Calm AI for Crazy Days: Inside Granola's Design Philosophy, with co-founder Sam Stephenson

Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution!

Today my guest is Sam Stephenson, co-founder and designer at Granola, the breakout AI note-taking app that has recently raised $125M at a $1.5B valuation. 

As a user of the app myself, I’ve been struck by how streamlined, even minimalist, the Granola product experience is.

Considering how easy it is to code up new features these days, I figured this had to be a very deliberate choice on Sam’s part, and wanted to use this conversation to hear what he’s learned about designing AI products for mass market adoption.

We begin with Granola’s product design philosophy, which Sam playfully calls "surprisingly unambitious", at least in terms of the number of jobs they aim to do for users.  Taking inspiration from the kitchen tool company Oxo, which designs products that work for people with disabilities and delight everyone else, Granola aims to provide a calm product experience for people with crazy workdays.

In practice, as you’ll hear, the keys to Sam’s success are simple, timeless design disciplines.  Spend lots of time with lots of users, understand their challenges deeply, do one thing extremely well before adding more features.  

All very familiar advice to any product leader, but increasingly counter-trend in the vibe-coding era.

As always, we get into a lot of detail along the way.

• Sam says that Granola’s rapid growth has been driven overwhelmingly by the single core mechanism of users sharing call notes with teammates and partners.

• He also highlights a number of popular and surprising use cases, and explains how they are using Recipes, such as the “blind spot finder” I created when Granola sponsored a number of episodes earlier this year, both for marketing purposes and to inspire users to use the product to its full potential.  

• He tells us what partners they are using for transcription, why Granola has no limits or concept of credits, and how they think about managing inference costs as they add new features over time.

• He explains their decision to make Granola work at the operating system audio level, rather than joining calls as a participant like most other note-taking apps do, and how this relates to privacy and consent, their decision to store call transcripts but not raw audio, and the idea that we might want to engineer at least some AI systems to forget certain details over time, just as we humans do.  

• He also unpacks how Granola is thinking about their new team collaboration features, the tricky balance between the immense upside of better information sharing across teams and organizations and the risks of over-sharing sensitive information, and also how much we can trust AI to decide what should be shared with whom. 

• We discuss how Granola’s team works today, including why he thinks Figma remains valuable but should be nervous, and more importantly, how they use a combination of internal demo days and dog-fooding to inform what are ultimately mostly vibes-based decisions about what to launch.  

• And toward the end, we get Sam’s greatest hopes and fears for Granola, namely that it will help people live something closer to their best lives, with less screentime and more space for reflection and strategic thinking, and on the other hand, the possibility that a few leading AI hyperscaler platforms could end up dominating an ever greater share of the market and capturing most of the value AI creates.   

Clearly there are multiple ways to build a successful AI product in today’s world, but for me, as someone who is constantly obsessing over frontier capabilities, this conversation was a very useful way to calibrate myself on how mainstream users understand and relate to AI, and a great reminder that timeless design discipline continues to work.  

With that, I hope you enjoy this inside look at the design thinking powering one of the fastest-growing AI products in the market today, with Sam Stephenson, co-founder of Granola.

Watch now!

Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution,
Nathan Labenz