Granola CEO Chris Pedregal on invisible AI bots, the coming fight over who sees your transcripts, and why he turns down the companies that ask for them
This podcast mentions Anthropic a few times; my fiancé works there. See my full ethics disclosure here.
Last week on the Platformer podcast, Raycast’s Thomas Paul Mann predicted that within a few years, as much as half the apps on your Mac could be ones you made yourself. For the third episode of our miniseries on work in the AI era, I wanted to learn more about a tool that may already know more about your job than any other: the AI notetakers that increasingly listen to every meeting we take.
And so this week I talked to Chris Pedregal. Pedregal is the co-founder and CEO of Granola, which has been my own AI notetaker since shortly after it launched. Pedregal started the company after a long tenure at Google, which he joined as an associate product manager in 2008. He left the company after a few years to start Socratic, a homework-helper app that Google acquired in 2018. In 2022, he left again to play around with the pre-ChatGPT large language models from OpenAI, and soon he and co-founder Sam Stephenson went on to launch Granola.
In an ocean of chatbot products, Granola is the rare AI tool with real product polish. Granola captures the audio from your own computer, lets you type your own notes alongside the AI, and fills in the gaps with an instant AI summary as soon as the meeting ends. (The app’s surprisingly good summaries were ultimately what prompted me to become a paying customer.) The company was most recently valued at $1.5 billion.
