mgadams3

I'm an R1T owner and I can't even put into words why the truck is just so much better and differentiated. It's not just that it's an EV Truck... my friend has a Lightning and it has none of the magic of my Rivian. Magic in a vehicle.

Grain | Senior Software Engineer | Remote (US timezones) | Full-time | https://grain.com/careers-detail

About Grain: We're a 4 year old company with an Elixir/Phoenix backend and React front end, 10 engineers (mostly remote) and raised a $16M Series A from Tiger Global last year. We found ourselves perfectly timed w/ digital conversation shift due to COVID 2 years ago and now find ourselves with a large data set to leverage LLMs to solve important problems for our users (by automating the mundane parts of their workflows and surfacing the useful parts).

https://www.businessinsider.com/most-promising-productivity-... (we're #7)

I've owned 3 EVs and Tesla is the lowest quality car I've ever owned. Teslas weigh down the average b/c they're the majority of EVs on the road.

IMO it's generally more of a tooling problem than a methodology problem... like trying to build a skyscraper without power tools.

The main challenge with taking notes during meetings is that the tools use were designed for drafting in a non-linear environment. But notes in meetings are directly related to the content of what is being said at a specific moment in time, and the text-only notes usually fail to capture the full essence compared to watching that part of the video.

When building my last start-up, an online school on Zoom, we recorded every lecture so our students could go back and review the content during the working sessions. But they found it hard to correlate their Google Doc notes with the moment in the recording they wanted to go back and watch. But since we pulled over the Zoom chat log with timestamps back to moments in the recording, they started taking notes there so they could keep track of the part they knew they wanted to watch later or reference.

Long story short, when the online school got acquired I started my current start-up https://grain.co to turn that insight into software anyone could use to better capture and share knowledge during any kind of meeting.

Great stuff Jake, thanks for sharing. I watched that pricing change very closely as we have a similar progression from solo to multi-player at [https://grain.co/pricing] but very helpful to hear the reasoning behind it.

Completely agreed that the nuance is critical to this discussion and the absolutism makes the great clickbait but isn't supported by reality.

Most new companies in this space have been using "AI" marketing to pitch a better world of video conferencing and it's been largely a failure. (unless you call getting bought and then shut down by Cisco a win)

But I 100% agree with you that this is a design problem to be solved first with better interfaces and workflows, not AI. Innovation is the sum of behavior change and AI is not going to be doing our knowledge work for us anytime soon. Given we're doin the work, we deserve better tools to do it ourselves.

I'm currently building grain.co that layers a new kind of video conferencing on top of Zoom, focused on brokering the recorded information gathered during sync calls into the async tools where knowledge lives and actual work is done after the convo ends.

Our approach is to make it easy to annotate in real-time, clip out those parts you want to save/share, and then push them into async tools where anyone can view them like it were text in a document or a message in Slack.

Thanks Dariel! Time is a crazy thing ;)

The cited article pulled out a catchy headline from an extrinsically motivated context like Telemarketing. Not surprising that people who fail from a rote task get de-motivated and quit, learning nothing.

I don't believe that study has any relevance to the world of creative work -- like building products or becoming a Jedi ;) -- that is driven by intrinsic motivation to iterate and improve. Success rarely requires the same level of self-evaluation and reflection in creative contexts.

completely agree with this. This is why the idea behind Cagan's "Empowered Product Teams" [https://svpg.com/empowered-product-teams/] is so important. Founders are often too blinded by their initial approach of solving their own pain that they are blinded to superior alternatives that could be more easily seen by fresh eyes. Key is to empower those people to solve the problem, not just implement a solution.

For sure, ideas matter A LOT. But we over-index on product solution ideas by default.

I think ideas that matter most for is for founders are the ones around a strong conviction on the market opportunity and then be flexible about the solution that is built to capture that opportunity.

The latter is where I think process is more important than the product solution idea having seen my product solution ideas fail hundreds of times without changing my market vision ideas.

Thanks, I agree that the default path of "be like Steve Jobs" is a trap that I've fallen into enough times to realize that there are more ways to build where you don't have to have the insights up front.

The key in my opinion is to be able to identify market opportunities and problems to solve, then be REALLY flexible about how you go about solving them b/c your first product solution ideas are very unlikely to work.

Thanks Scott. I remember back to our convos in the Grain office from a year back that helped to inspire the structure of this post. Was cool to see you invest in it at Tipe and reap the rewards!

We did concierge onboarding and set up shared slack channels with many of our early teams. This made it really easy and expected to ask for more feedback and to have users give it proactively.

Community channels are key as you grow. Frankly this is an area where we've underinvested as we've been heads down building/shipping product and is going to be a huge area of focus for us in 2021. The job of the founder is to really to give people who love your product a venue to share their ideas, questions with other users. Customer advisory boards work well too.

Author here. Great feedback and completely agree with your comments.

Taking a structure/organized approach to collecting, indexing, and sharing the qualitative data isn't something I covered here but absolutely essential to make sure that a research project scales. My experience has been that the first mile is where founders get the most lost.

very true. I should have been more clear that I was referring to their whole seamless profile vs landscape thing that I personally thought was silly when I tried Quibi. Seems like a good idea in theory tho

Wow, that honestly happened much sooner than I thought that it would.

Will be really interesting to see if anyone steps up to buy the content... but from what little I watched it was all pretty rough.

Seems like a lesson learned about raising money to solve something people don't care about... in this case a first-class mobile experience...

Who knows, maybe in 10 years we'll all be like "Quibi was really ahead of it's time"

Hey HN! Mike here, co-founder & CEO of Grain.

As of today, we're removing the waitlist for Grain 1.0 and releasing an all-new Windows app (in addition to our existing Mac app)!

Let me know if you have any questions. I'm a pretty open book and love talking about the nitty gritty of start-ups.

--------

So what is Grain?

Grain makes it easy to record, transcribe, and share the best parts of Zoom video calls in seconds, not hours.

Grain | Senior Backend Engineers & Head of Growth | https://www.grain.co/ | Remote | Full-time

Grain turns the important moments of live video (starting with Zoom) into async video highlights. It's a 10x faster and more effective way to document and share info.

We've raised $7M in funding ($3M just last week) and have dozens of teams that use Grain every day during our beta period.

See here:https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/16/grain-a-startup-built-expr...

We are growing our team:

Sr Elixir: https://angel.co/company/grain-intelligence/jobs/495036-seni...

Growth: https://angel.co/company/grain-intelligence/jobs/808197-head...

Apply to open roles at https://angel.co/company/grain-intelligence/jobs/

Frankly this wouldn't make for a great highlight clip. You could make it but nobody would watch it.

Grain is best for that punchy quote you want to share mid-moment or for the summary 30 second wrap-up at the end.

We have changed our dialogue to include these at the end of convos b/c that way it's easy to summarize conclusions and next steps to document and share with others. Most good meetings have these anyway.

Not really b/c 1) Grain is real-time and 2) it's not a screen capture.

Great questions.

- Yes, the only way to log-into Grain is with your Zoom account. It's been really seamless, they did a great job setting up those permissions.

- Sort of. You can take notes if 1) It's your Zoom link or 2) It's someone on your team who is also a Grain user's Zoom link. There isn't currently a way to take notes across workspaces b/c we want the meeting host to be in control for privacy reasons.

Frankly we didn't anticipate my calendar filling up so we added my co-founder Jake... his filled up so we added our intern Max... his filled up so we're finding someone new. Stay tuned, thx for the patience.

10 years of start-up network building has helped and so we got referred into them by people who they trust.

The bootstrap problem to get early teams before you have credibility is crazy difficult. It takes time to do it well and with authenticity.

Zoom is just one of many media input sources for us and the only one we launch with b/c the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

Good question!

Here are their docs: https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/api-reference/zoom-api

But we use everything around recording, including live streaming.

Zoom has a great team of folks in the developer forums that are really helpful. My biggest gripe would be that not everything that breaks gets documented and logged so it can be really frustrating when our service breaks b/c their webhooks are down and there is no status on their end that this is the case.

We had a list of a dozen thing we wanted them to support when they started and they are all now in there... so pretty happy w/ progress.

There are lots of differences but yes, it's a calculated risk we feel good about given those differences.

I only chose teams to put on the website that really use it regularly. We have a bunch more logos of the type others here describe that I could have chosen but that's dumb.

Two teams at Slack currently use Grain.

Behzod runs research and has been tweeting about his use of Grain a decent amount lately: https://twitter.com/beh_zod/status/1250900606073442305 https://twitter.com/beh_zod/status/1248740029901332481

Here's Jason from Podium: https://twitter.com/jregb/status/1250995517724585985

Here's Dustin from Lambda School (not one of the logos): https://twitter.com/dustint314/status/1250948975202426880

But the actual answer to your question of how is that it took a long time to build something they wanted to use. We've been building a version of Grain for about 15 months now, about 6 months on the product we just released and 9 months on a version we threw away.

Eventually we built up word or mouth of happy users that refer other teams. It's a grind to get real teams to adopt anything but it is possible with continued effort.

Yup, you nailed it.

Our transcription will naturally get better over time but it doesn't have to be perfect b/c it's a means to an end in Grain. (creating/trimming video clips)

Even perfect transcripts are still terrible to read most of the time b/c the dynamic nature of spoken dialogue just doesn't translate well across mediums.

Google "Media Richness Theory" if you want to go down the rabbit hole on this.

Not really, Zoom has gotten to where they are by focusing on what they're world class at, which is reliable connectivity. I don't see them changing focus on anything but keeping the lead they have that made them so successful. This DNA has always been the core of Zoom since Eric branched out of Cisco.

Cultivating an app ecosystem on their platform is a publicly stated goal of Zoom. Cutting off any start-up building on it would be counter-productive and lead to their competitors gaining the advantage of innovation on their platform instead.

See: https://marketplace.zoom.us/competition