California-based entrepreneurs rolled out a major update to their note-taking startup just as COVID forced the world to go remote. As user growth soared on Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams — Fireflies.ai experienced a big bump in users.
Founders Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong braced for an operational challenge. Prior to this, their users were mostly in the U.S. — meaning that there was natural downtime overnight when they could push out updates. Now people around the world are using it, and there’s never downtime — so the cofounders are often in the weeds with their engineers fixing problems on the fly at 3 a.m. “It is definitely an interesting transition period,” Ramineni says, “where we have to not only manage a team but also operationally be good at what we do as a startup.”
A few years ago, Ramineni and Udotong bet on the future — and now, it seems, the world has caught up with them. Voice technology is vastly improved, and teams are in increasing need of a product like theirs. Investors have noticed and are calling with interest. Ramineni imagines a time when the team is big enough for the founders to step back from day-to-day coding, and maybe even hire a sales crew.
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