00:00 Speaker A
What should an investor look for in some of these software companies? How do I know if they are durable?
00:04 Speaker B
You know, I think, uh, I mean we’ve been watching these cycles like mobile, like cloud, and so on. You know, I think you want to see what companies are adapting to that. So I think it’s important that companies that stick their heads in the sand will have to be sunk. But I think a lot of the companies that are being punished right now are responding well and will be fine.
00:23 Speaker A
Do you see themselves, do you see them reinventing themselves?
00:26 Speaker B
I think so. Yes. Yes.
00:27 Speaker A
Tell us about what you’re working on at Grammarly.
00:29 Speaker B
Yes, so grammar people aren’t familiar, we are one of the most popular communication assistants in the world. About 40 million daily active users, earning over $700 million. I think it’s 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’s a much bigger deal than people think. But actually, the thing that people get the most wrong is that they think it’s about grammar. Um, which is a totally reasonable assumption. But actually what Grammarly does is the OG AI assistant. It’s an assistant working right next to you. We see a million unique surfaces a day. So every desktop app, uh, web app, and mobile app, uh, we can see what you’re doing. We can annotate it in a way that doesn’t bother you and make changes on your behalf. Right now we’re only doing this for grammar, and the big change is that we’re about to do it for everything. So anyone can run agents just like Grammarly on the same platform.
01:21 Speaker A
How will this change the user experience?
01:23 Speaker B
Yeah, so maybe a simple example, let’s say I’m writing that I’m a salesperson, I’m writing an email to a customer. Today, Grammarly feels like you have your high school grammar teacher sitting on your shoulder with your red and blue highlighter marking everything. Now it’s going to feel like you have, you know, all these agents sitting by your side. So it could be your sales coach saying, hey, you’re about to recommend the wrong product. It could be your advocacy, uh, a person saying, hey, this person had an outage yesterday, you should acknowledge that. It could just be your electronic or digital assistant saying you said you’d meet tomorrow at 7pm, but then you have your daughter’s recital. And they can all help you in the same way we’ve helped millions with grammar. Now we will be able to help millions of people with everything they do.
02:08 Speaker A
As someone who actually works on it, I mean, this is amazing technology. I mean, are you dreading the next Anthropic update?
02:14 Speaker B
I mean we are huge customers. That is the Anthropic client. Oh yes, we are an Anthropic, Open AI customer. 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 directly to the user so you don’t have to think about it.
02:35 Speaker A
Are you worried that they are making a product like yours obsolete?
02:39 Speaker B
I don’t think so. So what we’re doing is a little bit different in terms of bringing AI directly to people’s surfaces. I think they’re working a lot on models, they’re working a lot on what we call new chat interfaces. But if you think about the main metaphors in AI, there’s a lot of people focused on chat, you know, we want to talk to an AI bot. It focuses a lot on what we call do, which is automating tasks. We’re working on something we call support. So if I like the stat that I gave you 100 billion LM calls per week to 40 million people, that means for an average Grammarly user, we’re making several thousand AI calls per day. So, you know, if you’re a really good chat user, a really good cloud user, maybe you could do a dozen in a day. But we do it every time you type a character, open a new document, open a new app, 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 to think about AI.
03:37 Speaker A
How about superhuman? Now these businesses have been combined. What would the next generation of supermen be like?
03:42 Speaker B
Yeah, so I put four different products together. So the original Superhuman product, what we now call Superhuman Mail, uh Grammarly, uh, my old product called Coda and the new product we call Go. Go is the Grammarly platform layer, which allows anyone to build agents that look like Grammarly. So we got all four of them together and then we decided to change the name of the company and we had a lot of ideas about what to do. We decided to take the one out
04:10 Speaker A
Sounds cool. No offense to Grammarly. I mean Superhuman sounds cool.
04:12 Speaker B
Well, I think so, sounds good. This is obviously a starting point. That was it. Sounds cool. It has to sound cool. Uh, it’s broad, which I think is really important, so you can cover a lot of things. But actually the thing we love about him is the human word. Because if you think about most people working on AI are really concerned, you know, they’re out there trying to replace humans. We have the opposite point of view. 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’re the one who submits the essay. Uh, that’s all we’re there to help you. So I like to say that I’ve spent the last 16 years turning people into super writers, and now we get to spend the next few decades turning people into super humans.