Earlier quoted context omitted.
AND you got a billion dollar valuation out of it? Wait...
you mean a billion dollar valuation that'll collapse long before you can actually get an exit?
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AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
61–70 of 71 posts
Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#62> "Sitting in someone's meeting uninvited is violation of privacy. They wanted a bot in the meeting, not an uninvited person," said automation expert Umar Aftab. "This way you sabotage trust and could incur legal implications." > "Good luck with all the lawsuits," added another. "This might read like a gritty founder hustle story," said software engineer Mauricio Idarraga. "But it's actually one of the most reckless…
> They charged $100/month for this. If it were free then whatever, but lying to paying customers about the service is not okay. Erm, to the customer , what is the difference between a bunch of humans transcribing your meetings or an AI doing it? If I'm paying $100/month to get my meetings transcribed, why do I care whether it's the founder, an AI, or magic pixie dust (but I repeat myself)? Misleading investors is a d…
> what is the difference between a bunch of humans transcribing your meetings or an AI doing it?
Probably depends upon how sensitive the information is. ie "was PII involved?" should be a fair clear example
Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#63I can understand why people are incensed the founders sat in stealthily on meetings, but I don't understand why they don't feel the same level of mistrust for the company's bots.
Don't they realize the company will store their whole conversation in the cloud, and a rogue employee/founder can just as easily pull it up and listen after the fact?
Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#64As always, amazed how accepting this place is of this sort of behaviour. I remember people here trying to defend Theranos when all that came out...
CS courses really have to start placing a bit more emphasis on ethics.
Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#65This strategy is often called a "concierge" MVP. You deliver the service you claim, but behind the scenes everything is incredibly manual. Once you've proved people like the service, you then go make the process less manual. Zappos and Amazon are both famous for doing this. p.s. -- I already put this in a chain, but the majority of comments are just claiming this is fraud. Thought it might be worth posting something…
When I was teaching product development I called this the Mechanical Turk strategy. Completely agree that it isn’t automatically fraud, it can also be a cheap prototype that lets you start testing hypotheses ASAP.
Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#66Best "fake it till you make it" story I've ever heard
Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#67From LI > this was for our first few beta customers from 2017 and we made it clear that there was a human in the loop of the service. LLMs didn't exist yet. It was like offering an EA for $100/mo - several other startups did that as well, but obviously it doesn't scale. So not necessarily fraud unless they deceived investors. Or he’s covering up his mistake. Getting the popcorn!!
1. It's not fraud. They were proving the market at an early stage while living on a pizza diet. 2. Their startup now does what it says on the tin. And it's now a unicorn. 3. To those claiming this was "unethical" - a large company providing this service would still record calls and have QA / engineers listening to calls to improve the service.
What the news article and the original post from the CTO clearly and describes is fraud: the service being sold on explicit, false pretenses.
What the later post from the CEO describes (and presents as a calrification, but it conflicts with rather than clarifies the initial description) is not fraud, but the question is was the CTO being loose with the truth to paint a rebel image or is the CEO. being loose with the truth to try to protect the company image after the CTO’s post got picked up by multiple news outlets and people were correctly pointing out that it described fraud?
Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
And as long as you much a buck or two then who cares if you lie a little to the customers about what is actually happening!
customers pay for the service, not the method-by-which-the-service-is-provided. If they explicitly sold it as a service without a human in the loop, then I think that's bad. If they just sold transcription..... then this is transcription.
I agree!
Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#69This strategy is often called a "concierge" MVP. You deliver the service you claim, but behind the scenes everything is incredibly manual. Once you've proved people like the service, you then go make the process less manual. Zappos and Amazon are both famous for doing this. p.s. -- I already put this in a chain, but the majority of comments are just claiming this is fraud. Thought it might be worth posting something…
Another famous example was JET.com
Jet later sold - presumably a distress exit - to Walmart, but the founder dude came out reasonably well
Re: AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
#70I thought HN crowd is smarter than average crowd, but surprised to see so many folks supporting this fraud. If they sold just "note taking service" then it does not matter what they do behind the scene or how they scale up the service, manual or automated. But if they sold "AI-enabled" note taking service, then it's a clear fraud. Nothing different from Trevor Milton rolling the trucks from hills.