The Exchanges

Q Like literally right now you're telling me some fun stories and I'm taking notes in my Apple notes app on the left side of my screen right now. Where would I do that? Where it gets integrated with grant? Like literally if I was using it now, how would I do that?

A So you download grain onto your desktop and you can actually use it on the web here in a couple of weeks. And we hook into zoom to where, when you are recording either through zoom or through our native recorder, um, there is a notepad that is live for the time that you are recording. As soon as you stop recording, the notepad goes away and it goes and it takes the content that you identified or flagged as important. And it brings it Into your web app where it synchronizes it with the transcript, with the full recording, and it becomes this like iMovie for the web where you can create and edit the video itself and create highlight clips using just the transcript. So you select the text you want from the transcript and you pull that out and it becomes like a loom like link where you can embed it. You can share it anywhere you want, or you can turn any of your notes into a highlight with With a single click.

AI assessment note: “there is a notepad that is live for the time that you are recording”

Q company down, but ultimately the biggest opportunity cost for anybody is your time. Right. So you don't want to waste, you don't want to, even though you have eight and a half million, you can pay yourself and pay your team. You don't want to do that. Kudos to you for doing the right thing there and getting that out. Grain is born. What year did you start coating grain?

A So we, the acquisition from WeWork was in 20, um, 19. And so I started full-time on grain September first. So my obligation through the WeWork acquisition was, uh, expired August the 31st of 2019 and I started playing September first. So, um, we raised some venture capital right out the gate from a lot of the people who backed me in the past. They still were big believers in me and they really loved the, uh, the vision that we had because I was building grain just to solve The same problem for future people that I had solved for myself building a school in the back of Zoom. What I, the insight I discovered was that spoken information, it's unstructured. It's largely ephemeral. It's usually not even captured, but it is the key to being able to bridge the gap in the future of work between seamless, um, between remote, uh, synchronous and asynchronous communication. So, uh, asynchronous communication tends to be text-based and the medium is usually the documentation. I wrote the message. It's in, it's, I go and search the Slack logs. The same is not true of the synchronous spoken world, but it is true if you record it, if you transcribe it, if you make that content searchable, but you need a new kind of, uh, wave of tools or software that can make it as easy to work with the content of spoken knowledge as it is to work with the content of written knowledge. And so that's kind of h…

AI assessment note: “acquisition from WeWork was in 20, um, 19. And so I started full-time”

Q So, so let me ask about that, right? When, when you do make that announcement, people will go, well, wait a second. It's very rare. You see a price round and then going back to unpriced, they'll go, wait, was there a down on there trying to manage through here? What's the story there?

A Yeah. The story was, uh, an up round on with amazing investor on amazing terms. And we wanted to work together very, very, you know, on quickly. So what happened is we launched on tech crunch a year after that price round. Um, this is about a month after the pandemic. And we made a positioning bet to say, we're on the back of zoom where the, we are the zoom app. When you think about zoom apps, think of grain. So we had a tech crunch launch. And then one of the investors that I really had a great experience Experience with her name's Jenny left court at freestyle. We see a year before, um, it timing wise didn't work out for her to, uh, to lead the price round, but she really wanted to get involved a year later. And so, uh, this was a really easy way. We had a huge amount of like in, uh, insider interests. And so the rest of it was just bought up by insiders. Um, so that's where we did the three million and they took like a much bigger check than they would normally do. Um, just cause she was so eager and excited to work with, um, green and we got really nice, You know, upterms on it as well. So it's just a clean, simple, easy way to get more capital.

AI assessment note: “The story was, uh, an up round on with amazing investor on amazing terms.”

Q all of his team members post meetings, even private meetings on YouTube is if you go to their YouTube channel, you'll see, you can open the transcript that Google automatically does and search the meetings quickly. You're sort of doing that, but in a much sort of more formal way and you're building business around it. You're using it right now, actually on this call. So what is brain work?

A Yeah. So grain taps into this recognition that the tools for the spoken world that we live in, um, are primarily designed to facilitate the conversation, not to facilitate the transfer of information across the bounds of, of, of synchronous and asynchronous work. That's where grain comes in is that we recognize that Well, like what GitLab does where you can upload videos and these artifacts, if you record it all, the world is open to you. The grain takes it one step further and recognizes that you're doing cognitive processing. You're identifying moments in time that matter. That moment mattered. And instead, we don't have the time to go back after the call and rewatch all the time. It's nice that we have that option. And that's kind of the GitLab approach where we come in as we give you a real time annotation layer. You can take notes, Like you would normally take notes in a, in an ocean or an Evernote or whatever else, but they get timestamps and you can actually, and they get turned into highlights. So you can share a moment of, uh, that you identified or flagged as important in the moment, uh, as it happens, independent of the underlying recording.

AI assessment note: “we give you a real time annotation layer. You can take notes”

Q If I fall in love with this thing, what's the average customer paying you guys to use this technology per month?

A Yeah, totally. So we have, um, uh, two plans. So there's a pro plan, which is a 144 dollars a year. And then we have a, uh, unlimited plan, which is 436 dollars a year per, uh, creator seat. So grain is a tool for teams from default. So we don't have this idea of grain of like, well, there's this individual kind of usage in the team usage. It's like, it's built to be used by and for and with your teams from the very beginning. And so you can have your entire team on grain and not actually have to pay for everybody who's in there, who's accessing and like getting, um, value out of viewing the content and having this like centralized source of spoken knowledge for the team. You, you pay a license for those that are contributing and adding and editing the content. So if you just view it and you want view only that's, that's, that's a free seat. But if you're contributing, um, and collaborating and editing and, and adding new recordings, you get an allocation of recordings Um, according to your, uh, license type, whether that be pro has a set number of recordings or unlimited, you know, yeah, unlimited, you can use, you know, you can, you can use it on every one of your calls.

AI assessment note: “pro plan, which is a 144 dollars a year. And then we have a, uh, unlimited”

Q So, so what happened to that? That sounds very interesting. Is that the one we were bought?

A Yeah. So, um, we work Bob mission, you, uh, fully remote on the back of zoom started in 2016. So we were one of the first like fully embracing the remote, you know, learning environment and cohort based model. And, uh, we ran into a lot of regulatory challenges at the state of California that has since made extremely clear that their position is that income share agreements where you pay a portion of your income in the future, once you get a job and only if you get a job, um, that's aligned with the students, that those were not actually legal in the state of California. They, Took a kind of an anomalistic stance on that. So that, that created a lot of challenges for our business. We looked forward to, um, you know, the, the vent, our ability to return venture, um, to make a venture outcome and ultimately made a determination that an acquisition was, uh, the best situation for us.

AI assessment note: “ultimately made a determination that an acquisition was, uh, the best situation for us.”