Nobody Takes Notes Anymore. 5 Million People Let AI Do It Instead.

Rob Williams: Every day that goes by that you're not capturing the conversations that are happening within your organization is a day that those conversations are gone forever. And so, yes, you could say maybe we don't wanna do it now. Maybe it's next quarter, but you're deciding to give up on ninety days of context.Song: Built This Week, breaking it down. Built this week, we show you how. A fresh idea, a clever tweak, you locked in.Sam Nadler: Built this week. Hey, everyone, and welcome to Built This Week, the podcast where we share what we're building, how we're building it, and what it means for the world of AI and startups. I'm Sam Nadler, cofounder here at Rise Labs. And each and every week, I'm joined by my friend, cohost, business partner, Jordan Metzner. How are doing today, Jordan?Jordan Metzner: Yo, Sam. How are you? Another exciting week in AI. We've seen new models, Opus 5.5 crushing it on on cost and speed. Lots coming out.And then, obviously, super excited by today's guest, So ready to get started for today's episode.Sam Nadler: Yeah. I'm super excited to introduce our guest. Before I do, quickly, please don't forget to like and subscribe. We just crossed 40,000 YouTube subscribers. We have new episodes out every Friday.And with that, I'd like to introduce our guest, Rob, who comes... Leads a a product or a company I think we've all seen over the past several years. Rob, with that, if you don't mind, give us a quick intro, and we'll we'll jump into what you're building.Rob Williams: Great. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Also, I just wanna do a personal plug and say I love the format that you guys do, so congrats on the 40,000 subscribers as well. Yeah.So my name is Rob. I'm a co founder and CTO at Reed AI. Many people know us, and I wince a little bit whenever I hear it, but it's totally fair. They know us as a meeting notetaker, and I understand why. But what we're really, really passionate about and how I think about the business and the way that I frame it to people is that we are capturing all of the conversations that people have throughout their work days so that we can do a whole bunch of valuable things with it.And so it's what comes next that I get excited about.Sam Nadler: Perfect. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I think in today's AI age, there's, know, several solutions popping up that provide so much value that didn't exist before. Can you take us through some of the, like, I guess, the latest Read AI features that you're really excited about?Rob Williams: Yeah. So, you know, as I mentioned, one of the ways that I view it is meetings are the, for many companies, literally the biggest investment of time energy and cost that they make. And so how do we just get more out of it? And one of the best ways that we found we could do it, and this was based off of some user data and user studies, was to do a better job of collecting all of the disparate conversations that might happen in, let's say, a 500,000 person company and use it to orient you for your day. So Sam, when you wake up in the morning, how can we have it be the case that your context is hot and hydrated and you know exactly what you're doing and you walk into every meeting that you're about to have prepared based off of all of the information that we've learned about you and the organization?So I'm happy to share... I'll give you an example right here. This is hot off the presses. This is going out to production, like, over the next week. So if it's not enabled for...We've got 5,000,000 monthly active users. We have to we have to pace the rollouts a little bit. So if it's not enabled for people today, it will be. And this is an example of, like, what I woke up to. This is staging data, so it's not complete for my whole account.But but, like, I get briefed based off of the email interactions we had, based off of what Reid knows about YouTube, off of what it knows about your podcast. And I can come into the meeting with some really clear and what's expected of me, how I can prepare for it. So as you see here, this is my product telling me that I need to prepare a demo of my product for you, and I decided I would just show it to you live and give it to you. And it's not just the case that we want it to be this passive thing. We also want people to feed into it and tell us how to structure and what data is related.So toward that end, something else that we launched just over the summer is switching over into our folders view here. You can set up all kinds of actions and rules so that your data flows exactly where you want it to flow. So if it's a client call, it can flow that way. If it's product discovery or user interviews, it can go to a completely different group of internal users. Really trying to figure out how to unlock information and get people what they need in order to be effective at their jobs is the name of the game for us.Sam Nadler: So cool. I love it. And I love seeing, how you would prep exactly for this call. Have there been any, like, surprise... Obviously, like, you know, I can see how, you know, getting a daily report of of the things that are relevant to you that have happened in, you know, maybe the previous meeting or the the the meetings you have lined up for the day.Have there been any, like, unusual use cases that you thought, wow, that's... You know, obviously, I think we can all, like, pinpoint the immediate, like, need, but anything maybe outside the box, maybe offline use cases somehow where people are like, Let's turn this on and capture this whiteboarding session or something. I'm just brainstorming here, but...Rob Williams: Yeah. I'd say that there are two different ways that I would answer that. One is not necessarily an unusual use case, but it's eye opening the degree to which people vary in their level of comfort and sophistication and interest even in adopting AI tools. And so within a company, you'll find users who think that absolutely everything should be shared far and wide and there should be no secrets, you'll have people who are absolutely terrified to interact with anything, afraid it's about to steal everything that they know. And so navigating that honestly has been one of the bigger challenges from a product perspective and from a go to market perspective.In terms of unusual use cases, a couple of things come to mind. One is we have all kinds of enterprise controls, and that's pretty typical. That's not surprising. So you could say we only want to retain data for the last one hundred eighty days or the last two years or whatever the case may be. When we rolled out that functionality, we actually had organizations set their retention to seven days, and these are organizations where I assumed I misunderstood them at that because it's so short that what could you possibly be doing with it, but they took the approach of every piece of data after seven days is likely to be stale and more likely to lead people to be wrong rather than right, and so they just took the share it far and wide, share it fast, and then retire it and don't ever show it to me again approach, which I would have never guessed.I would have thought 30, 60, 90 would be the minimum, but there are companies, especially in some of the AI forward spaces, are just at the speed of light. And even when you think that you're describing something that's fast, they're going faster than that. Wow.Sam Nadler: Seven days. Would have never guessed.Jordan Metzner: You said 5,000,000 plus customers is just incredible. So I think, obviously, that doesn't happen overnight. So, you know, kind of how has, like, looking at AI and the impact of AI kind of changed the business over this time. And, I mean, there's so much talk about how to, like, even maintain 5,000,000 customers and support 5,000,000 customers and, like, even just... We could dive on the token economics and, you know, maybe it's unitary on a per user basis, but it still sounds like a lot of tokens and AI to spend in general.So, yeah, maybe you could just tell us kind of like how you guys got to the scale and, you know, how you support a scale of such size. I mean, we always work on like b to b SaaS stuff, you know, we never have these types of customers on a day to day basis, you know.Rob Williams: So it certainly doesn't happen overnight, although you look back and it's a blur. But everything, when you zoom out, it just looks like exponential growth. And we see that with AI adoption that in particular, lot of them, there's how much are we growing within the market, and then there's just how much is the market itself growing. And so I would say the overwhelming majority of customers who come to us come to us looking for advice rather than coming to us saying, we're using this existing tool or solution, and maybe we want to migrate based off of your feature set. No.They're coming and they're looking to strategically align on how can we help them not miss the wave of productivity. With conversations and meetings in particular, there is a sense of urgency that I think helped that adoption, which is every day that goes by that you're not capturing the conversations that are happening within your organization is a day that those conversations are gone forever. And so, yes, you could say maybe we don't want to do it now, maybe it's next quarter, but you're deciding to give up on ninety days of context. And so I do think in that sense, we had a pretty accelerated adoption curve as people started to take an inventory of their internal SaaS products and tools. There's just that sense of urgency there, and we're happy to help with it.Jordan Metzner: Yeah. You know, we have a client who almost always had executive assistants sitting in on calls as live scribes for all of their meetings, and that wasn't very long ago, to be honest with you, but to even mention the idea would be absurd at this point for that organization, for example.Rob Williams: Yeah. And, you know, I've sort of noticed those assistance roles shifting a little bit from Scribe, obviously, into, you know, almost like an air traffic controller. I've seen assistants still present on calls or still reviewing the dashboard and the list of meetings that maybe the the executive team that they're supporting has been having, and they're doing something, and this was great feedback for us as a product organization, they're doing something that frankly we want to do automatically, which is understand what information needs to go far and wide within the organization in order for that organization to be successful. And so they've kind of just moved up stack, which is great. That's, you know, that's the best case scenario is they they keep their jobs, and now they're doing something that's higher impact that they get they get satisfaction for.Jordan Metzner: Yeah. I think on CNBCA today, somebody mentioned that, like, the opportunity for EAs to move into, like, project management based roles since, like, they're so good at kind of multitasking kind of opportunity there. 5,000,000, again, that's a huge number. Has... Have you found success in certain industries or regions or, you know, focuses like, hey, we're really good with tech companies or really good in life sciences or kinda, you know, where where have you guys found the niche or small businesses or whatever wherever kind of has been, you know, a good good place for you guys.Rob Williams: You know, this is one of the conversations years ago when we were raising our series a. We had these conversations with existing investors, with prospective investors, and the traditional lean startup advice is pick a narrow focus, nail that narrow focus, and don't think about anything else beyond that. I agree and I disagree with that. We took the approach that actually the narrow focus here, it may sound like we're avoiding focus, but the narrow focus is the information worker. And these people who go about their days and their work happens in meetings, those are the people we care about.And so whether you're in meetings because you're a project manager or an accountant or consultant of any variety, it doesn't really matter what the content is. What matters is the structure of your day, the importance of continuity in your relationships, of continuity in your context, and so that's what we went after. And from a market or a segmentation or industry perspective, I've learned about industries that I frankly would have never thought about when we started the company five years ago. And so we have, for example, oil fields in Africa working as subsidiaries with companies with offices in Asia, and one of the biggest use cases for us early on was time shifting context between different offices within a company. And so that's a how do we mobilize information without making people get up in the middle of the night to attend calls scenario.And it really doesn't matter. They could be making, you know, any kind of widget and they'd still have the same problem across time zones. So, that's been the approach we took.Jordan Metzner: Rise Labs builds production grade AI for the world's most ambitious companies. Support engineers. Data scientists. AI architects. All working together on your problem.While others talk about AI RiceLabs is already implementing it. Got one last question. You know, we discuss almost every week just like how fast the market's moving. There's new models from, like, all the foundational labs on almost a weekly, biweekly basis at this point. If it's not one lab, it's the other.You know, where did... Where do you see the future development of, you know, I I don't wanna say, like, AI or LMs or SI or whatever we're calling it now, but and the impact to your product over time as obviously these things get, you know, more powerful, maybe cheaper, faster. I'm sure we could think of more adjectives, but, yeah, where do you where do you kinda see it going and the impact on on your product?Rob Williams: I think that the way we build is different, and it's it's a hard thing to, you know, put your hands on necessarily when having these brief conversations with people. But what I mean by that is if you go back thirty years when we were building packaged software and physically shipping it to, like, an Office Depot shelf where it's shrink wrapped and available and it's static, you're producing... Your organization really is producing a noun that's just static. It's so important nowadays when you're building a product that's leveraging these tools to make sure that you're building a verb. Like the organization should be building the crank that we can turn to update the entire product line to take advantage of new abilities quickly as possible.Rather than just assuming what we have today is the steady state, it needs to be dynamically formed around the abilities of the underlying models. At the same time, a lot of things don't change, they just get better. And so if you design and build the product in the correct way, then you can almost abstract out all of that from your users and plug and play and drop in. But one of the early takes that we had in 2022, 2023 was that we didn't want to invest the same amount of energy that some companies did on prompt engineering back when that was all the rage, we assumed that that would be investment that was largely wasted. And instead, what we do is build the rest of the product in such a way that the assumed improvements would just, unlock value for free.Sam Nadler: What can we expect on the horizon, that maybe is kind of... Hasn't been prioritized yet from your engineering teams but could be a really cool feature?Rob Williams: Yeah. I think it's no secret, at least to the people around the Halls Of Reed, I think that one of the most important things that we can do in the next three, six, nine months is really unlock the speed with which information can move. And in some environments, it's spicy, and in some environments, people clam up and get concerned. But when you think about all of the things that have to happen for, let's say we work together, Sam. You wanna ask me a question, so you send me a Slack message.If you think about all the things that have to be true for you to get a response, it's I have to be awake, first of all. I have to be at my computer. I have to have Slack in the foreground. I got to have your DM in the foreground, and I've got to have a response that's locked and loaded so I feel compelled to send it. It's just such a big chain of dependencies that I think for the majority of questions, we can answer for you using all of the information that we already have.And I think the biggest challenge is going to be leading people to this point and building that trust and making them comfortable with unlocking this information. But I think in three years, let's say, which is a really long time, companies that don't allow their information to just move itself effectively to where it needs to be, to what's reasonable for others in the organization to know, they're going to be strategic disadvantage. And that, just hearingSam Nadler: your answer, to me, makes a lot of sense why that retention piece is so short, because if it's sixty days, ninety days, the agent, I guess, could be giving conflicting or outdated information. Information.Rob Williams: That's right. Yeah. What supersedes old context is definitely a thing that we think about regularly.Sam Nadler: Cool. All right, guys. I want to transition us to some, you know, silly news. I don't think any of us are necessarily the target consumer. I'm trying to share here real quick.But, you know, we thought this was funny. Hot girl hotline is the dear Abby for the AI era. You know, I think it is. I I went to the site. I didn't sign up.Maybe I should have. But it looks like an agent where you can discuss your relationship or your situationship. I thought it was funny. What I do have found in my own personal use case, obviously, I've used AI to navigate some probably less relationship, but maybe bigger personal decisions that I was evaluating, and, you know, I I found it helpful. So, you know, curious to what you guys think.Is this dangerous? Is this fun? Is there is there a segment of, you know, these products that will continue to grow?Rob Williams: I wanna take... Because I can make an argument either way. I wanna take the opposite view that Jordan has based off of this.Jordan Metzner: Yeah. I saw this, like, YouTube clip about this woman who has this relationship with her AI, and, you know, I think as AI gets smarter and smarter, it becomes easier and easier to be a, you know, copilot for your life, and, you know, and I think actually one of the things that I found it to be incredibly valuable for as its memory increases. Right? So, you know, maybe I can just ask it a simple question, but it's retention of memory from my historicals gives it context to that, you know, I can get questions answered faster and and some alternatives. You know, and obviously, at the same time, we've seen all this discussion of anthropic bringing religious leaders, you know, into their offices and, you know, is is the AI conscious and and whatnot.But, yeah, I'm I'm not surprised that people are finding value in, like, speaking to an AI and, like, having an AI companion and, you know, the cost of creating them is, you know, negligible. You know, you used to have to kind of make up that the tooth fairy existed, but now you can maybe just, like, you know, create a tooth fairy and call them directly. So, yeah, I think it's an interesting, fun time.Rob Williams: I thought you were gonna be bearishJordan Metzner: on it. Take the opposite. Don't worry. We'll cut that clip out. No.Rob Williams: It's... You know, I went through... I do... I find myself doing this. It's almost part of my regular process of digesting news is, like, the flash stages of grief, as I describe it, which is like I see something, I go, What?No. Well, maybe. Actually, yeah. And you just kind of work through all that. And I had a number of thoughts, first of which is obviously I'm not the target market for this, but then the second was how many times have I realized in my own personal relationships, let's say conversation with my wife in the evening, that really I'm just looking for a sounding board and not a solution, or vice versa.She's just looking for a sounding board and not a solution. And what better way to ensure that we rigorously follow an approach than to codify it and say, This is going to be a sounding board and maybe not a solver. Now I realize that there are instances in the screenshots in which it's giving advice, but I think it's phenomenal marketing and branding. Think that, who am I to judge? I sat there under my sink one evening trying to figure out why my disposal was clogged with Claude.Why not let somebody else? I'm not going to gatekeep access to tools that might be helpful for working through problems, whether they're personal or tactical. So it made me smile. Made me happy. I wish them well.I think it's a great... Here's one angle that I think is underappreciated in AI companies these days, caring about unit economics, and I look at that and I think, This is a real business. This is going to be viable. The cost of goods is going to be under the subscription that they're charging, and bravo to them. I think it's great.Sam Nadler: Cool. With that, Rob, where can people find you?Jordan Metzner: Wait. Sam, what about you? Don't you, like, use this for, like, your kids, like, to talk to them, AI, and aren't they talking to them?Sam Nadler: My kids are a little young for me to unleash AI friends for them. However, I I mean, I personally use... I I I... It's funny you mentioned that because I used AI to fix a... Actually, I I didn't fix it, but I tried to fix a garbage disposal, like, week ago.I I use it all the... I mean, I use it for a sounding board on big decisions. I have, you know, I haven't personally gotten relationship advice, but I can totally see for a lot of people. You you... Just going through that process, sometimes you just almost need someone to talk to, as you mentioned, and sort through your own thoughts.And, you know, if you're an avid AI user, you can... You kinda... You know that you need to, like, call it out on its bullshit, basically. And, like, and you you kinda maybe already know the answer anyway, but you just kinda need to sort through it yourself. So maybe there's some value in that.And, we'll see where these services, you know, I think there could be... Whether they're dangerous or not, I don't know. I think time will tell, but, you know, there could be somewhat similar services for seniors who are lonely or, you know, other relationship needs. So we'll see we'll see. Time will only tell.I think it's, you know, I think it's obvious to some degree, but, you know, that's it. That's all my thoughts.Rob Williams: Love it.Jordan Metzner: Alright, Rob. How do they get a... How do people find you? How doRob Williams: people get ahold of you? I'm super straightforward and simple. I tell people far and wide they can just email me, Rob@Reed.ai. I'm always happy to chat. I welcome inputs.I welcome ideas. I like meeting new people. So feel free to reachJordan Metzner: out. Awesome. Great episode. Thanks for joining us.Sam Nadler: Thanks, everyone.Rob Williams: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Thanks.