How to build a beloved AI product, with @meetgranola CEO @cjpedregal Granola is the rare AI startup that slipped into a very crowded niche — meeting notes — and still managed to become the product founders (and VCs!) rave about. Plenty of product lessons in this episode. 00:00 - Introduction: The Granola Story 01:41 - Building a "Life-Changing" Product 04:31 - The "Second Brain" Vision 06:28 - Augmentation Philosophy (Engelbart), Tools That Shape Us 09:02 - Late to a Crowded Market: Why it Worked 13:43 - Two Product Founders, Zero ML PhDs 16:01 - London vs. SF: Building Outside the Valley 19:51 - One Year in Stealth: Learning Before Launch 22:40 - "Building For Us" & Finding First Users 25:41 - Key Design Choices: No Meeting Bot, No Stored Audio 29:24 - Simplicity is Hard: Cutting 50% of Features 32:54 - Intuition vs. Data in Making Product Decisions 36:25 - Continuous User Conversations: 4-6 Calls/Week 38:06 - Prioritizing the Future: Build for Tomorrow's Workflows 40:17 - Tech Stack Tour: Model Routing & Evals 42:29 - Context Windows, Costs & Inference Economics 45:03 - Audio Stack: Transcription, Noise Cancellation & Diarization Limits 48:27 - Guardrails & Citations: Building Trust in AI 50:00 - Growth Loops Without Virality Hacks 54:54 - Enterprise Compliance, Data Footprint & Liability Risk 57:07 - Retention & Habit Formation: The "500 Millisecond Window" 58:43 - Competing with OpenAI and Legacy Suites 1:01:27 - The Future: Deep Research Across Meetings & Roadmap 1:04:41 - Granola as Career Coach?