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Chris Pedregal, Co-Founder & CEO at Granola

Chris Pedregal is the Co-Founder & CEO of Granola. He was a Product Manager at Google before leaving to build Socratic, an AI tutor for students that Google acquired in 2018. He then spent roughly a year tinkering with large language models and, in March 2023, started Granola with co-founder Sam Stephenson, a product designer. Since launching in spring 2024, Granola has raised $192M across four rounds, closing a $125M Series C in March 2026 that valued the company at $1.5B. Its users now run from individual VCs to companies like Gusto, Lovable, and Mistral, and they’re already moving into enterprise.

What problem is Granola solving?

The really simple problem it solves is that we all have meetings, and if you don't use something like Granola, you basically have to choose. Either you spend a lot of cognitive effort trying to take notes, and you're not fully present, or you're fully present, but then tomorrow you're like, ‘Crap, what was that thing we talked about? What are all the things I need to do?’ So the problem we're solving is letting you get great notes from every meeting with minimal effort. If there's something important, you can jot it down. But if you don't, the notes are pretty good on their own.

We have much bigger aspirations than that, but that's what it is today. Once people start using Granola, they tend to use it a lot, so it becomes this kind of backup brain because it has good notes and transcripts from all your meetings. It becomes something slightly different. It's not just about having meeting notes. You can actually ask it questions about your team and your work life, and it'll often have useful answers.

How did you and Sam come together?

I started playing with LLMs about eight months before ChatGPT launched, and I was convinced LLMs would change all the tools we use for knowledge and productivity work. They will get reinvented on top of them, and that was the vision with Granola back then. It's still what we want to do—build the tool that makes you better and smarter at all your work. Then the question was where to start. We built a bunch of prototypes going in different directions. There was an early-ish version of Granola and people's eyes really lit up. So we went in that direction because for an AI tool to be useful, it needs context about you, and we thought meetings were a great way to get that context.

On the co-founder side, I found Sam online. I knew I needed a co-founder, and the hard parts were either actually training the models or the design side, so it had to be a researcher or a designer. The tools-for-thought world was a bit of a niche movement a couple of years ago, with Roam Research and Obsidian and those guys, and I figured if there was a good designer who was thoughtful about that stuff, they'd be great at solving interfaces for LLMs.

I cold emailed Sam, we went out and grabbed some beers, and eventually we decided to prototype together. It actually took us a year to give up on the first idea. We were convinced you'd be typing commands during a meeting and Granola would write the notes in real time for you, because we thought it was so cool and so sci-fi. Turns out it's super distracting and takes you out of the meeting, which is the opposite of what you want, so we ended up cutting it. We're really big on user feedback, and that’s why we put prototypes in front of all our friends, but ultimately it was what we wanted. Sam and I have always built a version of software that we'd want to use ourselves, then talked to as many people as possible to validate it and find where our thinking was wrong. A lot of it was driven by what we would have wanted.

What stood out as missing in the industry?

The thing that became really obvious once you start talking to people about their workdays is that it's chaos. People's days are chaotic and stressful. At Granola, when we talk about our user, we're always talking about someone who's running four minutes late to an important meeting. They're stressed, haven't prepped, and all your other tools, like Slack and email, are unwieldy inboxes. Everything about the work experience is kind of a shit show. You design things very differently when your user is in that fight-or-flight, low-cognitive-bandwidth moment.

What usually happens is they start the meeting, and only when they have an important thought do they go, ‘Crap, where do I write this down?’ and they grab whatever's closest, a scrap of paper or Apple Notes, and then those notes invariably disappear because they're not in a searchable, structured place. The second sign was the bot joining the meeting. They're a bit less common now, but back then you'd get bots that would join and take up half the screen. It's a weird third wheel on a date. Sometimes they'd even show up before the other person, so it really changed the dynamic. And there was so much painful stuff with the bots. No one felt in control of them. Once you signed up, they'd show up to all your meetings; you'd have to try to kick them out, and sometimes you couldn't. None of that felt like a personal tool.

Lastly, good notes are genuinely personal. In a meeting with two people, the good notes for one person look completely different from the good notes for the other. We started with a lot of investors and founders using us. So say you have a meeting with a VC and a founder. The investor wants the market, the problem, the team, the fundraising history, the pretty standard buckets. The founder wants to know what questions the investor had, what they seemed skeptical about, what check sizes they write. It's the same meeting, but the best notes look completely different for each of them. Once you dug into it, the AI bots looked like they were doing the job, but they weren't actually doing the one job that matters: writing good notes you can trust, so you don't have to do that work some other way.

Why else has Granola been so successful so far?

It took us a year from the day Sam and I started the company to the day we launched, even though we had an early prototype within a couple of weeks. Every day we onboarded two people onto Granola, watched what was wrong, fixed it a bit, then onboarded someone new the next day and kept iterating. So by the time we launched, it was a pretty useful product. In the age of AI, lots of people are building and putting stuff out there, so having a more polished product that actually works goes a long way. Then, honestly, it really grew because the product clicked for people. We did nothing growth-hacky. It's almost anti-growth-hacky. Every other note-taker emails notes out to other people; we don't do anything like that. You'd almost expect the product not to grow.

Several smaller product decisions pushed it above some threshold where people realized that it’s really useful. One was that we made it a desktop app instead of a web app, because it’s much easier to get to. If you're three minutes late to a meeting and you've got 50 tabs open, it's really hard to find the right tab, but it's easy to open a desktop app. The second was that we send a notification at the start of a meeting with an ‘open Zoom’ button, and it also opens Granola. We fit naturally into people's existing workflows. They didn't have to build a new habit. A notification just pops up, and people find it useful, so it was low-effort to start using Granola. The third was that we didn't have a bot join the meeting, so there's none of that weirdness. Instead of a bot, we use the system audio on your computer. That means it works in Zoom, Meet, Huddles, and basically in-person meetings too.

It sounds small, but we also decided not to record any video or store any audio. All you end up with is notes and a transcript. We wanted to get rid of the transcript as well, but it turns out they are super useful, so we kept them. We did all this because we didn't want it to feel invasive or creepy. We wanted it to feel like a really smart notepad, like having someone taking perfect notes for you. Then we worked really hard on making the notes much better than the other companies. We realized that good notes really depend on who's in the meeting. So Granola does a little internet research on you, figures out who you are, and it uses that to think and build the notes around that. The last thing is that we just tried to keep it simple. The combination of those decisions is what put it over the edge.

What channels were working early?

It was all word of mouth and Twitter. We tweeted about the launch, and it got maybe 100,000 impressions. I didn't have any Twitter followers back then; we just got retweeted by some folks, and that was it. We didn't do any marketing. We thought the product wasn't great yet, so the plan was to launch publicly, get more data, and figure out how to make it better. And then, you know how tech Twitter is, a bunch of people interested in AI and thinking about AI products kept mentioning us and tweeting about us.

The other interesting part is that our notes were incredible for VCs and investors, partly because they were the easiest people for us to do user interviews with, so we actually chose them as our first target demographic. The pain point is super acute for them. They'll meet with four startups a day, and if they don't have good notes, they're hosed. We spread like wildfire among investors. Then they started bringing it into board meetings or telling founders about it, and that's how it spread. Founders found it really interesting, and a good percentage of them suddenly wanted their whole company to use this.

For about a year, Twitter specifically was quite an important channel for us, again all organic, just us tweeting. After that, we started being a bit smarter about tweeting our launches and putting stuff out there. Paid channels are a very recent thing, just the last three or four months.

What didn't go so well in the early days?

One thing that bombed is that we spent about six months trying to make that real-time UI work, and we just couldn't. It took us a long time to let go of an idea we thought was so cool, but that wasn't actually very good. But the biggest fuck-up, honestly, was that I didn't grow the team when I should have. We were four when we launched Granola, and I didn't hire because I thought the worst thing you can do is grow a team before you actually have product-market fit. But since it started growing, it was a bit of a boiling-frog situation. All of a sudden, we were getting lots of emails every day from users about bugs and issues, people wanting to access their data, things you have to respond to. At that point we were already completely overloaded, and I had no idea where we'd find the time to hire, because we were a team of five trying to do the work of 20. That was definitely my mistake.

Another one was that Notion basically carbon-copied our product and launched it. Zoom has done that now too. Not that we were the most original thing in the world—we actually took tons of inspiration from other products—but it happened faster than I expected. I thought the bigger companies would take longer, but they moved quickly. Even OpenAI did a really bad copy of our product. Obviously not as well as Granola, but it's a real thing. That was anxiety-inducing to watch.

And I guess this is just startups, but the version of the app we built and released wasn't really built to last in the way we needed. We had to rebuild the entire way we store data. While you're also trying to scale and do everything else, you have to go back and rebuild the basics so the thing is actually performant and scalable. It's a good problem to have, but it definitely cost us some time.

What are Granola's short-to-medium-term goals?

There's where the product is going, which I'm really excited about, and then there's some more basic stuff. We started out getting used by a lot of investors, and the next wave was AI startups. The people who were really curious about what AI tools existed, or how they could improve their work with AI, tended to be the ones who found us early. Then we started getting larger scale-ups, and now a lot of our conversations are with large enterprises. We just signed one of the Magnificent Seven. So part of what we want is to be the absolute best in the world at capturing and extracting insights from all your meetings across an entire company, and to do that for really large companies, not just small ones. We're on that path.

Right now, Granola is notes and a kind of backup brain for people. The next step is actually helping you use all that information and context to do things. Notes are useful, and I don't think they're going away, but notes aren't the point of a meeting. The point of a meeting is usually making some decisions and then having to go and act on them. We really want to help you go and do those things. If you have a meeting with a potential customer, you probably want to send a follow-up email afterward, so Granola drafts one for you automatically and surfaces it when it thinks you'll need it. That's a small, transactional example. There are a bunch of them—send the follow-up email, schedule the next meeting, update a ticket, update your CRM, all the no-brainer, meeting-adjacent stuff. We just launched this in beta.

What's more interesting over time is that I want Granola to be the most personal AI tool out there, the one that understands you better than anything else does. I don't want it to be a to-do list or to feel like a big SaaS tool. I want it to feel like your own little private superpower, something that goes, ‘Hey Bill, this is pretty important, and I've done some early research for you because I know you'll be thinking about it later, here you go.’ And you just say thanks.

What changes when you move into enterprise?

On one hand, there's a long checklist of stuff you just need—SOC 2, Okta, all of that. Every startup has to do it eventually. The more interesting part is the difference in mindset. The smaller, early-adopter startups are very open and context-forward. Sales calls are a big use case for Granola, and a smaller company will drop them into a public folder the whole company can access.

Then you start talking to an enterprise, and they tell you something like they don't want the European sales team seeing the US sales team's notes. There are all these internal silos and buckets that they're very attuned to. They're interested, and they very much believe this is where the world is going, but they have internal structures that they need our tool to mirror.

Operationally, it's mostly scaling work. We're building up a sales team. Until now, we had a very small sales team, and really all they did was handle the last mile. Granola spreads inside a company, and at some point someone reaches out to say a lot of their employees there are using us, but they don't have an official contract, and they need control over their data. So the sales team was basically catching customers who had almost sold themselves. When you're talking to one of these massive companies, it's a much more involved process. There's a lot more hand-holding and back-and-forth, and then once you sign the contract, setting it up correctly is a lot more manual. So we're also hiring a customer success team, people who make sure you stay happy after you've signed.

We've also done very little marketing and communication aimed at enterprises. It's always been aimed at the end user. Even the Granola homepage today speaks to you as an individual who's going to use the tool. But companies have questions about compliance and security that we can answer strongly, and we just aren't putting them out there. Recently we hired someone to work on enterprise marketing and communication, and a large part of the engineering team is now dealing with what you need to support larger companies. When we signed that Magnificent Seven company, our workspace suddenly needed to handle hundreds of thousands of meetings, which had never been the case before.

Sam Stephenson, Co-Founder & Designer at Granola

Sam Stephenson is the Co-Founder & Designer of Granola. A British designer by trade, with stints at a San Francisco design agency, an education non-profit, and the note-taking startup Ideaflow, Sam teamed up with Chris Pedregal and the two founded Granola in March 2023. What makes Sam worth listening to is that he owns the part of Granola everyone else is trying to copy and can't—the feel of it. In a category with hundreds of look-alike note-takers, Granola wins on taste. It's a design philosophy Sam describes as ‘surprisingly unambitious,’ built on doing fewer jobs well, cutting half the planned features before launch, and keeping the product calm for people whose workdays are anything but.

Where did the idea for Granola come from?

But it also felt like no one had figured out an interface for how to make it useful or approachable to real people yet. That was the problem we wanted to work on.

We found our way to meeting notes through a winding path of interviewing a lot of people about their work. We wanted to understand what things suck the most about their jobs, and where the overlap was between the pain points that exist in people's work and the things it felt like LLMs would be really good at. Meeting notes felt like a great place to start, because it was an achievable problem at the time. But it's never been the be-all and end-all goal for us. Really, we're in the business of helping busy people amplify their work. The advantage of meeting notes is that we get meeting transcripts, which are like fuel for the LLM, to do everything it might want to do. They give the computer so much understanding of what's happening in your life.

What were the hypotheses for people’s pain points, and what did you find?

At the beginning, they were super open-ended. We'd just talk to anyone who would talk to us, and spend quite a long time with them, maybe an hour, so they could walk us through what happened the previous day at work, from beginning to end. Where did you waste time? What were the different things you did? We did that for a while, and very quickly patterns started to emerge. Within a handful of interviews, we realized that the follow-up work coming off meetings seemed to be a constant burden for a lot of people. If a lot of your job is meeting people, you might have to keep track of five follow-up emails you're supposed to write and three different things you promised to do, and those things stack up very quickly.

As we learned this, we got more and more interested in meetings in particular, so we'd ask more questions about them. One thing that stood out was that most of the people we interviewed had tried some kind of AI meeting assistant or note-taker, and universally they hated them and churned. That felt surprising at the time. When we dug into it, we figured out why they weren't working, and that gave us the confidence to try something in this space. There was a lot of demand and interest in tools like that, but none of the players at the moment were actually delivering on what they said they would.

Why were people churning?

There are a few things. The status quo meeting note-taker was a bot that joins the call, which people find creepy. Nobody likes having a robot lurking in the corner of the meeting. The notes felt generic, not something you would have written yourself, and the interfaces felt like corporate software procured by your company and that you'd been told to use. You don't feel like you have any ownership over the stuff inside them.

The whole premise of these tools is that you get a meeting bot, and it takes care of writing the notes so you no longer need to. You can lean back and relax. But for a professional whose job is meeting people, if you care about the quality of your work, it just wasn't okay to fully outsource all of your note-taking to a bot. Your take on what's important in this meeting and your judgment on what's being said are stuff that really matters, and these note-takers were just ignoring it.

What was the first thing that actually worked?

The first thing was incredibly basic. What we gave to a handful of people was a web page you could go to that would transcribe whatever came through your computer's microphone.

There was no real product around it. When you wrote the next note, it would override the old one. So it was literally just an experiment to see what it would be like to have an LLM take what you thought was important and flesh it out. It felt like there was something new and interesting there. It wasn't usable as a note-taking app because overwriting the last note every time is kind of useless. Anyway, we persuaded a few friends to try it for a few meetings, and we watched as they used it. It still felt a long way off, but there was something there worth investigating.

How did you get your first users, and where did the investment come from at a pre-user stage?

They were our investors, our friends, or our partners. We were building a fairly horizontal tool, used by any knowledge-worker type of person, so we just reached out to the most accessible people. At that early stage, it's super important to get really high-fidelity feedback. It's not okay to just email someone a link asking them to try your app. You want to catch up with them on a call regularly and get a real, in-depth download on what's been good about it and what hasn't. Friends and family are great for that.

We'd been meeting investors in London, ones we liked or that people recommended, for quite a few months before we started working on Granola. We did a phase of research and built one or two prototypes, and then pretty quickly got to the point where we thought the product wasn’t there yet, but we could make a pretty compelling demo for what something like Granola could look like in the future. Then we showed that to a few of the folks we'd been talking to, and one of them basically bit and said he was in.

That was enough of a catalyst. We figured, if we can get one person in at this point, let's raise the round now. It was definitely too early to stomach for a lot of people, because we literally had a demo video of a product that didn't really work yet. But Lightspeed ended up being the investor that led that round, and I'm very grateful to them for taking the leap and believing that early.

What was the most difficult thing in the zero-to-one stage?

The hardest thing to crack at the beginning was the core interaction. We believed from very early on that we basically needed to find one interaction pattern, one new behavior that a user would learn, which would unlock this really useful product. The tab, GitHub Copilot, autocomplete thing felt like sci-fi, but as soon as we put it in people's hands, it became apparent that it wasn't it. We hadn't cracked it yet.

It took us a long time, trying lots and lots of different prototypes, to find something that worked. Maybe six to nine months of trying stuff that didn't work. There were definitely a lot of times when I wondered if we'd ever really crack it, or if the world would overtake us before we got anywhere.

Did it ever get to the point where cash flow or motivation was running low?

So far—touch wood—so good on that front. We fundraised very early, so cash flow was never a problem.

How and why is Granola growing so quickly?

I don't know exactly, but I can take some guesses. I think it addresses a real pain point for a lot of people. Back-to-back meetings are stressful, and you feel out of control, like you're not being your best self. Granola helps you keep on top of that and stay in control, so you feel better in that painful scenario. It really feels like a painkiller.

I also think that if you're AI-curious, there aren't many apps or experiences outside general-purpose chatbots that feel obviously useful to people. People like talking about AI stuff, and if you want to talk about AI without talking about Claude or ChatGPT, then Granola is up there. People also really resonate with the product and brand feel. It feels different from a lot of software. The feedback we get is that it feels more personal, like it's mine. It's my stuff, not my company's stuff. Most of our users feel an affinity to it because of that, and they want to talk about it with each other.

On an execution level, what are you doing that's working so well?

I don't think we do amazingly well at marketing. We're getting better at finding people and persuading them to give us a try and download it, but we're not amazing at that. What I do think, though, is that once we get someone through the funnel of downloading, signing up, and trying it once, the product is incredibly sticky. Our retention from someone who does a first meeting to someone who continues doing meetings in perpetuity is really high.

It's a mixture of things. The product feels friendly and approachable, and you don't have to learn very much to start using it, so it's a low barrier to entry. And then the ‘wow moment’, when the notes come out at the end of your first meeting, is immediate. You don't have to sit around and wait for it. It's really visceral. The animation feels like clever shit is happening right here, right now. So the first time you use it, Granola gives you something really useful you've never had before. That's pretty compelling.

Who was your most important early hire, and why?

Neither Chris nor I was very technical, so as soon as we had money, finding an engineer was critical. It took us ages—well, it felt like ages. It was two or three months of searching for the right person, which felt extremely frustrating at the time. We were tempted a couple of times to go with people who didn't feel quite right, just because we'd been looking for so long. But Andrei, the guy we did find, I remember interviewing him and immediately thinking he was our guy. He's incredibly smart, but you also just click with him as a person. I'm so grateful that we took the time to find him, because that first hire sets the blueprint for everyone else culturally after that.

Michael Altom, COO at Granola

Michael Altom is the COO of Granola. He joined the team in September 2025 to build the go-to-market and operations around the product, after more than three years running growth and operations across Europe at the wholesale marketplace Faire, a stint as COO of Virtuo, and seven years at McKinsey. What makes Michael interesting is the job itself. Granola is a product people genuinely love, and it grew to real scale on pure word of mouth with almost no marketing. His task is to build the GTM machine on top of that, which means hiring a sales team, opening a San Francisco office, and layering enterprise selling onto a bottoms-up, viral product, all without making it feel like every other company that has ever cold-emailed you.

His answer is to run the whole thing on conviction and product signals rather than spreadsheets. Follow where users are already sharing and retaining, treat sales as an extension of the brand, and make the big calls the moment the data clears a minimum bar rather than waiting for it to remove all doubt. It is a bet that you can scale something people love without loving it to death.

What does a COO actually do at a product-obsessed company like Granola?

The way I see it, my role is enabling the founders to achieve their vision. We're a product-led company, and that's the reason I joined. I don't want to change it from a product-led company into a sales-led or GTM-led one. I think our strength is being product-led, so I make sure we stay that way, and that everyone knows that’s our focus. We talk about the product very openly, and anyone here should know exactly where it is going.

The second half is that I run a bunch of functions I've built and run in the past. I've made lots of mistakes building those functions, and I've also seen what good looks like in all of them, which Sam and Chris haven't. So I'm leading those end-to-end—GTM, marketing, recruiting, finance, and ops. You need those functions for the company to keep growing and building the product the way we want.

What was broken when you joined?

The first thing was hiring. It wasn't growing fast enough. They had amazing, very complementary founders, who are amazing product leaders. And they had a good crew too: a wonderful CTO who was their founding engineer, six or seven really strong engineers, and a couple of CX people. That was pretty much it. We had a product, but there was so much to build, and I don’t think we had the hiring engine to find the right people. As a result, we were hiring a bit too slowly. So the first thing I did when I joined was find a team of really good recruiters. We needed firepower. Then I helped structure the hiring process and made sure we were clear on what we were looking for, how we were going to assess it, find candidates, and how we'd look at the funnel.

The second thing was growth and distribution. Once it felt like the product had clear PMF, I started to hire a marketing team. It had been growing really, really fast with zero marketing—non-paid, very little product marketing and organic social, just for launches. So could we accelerate the product growth even more by creating a lot more awareness outside the VCs and startups niche Granola was famous in? Very early on, I realized we actually needed to invest in what Granola is good at, which is brand. We were lucky enough to find Lise, who's been amazing at driving this, and we try to spend half of our budget on top-of-funnel awareness campaigns. Podcasts and newsletters are one good way to do that.

The third one was sales. From the get-go, I was really astonished when I started looking at all the leads we were getting from users who'd found out about the product on X and wanted to use it. I was astonished by the quality of these inbound leads coming in so early in the journey with nothing in place. We didn't have SOC 2 and a lot of the enterprise features at the time. There were many reasons not to buy Granola at the enterprise level 18 months ago. But there was so much demand that it gave us confidence to build a sales team and all those features that are table stakes for enterprise buyers.

What did the sales structure look like before?

Originally we had one person, Shre, who's very much the kind of amazing early employee you want to hire, because he can do anything. He was the first person to start thinking about what the enterprise sales motion should look like—how we should structure our inbound funnel, what customers really needed to be able to buy. People were coming in wanting to buy, but to do so, they needed us to fill out a security questionnaire, tell them about our compliance, how we’re using their data, and review MSAs their legal team wanted to redline. So we hired a small crew in London. Most of them spent their time answering inbound leads from companies in the US, so they were working quite late. We tried to hire people who were comfortable with early-stage selling and sales on top of PLG, because they knew how to do that.

The process took a couple of months, but we found an amazing one in Bardia, who was at Fireworks AI before. Since we opened the SF office, we've been growing the team there quite aggressively.

It was very much building the plane while flying it. Simultaneously, we were building the product that enterprise buyers needed. I think we're really in a good spot now. We were building the team at the same time as we were validating the demand. I'm very happy we didn't wait too much, because otherwise we would have built the team much more slowly, which would have put us in a worse position.

What does it actually take to sell on top of PLG?

In most cases, in a sales-led process, the flow is very theoretical. You get your ICP, find the best accounts that match it, prioritize them, give them to salespeople, and tell them to go after them. In a PLG motion like Granola's, especially when the product is so viral within companies, using product data is really helpful. You're not just shooting in the dark. Here, I just follow the PLG and look at which companies and domains have users using the product. Do they retain well in that domain? Do they share invites and notes internally? Are they using more advanced product features? We can use all of those signals to prioritize, so we're not being theoretical. We follow where we feel we have the best chance to capture the demand.

That means we can really help reps know which accounts to target and when. We can identify exactly who inside that company are the power users, and those folks are much more open to responding to our outreach since we're trying to help them. You need people who think this way, which doesn't mean we need to hire people who've done it this way before—people who can think from first principles. If they can do that and they're good sellers, that's the magic combo. And they perform really, really well here.

Are you building case studies and collateral before you're even in the deal for outbound?

No, we don't do that too much because pretty much everyone we reach out to already knows Granola. In most cases, they're getting lots of value as an individual, so then, depending on which function they're in, we can point out that we often see teams not getting enough collective value from Granola, because not enough of the team is in there, or because they're not using the sharing and foldering features that help people share context within the company. That's an angle that usually resonates with a prospect.

One thing that's important to me, and to the VP of sales, is that we really see sales as an extension of the product and an extension of the brand. We don't want salespeople to sound too salesy, too commercial, or too desperate in any way. You really don't want to be the annoying salesperson landing in someone's inbox. Every email should add value. So we always ask ourselves whether we can add value to an account. If so, let's reach out, and let's make sure that from the very first email we're giving them something that will hopefully make them want to help us, and help them.

Why is Granola's go-to-market working so well?

At the end of the day, it's all around the product. So the question is why the product resonates so well. I think it does for a few reasons. One, it's incredibly simple and easy to use. Everyone talks about how simple it is to install. You can start today and use it right away. Second—and I've heard this from a lot of customers—the ROI and the value you get from Granola are obvious. It's right in your face at the end of the meeting. You get your notes instantly, generated in front of your eyes. Most other tools don't give it to you like that.

Then it's the timing and the market. Every knowledge worker feels like they're in back-to-back meetings, so it speaks to everyone. And the fact that it's a horizontal tool that anyone can use makes it really easy for people to share with their colleagues. That starts the viral loop that the whole PLG motion of Granola is built on. That's honestly where the magic happens. Now, it's both hard and simple to build a good sales motion on top of that. It's simple because, at the end of the day, there's already a lot of intent and a lot of users. It's just about capturing that demand. The hard part is that you still need to go through the buying process. Enterprises have requirements, so you need to guide the customers through that process. But I've seen cases where the intent and the PMF aren't as strong, and it's a very, very different job. So I'm very glad we have so much tailwind from the product to accelerate from there.

Anything else you'd add on the magic-moment effect?

Something amazing about Granola, and it's among a few B2B tools where people say this, is that people talk about love. Not everyone likes it, of course, and it's hard to be 100%, which hurts every time. But when I was interviewing a year ago, talking to people around me and looking at social media, there was this love. Ask people what they thought of Granola and they'd tell you they loved it. We still get that constantly. When we reach out to prospects, they tell us they love Granola, that it's so good, that it's their new memory at work and so useful. That's the kind of reaction we strive for. We don't want to be, ‘Yeah, it’s pretty good.’ And one way of maintaining that is magic.

One big moment for us, where I think the world—or at least the world on LinkedIn and X—rediscovered or discovered Granola, was when we did the Granola Crunched campaign in December, which was our take on the Spotify Wrapped campaign. People really loved it, because it brought that magic to life again. It was a great brand moment. It showed people that Granola knew so much about them, and it delivered that in a very delightful way. Now one of our missions is figuring out how to find more moments like that, to keep that sentiment and brand alive.

What's next for Granola in terms of growth?

The mission for Granola is helping large teams, the best companies in the world, capture and leverage their conversations and their context. So we need to be the best tool at capturing a large amount of company context. That sounds simple, but a lot of things need to go right. It needs to be a great tool people want to use, because when they want to use it, you end up capturing way more context than if you mandate a tool people don't like. If people love it, you also capture the follow-up call within your team to debrief from that call. The more context you can capture, the better. That's the goal we're striving toward, and I think Granola is incredibly well positioned for that.

Once the context is captured, the question is how we help teams make the most use of it. Putting that context to work with Granola. We have a bunch of functionality that helps you make the best use of the context in Granola, whether that's your individual or your team's context. It can help you know what customers are asking, what the risk is on a deal and what you need to do to unlock it, or what's slowing down product development. Once you have all the context captured for your whole company, it's really easy to go at those questions.

It can also mean helping companies take that context elsewhere. I personally spend a lot of time talking to customers, trying to understand what they're building.

Extra reading

• Granola: Healthy Breakfast & Killer AI Notepad - August, 2026

• $1.5B AI Founder: The Mindset Shift That Separates Winners in 2026 - May, 2026

And that’s it! You can follow Chris, Sam, and Michael on LinkedIn, and also check out Granola on their website to learn more.

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