This podcast mentions Anthropic a few times; my fiancé works there.
asserted
fiancé → mention → Anthropic
Last week on the Platformer podcast, Raycast’s Thomas Paul Mann predicted that within a few years, as much as half the apps on your Mac could be ones you made yourself.
uncertain
you → predict → Mac
For the third episode of our miniseries on work in the AI era, I wanted to learn more about a tool that may already know more about your job than any other: the AI notetakers that increasingly listen to every meeting we take.
uncertain
we → want → meeting
And so this week I talked to Chris Pedregal.
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I → talk → Pedregal
Pedregal is the co-founder and CEO of Granola, which has been my own AI notetaker since shortly after it launched.
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it → launch → Granola
Pedregal started the company after a long tenure at Google, which he joined as an associate product manager in 2008.
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he → start → 2008
He left the company after a few years to start Socratic, a homework-helper app that Google acquired in 2018.
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Google → leave → 2018
In 2022, he left again to play around with the pre-ChatGPT large language models from OpenAI, and soon he and co-founder Sam Stephenson went on to launch Granola.
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he → leave → Granola
Granola captures the audio from your own computer, lets you type your own notes alongside the AI, and fills in the gaps with an instant AI summary as soon as the meeting ends.
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meeting → capture → summary
(The app’s surprisingly good summaries were ultimately what prompted me to become a paying customer.)
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what → prompt → me
The company was most recently valued at $1.5 billion.
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company → value → billion
Unlike some rivals, Granola is invisible to the person at the other end of the call — something that has generated some controversy among workers who are leery of being secretly surveilled.
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who → generate → workers
Pedregal told me the design is an artifact of how difficult other meeting software make it for third-party bots to join conversations, and walked me through the lengths Granola now goes to in order to disclose itself — displaying an animated watermark on your video feed through a virtual camera, since Zoom and Google Meet offer no better way to ask a room for consent.
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Zoom → tell → consent
Pedregal also made a prediction that may chill some privacy-conscious workers: "I think we'll probably end up in a world where in work meetings, the expectation is that you are being transcribed by default, and you ask not to be transcribed."
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you → make → default
Pedregal shared some product news on the show as well: Granola, which has never stored audio recordings, is now researching whether to automatically delete verbatim transcripts after some period of time, while compressing the contained knowledge into a working memory.
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which → share → memory
The company is also prototyping "enhanced transcripts" built for AI agents to use as part of a corporate knowledge base.
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agents → prototype → base
But what struck me most was Pedregal’s attitude toward actual surveillance.
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struck → strike → surveillance
Granola notes are private by default, and "companies hate us for this," he told me.
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he → hate → me
CEOs regularly ask for access to every employee transcript, and Granola refuses.
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Granola → ask → transcript
"If you have a backdoor way for someone in power to use all this context to make judgment calls in that way, that doesn't feel right to me, and that's not a future we want to build towards," Pedregal said.
asserted
Pedregal → have → me
When I asked my standard question about the risk of AI job loss, Pedregal — who runs a company of around 80 people, and could see it reaching no more than 120 — played down maximalist predictions of labor disruption.
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it → ask → disruption
"People thought when the computer came out, we'd have lots of leisure — and no, the opposite happened," he said.
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he → think → leisure
As for the seven other apps that now offer to take notes every time I start a meeting, he is unbothered: "I think we are, like, 5 percent into this new technical revolution," he told me.
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he → offer → me
Transcription, in his view, is merely the word processor of this era: "Spreadsheets haven't come out yet.
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Spreadsheets → come → era
The GUI hasn't come out yet."
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GUI → come → ?
The real fight, he says, is over what interface we'll all be working in a decade from now.
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we → say → interface
In some ways Pedregal’s project reminds me of the original version of Slack — a company whose name is an acronym describing its onetime vision to become a “searchable log of all conversation and knowledge.”
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name → remind → conversation
Granola is building a log not unlike that one.
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Granola → build → one
The question now is whether it can become as essential to the modern workplace as Slack has — or whether, by letting you grant AI agents access to your conversations via MCP connectors, it risks giving away the game to OpenAI or Anthropic.
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it → become → OpenAI
A long excerpt of our conversation is below, edited for clarity and length.
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excerpt → edit → clarity
Listen to the entire conversation wherever you get your podcasts — just search for Platformer — or watch it on YouTube at youtube.com/caseynewton.
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you → listen → youtube.com/caseynewton
And let us know what you think — we welcome your feedback at casey@platformer.news.
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we → let → casey@platformer.news
I find myself using Granola for everything, but maybe searching through my notes less than I expected to.
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I → find → notes
I get a lot of peace of mind from capturing everything, but it turns out I don't really need to check back for what this one person said.
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person → get → what
How true does that prove across your user base?
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that → prove → base
I go back less than you'd expect I would, and some companies would look at that and say, okay, how do we drive that number up?
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we → go → number
I actually think forgetting — not going back and looking at stuff — is a feature as much as a bug.
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forgetting → think → bug
Our brains are actually pretty decent at remembering the most important things.
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brains → remember → things
What's powerful is that moment when you're like, ah, crap — what did I say in that meeting?
asserted
I → say → meeting
Just knowing that you have it is very valuable.
asserted
you → know → it
…and 252 more, not listed.
