2 founders pretended to be AI and manually took notes at 100 meetings

Amusing story from the co-founder of startup Fireflies.ai. They make an AI-based assistant for online calls. And are now worth 1 billion dollars. And here’s what turned out about their beginning.

In a fit of candor, the co-founder of this startup Sam Udotong told how in 2017 he and the 2nd founder, under the guise of an AI bot, joined client meetings. And manually took notes.

They literally joined under the name Fred from Fireflies, sat on mute and typed notes. 10 minutes after the meeting they sent the result. No AI. Just 2 guys with a keyboard.

Fake it till you make it in action. And here’s everything you need to know about startup life, quote: “After we took notes at more than 100 meetings and fell asleep at many, we finally managed to earn enough to pay 750 dollars a month for renting a tiny living room in San Francisco”.

But then the most interesting begins. In the comments the company CEO immediately rushed in to do damage control. He writes that it was long ago and anyway the clients were only friends, and they knew that humans were doing everything. But he’s being somewhat disingenuous, it seems to me.

It turns out that the company now valued at 1 billion dollars for AI technologies started with 2 tired guys pretending to be a bot and falling asleep at other people’s meetings.