AI & I

Chris Pedregal knows how to build AI products that people love. 

Chris is the cofounder and CEO of Granola, an AI-powered notepad for meetings. We use it for many of our meetings at Every—the app listens in on the conversation, transcribes it in the background, and when the meeting ends, creates automated notes and a shareable transcript for anyone who missed it. If you take notes during the meeting, Granola polishes them to be more organized and complete. 

Granola is one of my favorite consumer AI products because it’s equal parts delightful and useful. It’s not a bland chat interface. It’s not an over-the-top demo that you wouldn’t use more than once. Granola is a product with “soul,” imbued with the team’s vision for how AI can work alongside you to turn discursive conversations into clear insights. And I’m not the only one who thinks so—since Granola’s launch in May 2024, its user base has grown by 5x, with around 5,000 weekly active users, and half the people who try the app still use it 10 weeks later for an average of six meetings a week. The company also recently raised a $20 million Series A.

Granola has the marks of being built by a thoughtful, intentional team, which is why I was excited to have Chris on the show. We spent an hour talking about Chris’s product development philosophy, the role of intuition in making products with “soul” and how he balances this with user feedback, how you can become a better product thinker, and the kinds of consumer AI startups Chris thinks will succeed. Here is a link to the episode transcript. 

This is a must-watch for anyone interested in building valuable, sticky AI products that users will love.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! 

Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe 

Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper 

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Chris Pedregal: @cjpedregal

Granola: http://Granola.ai, @meetgranola 

The piece Chris wrote for Every about building useful AI products: https://every.to/thesis/how-to-build-a-truly-useful-ai-product  

What is AI & I?

Learn how the smartest people in the world are using AI to think, create, and relate. Each week I interview founders, filmmakers, writers, investors, and others about how they use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney in their work and in their lives. We screen-share through their historical chats and then experiment with AI live on the show. Join us to discover how AI is changing how we think about our world—and ourselves.

For more essays, interviews, and experiments at the forefront of AI: https://every.to/chain-of-thought?sort=newest.