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Early drivers steered cars by pushing a lever left and right. That was fine at slow speeds, but disastrous when you accelerated. It took years before the steering wheel arrived. Granola CEO Chris Pedregal says AI interfaces are still in the lever era. Pedregal, who in 2019 sold the edtech startup Socratic to Google, says were just beginning to figure out how humans should interact with AI. Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, people still associate AI with typing into a chat box. Granola is betting on a new approach to AI-enhanced note-taking. The London-based startup doesnt record audio or video or send bots into your meetings. Instead, its tool sits on your computer or phone, transcribing in real time while you maintain control. Chris Pedregal [Photo: Granola] You can jot notes alongside its transcription, building a personal knowledge base instead of a raw archive of recordings. The viral spread of its tool helped the company raise $43 million last year, bringing its total funding to $67 million at a valuation of $250 million. Its also grown from a team of 4 to 35. Fast Company spoke with Pedregal about the steering wheel moment still ahead for AI interfaces and the surprising ways people are using Granola to take notes on everything from therapy to vet visits. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Youve described Granola as a steering wheel for large language models. What do you mean by that? I think its very, very early days in this new wave of AI, particularly on the user interface interaction side of things. The technology developed very quickly, but it takes human time to figure out the right interaction patterns. I looked it upit was over three years from when the iPhone came out to when Instagram launched. I think we’re in that time period right now. People might be like, ChatGPT has been out for three years, and we’re still just dealing with chatbots. Is that the end of it? I think it’s just early days. Early cars were driven with a lever, literally a stick that you’d move left and right to steer. It was fine if youre going slowly, but the moment you started going quickly, it was easy to go off the road. It took quite a while for them to develop the steering wheel. Once they figured out the steering wheel, it became very natural and it stuck. AI interfaces are still in their lever era. Granola deliberately doesn’t record audio. Why make that choice when competitors do? Granola doesnt record audio by design, which is probably annoying if you ever try to use Granola for interviews. But it makes it less invasive for work conversations, because really what you want are the notes. The goal is not to have an audio recording. The way I think about it is: What’s the minimum amount of invasiveness for the most value? That’s how you have to thread the needle. AI is here, we’re all going to be using tools like this in the future because they’re so useful. But what are the norms? What’s the thoughtful, ethical design of these tools so that we maximize the gains for the cost? How is Granola different from Otter, Fathom, and other meeting notetakers? It all really comes down to this: Granola feels like a tool that lets you be your best self in meetings. The operative word there is tool, and that means you control it. You can write your own notes. When the AI generates notes, you can edit them. The AI is subservient, augmenting your abilities. Its your personal place where you have all this information. I think a lot of the other toolsOtter is like 9 years old at this pointare really about meeting capture, meeting recording. You log in and heres all your meeting recordings. Thats useful, but it feels very different than when you open Granola. Its like, heres my personal context where I can ask questions. It’s not really about the meetings. It’s about the notes, the knowledge inside of it. As we look towards the future, Granola and those other tools are going to look more and more different. I see Granola as being much more of a contextual workspace where Granola has all this helpful context about you. Now if I need to go write an article or a blog post, or institute some process changes inside the company, I will go into Granola and write that first draft because it has all that context. I can’t imagine doing that in Otter or Firefliesit just doesn’t feel like the right place for it. You’ve found that mixing work and personal contexts in Granola is actually more useful. Why? Right now, I use Granola for all my work meetings, therapy sessions, and logistics conversations about my life. If you had sat me down two years ago and asked if that’s really useful, I would have said noI want those things separate. It turns out when you’re asking Granola questions, it having a 360-degree view of different things that are going on in your life is very useful. When you’re making decisions, you’re weighing all those constraints and prioritiesnot just the ones tied to this specific project at work. I was just at the vet this morning, and I used Granola because it’s my mom’s cat and I’m not going to remember exactly what the vet says. Moments like going to the doctor, parent-teacher conferences, talking to a construction worker or plumberany situation where there’s sometimes technical language that’s really important to get right, that you’re not familiar withare incredibly valuable to capture accurately. Theres a different question around data ownership. I dont necessarily want my company to have my therapy notes. But as models get better, the AI having access to the right context makes all the difference in terms of the quality of the response. What’s appropriate etiquette around recording conversations with Granola? I think right now, the etiquette is simple: Ask. I imagine that the norms around this will change quickly, but it will remain very situation-dependent. Inside our company, its expected that meetings are Granola’d unless someone asks not to be. But in social environments the norms will be very different. Ive tried some of these pendants that record everything, and the idea of wearing those at a party just makes me feel a bit icky. I also think the video conference providers will adapt and make it easy to show meeting participants that you are using something like Granola, so ou won’t have to think about it. I think it really comes down to the social nuances of the situation. I usually frame it simply: Talk about it in terms of notes and transcription. Is it okay if I take notes? This thing will transcribe so I don’t forget the important stuff you say. That’s basically what I say. What’s been your biggest mistake as you’ve grown Granola? The biggest mistake I’ve made so far was that we didn’t grow the team fast enough. We had product-market fit in a fast-moving space, and I didn’t recognize that early enough. By the time I did, we were drowning in user tickets, requests for billingall the kinds of stuff that happens when you grow. There were only four of us on the team when we launched the product. I was trying to use my playbook from my last startupkeep the team super small, grow slow and steady. [I realized] that’s great, Chris, but actually the world wants this and you have to respond. I thought growing quickly meant sacrificing how thoughtful we could be about product, and I wasn’t reactive enough. We’re 35 people now, and most of that has happened in the last couple of months. What are some surprising ways people are using Granola? All the personal stuff was surprising at firsttherapy, vet visits, parent-teacher conferences. Then there were these founders early on who used Granola as their collective brain. They logged in with the same account and would record every conversation they had because they were early in their startupevery brainstorm, every argument. It became a single shared memory between the two of them. One user followed this famous sales methodology where every conversation falls into one of 14 buckets. He created very specific templates for each bucket, and at the end of the meeting he’d select the right one. Granola would basically spit out all the next steps to win that deal based on that framework. He encoded his entire sales process into itsuper intricate. I didn’t see that coming.
Category:
E-Commerce
Through the end of the 2010s, people were a companys infrastructure. Large workforces provided the scaffold upon which a business could build capacity for complexity: hire more people, take on more work. Artificial intelligence has upended this relationship, decoupling a companys potential productivity from its headcount and redefining which businesses will fare best. As a result, Americas mid-sized companies are disappearing: the number of businesses with between 250 and 499 employees has fallen by 22.5% since 2020. Meanwhile, the independent professional economy is quickly growing to take their place: 30.4 million U.S. solopreneurs (businesses with a single employee) now collectively generate over $1.75 trillion in output, rivaling that of larger firms. As mid-size companies dwindle, their economic role will be replaced by individuals using AI as their infrastructure. The next five years will see the rise of an entirely new model of work, one in which savvy service professionalsfrom lawyers to plumberswill operate at a scale previously possible only for mid-sized or even larger companies. EXPANDING SOLO WORK When surveyed, entrepreneurs note that they spend 36% of their working hours on administrative tasks, leaving little capacity to think about business growth or transformation. Single process automations have historically helped to free up some of this brain space, but AI does this on an entirely different level. Pearls proprietary research shows 50% of white-collar workers believe AI could handle over half of their job responsibilities in the next five years. For a new crop of solopreneurs, AI will completely assume their burdensome administrative work. But AI wont be just another force multiplier akin to digitizing invoices in QuickBooks or tracking a customers status in Salesforce. For solopreneurs, AI will add entirely new forces, equipping them with super agents to expand their business to the heft of a mid-sized firm while leaving them room to focus on mastering their craft. Middle-sized companies used to occupy a protected niche, gathering trusted groups of professionals to offer formalized work too specialized for large enterprises and too complicated for solo workers. Now, a solopreneur can harness the power of a 250-person firm, not by replacing hundreds of employees but by using AI to replicate the coordination that previously made this size staff necessary. THE DIGITAL WORKFORCE Solopreneurs will match the quantity and quality of work of a mid-sized business by assembling a digital workforce to coordinate across five distinct categories: Sales and Marketing The solopreneur already has a distinct advantage over mid-size companies in acquiring customers: their singular voice. AI helps them extend this voice to find new leads far beyond their network and maintain sales relationships at a capacity far higher than what one person can manage alone. Businesses are currently using AI to make faster marketing decisions and even automate entire workflows, such as sending tailored emails to capture a potential customer who has abandoned their cart and tracking the results. Future sales and marketing will hand off even more of the strategic work to AI, allowing it to lead entire accounts, negotiate pricing, and derive new messaging based on real-time customer signals, all to extend a professionals personal reach. Research For client work already secured, solopreneurs are using tools like Perplexitys Deep Research to create expert-level briefs in minutes, earning the company an $18 billion valuation from investors betting on AI-driven knowledge work. From synthesizing multiple earnings call transcripts to surfacing the latest news on competitors and novel techniques, AI is giving sole proprietors access to an exponentially wider breadth of knowledge and eliminating the fluff so they can absorb only the most consequential information. As AI matures, it will help solopreneurs continually update a research memory bank, question initial output for factuality, and flag missing data. Execution For a legal issue, for example, customers would rather avoid paying for the overhead of a large firm and work solely with the most experienced lawyer. AIs execution power finally enables this, connecting trusted experts directly with customers. The most advanced sole proprietors today compete with mid-size companies by running multiple specialized agents, automating workplace tasks like drafting informed email responses, summarizing meetings through different expert lenses, and preparing tailored reports. Already, U.K. civil servants have reported that they save an average of two weeks per year with similar AI automations. In the next five years, AI will evolve from requiring explicit instructions to only needing intent. Instead of requesting email drafts for review, a solo lawyer might ask AI to keep a client warm or move this deal forward and let an agent do the rest. Humans will still play the most important role, consulting on nonnegotiable accuracy checks and strategy decisions. Compliance Though famously unsexy, compliance is essential to company growth and what keeps many smaller firms from venturing outside their core pursuits. With AI anticipating compliance issues, solopreneurs can more quickly expand into new areas of business, rivaling larger firms whose governance teams protect them in these pivots. AI compliance platforms already track and map relevant changing regulations, allowing solopreneurs to keep up with shifting legal obligations without a large compliance team. What will come next is AI-generated audit trails and compliance assessments for real-time operations, shifting the work of keeping a company in line completely into the background. Management Coordinating an entire infrastructure of autonomous agents will be essential to scaling a business with only one human employee. The startup period will likely be much more extensive than for a human-staffed company, with the solopreneur needing to define a vision fo the business and reiterate it to management agents to get processes right. When management agents are finally aligned with the company leader, theyll be able to predictively schedule subordinate agents, balance workloads, and uplevel important considerations before they turn into problems. Today, an AI agent can launch tens of others to complete a complex process. Tomorrow, a network of management agents will continuously reprioritize work to meet the solopreneurs long-term goals. SCRAMBLING THE PROFESSIONAL FIELD Rather than a distant vision, the multi-million-dollar solo business is already here. In just six months, Maor Shlomo alone built vibe coding platform Base44. He garnered tens of thousands of customers and sold it to Wix for $80 million. Meanwhile, 50% of global freelancers are already earning more on projects when they use AI tools. 62% of GenZers are interested in starting their own business so America can expect a continuing increase in sole-proprietor firms from the next generation of knowledge workers. However, not every professional will be equipped to immediately become a solopreneur. They will still need training grounds like enterprises, continuing education programs, and peer mentorship to hone the expertise necessary to justify staking out on their own. What AI has changed is that anyone in the professional sphere can now go solo, they just have to choose the right moment in their career. Even as more Americans consult AI for advice, they will continue to seek out human experts for the best service. Increasingly, however, these professionals will be powered by AI infrastructures complex enough to rival mid-sized firms.
Category:
E-Commerce
As the Barack Obama Presidential Center takes shape ahead of its June 2026 opening, some observers have pointed feedback about an element of the building’s design. The Chicago tower features all-caps lettering that wraps around two sides of the building. But for many people, the textan excerpt from the former presidents speech in 2015, on the 50th anniversary of the marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabamais nearly impossible to read. Its designers say legibility isn’t the onlyor even the primaryfunction of the lettering. “One of the key questions I asked at the beginning was, are people supposed to read this?” says designer Micheal Bierut, who typeset the lettering with a team at Pentagram, led by designer Britt Cobb. “Is legibility the primary goal here? Do we want people to be able to stand on the ground, look up at this tower, and read those words? And that was discussed on the client end, and the answer came back, ‘No, it should have the promise of meaning, it should be decipherable, everything should be spelled right and it should make sense. [Rendering: The Obama Foundation] Letters as texture Early concepts of the Obama Presidential Center designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (TWBTA) showed a perforated upper section depicted in drawings as an abstract, irregular pattern. At one point, architects considered filling the space with a bunch of words, like a word cloud, though that idea didn’t feel quite dignified enough for a presidential library. Instead, they decided to use an excerpt from one of Obama’s speeches. “Just as a million people go to the Lincoln Memorial, some of them will stand and read every word of the second inaugural; some people will just admire the statue in the building and kind of take it in, and a couple of words will jump out, but not the whole thing,” Bierut tells Fast Company. “It’s in that tradition that I think we were operating.” The function of the feature is to serve as a space on the building that would be illuminated to the outside at night; from the inside, it’s a viewing area. Bierut says it was “never intended to look or feel or communicate as an applied sign stuck on the building.” It’s part of the architecture, not separate from it. Not everyone is a fan, though. Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey wrote on X that the text was “tough to read to me, giving off the lorem ipsum vibes,” referring to the Latin dummy text designers use as a placeholder when typesetting, while other X users joked the full quote can only be fully read by a drone as a dual dig against the design and against the Obama administration’s drone warfare program. [Photo: E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service/Getty Images] Typesetting an architectural feature The words are load-bearing, which added an element of complexity to the design process. “We’re moving around typography, adjusting letter sizes and letter spacing, and suddenly you’re typesetting 5-foot letters that are bearing tons of weight,” Cobb says. “It gets to a point where it becomes [more] about structural design. . . . I might say how I wish that letter could be three inches closer, but no, sorry, it’s bearing all this weight. It’s got to be here instead of there.” The letters are set in an adapted version of Gotham, Obama’s presidential campaign font, and the excerpt comes from one of Obama’s most famous speeches as president. Given at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the National Historic Landmark where police attacked civil rights marchers on Bloody Sunday 1965, Obama tied Selma to the broader American story in his speech. The excerpt reads: “You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there is new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word We. We the People. We Shall Overcome. Yes We Can. That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.” The text as it appears on the building wasn’t designed to be a billboard or read as a speech. It’s a pep talk to America. You are America. We the people. Yes we can. Even if glanced only in snippets, these words still hold power.
Category:
E-Commerce
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