year, Fireflies.ai took notes for over 2,000,000 people across Fortune 500 companies. At first glance, it’s easy to think that the company’s future is set. In reality, startups have to work consistently to stay in business.
“96% of startups don’t succeed. Very few startups are able to raise money from investors. There’ll be days where you’ll be like, why am I doing this? And then there’s days where you’re like, this is so fun and innovative,” said Ramineni.
Regardless of what the future holds, Ramineni is determined to keep Fireflies.ai growing for as long as possible, keeping customers and his team as the main focus, whilst learning and cultivating communities along the way.
“When you’re young, you should optimize around learning. Getting on Forbes 30U30 or the cover page of Entrepreneur Magazine was a byproduct of us focusing on the product and building a really good experience for our customers. I would love to see how big and far we can take this thing,” said Ramineni.
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Katy Clark • May 26, 2023 at 11:24 am
great article!!