00:00 Speaker A
What should an investor be looking for in some of these software companies? How do they know if they are durable?
00:04 Speaker B
You know, I think, uh, I mean I saw these cycles as mobile, as a cloud, etc. You know, I think I think you have to see what companies are adapting to it. So, that’s why I think it’s important that companies that stick their heads in the sand are going to be sunk. But I think that most of the companies that are being punished right now are actually reacting well and they will be fine.
00:23 Speaker A
Do you see themselves, do you see them inventing themselves?
00:26 Speaker B
I think so. Yes. Yes.
00:27 Speaker A
Talk to us about what you’re working on at Grammarly.
00:29 Speaker B
Yeah, so, um, so the Grammarly people aren’t familiar, we’re uh one of the most popular communication assistants in the world. Uh about 40 million active users every day, making more than $700 million in revenue. I think it is one of the best kept secrets in the world.
00:43 Speaker A
I didn’t even realize it was that big now.
00:44 Speaker B
Yes, it is a much bigger business than people think. Uh but actually the thing that people get the most wrong about it is that they think it’s about grammar. Um, that’s a totally reasonable assumption. But actually the thing that Grammarly does is the OG AI assistant. It’s an assistant that works right next to you. We see a million unique um uh faces every day. So every desktop app uh web app and mobile app, uh we can observe what you’re doing. We can note it in a way that does not disturb you and make changes on your behalf. At the moment we only do this for grammar and the big change is that we are about to do it for everything. So anyone can run agents like Grammarly on that same platform.
01:21 Speaker A
How will this change the user experience?
01:23 Speaker B
Yes, so maybe uh a simple example, let’s say I’m writing I’m a seller, I’m writing an email to uh a client. Today, uh Grammarly feels like you have your high school grammar teacher sitting on your shoulder with your red and blue marker, uh marking everything. Now you’re going to feel like your, you know, you have all these other agents sitting with you as well. So it could be your sales coach saying, hey, you’re going to recommend the wrong product. It could be your support uh uh person who says, hey, this person had an outage yesterday, you should acknowledge that. It could just be your electronic or digital assistant that says, you said you’ll meet tomorrow at 7:00 pm but then you have your daughter’s recital. And all of them can help you the same way we’ve helped millions of people with grammar. Now we will be able to help millions of people with everything else they do too.
02:08 Speaker A
As someone who is really working on it, I say, this is amazing technology. I mean, are you afraid of the next update from Anthropic?
02:14 Speaker B
I mean we are big customers. That is so a customer of Anthropic. Oh yeah, we are a customer of Anthropic, Open AI. We make over 100 billion LLM calls per week. Um, because I mean if you’re just judging us as an AI property, we’re probably one of the biggest in the world. But we do it in a way that brings it straight to the user so you don’t have to think about it.
02:35 Speaker A
Do you worry that they make a product like yours obsolete?
02:39 Speaker B
I don’t think so. I mean what we do is a little bit different in terms of bringing AI directly into people’s faces. I think they work a lot on models, they work a lot on uh what we call chat interfaces. But if you think about the main metaphors in AI, there are a lot of people focused on chat, you know, we want to talk to an AI bot. There is a lot of focus on what we call doing, which is the automation of tasks. We work on something we call assist. So if I like the state that I gave you 100 billion LM calls per week about 40 million people, this means that for an average Grammarly user, we make a few thousand AI calls per day. So, you know, if you’re a really good chat user, a really good cloud user, maybe you can do a dozen a day. But we do this every time you type a character, open a new document, open a new application, we’re calling all the AI systems on your behalf. And I think at that scale and that level of integration, it’s just a very different paradigm for how you think about AI.
03:37 Speaker A
What about a superhuman? Now these businesses have been merged. Like what is the next generation of superhuman?
03:42 Speaker B
Yes, so we reached four different products. So the original Superhuman product um, what we now call Mail Superhuman, uh Grammarly, uh my old product called Coda, and the new product we call Go. Go is the platform layer of Grammarly, the thing that lets anyone build Grammarly-like agents. Uh so we got the four of us together and then we decided to change the corporate name and we had a lot of ideas about what to do. We decided to cut the one off
04:10 Speaker A
Sounds cool. No offense to Grammarly. I mean Superhuman sounds cool.
04:12 Speaker B
Well, I think it is yeah, sounds cool. That is obviously a starting point. That was it. Sounds cool. You have a cool sound. The uh is broad, which I think is really important, so you can cover a lot of things. But actually the thing we love about it is the word human. Uh because if you think about most people working on AI are really worried about uh you know, they’re out there trying to replace humans. We have the opposite opinion. Grammarly has always been the product that we work with you, but at the end of the day, you write the article, you submit the blog post, you are the one who submits the essay. Uh that’s all we are there to help you. So I like to say that we’ve spent the last 16 years turning people into super writers, and now we can spend the next decades turning people into super humans.