Jennifer Smith
Co-Founder and CEO, Scribe. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@scribeceo ↗LinkedIn ↗scribehow.com ↗
Jennifer Smith co-founded Scribe, an AI workflow documentation platform that automatically captures digital tasks to generate step-by-step guides. Before launching Scribe in 2019, she worked at McKinsey & Company and spent years in venture capital and business development at Greylock Partners and Coatue Management.
1shows
1appearances
24statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Jennifer Smith said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Smith: Enterprise AI transformations fail because leaders lack workflow data
“Literally, unless you're walking around and looking over everybody's shoulder the whole time, like, doing what I did, like, at scale, like, you don't know. You have no way of knowing. And so, these people try to drive transformation, you know, back when I was …”
Smith: Early investors told her she killed Scribe by pivoting
“We had investors who were like, you just killed the company, you know? Yeah. Like this is over, you know, I don't know why you did this.”
Smith: Early founders mistake by hiring big-company executives too soon
“One of the mistakes that I see it like first time early stage founders make is they're like, oh, I'm gonna go hire the like person from Cisco or something. You know, I don't know, like the big leagues and I'm gonna bring them into here. I have no idea what to …”
Smith: RPA is a terrible approach to automation due to UI fragility
“Building automations really sucks, and RPA is a really terrible way to automate, actually, because you're doing it at, like, the UI level, and so there's a bunch of reasons why, but a big one is very fragile.”
Smith: Waiting for PLG to stall before building sales causes company whiplash
“And I think one of the very common mistakes Many of them made is they waited way too long to build out sales. And they built out sales only when they needed it because their PLG business started stalling out or whatever. And like, that is too late. Then you en…”
Smith: Scribe is used by 95% of the Fortune 500
“And like, we're incredibly horizontal. We're used by 95% of the fortune by hundred in like most departments.”
Smith: Founders should ignore investor feedback because they are noisy proxies
“Don't listen to what investors say. They're not close to the customers and the users. They don't actually know. They could maybe be a proxy at best, but they're pretty noisy proxy.”
Smith says McKinsey charged $1M a month to map processes manually
“And so we'd pull up a chair, look over their shoulder and basically create a new guide with their best ways of working. And we charged like a million dollars a month for that.”
Smith: Fortune 500 COO tasked with cutting $100M using AI
“I had this conversation actually with a fortune 500 COO last week. And he was like, I've been told to pull out a hundred million dollars in cost and I'm supposed to use AI to do it everywhere that I can.”
Smith: Enterprise leaders manage blind by seeing only inputs and KPI outputs
“You can see the inputs, like you see the salaries that you pay people, you see the software you buy them, whatever. And then to your point, you see the outputs, you see the KPIs, but you have no way of actually observing like the transformation of work. It's l…”
Smith: Early robotic process automation had major execution flaws
“There's like anyone who's followed it, like would say there's a ton of flaws that they were less evident to everybody at the time. But I think Are very evident now. And if you've spent kind of more than a minute looking at it at the time, you could have kind o…”
Smith spends 75% of her time recruiting for Scribe
“I mean, I still interview almost everybody we hire at Scribe. I probably spend 75% of my time on recruiting right now.”
Smith: Best hiring test is wanting to hand candidates real problems immediately
“And that's kind of the litmus test that I apply when I am hiring people as well, as I sort of end it, and I'm like, gut feel. I'm like, do I want to give you a problem after this? Am I like, oh, I wish this person were here right now, and I could just hand thi…”
Smith: Enterprise leaders know repetitive processes exist but cannot locate them
“The challenge we learned is a lot of people don't know where they are. They know they've got them, but they don't know where. So that was like a big problem in and of itself. And so I had to do a lot of like most professional services work to help them figure …”
Smith: Enterprise sales feedback is delayed and distorted by buyer priorities
“And when you're doing enterprise sales, like you've got long sales cycles, your feedback is delayed. And it's kind of schizophrenic, because you'll get the feedback from the buyer during the sales cycle, which is more about the story and the promise and the bu…”
Smith: Remote work helped Scribe by exposing hidden knowledge-sharing friction
“I think COVID helped us because it made the pain more visible. Like, previously, when people were all next to each other in office, have you ever spent time in, like, a big open floor plan? I would do this sometimes for fun. I would just, like, sit and be a fl…”
Smith: Unsolicited essay-length user feedback signals early product-market fit
“This was actually, like, I think what I started realizing we were on to something. It wasn't just, like, the downloads were growing every day. It'd be, like, you know, 10 downloads. Like, 15 downloads. You know, it's just starting to grow a little bit, but the…”
Smith: Free end-user tiers prevent roadmaps skewing toward enterprise buyers
“Like a basic end user version, because that's how you get faster feedback. Like, otherwise I have to wait for a three months, six months sales cycle. And then I gotta go try to find the users within that company. And like, then my product development is going …”
Smith: Non-paying PLG users drive significant value via virality and data
“If you use scribes for free, you never pay me a dime. You're still valuable to me because you are creating scribes and putting them out there in the world. And we're becoming the standard by which people are documenting processes. We're documenting more workfl…”
Smith: Protracted 'maybes' in enterprise sales will kill an early startup
“A long maybe will kill you.”
Smith: The 9-to-5 knowledge work structure is a massive waste
“And the way that nine to five knowledge work is structured is like one of the biggest freaking wastes in the world, in my opinion.”
Smith benchmarks excellence two to three quarters before hiring leaders
“If I knew I was going to be hiring for that, like two, three quarters down the line, I would spend the previous two or three quarters trying to meet people who were examples of excellent, like a couple clicks ahead of where we wanted to be as a company.”
Smith sent thousands of personalized emails during Scribe's Product Hunt launch
“I just like didn't sleep for 24 hours, and I just emailed basically anybody I had ever met one-on-one. Was like, hey, we're launching this thing on Product Hunt. We want to see if the world cares. Like, would you please check it out and tell me what you think.…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jennifer's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Scribe | 1 | 24 | — | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |