Krish Ramineni On Building A $1 Billion-Company To Provide Users With An AI Meeting Assistant

Krish Ramineni has navigated the complex terrain of startup building with resilience and strategic focus. As the co-founder and CEO of Fireflies.ai, he has led the company from humble beginnings to become a billion-dollar AI enterprise, reshaping the future of work.

Fireflies has secured funding from top-tier investors like Khosla Ventures, Canaan Partners, Coelius Capital, and April Underwood.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Start with pain, not hype. Fireflies was built by solving a real, annoying problem with focus and resilience.
• Fundraising isn’t success. Krish sees capital as a tool, not a milestone, and built Fireflies with profitability at its core.
• Momentum over polish. Investors came on board after seeing consistent, scrappy progress, not big vision decks.
• AI isn’t replacing you; it’s freeing you. Automating tedious tasks lets people focus on creative, high-value work.
• Middle management is at risk. In Krish’s view, organizational charts will become flatter as AI enables leaner, more agile teams.
• You don’t need permission to start; Krish encourages founders to build without waiting for validation or approval.
• Focus is your superpower. Staying focused on the core problem and avoiding distractions helped Fireflies thrive.

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About Krish Ramineni:

Krish Ramineni is the CEO and Co-founder of AI meeting agent Fireflies.ai. He leads the company’s product, design, and go-to-market efforts.

Krish believes AI can empower people to do their most creative work by streamlining mundane and repetitive tasks. He envisions a world where AI and humans collaborate to achieve incredible feats.

Krish started his career in product management. As one of the youngest product managers at Microsoft, he led projects focused on customer voice and growth engineering before founding Fireflies in 2016.

Krish is a 2021 Enterprise Technology Forbes 30 under 30 recipient and an early-stage startup advisor. He has been a guest lecturer on deep learning and machine learning at Stanford University.

Krish graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a focus on human-computer interaction.

Connect with Krish Ramineni:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• Forbes Council
• RocketReach

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMaker show. So today we have an amazing founder joining us. We’re going to be talking quite a bit about the stuff that he’s up to. I mean, 20 million users are using what he’s built.

Alejandro Cremades: Him and his team, obviously. But I mean, it’s definitely something that you guys are probably customers of, and the story is really going to resonate.

Krish Ramineni: But I mean, it’s definitely something that you guys are probably—

Alejandro Cremades: We’re going to be talking about the whole building, the scaling, the financing, the contrarian thinking about work, about building the team, about raising money, about how AI is going to change things, how it’s going to change the way that people are working nowadays. I think the conversation is going to be quite inspiring. And without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today—Krish Ramineni. Welcome to the show.

Krish Ramineni: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Alejandro Cremades: So originally, you were born in India, but you came to the U.S. quite early. I mean, you were literally five years old. I think that your father was in tech, so obviously it’s not a surprise that California was the way to land. But give us a walkthrough through memory lane—how was life growing up for you?

Krish Ramineni: My father came here in 1999, right around the dot-com era—the dot-com boom in California. He’s worked in tech ever since then.

Krish Ramineni: I was five years old when I moved out here, and it was a very interesting experience growing up, where so many friends and family members and relatives all worked in tech.

Krish Ramineni: I come from a very traditional South Asian background where you’re either a doctor or you’re an engineer—there’s no other choice. And growing up, I thought I would be a doctor. That’s what my mom wanted me to be. She had gotten into medical school, didn’t end up going.

Krish Ramineni: And that was something she wanted for me. But once I got into college, I realized that I felt more of a love for entrepreneurship and starting something.

Krish Ramineni: It didn’t even have to be in tech. It could be manufacturing, it could be in hardware, it could be anywhere. I wanted to start something. That something was very—like, I was very passionate about it. So I ended up switching to doing things completely outside of medicine, focused on engineering, learning how to code, and the rest is history.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s incredible. I mean, in your case, you literally went to UPenn and then right after you joined Microsoft. But it wasn’t long until you felt the itch, right? Of really taking ownership of your own future and destiny. So literally only one year in—I mean, I’m sure that your parents were like, “What’s happening?” I mean, you were already thinking about wrapping up and becoming an entrepreneur. So give us a little sense of what happened. What were the sequences of events that needed to happen for you to really bring Fireflies to life and really—

Alejandro Cremades: You know, get into the venture world.

Krish Ramineni: Microsoft was a great experience. I had never worked at a big tech company before. I got to learn a lot about their process. I felt that if I had my own team, what could I do? How could I move faster? And so it happened very organically. I didn’t think Fireflies would be where it is today at that time. I said I just want to go try for one or two years, build something on my own, and see where that gets me. If it doesn’t work, I’ll go back to grad school or I’ll go back to another large company.

Krish Ramineni: I spent a year at Microsoft, and then my co-founder had never worked at another company before. And he said, “Why don’t you come out to Boston and spend the summer here before you go off to graduate school?” And we started working during the summer—loved working every day. Woke up, spent almost twelve to fifteen hours every day working. That’s all we did—write code, talk to customers, build products. And then at the end of the summer we said, “This is fun. Let’s go full-time on this.”

Krish Ramineni: And the rest is history. My only condition was I wanted to move back to California. I didn’t want to be in Boston. And we started building the company. To be honest, we were naïve—21-year-old kids that didn’t know how hard it is to actually build a business. We had just watched the TV show Silicon Valley, we hear about Silicon Valley and read the TechCrunch articles. You think that’s the world—raise a big funding round, make a big splash announcement, hire a bunch of Stanford kids, and the rest is easy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Krish Ramineni: So reality hit quite hard once we got started working on this stuff. And yeah, it was a long, long journey and it took us several years before we were able to raise our initial round of capital.

Alejandro Cremades: But I guess for the people to get it—what ended up being Fireflies? What’s the business model?

Krish Ramineni: Today, Fireflies is an AI meeting assistant—an AI teammate that joins your meetings, takes notes for you. You can talk to Fireflies on a meeting. You can have it assist you quietly in the background. You can also have it do work after a meeting. And in the future, you can just have Fireflies go take meetings on your behalf. You don’t even have to attend them. I know that sounds very sci-fi-ish, but we’re very excited about what we’re building here. But it took a long time to get there—one step at a time.

Krish Ramineni: And the way we built our business is user by user, meeting by meeting. We have a freemium product as well as a monthly subscription product that people pay for. And we’ve been able to scale it to millions of people that are using Fireflies on a daily basis. We have large, large companies, small, small teams, and everywhere in between using the product today.

Alejandro Cremades: Now obviously, you guys are now on this rocket ship, but it took some time to get there. And you guys had to fail, get up multiple times. I mean, how was it like, you know, until—

Alejandro Cremades: What was that journey to get to product-market?

Krish Ramineni: I always like to say comfort kills ambition. And if you are too comfortable doing what you are doing today, you’re not stretching yourself. So I can say, in the early days, we were not comfortable at all. It was painful—every day was painful. We had systems breaking every other day. Had to be up at 2 a.m. trying to fix things. We got a lot of rejections from investors. That builds character. But when you get told “no” so many times, it gives you a chip on your shoulder. It makes you want to prove the world wrong.

Krish Ramineni: And I think that’s been the driving force for my co-founder Sam and me—to go out and say, “Hey, all these people betting on us not being able to do this—let’s go prove them wrong.” I think the hardest lesson we learned early on is it’s not about networking, it’s not about going to the fancy founder startup events, it’s not about the sexy conferences. It is not about chasing the hype—it’s about focusing on customers.

Krish Ramineni: A lot of times you don’t have an option, especially if you are low on capital and don’t have a lot of funding. You have to be very, very resourceful. So for us, being profitable was not optional—it was mandatory. It was proof of success. That’s how we decided to build our company. We’re fortunate to have raised twenty million dollars along the way, but it was not something that would have happened magically. So we weren’t banking on the capital to save us—we had to build it brick by brick.

Alejandro Cremades: What was that moment like when you were like, “Oof, I think we may be into something here”?

Krish Ramineni: Well, the first “aha” moment for me was when someone went to our website, put in their credit card, and paid for it without talking to any of us. They said, “Hey, I heard about this from a friend. I signed up, I’m paying for it. I like it—keep up the good work.” That was all the motivation we needed when we were very low on spirit. And that changed things for us. We said, “If we can make one customer happy, I’m sure we can make ten happy. If we can make ten happy, I’m sure we can make a hundred happy. And if we can make a hundred happy…”

Krish Ramineni: I started to build that self-confidence that we can make a million people happy. And you don’t notice that while you’re on the journey, but when you look back, you’ll see that—holy crap—we’ve gotten to this place where you’ve created your own brand. And the best form of marketing is when people tell others about Fireflies—and they’re doing a lot of that hard work on our behalf.

Alejandro Cremades: I know that you have some contrarian views when it comes to fundraising and work. Why don’t you share those with us too?

Krish Ramineni: Yeah. One—fundraising is not a strategy. It is one of many things you can do. But just assuming that if you fundraise all your problems will be solved—nothing can be further from the truth. The other thing is, you only want to raise money when you absolutely need it. That’s our DNA. That’s our mindset. And we want to be in a position where we don’t have to go stretch our arms out and ask for money. Because a lot of founders are essentially just high-profile fundraisers, and you’re having to beg for money. I don’t like doing that. So I like to do things on my own terms. And that’s one of the reasons why we wanted to make unit economics work. We wanted to build a business that was sustainable. And in the world of AI, that’s really difficult because it’s very expensive to scale this type of business. I like to say that when you raise money, you get that TechCrunch article—it feels good, absolutely.

Krish Ramineni: But that’s when the real work starts. That’s when more and more people will be like, “Oh, let’s see how long it’ll take for this company to fail.” That’s why I always say don’t celebrate fundraising. We don’t celebrate fundraising at our company. I think of it as—you now just took on a burden. You took on a loan. And what you should really be celebrating is making customers happy, making real revenue, profits, and taking care of your team. That’s what I value the most.

Alejandro Cremades: I very much agree with you. I do believe too that fundraising is not a milestone—it’s a stepping stone. So, right. In terms of your seed and your Series A—walk us through that. Because also, it sounds like it was quite strategic. And I’m sure very strategic too with who you decided to bring on board as well.

Krish Ramineni: For our seed, we had Canaan Partners that came on and invested. We had a relationship of two-plus years with the partner at Canaan there—before we raised our round. And this person would see us try many different products, fail, but we always made some sort of progress. Momentum is what investors like to invest in, versus having to invest in grand, ambitious ideas. If you’re a second-time founder, you can do that. If you’re a—

Krish Ramineni: Celebrity or a well-known person, you can raise on just a slide and a vision, right? But if you’re a first-time founder, you have to raise on traction, on progress, on momentum. That’s what attracts money. That’s what attracts capital. So after failing many years but making a lot of progress, we got to a place where we thought, “Hey, we think this is going to work and we’re convinced.” We were able to raise our seed round at that time. That was about $4.5 million—$5 million altogether including angels.

Krish Ramineni: We got some really amazing people on board. The Chief Product Officer at Slack came on as an investor. The CMO at Salesforce came on as an investor. We had some of the earliest engineers at Dropbox come on as investors. The CEO of Segment. A lot of these folks that built the PLG playbook. We aligned ourselves with some really smart people that came on to invest in Fireflies during the seed round. During the Series A, we were actually not even looking to go raise capital.

Krish Ramineni: We were scaling up, we were doing fine. But then the opportunity presented itself for us to grow faster. That was a moment where we doubled our team in a two-month period—three-month period. That’s where we realized, “Okay, this is how it has to happen.” And we were able to get Khosla Ventures on board. They did our Series A. Vinod Khosla has been very helpful as well. Through him—

Krish Ramineni: We were able to get connected to Sam Altman and get early access to OpenAI’s API—a year before the rest of the world did. We were able to make our product better, and we had a six-month head start to continue to innovate. I feel that was very strategic. And that was made possible by one of our angel investors, Sandhya, who was a partner at Khosla Ventures at that time. So when we were deciding on who to raise from, we wanted to pick someone—

Krish Ramineni: That was very much aligned towards deep tech, looking at the ten-year vision rather than what’s going to happen tomorrow. And a lot of VCs say that they’re long-term oriented, but when the chips are down, they have to worry about the short term, right? And Khosla was unique in that they wanted to go after a big bet. And as luck would have it, and the timing would have it, and the team’s hard work would have it, all the things started to align because LLMs and AI—

Krish Ramineni: Made what we were doing even faster and even better.

Alejandro Cremades: So then obviously, when you’re raising money from these people, they are betting on a vision—now, as well as employees, customers. If you were to go to sleep tonight, Chris, and you wake up in a world where the vision of Fireflies is fully realized, what does that world look like?

Krish Ramineni: Would be a world where I don’t have to go to any meeting because my AI is going, taking those meetings, and then coming back to me and giving me updates—and I can advise it. So I don’t want to have to do the busy work. Sure, there’s companies out there going to build the smartest AI in the world—the AGIs of the world, these research labs, the AI researchers at OpenAI and Meta—that are getting paid tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars. What I want to do is build AI that solves the dumbest problems that are tedious and painful. And whether that’s note-taking, whether that is—

Krish Ramineni: Taking calls on your behalf, automating all that mundane work and making those small businesses happy and have more time and cut their costs—that’s what I care about. And if I can do that—where Fireflies is powering, say, seventy percent of the world’s conversations using our AI and automating a lot of busy work for people—I consider that a success.

Alejandro Cremades: I mean, that’s really unbelievable. Obviously, I’m seeing Fireflies on so many meetings every day. I guess question for you then, on the way that you’re seeing things unfolding—how far away are we from being in meetings where people don’t even have to show up because things are taken care of for them?

Krish Ramineni: We’re already having public companies send the AI avatars to do earnings calls and do earnings call updates. And I don’t think we’re very far away. In fact, we’re working on something big here at Fireflies that we’d like to announce in a few months that will definitely change the world for recruiters, for salespeople, for customer support people—anyone that has to take repetitive, mundane phone calls all the time. So I’m very excited about that.

Krish Ramineni: We’re just on the precipice of a pretty big technology breakthrough and actually making it really good. So yeah, it’s not too far. We’re talking in terms of months—we’re not even talking about years.

Alejandro Cremades: So then, I guess when we’re thinking about AI, people are scared, right? I mean—what jobs are being, you know, bypassed and things are changing. How do you see AI impacting companies as a whole? The future of work—what should we anticipate?

Krish Ramineni: You know, this is a really important thing that everyone constantly worries about—how fast is AI moving and how many jobs are going to be impacted? The way I like to also look at it is—if you are doing the same thing, doing data entry every day, the same repetitive task every day—are you actually happy doing that? Are you doing that in exchange for money? But if money wasn’t an issue, would you be doing something else? And so when I look at it from that lens, AI will eat—

Krish Ramineni: Repetitive, boring jobs day in and day out. Boring tasks. It’s not going to mean that humans are completely replaceable—that’s not the point. But the thing is, humans are going to be able to focus on more valuable, creative work up the food chain. Every human is going to have to learn to be a manager of AI agents and get the results that they want. I do feel that if you don’t adopt AI in your business today, that’s like running a company without internet.

Krish Ramineni: You can’t run any business without internet. In the future, you won’t be able to run any company without AI—it’s inevitable. What I like to also believe is that if we can automate the boring, mundane tasks for people, we have a huge opportunity to really, really make companies more efficient—faster. And what I think—the people that are most at risk are middle managers, because you and I both know that middle management adds—

Krish Ramineni: Zero value inside an organization. And AI will flatten org charts. Fewer people are going to be able to do more. And if you’re a middle manager, if you are a management consultant—I don’t think that what you’re doing is uniquely valuable compared to what AI can do. And I know that sounds controversial, but it’s very important that we reward smart, creative work rather than repetitive work, templates, and mundane tasks. And maybe what we’ll end up having is, instead of—

Krish Ramineni: Tons of big, big companies—we’ll have lots and lots of little companies, a lot more creative ideas. And you know, this is something Vinod Khosla says—in the future, maybe we should start to think about, are there going to be the need for jobs? Do we need humans for jobs—or do jobs need humans? That’s the reality that we have to think about. There’s probably going to be many jobs that don’t need humans. And when you don’t have that, I think we can create an opportunity for people to do many, many things.

Krish Ramineni: Now, AI will also create tons of abundance. You’ll bring down costs significantly. You’re going to have a doctor in your pocket for almost free of charge. You will be able to have access to lots of resources for almost little to no expenses. So the most important thing is—and this is the existential question that I have—will you have to work to make a living, or can you live and work on the things that you want to do? That’s something I don’t know, but—

Krish Ramineni: Pretty much in a good position to answer that question now than ever before.

Alejandro Cremades: I know, too—that seemed like not long ago. I mean, I think that very recently, in the last thirty days, you guys made an announcement with reaching a billion—hitting the billion-dollar valuation. I mean, that’s pretty amazing, especially after only having raised a Series A. So tell us—what can we expect? I know that Perplexity is in the mix, bringing web search now to the way that you guys are going about meetings. I mean, it sounds like quite exciting stuff.

Krish Ramineni: Well, we’re very excited about pushing AI applications and custom workflows for people. Fireflies can do hundreds of different skills beyond just taking notes for you. It can write emails for you, it can analyze your calls, it can create scorecards, it can create reports. We are excited about the unlock—all the work that you do after you hit “end” on a meeting—we’re going to have Fireflies do that in real-time while the meeting is going on. So that’s what you can look forward to in the next couple quarters from us.

Krish Ramineni: It’s all of these AI apps, AI tasks, and Fireflies will be able to complete.

Alejandro Cremades: So obviously we’re talking about the future here, but I want to talk about the past—and doing so with a lens of reflection. If I was to put you into a time machine, Chris, and I bring you back to that moment where you were giving your notice at Microsoft, and you are now thinking about entering the world of entrepreneurship, and you’re able to see that younger self coming out of the Microsoft building—and you’re able to stop that younger self and be able to give that younger version one piece of advice before launching a business—what would that be and why, given what you know now?

Krish Ramineni: Focus beats optionality. Complexity kills clarity. And you don’t need permission to get started. If you focus on doing that one thing really well, it’ll get you a lot further in life than trying to do ten things mediocrely. So I think I’ve given up on some things early on because of a lack of focus—because of getting distracted. And I think the most important thing is building something that—

Krish Ramineni: People actually want. That’s easy to say, but hard to actually achieve. If you can do those things, you’ll be on the right track. And don’t chase the shiny objects. Don’t chase the PR, the hype. Just focus on taking care of your customers and don’t get distracted. And we probably could have done what we’ve done maybe two, three years faster.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. For the people that are listening that would love to reach out and say hi, what is the best way for them to do so?

Krish Ramineni: I am active on LinkedIn—it’s Krish Ramineni. And then I also am posting a lot of content these days on Instagram—so Krish Ramineni. That’s where you can find me. And if you haven’t tried out Fireflies, you definitely should—it’s fireflies.ai.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, Chris, thank you so much for being on the DealMakers show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Krish Ramineni: Thank you so much for having me.

*****

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