The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 38 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Pedregal: Granola is a Trojan horse to aggregate user context
“And in a way the product we have today is, is a Trojan horse to collect a lot of your context so that you can then use all the information in that context to do future work.”
Pedregal: The computer mouse is Douglas Engelbart's least important invention
“Like he's known for being the inventor of the mouse. And I think the mouse is like the least important thing he's come up with.”
Pedregal: Granola's biggest competitor has always been Apple Notes
“The biggest competitor that Granola had from day one and even today is Apple notes.”
Pedregal: Applied AI startups don't need deep technical chops for MVPs
“It used to be that you need really strong technical chops just to build an MVP to understand if you, this is something people wanted or not. And I think the reality now is that that isn't the case. You can usually figure out MVP or like, is there may be even e…”
Pedregal: London is seeing a huge influx of Russian tech talent
“And there's a huge influx of Russian tech talent that's coming to London.”
Pedregal: Startups need polished products to stand out in crowded markets
“I think today there are so many products and companies coming out and vying for your attention that Launching something more polished so that when people use it, they're wowed by it is, is a way to stand out.”
Pedregal: Everyone will use AI meeting note tools within 2-3 years
“I'm sure that two years from now, three years from now, everyone's going to be using something like granola. Like, I'm hoping it's granola, but if it's not granola, something like granola, just because it is so useful and will get so much more useful over time…”
Pedregal: Granola makes most product decisions based on intuition
“So our general our philosophy that's gotten us here, and it may not get us there as we scale, is we make most product and design intuition, sorry, decisions based on Intuition.”
Pedregal: AI startups fail when optimizing for current user requirements
“I think the failure mode is that we optimize for today's world. So we optimize for today's product and today's world and today's needs. And it's easy when you just talk to users and you get these requirements or you talk to enterprises. You just kind of, it's …”
Pedregal predicts cross-meeting AI research will drive massive value for Granola
“We're doing a kind of a, this really incredible, like deep research mode across that can look at thousands of meetings in a matter of seconds and pull out these insights and, You know, that's not something that our enterprise customers are asking for right now…”
Pedregal: Complex meeting queries fail with standard RAG without full context
“What we found is that a lot of the most interesting queries that people have like would completely fail with that type of method. So for example, query might be like, what are all the things I didn't do a good job explaining. Or tell me what are all the bugs t…”
Pedregal: Audio transcription is Granola's largest cost, exceeding LLM inference
“So the most expensive thing about our business is actually transcription. And historically it's been actually transcription and high quality transcription versus LLM inference.”
Pedregal: Granola does not operate with negative gross margins
“We're not at a negative gross margins right now”
Pedregal: Granola's inference costs will stay flat or rise as queries expand
“What I do expect is I expect the cost of inference to stay the same or go up as we allow users to do much more complicated queries over much larger data sets.”
Pedregal: Incorrect diarization confuses AI models more than letting them infer
“If you give like incorrect diarization, To a model, it'll oftentimes confuse it more than if it just has to try to infer who's speaking.”
Pedregal: OpenAI will try to do everything for everyone
“OpenAI is going to try to do everything to everyone.”
Pedregal: AI's long-term effect on human agency will be decided within 10 years
“And I think it's a little bit What tools we build, what bets we make as a society, what rules we make, I think that's going to be decided over the next, like, 10 years.”
Granola paused hiring deep LLM experts until reaching product-market fit
“And in, in those early phases, like when I was looking for a co-founder, I met Sam, but I was also, I met all the LLM experts from Imperial and Oxford and Cambridge. Because I thought that was DNA we would need on day one. And as Sam and I started prototyping,…”
Granola enforces American spelling to present itself as a US company
“If I ever see any copy that has English spelling instead of American spelling that goes out, I throw a hissy fit because I want everyone to think we're an American company.”
Pedregal: Granola will eventually be a horizontal product used by many user types
“We know granola will be a general product, a horizontal product, lots of different types of people are going to use granola”
Pedregal: Building a great product for founders creates a decent product for other roles
“A great product for founders would be by default, a decent product for folks in these other roles.”
Granola does not record or store raw audio from meetings
“Even though we could store the audio and that would be useful, we do not store the audio. So we don't record the audio”
Pedregal: AI tools must let users verify LLM outputs against source data
“In the world of AI, where AI makes mistakes, transcription makes mistakes, it's really important that I don't have to trust, I don't have to trust the LLM output. I can kind of go back to the source.”
Pedregal: Cutting Granola features post-launch would have been nearly impossible
“I think that would have been impossible or extremely hard to do if we had been publicly launched.”
Pedregal: User requests pose the greatest danger to product simplicity
“The real danger there is user requests. Like, you know, people always ask for the things they don't have. People rarely say, oh, actually, can you cut out half of the functionality of the app?”
Pedregal: Granola will only fine-tune or train models after hitting base-model limits
“Our strategy has been to use the latest and greatest. And when we feel like we hit a wall and the only way to make the experience better is then to fine tune or train models. And we will do that.”
Pedregal: Granola abstracts model choice for note generation, allowing choice only for chat
“And we only let users choose their model on chat. On the note generation side, we completely abstract it away.”
Pedregal: Every new base model requires Granola to overhaul its prompts
“Every time a new model comes out, we have to completely change or tweak the prompts that we use for note generation to provide consistency of experience and an improvement of experience.”
Pedregal: Granola builds for AI capabilities expected a year out
“And our philosophy since the beginning of Granola is always to build for the world a year from now, because by the time we build it and it gets distribution the costs of those models or those capabilities will come down to a reasonable place.”
Pedregal: Real-time speaker diarization quality is still in its infancy
“Real-time diarization is still in its infancy in terms of quality.”
Pedregal: The future of software is generating artifacts on the fly
“I think that the world we're moving towards is You have a bucket of context, and then you generate documents or artifacts on, on a per need basis on the fly.”
Granola built an internal prototype searching 2,500 meetings in 20 seconds
“I have a version of granola that will go through my 2500 meetings and spit out a remarkably intelligent answer to that in 20 seconds.”
Pedregal: Granola spent a year privately onboarding users before public launch
“So we basically spent a year onboarding people, learning what was wrong about it, making fixes to that onboarding a new set of people.”
Granola cut 50 percent of its product features prior to launch
“We looked at it all and we cut out 50% of it. We basically redesigned and cut out 50%.”
Granola's next goal is becoming a second brain for teams
“If granola acts as a second brain for you, like our goal, the next step there is to be a kind of a second brain for your team or for your company.”
Pedregal: Granola's retention relies on utility and timely calendar triggers
“It's the, I think the combination that granola is useful to folks and we can send notifications at the right moment to start it.”
Granola's SF user meetup packed a two-floor bar despite expecting five
“I we did this was last maybe November so we're based in London, right, and we went to SF for a board meeting, and someone on the team said, hey, should we rent out a bar and just email users and say if you'd want to come? And we'd like, sure, you know, and we …”