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AI note-taking startup Fireflies was really two guys typing notes by hand
- charles_f 11mo agoIsn't that something the startup people always advocate, to do things by hand till you proved there's a market? Sounds like they did
- henry2023 11mo agoYeah imo this is a success story.
- mmcdermott 11mo agoIf it was a digital transcript service alone, yes, it is a success. Claiming that the transcripts were generated by a nonexistant AI is fraud and should be treated as such.
- deepfriedbits 11mo agoNot sure if this is what PG had in mind, but yes, the famous "do things that don't scale at first" advice to startups
- 1659447091 11mo ago> "Sitting in someone's meeting uninvited is violation of privacy. They wanted a bot in the meeting, not an uninvited person," said automation expert Umar Aftab. "This way you sabotage trust and could incur legal implications." > "Good luck with all the lawsuits," added another. "This might read like a gritty founder hustle story," said software engineer Mauricio Idarraga. "But it's actually one of the most reckless and tone-deaf posts I've seen in a while." > "We told our customers there's an 'AI that'll join a meeting'," said Udotong. "In reality it was just me and my co-founder calling in to the meeting sitting there silently and taking notes by hand." They charged $100/month for this. If it were free then whatever, but lying to paying customers about the service is not okay.
- mips_avatar 11mo agoExcept they were pretty transparent about there being a human in the loop. They were essentially selling an MIT engineering grad as your note taker for $100/mo, which is a steal. Google hires associate product managers from MIT to be note takers for $20k/mo
- 1659447091 11mo agoThe quote taken from the article is: "We told our customers there's an 'AI that'll join a meeting'," said Udotong. How do you get from 'AI that'll join a meeting' to 'an MIT engineering grad as your note taker'? The rest about note takers is irrelevant when the problem is lying about the "note taker" as that could be the deciding factor for choosing a service, not price
- mips_avatar 11mo agoDisclaimer I actually met Sam when he was launching this and I felt like he pitched it at the time as aspiring to make it do all the things. I guess that’s a lie since the ai didn’t work at the time.
- bpodgursky 11mo agoUnless there was a violated promise of an on-prem notetaker app, there's absolutely no difference between having a third-party AI and third-party contractor listening to your meetings. You should ALWAYS assume their engineers have access to stored data for maintenance and debugging.
- jacquesm 11mo agoIt's a lot worse than that. This is a breach, from the perspective of the customers. They now have to explain to whoever was there how they disclosed their confidential information. That's going to become a nice boomerang.
- bsder 11mo ago> They charged $100/month for this. If it were free then whatever, but lying to paying customers about the service is not okay. Erm, to the customer, what is the difference between a bunch of humans transcribing your meetings or an AI doing it? If I'm paying $100/month to get my meetings transcribed, why do I care whether it's the founder, an AI, or magic pixie dust (but I repeat myself)? Misleading investors is a different problem.
- parpfish 11mo agolots of people joke about how their jobs is "just attending a bunch of meetings", but can you imagine how horrific your job would be if you were this guy and your job actually was just "attend a bunch of meetings"? AND you didn't have context or interest in the content? AND you were required to write an essay at the end proving that you paid attention?!
- 0manrho 11mo agoAND you got a billion dollar valuation out of it? Wait...
- parpfish 11mo agoyou mean a billion dollar valuation that'll collapse long before you can actually get an exit?
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- jordanb 11mo agoOn the other hand you can make goofy stuff up and people will think it was "the AI". https://youtu.be/85fx0LrSMsE?si=D5WU1DEtBeHvjVaN&t=115 https://youtu.be/85fx0LrSMsE?si=D5WU1DEtBeHvjVaN&t=115
- ungreased0675 11mo agoIf this wasn’t related to software, it’d simply be called fraud. Selling an AI service that has no AI is lying. But when it’s a SaSS product it becomes an inspirational hustle culture story.
- henry2023 11mo agoA business charges for a service and the service was met. what’s the problem here? I would bet the TOS mentioned manual reviews.
- jlarocco 11mo agoIMO the real fraud was against the investors. If I invest in your AI startup and find out it's really people doing the work, I'm going to be pissed.
- ajcp 11mo ago"I'll get you to the moon safely" = NASA "I'll get you to the moon" = me with a wood chipper and a very powerful potato gun The startup charged for "AI note- taking", not simply "note taking".
- jacquesm 11mo agoConfidentiality breach. You are supposed to have processes in place to guarantee that your customers data is safe from employees that are not explicitly disclosed to the customer from having access. Saying 'a program makes annotations' versus 'me and my buddy are sitting in undisclosed on your confidential meeting' are two entirely different things from a legal perspective.
- henry2023 11mo agoRelevant essay, Do things that don’t scale by Paul Graham. https://paulgraham.com/ds.html https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
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- ngruhn 11mo agoWhy even cheat here? Sounds like this is almost trivial with current AI systems.
- loloquwowndueo 11mo agoMaybe it wasn’t when they started the company?
- davidgaw 11mo agoThis is fraud. Their exposure here is not just being sued by clients, though there's that as well, but being charged with one or more crimes, convicted, and going to prison. This was an incredibly stupid scheme, made even more stupid by publicly confessing to it.
- anonymousiam 11mo agoReminds me a lot of Theranos, but without the jail time (yet). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes Also, there was this, which also originally claimed to be AI: https://spectrum.ieee.org/untold-history-of-ai-mechanical-turk-revisited-tktkt https://spectrum.ieee.org/untold-history-of-ai-mechanical-tu...
- dustingetz 11mo agosounds fake, founders these days make up all sorts of edgy stories to PG signal to investors
- shrubble 11mo agoThe joke that AI stands for “Actually, Indians” and the co-founder annd presumably the other guy typing is Indian is crazy.
- icepush 11mo ago"Actually, Indians" is not meant as a joke.
- jacquesm 11mo agoAnd it's not rare at all. It is also not rare to see such efforts funded.
- ChrisMarshallNY 11mo ago> However, some LinkedIn commenters seem to see very little wrong with Fireflies' dubious early business practices. Seems to be a good example of today’s zeitgeist. Many of the comments on this very post, seem to take the same position. I’m not horrified about what they did. This kind of shysterism is pretty common, these days. What does disturb me, though, is an “end justifies the means” acceptance of these practices. In law (and law enforcement), they have a “fruit of the poisoned tree” doctrine, where starting something wrong, immediately nullifies everything after that, even if it solves the case. Coming from a perspective of wanting a lot more ethics and integrity in technology, I think we might be well-served to consider something like this. I’m deeply disturbed by the blatant moral decay in tech. I keep flashing on Dr. Malcolm, taking about “could,” and “should.”
- nacozarina 11mo agosurprise, surprise, ai being used for fakery instead of value
- ctxc 11mo agoHow isn't this just fraud? Expectation is that sensitive meetings run through a pipeline without being exposed to actual people (and if it is for very specific reasons, there are audit trails). Here, they literally listen to sensitive information and can act on it. How do you trust they won't do it again to "enhance summaries" or something in the future?
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- xwowsersx 11mo agoI think what PG meant by "do things that don't scale" is earnest effort in service of building a real product: talking to users, manually onboarding, hand-holding early customers so you can learn fast and iterate toward something that eventually does scale. What this startup did isn't that, AFAICT. It wasn't manual work in service of learning...it was just fraud as a business model, no? Like, they were pretending the technology existed before it actually did. There's a bright line between unscalable hustle and misleading customers about what your product actually is. Doing unscalable things is about being scrappy and close to the problem. Pretending humans are AI is just straight up deceiving people.
- cbracketdash 11mo agoTotally agree with this point. There are several advice that pg and similar roles give which are not universally true. I reiterate your point that "doing things that don't scale" is meant specifically for searching for 1-1 user experience advice. A similar exmaple is "Make something people want". This is generally true advice in focusing your efforts on solving customer's problems. Yet, this is disastrous advice if taking literally to the fullest extent (you can only imagine).
- bix6 11mo ago$10M revenue in 2024, now $1B tender offer lol.
- bravetraveler 11mo ago"Make it exist, first. You can make it good later" Bias towards bullshit
- bix6 11mo agoFrom LI > this was for our first few beta customers from 2017 and we made it clear that there was a human in the loop of the service. LLMs didn't exist yet. It was like offering an EA for $100/mo - several other startups did that as well, but obviously it doesn't scale. So not necessarily fraud unless they deceived investors. Or he’s covering up his mistake. Getting the popcorn!!
- echelon 11mo ago1. It's not fraud. They were proving the market at an early stage while living on a pizza diet. 2. Their startup now does what it says on the tin. And it's now a unicorn. 3. To those claiming this was "unethical" - a large company providing this service would still record calls and have QA / engineers listening to calls to improve the service.
- pinkmuffinere 11mo ago+1, this strategy is often called a "concierge" MVP. You deliver the service you claim, but behind the scenes everything is actually incredible manual. Once you proved people like the service, you then go make the process less manual. Zappos and Amazon are both famous for doing this.
- collingreen 11mo agoAnd as long as you much a buck or two then who cares if you lie a little to the customers about what is actually happening!
- pinkmuffinere 11mo agocustomers pay for the service, not the method-by-which-the-service-is-provided. If they explicitly sold it as a service without a human in the loop, then I think that's bad. If they just sold transcription..... then this is transcription.
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- hninvsturr 11mo agoIt won't be a surprise if YC has invested in this company.
- black_13 11mo ago[dead]
- pinkmuffinere 11mo agoThis strategy is often called a "concierge" MVP. You deliver the service you claim, but behind the scenes everything is incredibly manual. Once you've proved people like the service, you then go make the process less manual. Zappos and Amazon are both famous for doing this. p.s. -- I already put this in a chain, but the majority of comments are just claiming this is fraud. Thought it might be worth posting something slightly more visible.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 11mo agoEven better, its subclass the Wizard of Oz MVP: https://www.rabitsolutions.com/blog/examples-of-mvp/ https://www.rabitsolutions.com/blog/examples-of-mvp/
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- Zagorath 11mo agoThere are many times a service like that might not be fraud. For example, if you never explicitly said it was an AI, and if every detail of the service remains the same, from the customer's perspective. The privacy implications alone make the difference between a human sitting in on your meeting and an actual AI enough to call this fraud. Giving it a fancy name doesn't change that.
- PhotonHunter 11mo agoWhen I was teaching product development I called this the Mechanical Turk strategy. Completely agree that it isn’t automatically fraud, it can also be a cheap prototype that lets you start testing hypotheses ASAP.
- IG_Semmelweiss 11mo agoAnother famous example was JET.com Jet later sold - presumably a distress exit - to Walmart, but the founder dude came out reasonably well
- bravoetch 11mo agoThe Lean Startup.
- Antony90807 11mo ago[dead]
- pogue 11mo agoWas it fraud? Or were they a couple of plucky capitalists rigging the system to get by? I guess it just depends on your perspective...
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- zkmon 11mo agoSounds similar to builder.ai but on a smaller scale?
- rkagerer 11mo agoI can understand why people are incensed the founders sat in stealthily on meetings, but I don't understand why they don't feel the same level of mistrust for the company's bots. Don't they realize the company will store their whole conversation in the cloud, and a rogue employee/founder can just as easily pull it up and listen after the fact?
- rsynnott 11mo agoAs always, amazed how accepting this place is of this sort of behaviour. I remember people here trying to defend Theranos when all that came out... CS courses really have to start placing a bit more emphasis on ethics.
- novoreorx 11mo agoBest "fake it till you make it" story I've ever heard
- guru4consulting 11mo agoI thought HN crowd is smarter than average crowd, but surprised to see so many folks supporting this fraud. If they sold just "note taking service" then it does not matter what they do behind the scene or how they scale up the service, manual or automated. But if they sold "AI-enabled" note taking service, then it's a clear fraud. Nothing different from Trevor Milton rolling the trucks from hills.