What's coming next for Granola
Co-founder Sam Stephenson joins us this week on the podcast. Also: Wired asked me about using AI to write the newsletter, AI headlines you should know about, and more.
”So much of what people say in meetings is code for, ‘I never want to think about that again’”
Granola is one of the few AI apps I feel like I can’t live without. I run it during pretty much every meeting, and it has become the thing I rely on more than almost any other tool in my workflow.
I was excited to have co-founder Sam Stephenson on ACCESS this week to get into how the product actually works and where it’s going. Granola raised $125 million this week at a $1.5 billion valuation and has been rolling out a wave of new features: Spaces for teams, MCP to connect with other tools, and a public API that opens meeting data to developers.
Stephenson says traditional SaaS wisdom about keeping data locked in the product doesn’t work anymore. “Every AI tool is becoming so interconnected,” he said on this week’s episode. “If we don’t play ball in that system, I don’t think we’re relevant anymore.”
Catch the full conversation on this week’s episode of ACCESS, the podcast I co-host with Ellis Hamburger:
Stephenson is Granola’s design-obsessed co-founder, and our conversation delves into the product thinking that’s made Granola stand out in a crowded field of AI note-taking tools. Before the interview with Stephenson, Ellis and I talk about navigating ethics in media and programming the pod, the rise of film photography, and my recent trip to OpenAI to spend time with the Codex team. (More on that next week.)
Highlights from the conversation with Stephenson:
How Granola actually works: A question I get all the time is whether it actually records your calls. Stephenson demystified this: the app sends your audio to a transcription API, which converts it to text in real-time and doesn’t save it. Granola doesn’t store audio files either. “It depends which lawyer you ask in which state,” he said of the legal gray area, but the short answer is no, you’re not recording people.
What’s coming next: Stephenson teased a bunch of stuff in the works. An Android app is in early development (their first Android engineer started last week). They’re prototyping proactive follow-up nudges, though he says there’s a ton of nuance to get right (”So much of what people say in meetings is code for, ‘I never want to think about that again’”). They’re building the ability to send emails and handle post-meeting tasks from within Granola. And better speaker identification is a major priority.
On AI agents joining meetings: Stephenson describes a near-future in which agents listen in on meetings via Granola and begin taking action. After Granola launched its MCP support, Replit CEO Amjad Masad tweeted: “Imagine leaving a product requirements meeting and Replit is already building the MVP via Granola MCP.”
Listen or watch wherever you get podcasts.
