This Week in Startups - Grammarly CEO Rahul Roy-Chowdhury on the future of user-centric language tools | E1817

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… CLA. Innovation takes balance. CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at https://CLAconnect.com/tech Codecademy. Build the future you want to see with Codecademy. Codecademy Pro helps you learn everything you’ll need to shape what comes next in the tech space. Try it free for 14 days. Visit https://Codecademy.com/TWiST LinkSquares. Life for in-house legal just got a whole lot easier. From contract creation to execution and more, LinkSquares is the go-to for all your legal needs. Learn more at https://linksquares.com/twist * Today’s show: Grammarly CEO Rahul Roy-Chowdhury joins Jason to discuss his journey to CEO (15:28), Grammarly’s product features (26:20), AI integrations (32:28), and much more! * Time stamps: (0:00) Grammarly CEO Rahul Roy-Chowdhury joins Jason (4:19) Rahul's start in tech and his time on the Google Chrome team. (8:57) CLA - Get started with CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors now at https://claconnect.com/tech (10:24) The Chrome team and Chrome OS (15:28) Journey to Grammarly CEO (19:29) Exploring applications and platforms for Grammarly (25:05) LinkSquares - The go-to for all your legal needs, learn more at https://linksquares.com/twist (26:20) The product roadmap and what draws people into Grammarly (35:04) Grammarly's business and enterprise offerings (37:32) Codecademy - Try Codecademy Pro FREE for 14 days at http://codecademy.com/TWiST (38:53) Product Features: Knowledge Share and Grammarly Goals (42:28) The addition of Grammarly Go and the LLM powering it (47:12) Controversial product features (54:17) When to use the native desktop application and extensions (57:13) Future integration of AI and the path ahead * Follow Rahul: https://twitter.com/rahulrc * Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo: https://www.launch.co/four Apply for Funding: https://www.launch.co/apply Buy ANGEL: https://www.angelthebook.com Great recent interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

In general, my philosophy of life is, you know, we have limited time on earth to make an impact. Let's just really do things that matter that create the most possible impact we can have in the time that we have available to us. That's my idea behind Chrome. Let's work on Chrome because we can have a massive impact on the world. And so when I look at Gramerly, I'm like, I love this mission. If we're successful, 10 years from now, five years from now, billions of people around the world are using Gramerly to communicate better, to show up better, to have more confidence. to reduce misunderstanding. That is a worthwhile endeavor.

So the mission hooked me in. This week in startups is brought to you by CLA. Innovation takes balance. CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at cLA connect.com slash tech. Link squares. Life for in-house legal just got a whole lot easier.

From contract creation to execution and more, Link Squares is the go-to for all your legal needs. Learn more at linksquares.com slash twist. And CodeCademy. Build the future you want to see with CodeCademy. CodeCademy Pro helps you learn everything you'll need to shape what comes next in the tech space. Try it free for 14 days.

Visit codecademy.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. I'm really excited because once in a while, you know, I'll have a CEO on the company who I am absolutely a fanboy of their product. And today, I am really lucky to have Raoul, Roy Chattery, the CEO of Gramerly on the program. I am addicted to Gramerly. What is Gramerly, you ask?

It is a app that helps you become a better. writer. Now, it's called Grammarly, of course, because it fixes your grammar. But oh my lord, I can take you to this product roadmap point by point. And I, as a writer, professional writer, somebody who's paid to write and a former journalist, I like to have the commas in the right place. I like a certain style of writing. And I with Grammarly can say, I want concise writing for intelligent people in a business setting that is motivating. And this Grammarly tool, It gets better and better. It follows me around my desktop now.

And I have a keyboard app. What does this mean? When you see some of my tweets and you go, wow, really well-constructed tweets from J-Cal, or I like the way you phrase that, it's because I got Grammarly as my over-the-shoulder editor. I have forced everybody in my company to use Grammally, two companies. I think I have about 50 licenses to the product.

It's not expensive for what it does. when you write an email to somebody and it's got a grammatical error in it, they judge you. And the smarter you are, the better your grammar. The more professionally you are, the better you're writing. Writing is critical. Now, of course, we have the age of AI and some people are going to debate this. I actually don't think there's any debate. I think AI makes grammar really even better.

So, Raul was at Google, and he helped grow this little browser you may have heard of Google Chrome into the world's most use browser. And you'll have Google in 2021 to join Grammally as the head of product. Welcome to the program. Jason, first of all, that is quite the intro. Wow.

You're not going to get that on another pot. I'll tell you that. This is amazing. We should clarify to all of your listeners that this is not a paid placement. Jason loves Gramerly. That's a great, that's a great advertisement for our products.

So I appreciate that. Yeah. It's great to be here, by the way. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think I feel like this is one of the OG Tech podcasts. So it's pretty cool for me to be here. So thanks for having me. Of course, 1800 episodes and counting now. Amazing. It's the great joy of my life. Yeah. What a great run. What's great about it is I'm passionate about technology, entrepreneurship and product. And here we are. You did build, I think, or manage Chrome. How did you wind up on the Chrome team? And when did you join that? I'm curious. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually a funny story.

I was at Google doing some other projects in the Bangalore office. And I was looking to find my next gig at Google. And there was Chrome. It just got started. It was a pretty small team at the time. Under 100. Under 100, yes. And I spoke to the Chrome leads.

Sundar was the product leader for Chrome at the time. There's a guy named Linus, who was the Eng lead. And I met them. And I was like, I love the mission. You want to make the web platform better? I'm in. I love the people. I love the team.

Let's go do this. Now, the funny thing was, I was in Bangalore. My wife was a lawyer in India, not a very transferable skill. And so I was like, hey, you know, I think we should move back to the U.S. to do this chrome thing. And she's like, well, okay, what's the job? What is this job that you have that you're so excited about? And the funny thing is when Sundar and I spoke, Sundar, it was a very small team.

And Sundar is like, you know, I don't have a job for you. per se, but just come over, we'll figure it out. And so I did. So I did. I was like, you know, I don't quite know where this is going to go, but I really believe that Chrome is awesome and we're going to figure it out. This is the first time I've had somebody who hailed from the India office of Google, I think, on the program. So let's go back a little bit here because it's super fascinating. How did you wind up at, I mean, I know you're educated here in the state.

you went to Stanford and you went to Columbia. But how did you wind up in India? You know, I was, I grew up in India and right around the time that I ended up with Google in India, 2007, there was this moment where it felt like India was going to be the big next tech center, lots of innovation happening, lots of interesting things happening. Google was trying to figure out what to do in India at the time. They were like, well, we've got a bunch of product managers in the U.S., but we don't really know what local conditions are like.

So are you interested in going to India to figure out what products do we need to build? Like, what are the needs there? And so I thought that sounded pretty cool. And that's how I ended up in Bangalore. Yeah. And the Google presence there, I'm guessing it's pretty significant, yeah, with all the talents there? It was not huge then. It is very different now.

And, you know, in a nutshell, I think we really struggled to figure out how to get breakthrough usage in India back then because it was pre-smart phones. That's how far back I'm talking. Yeah. So ultimately, access was expensive. It was limited. It was hard to get access to Internet services. And Google was doing all sorts of things. At one point, we had a bus, believe it or not, the Google bus that drove from town to town to educate folks on.

There's a lot of cool stuff you can do on the Internet. come take a look. Here's the internet. Here's the internet. So ultimately, smartphones changed everything, but by that time, I was working on Chrome back in Mountain View. So you went to the Indian high school system? I did, yes.

I mean, incredibly competitive. I was watching this Netflix show about kids who go away, I guess, to this town where they have the super competitive IT slash math, schools, how intense was the education system for you in India? It was intense, but I always, that's actually the reason I came to the US. I've always had a lot of different interests. I like to read. I like philosophy.

I like math. I like tech. And I really wanted to have the ability to explore all the things I liked. And I heard of this idea of liberal arts. I hadn't heard of it before. and I was like, liberal arts, that's the thing that really resonates with me. That's what I want to do.

And that's how I ended up in the US. They were not going to be supportive and happy. Yeah. But I kind of hear under what you're saying that they kind of push it towards STEM a bit. They feel like that's like the best career path or? Yeah, I think there's limited. I mean, also keep in mind that back then there were fewer options. And so you can have to pick a safe path because there aren't that many opportunities to go around.

So find the path that gets you the most. at bats for that opportunity. Now things are quite different in India, but yeah, that's what led me to the U.S., liberal arts. And to this day, I just have a lot of different interests. I don't like to get pigeonhole into one thing. All right, everybody. Stephen Estes is a principal at CLA, Clifton Larson Allen. This is a professional service provider that specializes in CPA, tax consulting and wealth

advisory. Welcome to the program, Stephen. Thank you for having me. All right. What is a really simple tax mistake that VC-backer? stars make all the time. And how can people avoid that? One of the simpler mistakes is, is really just in how you structure your company. A lot of companies these days will start doing international operations a lot sooner than they used to. I mean, I think we're all seeing

with remote work and just it seems like the world is shrinking on a daily basis. We'll set up a subsidiary in India or wherever that particular founder is from and not understanding how to structure and how to actually do those intercompany operations can result in, you know, IP not being in the right area. And when you go to exit and so-and-so wants to pay $500 million to your company, well, their accountants, right, usually big four, are going to come in there and tear it to pieces. And if it's found out that the IP that they really want to acquire isn't even in the United States, then that can lead to a lot of issues. So I think it's important for companies just to get good quality advice and understand that the little things that they do

today can have massive impacts down the road. Get started right now at CLA connect.com slash tech. Let them know your boy, Jake Howl sent you. CLA connect.com slash tech to get started right now. And so that leads you back to the United States and you work on the Chrome team. What an incredible success that was. I mean, people don't realize at the time how big the Mozilla Foundation Firefox were. Safari was kicked in

Internet Explorer doing great Microsoft bundling everybody bundling how did Chrome get that good so fast you know it's interesting oh and there it is look at that market share my lord look at Chrome unbelievable warms my heart

I see it flattening after I left Chrome you know I think a very simple thing people should remember that people were Chrome's success was not preordained In fact, even inside Google, people were questioning, why does the world need another browser? We have Internet Explorer, we have Firefox, what's happening? What are you trying to solve here?

And I remember I was celebrating when we hit 1% market share. There was a huge milestone for us. And so it's been quite a journey. But to me, the key insight, the reason I was always knew that Chrome was going to be successful, was that the key insight was the web was moving away from documents to applications. And browsers had not been built to run applications very well. They had been built to render documents. And so the way browsers were dealing with it at the time was,

we'll just keep bolting on stuff on top of the existing browser engine. We'll make JavaScript a little bit faster. We'll do a couple of things. We'll tweak at the edges. But fundamentally, if you believe, if you truly believe that, okay, the future of application development is the web. Then the logical conclusion is you've got to build a browser that is optimized to run web applications. That was the insight behind Chrome.

That's what led to multiprocess architecture. That was one of the key innovations of Chrome. It led to a 10x better JavaScript virtual machine. And so to me, it seemed clear that we were years ahead of the game in terms of building an app runtime that is on the web. that's in a nutshell, I think, what they do our success. Google had to earn a lot of the success. They have to get people to download it.

With the exception of Android, but they do have the Chromium operating system. Android came much later. So in the early days, it was, you know, why should people get Chrome? And, you know, we didn't have, when you first launched, we didn't have extensions.

And so people are like, well, a browser, no extensions? What is the point of that? So, you know, it was a journey to get to parity, to get people to use it. What do you think of the Chrome OS? I was addicted to that. I had everybody in our company on it.

I standardized all our computers on it because it was distraction-free and so affordable. I mean, just $500,000 for a desktop and laptop. So I just got everybody desktop, put them on giant monitors. And people loved it. Only problem was Zoom. Zoom came along and it was very limited in support of like video conferencing, unfortunately because it did it through the web browser, which is kind of an imperfect experience.

But I see in schools, It's really made progress. It's two separate teams, I take it, or they share a lot of team members? Yeah, we start. It's a, it's a kind of a long journey, but we started out as one team. The reason for Chrome OS was we have this browser. We think the browser is the thing that is the computing experience for most people. It's a better computing experience.

And all the stuff outside of the browser is just legacy stuff. So what if the only thing you had was the browser? Well, let's build that thing and let's call it ChromeOS. So that was the idea behind Chrome OS. So started as a single team, then through kind of, you know, Google's a large company, lots of kind of shakeups and reorganizations. Chrome ended up, Chrome OS ended up somewhere else, but then eventually came back together and I think they're still together.

My knowledge is a bit dated, but I think they're still together as a single team now. Yeah. And they, Google actually made a similar called the Pixelbook. And man, that was a great computer. The best computer I've ever owned is a pixel book. I love that thing. People don't know. It had like 4G, 5G built into the laptop, which you never see. I don't

understand Apple and I think Dell only has that on like one or two computers. This has got to be standard. Put cellular into 5G into every laptop. It is an amazing experience when you open your laptop and you're on 5G or you can go onto Wi-Fi, but 5G is obviously going to be a little bit more secure,

I think, than most Wi-Fi networks which can be using to compromise. So, yeah. What a great computer. I mean, and a lot of people used it inside of, um, inside of Google. Yeah. Inside of Google, a lot of people used it. But it's a very, it's a very high price point.

And so it was like a thousand markets. It was like $1,500 or something like that. So yeah. Yeah. It was a Googler. It was a Googler optimized device. So yeah. I just love that computer.

It was so slick and easy to use. And then yeah, I like when Google makes hardware. They have like some certain aesthetic. I kind of, I kind of like a Spartan aesthetic. So you must have gotten called by a recruiter or something to come to Grammarly. And I think the company was when you got there, I was doing pretty good. It was probably a mid-sized company when you got there. What year did you get there?

Yeah, I got there in 2021, middle of COVID. And to be clear, no one, recruiter didn't call me. It was a kind of a certainipitous introduction from an investor who's a friend of mine, who knows Grammarly. And I wasn't looking to leave. I was actually quite happy at Google. It's not like I was doing a job search. the thing that, and I wasn't a Grammally user, unlike you, I had not used Grammally.

I felt like, my writing's pretty good. I don't think I need the product. And so this came out of left field. The first thing that really got me was the mission of the company is to improve lives by improving communication. And I just deeply connected with that mission. And, you know, in general, my philosophy of life is, you know, we have limited time on earth to make an impact. let's just really do things that matter that create the most possible impact

we can have in the time that we have available to us. That's my idea behind Chrome. Let's work on Chrome because we can have a massive impact on the world. And so when I look at Gramerly, I'm like, I love this mission. If we're successful, 10 years from now, five years from now, billions of people around the world are using Grammarly to communicate better, to show up better, to have more confidence,

to reduce misunderstanding. That is a worthwhile endeavor. So the mission hooked me in. Then I started using the product, I was testing it out. Ironically, my older kid was applying to private school at the time, middle school. We ended up not going, but I'd written some essays, you know, these parent essays for school applications. And so I'm like, all right, let me try Grammarly on these pieces of writing that I'd spend some time on. You know, this is not casual writing.

And Grammally made the writing better. And that genuinely surprised me because, A, I thought, I'm pretty good. and B, this is not casual writing that I just dashed off. I'd actually spend time on it. And the idea that software could take this carefully considered piece of writing and improve it was really just kind of expanded my mind on what is possible. And then, you know, it's a great company and just wonderful product, wonderful people. So long story short, I went from what is this grammarly thing to, I have high conviction

that this is awesome and I'm in, I want in. And that all happened in the space of a month. And so you took over the company, it's got significant amounts of revenue. I know that because it's not cheap. It's SaaS software. What is it, 10 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month when you buy for your team? It depends on the plan, but yeah, somewhere between 10 to 15 bucks. Yeah.

You got to get the pro. Just so people know. Yeah, premium. Pro really is going to make you a better rider. Yes, thank you. Yeah. I mean, there's two versions. There's like an entry level version and then there's the pro.

The main differences. There's actually, there's a free version. Everyone can download the free version. That's really optimized for making you sound polished, correct, fixing kind of essential issues around professional sounding text. The pro, the premium version, what you call the premium version, which you pay for, that helps you with additional kind of higher leverage types of writing assistance. Things like, what is your tone?

And maybe you, you don't have exactly the right tone. or can you be more clear? Can you be more succinct? Can you be more engaging in your text? Because maybe you use the same word, you know, in 10 times in the same paragraph, you pick different words. So we kind of look at the more holistic view of your document and we help you sound more on point.

That's really the essence of premium. And then we also have an enterprise product called Grammally Business that takes everything that premium has and layers on top teams value and teams' features. features as well. So you can collaborate and communicate better in the context of your organization. So those are the tiers of product and offer. And it's really nice because you know, you have a lot of different ways you can use grammarly. So you have to support many platforms. iPad, iPhone, web. Then you have a downloadable tool that sits in your system tray and follows you're on the web so that if you're using Twitter or you're using Slack, you get a little bubble

that as you type tells you what's going on. So when you first start using it, you might think, hey, this is for people writing blog posts. But it's really actually when you're typing anywhere. And so how many different platforms do people experience? Because I just name five, I think, web, iPad, iPhone. Yeah. The system tray, I don't know what we call that these days. There's a Chrome extension and then there's a keyboard. There's a lot. There's a lot. On top of my head.

I think you got it all. The way to think about it is we have a mobile offering. So we have an iOS offering. We have an Android offering. And then for desktop, for both Windows and Mac, we have a browser integration. That's the extension for different browsers. There's one for Safari, one for Chrome. And then we also have a native application, a native application for Windows and a

native application for Mac. And so what the difference between the extension and the native app is the native app can see more across your writing surfaces. So a very common use case for us at Gramerly, for example, is we use Slack as our messaging app. And that's a native application. It's outside the browser. So before we built our native apps, you could use Gramaly inside a web page, but not on Slack.

But now with the native app, you have full coverage. So that's, and you know, I think it is important because we write a lot. lot. As a data point, the average knowledge worker in the U.S., and I think you may resonate, I certainly resonate with this, we spent more than 20 hours a week just writing in different surfaces. And so it's probably the biggest activity we do in our work week when you add it all up in all the different places of writing, messages, documents, social media, news, what have you. There's a ton of information. And so it's important for us that we see everything you're doing so we can give you a consistent experience across all of these apps and surfaces.

I noticed it's getting more consistent. I think that's obviously your probably Google experience of just simplifying stuff and making it faster. Is that a big part of your Google education that if you make it faster and you simplify it, consumption goes up? You know, I think keeping users front and center, that's just a key tenet. Gramerly had it as well, and that's something I certainly learned at Google, so it was not a new thing for Gramerly. but these are lessons we can apply to do things at scale. And so it's easy to lose sight of the user. One of the hard lessons I've learned over the years is,

you say it's all about the user. You say things like, put the user first. It seems almost like a platitude. It's like, well, of course, who wouldn't do that? But actually, it's quite easy to lose sight of that. It's quite easy to end up in a bunch of meetings where you're discussing a lot of things and never once you discuss, well, what does the user need?

And that's actually a sign that, you know, we've kind of like gone away from that core tenet. So you actually have to actively keep pulling back to what is the user need? What problem are we solving for the user? And what do you see the problem now? Because you had the mission statement before, which is like in the clouds kind of like. I love that mission statement. But okay. Well, no, no.

I mean, say it one more time. Improving lives by improving communication. That's our, that's what you're chasing. Almost all mission statement. are way up here, 30,000, 40,000 feet. But most people, when they come to a tool, they got a tactical problem they want to solve, right? They got some maybe even strategic, but generally, people come in tactically because they're

embarrassed by the writing or they want, maybe they have concerns about it. What drives people to get in here? I know students use it a lot. I know teachers use it to check for plagiarism. I know that was like a beachhead market. Yeah. But what is the entry point? Because I notice you're doing TV now.

I saw TV ads. That's what I know a company is doing really well and that you cross like a hundred million in revenue or something. If you're doing TV ads, company's got nine figures

in revenue. I'm saying that you're not. But I know you're doing well. How many employees now? It's a big company. We're about a thousand employees now. Yeah. So this is a huge company.

What are they all doing? Well, we have a lot of different surfaces as we just discussed doing all these things. We're also scaling into the enterprise. So that's something we've been really driving a lot

in the last couple of years. And so that's a big point of focus for us in the years ahead. And, you know, we have a lot of users. We need to make sure that we are serving them well when they have support issues. They can come to us and talk to a real human. So it's a large business.

We're operating it at scale. And so, you know, we have, you know, it's funny. We hit 1,000 people recently. And we are celebrating this at a town hall meeting inside the company. And you'll appreciate this. So I was just kind of joking and saying, what is the collective

noun for a thousand grammarlians. That's what you call ourselves, grammarilians. And so people are like, you know, had all sorts of interesting ideas and, you know, it's a witty crew, as you can imagine. We all love words and wordplay. But the winner was, we're a kilogram.

A thousand grammalians, a kilogram. A kilo gram. I love it. I love it. Yeah. All right, everybody. Life for your in-house legal team. Man, it can be so hard chasing down signatures,

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In terms of the product roadmap, I'm curious because as one of your power users, things I love about it is, you know, it will rewrite sentences. This is something where I think it's super underappreciated. And it also let you set what your goals are in your tone. and it kind of just speed you up with your writing. That's all great. It does that better than anybody. I think that's probably,

and then also maybe sounding more confident when you use it. So there's consistency and grammar stuff, but I'm sort of getting at like, what do people come to the product for? And then what do the people stay for? What are you finding there if you were to look at those two dynamics and how you think about keeping people from churning out of the product because you do have serious competition now. With

AI, I've heard more than one person say, oh, that's the end of grammarly. You can just cut and paste and throw it into chat GPT and say, make this look perfect. I don't think those people use grammarly so they don't understand exactly how it works. But let's tackle that issue. Why do people come? Yeah. Why do they stay? And then, hey, what impact is, you know, the AI competition that's out there going to cause you? Great question. And we should definitely dive into the AI stuff. That's super interesting and top of mind as well. Yeah. But, you know, I think at a high level, we have students as a big segment of our users. They will come into Grammally because they need help with an assignment.

They need help maybe because they're not confident communicators in English and they need an extra pair of eyes. So we hear things from our users like they say things like, I just need an extra pair of eyes looking over my shoulder to make sure that I'm not making mistakes, that I won't get dinged for making an incorrect statement or kind of avoiding things. things that will get me dinged on my grade. With Grammally, I feel more confident. So that's one reason people come. We also have a lot of professional users, and professional users have a broader set of things.

One reason they come to Gramerly is maybe they need just support with communicating in the right way, especially with remote first work and distributed teams. There's so much weight on written communication more now than before. And so maybe you think you sound perfectly fine, but then the both. receiving your email says, hey, you sounded kind of rude or abrupt. What's to deal with that? And so there's just more of that now than there was even a few years ago. So people need that extra help to make sure they sound on point, on brand. And so Gramley has a lot of features enabling those professional users to help with this new reality of we're doing a lot of

async communication. And so we need to make sure we're showing up in the right way. We're communicating the right information at the right time in the right way. So those are roughly the things that we see in terms of usage. And then with AI, just at a high level, we can talk more about the kind of the opportunity with AI, but at a high level, the way I see the problem is communication is a, there's a life cycle to it. It's not a point in time thing. So a simplified way to think about the life cycle is there's a conception phase or maybe an

ideation phase. there's a composition phase I'm writing it down there's a revision phase I'm polishing it, cleaning it up, making it sound better and because it's a multiplayer game

there's a comprehension phase at the other end. So I might go through all these phases to write an email to you. You will comprehend my email saying, okay, what is he saying? Does he need something for me? What's happening?

And then you'll go through the phases yourself. So we have, you know, so given that entire life cycle, Grammally up till recently has focused completely on the revision phase of communication. It's not because we didn't want to cover the entire lifecycle. We absolutely wanted to. We were trying to find the right way to bring a great product and technology to market that salt that life cycle.

And I think the advancements in foundation models and generative AI is exactly that thing. And so now we're going to go off to not just revision, but the entire communication life cycle. So that's in a nutshell what we're building our future on. And this is where I think it would be really great to have multiplayer. This is the thing I've been harping you all about. I'll tell you my workflow. We love a product called Coda.

We love a product called Notion. And I still got people on Google Docs because, but increasingly I'm banning people from using Google Docs because I want that information in Notion. And so I see a collision path between you. notion and Coda, because where this content lives is going to be important. Now, of course, you can, you don't have to use the Gramley editor because a Gramley can come with you and you can use it in Notion.

But watching the feature sets, I'll just do a little quick screen share here. You and I will use the product live. You didn't expect this, did you? I'm curious to see what's going on here. Well, here we go. Look, can you see my screen? Okay. I see it.

Yep. Okay, great. So I just started, you know, while we're talking here. I was like, okay, let's pretend I'm like a venture capitalist. I am. Yep. And I'm going to write a blog post because I'm. I'm trying to get some cloud and get more founders.

So here, I just started, hey, I'm going to start writing it. I just wrote this while you were talking there, just three sentences to show. And I wrote it kind of how I write, which is I just write as fast as I can stream of consciousness. Get it out there, yeah. Yeah, what I learned from Stephen King, a really great book called On Writing, you should, everybody should read if you're a writer or if you're not a writer just because it's such an incredible. It's kind of his biography, autobiography. And writing is really just about the rhythm. Better to write bad stuff than write nothing, right?

And the white empty page is the kryptonite for writers or would-be writers. So here, I just started as a blog post and I wrote, I've invested in 400 startups over 10 years, comma, here's what I look for when I cut the first check into a startup. And I purposely wrote it in a clugee way. Sure, sure. This advice is for startups that are in year zero, which typically means a startup consists of a couple of founders and idea. and a prototype, MVP or a mock-up of a product. Often a year-zero startup isn't even incorporated, and sometimes they don't have any users or customers.

I also type very fast, but I don't care about typos. I'd rather go for speed. And it's really great, because as you can see here, if you're watching, it will very quickly say, oh, well, you know, AP style here, and people don't know this, but if you're using the numbers between 1 and 10, you actually spell them out. When you go to 11, that's when you actually put the number. So if you're writing the number five, you type F-I-E.

So it corrects that for me. I just click it. It corrects it. It also thinks this is a run-on sentence. So it thinks I should just not use a commis, put a period and make the first one into two sentences. This is, and I wrote, this advice is for startups that are in year one. It says, just take that out. It appears that that are maybe unnecessary.

And I get that a lot because I write like I talk. And sometimes you're a little bit wordy when you talk. So you can just take that out if you want. You'd be more concise. Here are another great suggestion. I've invested in over 400 startups over 10 years, and it wants me to either put a period or a semicolon. Really nice, and this is for a headline, which it doesn't realize it's a headline.

That would be actually a good feature is to treat headlines differently. Do you do that? Do you know? We do that. And by the way, notice also that we don't give you this suggestion. We tell you why we're giving you that suggestion. So you can actually educate yourself and build your skills over time. Such a good point.

This is why I force people to use. it and this is why I need you to make multiplayer mode because I want to see all the and I know that you're probably thinking I have to do on my same. We have multiplayer mode, but we'll talk, we'll get there. We'll get there. Yeah. I need to have three people in this document and I need to see who accepted which change. And I need to be able to have a discussion about each change.

Like so here where it says, hey, this is a spelling error for prototype. Yep. If we had a, see here it says it or mock up of a product. Yep. And it says, hey, the phrase mockup of a product may be wordy, consider changing the wording to a product markup. That's such a great suggestion. But if we wanted to debate this, how great would it be if I could click here and put my comment in? And then you, Raoul, could say, you know what?

I say we go with A. And I go to go to go B. And, you know, we have like a little debate here about. Now, I know that this is in the weeds. But this is what, like, serious copy editors do. And this would get you the, like when I wrote my book, my editor and I would be having very granular discussions about. out, you know, hey, is this my voice or, you know, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'll just accept some of these other changes here because we're getting repetitive and I put a couple spelling hours in their purpose. Let's go back to the product mock up concept because actually what I'm hearing from all of this is you would benefit from getting Grammally business for your organization. Because what gramelly business layers on top of what we just saw is we can actually add features that do multiplayer things, such as, for example, one of the features is, we have this idea of a style guide. So you can say for my organization,

that's exactly what you said for product mock-up. So let's say you and your editor have that discussion, and you're like, all right, from henceforth, this is the rule. Yes. You can actually encapsulate that as a style guide rule and Grammally supports it. What is Enterprise? What does Enterprise cost?

Tell me the true. Because, you know, nobody ever puts that on the website. Is it on your website? Yeah, go to the website. You can take a look. There's different ways to... I'm not trying to be cagey here. There's different flavors of it.

20-person organization. If I want enterprise. There's a team's feature that you can try. There's a free trial. So just do the free trial. I'll do it. Yeah. If you like it, you know, give me a 10, 15 bucks a month per person, what do I wind up paying net

net net? So if I'm paying 15 bucks a person, I'm paying, what is that, 180 a year? I have 20 people. So right now I pay you like $4,000 a year for Grammally, which I feel is a pretty good deal, right? I feel like that's a good deal for both of us. If I go to Enterprise, what do I add a zero or does it double it? Where would I be at?

It doesn't double it. It's a slight step up. And it depends on kind of, enterprise versus teams, but it's very reasonably priced. And you get a lot of extra value because what enterprise does is... What do people just put that on the website, like the exact cost and everything? Because I notice it with all these... Every time I want to use, go to the enterprise level, people don't put it...

Is that because they want to get a salesperson on the phone? Well, it's... We have two ways to get Grammally. There's a direct... You could self-serve. That's all on the website. You can just click. There's a plans page.

You can go to Grammlee.com slash plans. You see all the prices. And then there's an enterprise sales... driven, you could call it a managed go-to-market. And that usually isn't on the website because you kind of want to understand how big is the deployment, what's it going to take to actually make that company successful. So there's more nuance that goes into it. It's not, it's less about not being transparent and more about it's more misspoke. And so we just need to understand what what I always wind up doing. And everybody in my portfolio 400 companies I've invested in,

as I said, in that little document here, if they all just go figure out what does Salesforce cost for enterprise. And then there's like all these websites now that actually like if you go to, what is it, G2, Captera and some of these places, they'll just, in the comments, they'll tell you what people do. Everybody knows. Technology is moving at a blistering pace, but CodeCatami's goal is to help you stay a step ahead. So whether you have some experience or your brand new to coding, CodeCatomy offers everything you need to build the tech career you want. Gain specialized skills in artificial intelligence, full-stacketting.

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you can work towards your next promotion with guided skill paths. So start your free trial today. Visit codecademy.com slash twist to try codecademy pro free for 14 days. That's C-O-D-E-C-A-D-E-M-Y.com slash twist. Coachatomy.com slash twist. Can I tell you my single favorite feature of Gramerly? It's not any of the features you showed. It's actually a Gramaly business feature. Okay. Which is, it's a thing called Knowledge Share.

So the idea is there's so much jargon. Like inside Gramerly, we have project names and acronyms and new people are joining. And they're like, what is this thing? Like there's someone who just mentioned this world. It's like a glossary. It's like a glossary. So it exists somewhere. Like maybe there's a wiki page.

But I'm reading an email and I'm like, should I stop reading the email, go to the wiki page? I probably should, but I don't because I'm lazy. Yeah. And so. Or you're just in flow. You're going through your email box. You don't want to get out of your email box. Let's put the positive PS.

Exactly. That's the reason. And so with knowledge share, we actually show you what these things are in the flow of your reading and writing. So you can see, what is this thing? I can learn more about it. I can find out who the people are that I can go talk to about. it and so it's trying to get all of your organizational context built into your writing

workflows and that's a very good idea the glossary is killer I don't simplify with glossary but that's a great idea and then also people might not know how to capitalize a product name so you got you know some sales folks are just using like a space and you know the product name is you know grammarly go but we like to capitalize the geo you know like it's one not two right so that would be in your glossary and uh A couple of other features here people should know about, um, uh,

when you look at goals, this is where, you know, I really talk to my team about just trying different things. Uh, you know, here, it's,

it's set at general, but my intent here, you know, it's really to inform people, but I also want to convince them. So I'm going to pick both of those. And then this is general. I'm going to say now,

general is a pretty good place to start. That's the default, but you might want to go business. And, and if you go business, um, you know, it applies more rules, right? And take out some informal expressions.

Yeah, that's right. Just some more professional, more polished, et cetera, yeah. Yeah, but now I don't like that because I like to be casual. And casual, this is going to let you have a little more stylistic flexibility. You know, spread your wings a little bit. Now, of course, you can still write whatever you want. It's just this is what gives you the suggestions, right? So this will change how suggestions come into.

It'll tailor the suggestions, correct. Yes. Now, another great one here. How much knowledge does your audience have, right? This is the empathy for the audience. And, you know, if you have a lot of acronyms and stuff in, you know, you're talking about the SEC or you're talking about, you know, some obscure topics. You say expert. And yeah, you can assume a more higher level and then formality. Neutral is the thing. And then, so did I, did I explain those correctly? you did you did a great job jason i i was going to ask can you are you available to do product demos this is amazing if you need a product if you need a pm i'm here yeah okay good to know so those are goals and you know when you're typing uh one of the things i love is on the right hand side kind of gives you a little scorecard in real time and now i already fixed everything in here but if i went in and i just put in a couple of typos and i'll put in three typos for fun you know and it checks everything you know it's going to change some of the correctness and stuff like that and you're going to

going to change your scores, but it does give you clarity, engagement, delivery. So, you know, you can really start to see how you're doing. And the new feature, you know, so if I click on correctness here, it's going to just focus on that. But the new thing that you've done is, you know, it's a perfect example, startups or start dash-ups. Yep, yep. Is Grammarly Go. Now, this is a very experimental feature. This is your AI feature.

And so do you use which language model are you using here? We're using, right now, we're using GPT 3.5 turbo running on Azure. That's what we're doing right now. Yeah. So here, it's giving you prompts. So most people don't know how to do prompt engineering, but it can say, hey, identify any gaps. Yeah. Give me ideas to improve.

Pick out my main point. And this is just a great way to do it, providing startup investment advice. Like, it nailed that, right? It really does a great job of figuring out what's in here. But you also can give people ideas, which I think is, you know, give me ideas for improvement. That's a really interesting one. It's probably going to tell me to add more points. Consider breaking up the text into smaller paragraph, sure, try to provide more concrete examples.

That's a great one. And consider providing more context around what year zero means for startups. This may be unfamiliar terminology. That's a great one because I just made up years. in this context. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can see already here that this, uh, grammarly go, you call it, but let's just call it your AI.

Yeah, so it's our, it's our generative AI offering, uh, to kind of build us on this life cycle. Is I think what they, yeah, I think co-pilot. That's what you should call it. That's, I think, I think it's taken. Oh, it's co-pilot. Oh, is that trademark? I don't know, maybe it's not.

But yeah, I think everybody's calling them co-pilots in the industry, but you're right. Get, get, get, get, get, But for us, it's actually not a different thing. It's actually this is what Grammally is. It's now solving your entire life cycle. It's not a different product. It's actually part of our offering. Yeah.

And then you had this crazy feature. And I remember this in the early days. Wow, you really have found every single feature we have. Yes, this is a little known feature. Little known feature. You might deprecate it at some point, I bet, but because I think... We like it. Yeah, I'm really interested about this one because there are human editor.

out there. And they work from home and they will read something you're doing. And you can have, you'll actually have a marketplace of humans to do this. And so you can see here it says, hey, in 24 hours, we'll edit this document for four bucks, in 12 hours for six bucks, and three hours for 12 bucks. So it's time-based pricing. You got a little Uber surge pricing in here, if you want to go faster, if you don't care. How many, what percentage of people actually use this feature? Because I saw this, I was like, I don't think anybody uses this, but people do use it. I mean, enough for us to have a pretty strong team of people who are engaged, helping users, etc. So it's not a huge feature.

It's definitely a power user feature. So it's a small percentage. But for the people who do really need it, it's invaluable. So we want to keep it around just for that. And it's actually a human, gets an alert. It's actually a human looking at your text and giving you suggestions on how to make it better. Just like maybe you have a... Are these part of the thousand people you have on staff or are these freelancers?

These are, some of them are on stuff and it's a mix of some to some on stuff and some working with us. Is the reason to offer this, since it's like a very small percentage overall people using it and to put effort into this, is it because this is a way to see what AI and machine learning aren't doing? And this is like your reinforcement learning part of the product? There's a couple of reasons. One is we just have a lot of language expertise in how's the, That's actually one of the things that sets us apart is we have a ton of linguists on staff. We are always understanding and evolving the structure of language. And so this is a way for us, A, to provide a great service to our users for the people who care about it,

but also, as we're dealing with these really complex, you know, you saw some of these early suggestions on clarity and brevity. Now, the training models that go into that require really deep annotation, the training data that we're using and the annotations we use for that machine learning model is not something you can just kind of give to an untrained person to do. And so we have our expertise and our linguistic expertise is actually something that enables us to do better training data, better quality input to get better model output. And so that's kind of a part of what we invest in in our solutions.

This is my, and the defaults like really matter. you can set all your defaults. So, you know, if you want to use, you know, APA, whatever, Oxford commas. But I noticed this feature, this must have been a little controversial internally. You added the woke features. You added the, like,

let's call it language police for me as a writer and a free speech advocate. But for corporate, super important because people will, you know, you might have some old people in your organization who use words and pronouns. and, you know, call women, girls or guys, boys, and do silly stuff like that. But it has sound more diplomatic.

I turn that right off. I'm not diplomatic. I like the dictator kind of stuff. Use gender neutral pronouns, avoid personal pronouns, and academic writing. And then there's a long tail, ablest language, bias language, family, gender, human rights, LGBTQIA, race, ethnicity, politically incorrect language. Tell me about putting all those features in, because I got to think that might have been

controversial in some way, and then how do you default them? Are you defaulting them on for people or off for people? So the way I think about this is we all communicate differently. We have different styles, different approaches. You have one way, I have a different way. That's what makes communication so different. ironically, which is why Grammally exists.

And so what we want to do is give people the tools. We're not here to be prescriptive about how language should be. I don't think that's our job. That's not our role. But you want to make sure that you understand how you're communicating and you're doing it intentionally versus saying, I did this thing. It seemed to have landed like a brick. And I'm not quite sure why.

Like, how come people didn't resonate with what I said or people got? upset or whatever. Like, you should, we can help you with that. So we want to make sure you understand the implications of what you're doing. And then you make the choices. As a user,

you should decide ultimately how you want to sound. This reflects you and your voice. Actually, I do not know how we default them. So that's a good question. Yeah, I was curious about that. Like, it really is interesting. These things are always changing as well. So this is, I think it's very important in a corporate.

We keep, yeah, we keep up to date with the changes too. So it's not like, undusted. So this is where our linguistic experts are always tracking, like, what is the new thing that happened? So, for example, to take an example from a few years ago, when COVID started spreading, there were lots of disparaging terms being used to refer to COVID. That was a new thing. That didn't exist prior to COVID. And so we were on it, and we were like, look, you may choose to use those terms, but be aware that they are considered disparaging. And so you can make an informed choice. And that's our job is to inform, but not to police or dictate.

Yeah. I mean, the perfect example is homeless. People, there's a term now people suffering from people experiencing homelessness is I guess the, I guess somewhat comical way to say homeless, some people would say. And then handicapped. This is something I learned recently that that could be ablest to use the word handicapped. And so there are some words around that. I was just seeing if handicapped actually raised a flag. I mean, I think it's a good thing because you don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. And then I think you're going to, this is where I think enterprise comes in, right? Like, you've got to really think as an organization, if people use that.

I had somebody in an organization who kept using the R word, which is retarded. And they were using it not to say something has changed in a way that's kind of broken or something. like to refer to a piece of plastic that got melted and whatever. They were using it as a synonym for stupid. And I had to tell them like, you can't say that anymore. You know, that is like 20 years old. But this is where I think like for enterprise, you could lose a deal if somebody said like, this is a retarded proposal.

And they actually should be saying this is a, this proposal could be. improved or we're being stupid in how we're creating this proposal. My view of this is very simple, which is that it really comes down to outcomes. You're communicating with someone or a group of people. You want to communicate as effectively as possible. That's a goal. And our goal is to help you do that. That's our product's objective.

And so the question is, if you're using language that may or may not resonate with people, you turn different settings in different ways, is that helping you achieve that goal or not? And do the thing that helps you achieve the goal. And we're going to try and help you do that. And, you know, so if someone wants to kind of make a point because they feel like that's a kind of their personal brand, but it doesn't help them achieve their goal, that's fine. But I see our job as a piece of software, not as, not as kind of legislators in this country, is let's just help you achieve your goals.

And we're going to give you everything you need to make sure you can do that. Roel, you passed it perfectly. I gave you the hardest. Even inside of Grammarly, there is a micro-controversial question I could ask you, and you answered it deftly. Avoiding unnecessary ellipsis. This is one that I have a big fight with Gramerly about, and now I see it's on the settings page. I didn't know this was on the setting pages, but I like ellipsies. I think many of these settings are born of people having their own fights with different things.

Yeah. I have my own, like Oxford commas. Yes. like Oxford commerce. No. But every once in a while, but the problem is, I turned it off, but the problem is every once in a while, you really do need it. And so I'm like, ah, what do I do?

You know, this is the beauty and the infuriating piece of just language, you know, I mean, this is, this is language. You know, sometimes I basically have a jump ball, you know, it's like, it's a, it's a stylistic decision. You might want to use it sometimes. You might not want to use it. One thing I love is word variety. This is something I've always, as an editor, because I used to be a,

magazine editor. Yeah. I'd have people use the same word over and over again. I'd say, you know, you've used this word beautiful four times in the last 400 words. Like, you love beautiful. Like, yeah. Got it. Like, let's move on.

Can we use a different word than beautiful? And for people who don't know, one of the great features, which sometimes doesn't work when I'm going around the web. Yeah. I find that there's a little bit of stickiness and some UI work to be done on the double click on a word. So here I'm clicking on proto. or incorporated here.

So, you know, when you double click, it will give you word suggestions, basically the Soros, et cetera. And you can see included, contained, mixed, integrated, assimilated, embodied. This is really a powerful feature for folks. You can get them in trouble because it can get too wordy, but Grammarly will also tell you if you're getting

too wordy and flowery with the language as well. Yeah, yeah. But I find this doesn't follow me around the web. So maybe you can talk a little bit about the Chrome extension versus the one that's in your system tray. And then the conflict between those two and like web forms are also problematic. They seem to get sticky sometimes. What should people be using? Should they be using a Chrome extension or the desktop tray item now? I think people should be using the desktop icon, the desktop app, the

native applications, because that is the most complete coverage. And then the Chrome extension could be used for places that you need extra help or the desktop app doesn't cover, such as Google Docs is one such example. What is going on with you guys in Google Docs, superhuman, like it seems like a little bit of a war. Are they, is there some sort of like security thing where they think you're injecting stuff in? Or are they trying to block you because you're a threat?

No, it's not, none of those things. So Google Docs, for example, the issue is, the way that Grammally works is we look at the page, the HTML on the page to understand what the content is. And then we provide our suggestions based on, like, okay, you've typed in this bunch of stuff in a text box, We understand what you're doing, and here's a set of suggestions. That's our extension.

Now, Google Docs moved away from that model to something called Canvas, which you can think of it as they're drawing the text. What you're seeing is not text as an HTML thing. It's like you're drawing the lines and the squiggles that result in characters on the page. So for extensions... Why are they doing that? That's performance. It's good reasons to do it.

There's performance reasons, et cetera. So that's the reason it's complicated, and that's why we have... have the extension as well because there's lots of different technologies. And so ultimately, we want to make sure we understand what users have written so we can give them the right suggestions. And, you know, when Google Docs makes a technical change. And by the way, they love us and we love them. And they worked with us on this transformation. So this is not something that happened overnight. We worked with the Google team. They said, look, we're going to move to canvas. Let's help you figure out how to do the map to the migration so that you don't get

affected. And so, you know, we work really well together. Here's a number. other suggestion for you. I want to be able to go to the New York Times when I'm reading a story. I know this sounds a little crazy. Okay. But when I'm reading a page, like I'm reading my own web page. Yeah. I want to be able to highlight a portion of that page or have grammarly, you know, like as a browser

button, not with the extension, but just, you know, someone floating around. And then just right mouse click and say, grammarly, this page. So I could actually run grammarly against the New York Times I'm reading or against a web page or a pressurly. and see it in the wild. Has anybody else asked for that or am I a lunatic? Fascinating. It's a great idea.

I mean, this goes back to this. AI is going to now allow us to go from revision, which has been our bread and butter for a long time, to this entire life cycle, including comprehension. I'm reading something. Summary it, make it easier. So maybe we can talk about AI because I think that's something you even bring up. I notice every single person, that little grammar we go you're doing,

that's in everything now. Google Docs. just added it. Notion has a, CODA has it. It's just everywhere. And people are selling third-party tools.

Yes, yes. So what is your plan in terms of dealing with, let's say, the CODA notions and Google Docs of the world who are looking at the success of Grammally and saying,

hey, I want some of that. Yeah. So a couple of things. First, codas and Google Docs and notions of the world, they're not competitors. We're friends because we are trying to,

we're not trying to take their surface. We're trying to take what is being written in these places. and make it better. Yeah, but they're trying to take your surface. So let's talk about AI and how I think about AI. So, okay, so step one is recognize that we as knowledge workers are spending over half hour work week in written communication.

We're drowning in information overload. We're just like across messages, documents, email, social media, news. Oh, my God. Just so much information, so much to process. How do I stay on top of it? I don't know about you, but for me, it's a struggle. Like, I've got to really work to kind of stay on top of it, right? So that's just, let's park that.

You all know that to be true. On the other side of the equation, we're like, all right, Gen AI, best things in slice bread, amazing, it's going to change the world, which is true, by the way. I do believe that. We agree. And, but while there's a lot of uncertainty around how Gen A.I. One thing is clear that the cost of content, the cost of content creation, is, going to drop to zero or very close to zero because of Gen AI.

All right. So on the one hand, we're drowning in content. Isn't enough hours in the day to consume all this content? On the other hand, we're super excited about a new capability that lets us create 10x or 100x amount of content. It doesn't add up. Who's going to read all this stuff? Like, not me.

Maybe you will, but I don't have the time to do it. So to me, that's a sign that while you're... regenerative AI is awesome. It is very early in its deployment life cycle. And so step one in the hype cycle is let's just take AI into everything and you just create a bunch more content. But I don't believe that's the right end state of deployment of this deck because as we discussed, the answer is not like, now read a hundred times of stuff you're reading today. That can't be the answer. It's physically impossible. That's why Gramerly comes in. Because I think what we uniquely can do is we recognize the insight we have is it's not about more content, it's about better.

So we can see across all of the apps you're writing. We can help you connect the dots across all these different workflows. We understand you, we understand your context, so we can help you communicate in a way that sounds authentic to you that uses the right context to make it more relevant. And then we can bring all of that to bear to help you achieve your goals faster and effectively and more efficiently than before. So I believe this idea of stitching across all of these workflows, that's our future. That's what we want to enable.

That's what we're interesting. So if I am bouncing between Twitter, Zendesk, doing my customer support tickets, I'm using LinkedIn and I'm posting updates and blog posts there, I'm using Twitter, I'm using Slack, obviously, I'm using Notion, Coda, whatever, my sales team's using some other tools. and we keep talking about, I don't know, some project we're working on and how we communicate, let's say in your case, grammarly enterprise. And so in your enterprise, you're talking about grammarly enterprise, you might, the way you explained it to me, have explained it like a hundred times this month to people. Yes. Now it knows how you explain it as the CEO.

And then there's a product manager explaining it, and then you got the sales team explaining it. Yes. And it could be like, hey, this is actually the best. explanation. And let's standardize on this one. Yes, exactly. I mean, so much of what I do is mentally or physically just cutting and pasting context from one place to another. And that's not great. I mean, that's not going to, you know, even if you think about what makes a good enterprise, right, even the words we use, we describe a well-functioning company as it's a well-oiled machine. It's a very industrial age metaphor, right? And so we don't need well-oiled machines. We need

AI-enabled enterprises. And so it's not about, let's just do more. I think it's a pretty good vision. It's about better. And so that's my vision. Yeah, I think the vision of consolidating my writing across all platforms, which means you're going to have to ask me for the right to just intercept everything I type. Or I'm going to have to say put Notion Coda, Google Docs, my email, and my sales tools,

that my customer support to us, put that into this, but don't do my signal, I message, don't do my passwords, don't do last password, one password. And so are you going to have to, like, kind of get permissions for me as to what to put into the knowledge base and then on an enterprise basis, are just going to roll up into my enterprise as well?

This is going to roll up into the enterprise. And so, you know, users will have choice. Everyone kind of decides how they want to opt in and data permissions, et cetera. But you touched upon something really interesting, which is, user trust is going to be critical to the effective deployment of AI. So this is something I personally care deeply about.

This is something grammily cares deeply about. And so I think that is going to be the thing that ultimately would enable the success of this technology broadly. Because at the end of the day, like let's say, you know, some large enterprise says, all right, I want to use generative AI. I want to transform my business. I want to move from well-oiled machine to AI-enabled enterprise. Guess what?

It's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take years to drive that transformation. And so I want to be the person to go to these enterprises to say, we are your trusted partner on this journey. We don't know where the end state is. No one knows. If anyone says, I know exactly how it's going to end, I don't believe you. It's going to be a journey.

And so we are your trusted partner on this journey. We've made deep investments in responsible AI, in privacy, and security. And this is something we know how to do. And I think it's essential. It's actually essential. Yeah. I think you have the right approach there. I think we have to also have a reset on employees, especially remote employees and people

and what's their work laptop and what's their private life. And I told my team, because we're increasingly recording calls, transcribing calls and summarizing calls. And sales teams are doing this with different sales, coaching software. You've probably seen that. Yep. So I think everybody in business needs to understand your work laptop, everything you do on it, is going to be recorded eventually. And in some cases, some jobs it already is.

So if you're in finance, you know this already because you have compliance. And Google probably records everything happening on people laptops. And I bet you those large enterprises do that in a lot of different job functions. and so don't do anything casual on your work laptop and I think you're going to have to have your personal laptop next to you so if you're multitasking during the day which we all do and you're like you know what I got to buy something for my kids let me just hop over to Amazon you're going to just have to get into the

mode of I'm going to use the second laptop or I'm going to use my personal phone for that because everything you're doing because of AI is going to be recorded and put into the repository in the database and I was talking to a sales team, or talking about sales teams, now, whoever the best salesperson is, their calls are getting recorded,

and then put into the sales training software and then, you know, AI is like examining it, whoever the best salesperson was, and they know how to get through objections, oh, you got somebody selling Grammarly Enterprise and they talk to me and they're like, hey, yeah, it's going to be, you know,

an extra two grand a year or whatever. But, you know, hey, obviously, you know, if we pick up one mistake and we make everybody 10% better, for itself many times over and we think we can make everybody 5% faster. Even 20 people 5% faster, you're going to recapture that and pace for itself in month 1. And if that like works, that immediately is going to be trickled down to every other sales executive as the greatest way to overcome the increased cost, you know, of, you know,

going to enterprise mode and some SaaS software. Yeah. What are your thoughts on this? Like the, the way I think a lot of us workers, the knowledge workers are going to have to start thinking about whatever we do on our laptops is captured and processed and this change in trust that we're just sort of talking on. Because people are not talking about this right now. Well, I think there's a couple of things going on.

One is I want to make sure, like, you know, there's this thing that people say that AI is not going to displace people. People using AI will displace people not using AI. Explain, yeah. Explain. I think that's true because I believe that, you know, technology always ends up becoming an instrument for people to do bigger and better things. There's always been fear in tech all the way back from the 70s when ATMs first started getting introduced into the US.

Tellers went on strike because they're like, oh my God, death of the teller profession in the US. None of that happened. Tellers actually ended up doing more complex. Yeah. Mortgages. Yeah. More interesting jobs.

Yeah. And actually the number of bank branches skyrocketed because it was cheaper to open a bank branch with ATMs. So actually it had the office. opposite impact than people thought. Interesting. And tech always surprises on the upside. I'm always a tech optimist, and I believe that we should just use tech and harness it to make ourselves better.

You know, the thing I have in my soapbox, I don't know if you've seen one of the talks I did was, I wish AI was called augmented intelligence. It's actually so much better than artificial intelligence is like, it's scary, like, you know, robots, killer robots and consciousness. We want these tools to make us better to augment our skills. That's what this is all about. And so I really think of this as augmented intelligence. And so we should build our products to really enable that to be true.

And people should see that. So as knowledge workers, to go to your question, I would like knowledge workers not to feel like this is something being done to them, that this is like their kind of pawns in this great game and they're powerless. This is about augmenting your skills and your potential. And we as software providers, it's our responsibility to make that true. We can say it, but you've got to make it true. So that's a core kind of product development tenet we have at Grammarly to make sure that

we don't lose sight of the fact that this is about augmenting people. Yeah. And that's, I'm sure, happening. What do you think about the privacy issues and then all this data being sucked up and then processed against an entire organization versus, you know, I have my own little island I sit on, my laptop, my writing, my way of doing business, and then this sort of collective intelligence, hive mind, because now, you know, you used to have these little fiefdoms inside companies. You worked at Google, you might have seen a couple of them. You know, fipdoms.

Little islands of data and best practices form. Android people want to do something some way. The Chrome team wants to do something another way. And never the two shall meet or until Sundar comes down and says, the two shall meet. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that change that's occurring. Or even if you, I don't know if you've thought about it that much. Yeah, you know, I mean, I I think privacy is an ongoing issue. And so there's lots of interesting, like privacy and user trust can be a bit of a fuzzy concept. There's like a lot of wooliness around it. There's this thing called the trust equation, which if you haven't seen, you should take a look at it.

It's kind of given me a lot of, it brings rigor to the concept of trust. And so this is created by some Harvard Business School professors, I think, a couple of decades ago. And so in a nutshell, trust equals credibility plus reliability plus intimacy divided by self-interest. And so credibility is, am I actually, can I, am I capable of doing a good job? I tell you that I'm going to keep your data safe, but if I'm not very good at security, I'm not credible. So credibility is you've got to have the capability to do a good job. Reliability is, what is the promise you're making to your users and how, reliably are you following through and adhering to those promises? You can think of these almost as

brand attributes. Exactly. That's the one. Yeah. So trustworthiness equals your credibility plus your intimacy divided by your self orientation. Correct. Got it. So reliability is like for example, we don't sell user data. We don't do ads. And so that's a core brand promise we make. We're never going to go back on it. We're going to be if we structure the company around making sure that that's never called into question. So that's reliability. Intimacy is about how do you feel? Do you feel like you're in control,

or do you feel like it's being done to you? Something is being done to you. And so that actually requires very deliberate product decisions. Do you just apply a bunch of stuff and tell people that it's done? Or do you have people in the loop so they can actually look at what's going on, make changes, and have agency in the process? I really believe that people should have agency. And so that goes in intimacy.

And then self-orientation erodes trust. That's why it's divided by self-orientation because that's the question of, to what extent are your incentives and my incentives align? Am I a pawn in your game? Am I the product? You know, all these different things people talk about. And so, grammarly, for example,

as just one example of using this, is our incentives and our users' incentives are 100% aligned because we make money when people pay for our service. That's it. That's our only source of income. And you lose money if they leave. And you lose money if they leave.

That's the unsubscribe is such truth in product. Exactly. So that's where I feel like that's where the rubble meets the road is if I look at if some product idea or some business idea that causes us to create any sort of daylight between our incentives and our users incentives, that's a no. Yeah, I mean, you can do Facebook, right? Like you put Facebook into here. People don't feel it's very, you know, trustworthy.

Exactly. So you have credibility. It's like, yeah, they say like, we're not sharing your data all the time and reliability.

I think they reliably sell your data and then people feel like the ads are creepy and like two, and then intimacy, like Zuckerberg doesn't talk to the user base, right? And it's like he's never really talks about how they're using your data

or protecting you. And then when you go try to change your settings on your page, you're like, these settings are made to confuse me, as opposed to the grammarly setting page. where you're like, oh, this is to enable me. The setting pages are dark patterns, is the term, right?

For settings that are like designed to steer you in a certain direction that you don't want to go. Unsubscribe. I tried to unsubscribe. Yeah, exactly. It's like I'm giving you this option, but I don't really want you to do it. That's like, you're going to lose right there. That's a trust losing kind of situation. I was literally trying to unsubscribe from a newsletter I was paying for on substacks.

and the number of dark patterns, just for the substack team, like, really? I mean, so lame. I had to click like five times to unsubscribe. And they're like, you can unsubscribe and it's like from the free newsletters. And then it's like,

no, I want to unsubscribe from the paid one, obviously. And it's like, oh, that's on a different page. And I'm like, okay,

I click that page. And then it's like, okay, this is the page to unsubscribe. And then there's a second unsubscribe button. I'm like, really? And like the Wall Street Journal

and Substack spent all this time trying to build up their credibility of their platform. and that in the final instance, I don't trust either of them because how you make me suffer, and I went off on

Peloton for this. You can't pause your Peloton in the app or your tonal. You have to call them on the phone. And I'm like, I can sign up and give you my credit card in the app. I'll take your money. Yeah. But also like pausing. Like, okay, I'm away for the summer. I'm not going to use my tonal

on my Peloton for three months. It's $50 each a month or something. So it's like $300. Yeah. Just let me pause it. For the summer when I'm in Tahoe, I want to pause it, I'm not going to use it. Yeah. And they're like, no, you have to call us on the phone. And then Tonal didn't even let me, they're like, you have to cancel it. I'm like, I don't want to cancel it.

I want to use it on September 5th. And no. And so this is super important, the trust equation. Self orientation, I'm having a hard time understanding that. So self orientation is exactly like what is your incentive and what is the user's incentive? So let's look at ads company. I'm trying to get the user to use my product because I'm trying to sell ads and I'm making my money through ads.

Now, you may be well motivated, but your self-orientation is different. It's diverging from your users. And so it's manageable, but it erodes trust. You've got to be clear that it erodes trust and you've got to be very good at everything else because this is a net negative. In our case at Gramerly, we're like, we don't want anything to ever get in the way of having 100% alignment between our incentives and our users incentives. None of this question around, am I the product or why do you have this doc pattern?

I really, I need to put this feature in place, but I don't really want you to use it because that's not good for our business. None of that stuff. So it's actually very simplifying. Sometimes you've got to say no to things, but it creates simplicity and clarity for the path ahead. All right, listen, I can't believe we talked about all the features in Gramerly for over an hour. You did a great job, Jason.

I really, you're a great when you do your user conference, I'll come up and talk about your new features. I will take you up on that. It's absolutely great. I can't wait for this vision you have of the AI that is taking all of my writing and then just organizing it for me in one place and giving me suggestions. I love the idea of the snippets.

So we're investors in a company called Superhuman, another role. Yeah, yeah, who is obsessed with product. And he's got these snippets. it's in it. So, you know, as an example, a lot of people pitch us to be on the podcast and we don't take pitches. And I get 20 a day and then some people will ask, they'll reply 10 times to them. And so I ignore the first one, but then when the second, third, fourth one comes in, I just hit, and it's from like a big PR firm, I hit reply. Yeah. And then I hit semicolon S and it puts in,

thank you so much for thinking about us. We actually don't take pitches for the podcast. If you could note in your database and remove us from your database, that would be really a appreciated best J-Cal. And, you know, people take it well. They understand. Yeah. This is not the type of. So much time.

Yeah. And but I have that in one place. I would like my producers to have that. I would like to be able to share that with my team. So I've been asking Raoul, like, hey, can we have multiplayer mode in our organization to share that. But, you know, like text is happening all over my desktop. If you did it and you said, hey, here's something that you say all the time.

Yeah. Do you want to make it into a snippet? Do you want to make it into a reoccurring, you know, like we have, by the way, we have that. And so you really need to check out. We have glossary. We also have snippets. Oh, you do have snippets. So you can do exactly what you're saying and you can have shared with your entire team. So it sounds like you've got to go check out Grammally

business. I'm going to a gramelly business. I just had everybody buy it for individual. So we're going to go up to business. We can help you. Yeah, we can help you. I'm going to do a right after this call. Awesome. No, I'm going to pay for it. I don't need any freebies. Yeah, yeah. I'm not going to pay for it. Please do pay for it. Yes. Yeah. No, this is, you know, even when we have like,

when I invest in companies or I have advertisers or like, oh, we'll send you something for it. I'm like, let me just pay for it so that I, talking about trust. I asked my, yeah, I asked my kid to pay for it. He's like, dad, I'm going to use Grammally. I'm like, please pay full price. It's valuable.

You got to pay for it. Yeah. All right. Listen, I appreciate your rule. I appreciate you. And everybody, go try out Grammally. You'll love it. Just use a free version.

Use it for a day. And then upgrade to the paid version. I guarantee you you, you will love it. And we'll see you all next time on this week in startups. Bye-bye.