Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a new episode with Sam.
Sam is the co-founder of Granola, the AI meeting notes app now valued at $1.5B. Granola has helped me survive (and even enjoy) countless meetings, so I was excited to learn how Sam uses AI to show up prepared. We also talked about building an AI company without the 996 grind and what design means when agents skip your app.
Sam and I talked about:
(00:00) The AI brief Sam now relies on before every new meeting
(01:27) “What did I miss?”: Granola’s most used recipe
(03:45) Why Granola hides the transcript despite user complaints
(09:37) A Granola recipe to get feedback from founders
(13:54) Why Sam feels a pang of sadness when agents skip your UI
(19:30) Why Sam’s Figma use fell to 20% and how Granola stops slop
(26:14) Nacho: The agent every Granola employee asks first
(30:58) Why most people stop improving their product way too early
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Top 10 takeaways I learned from this episode
Design principles for the AI era
Design for your user’s most stressful moment. Granola is built for the space between back-to-back meetings, when you’re late and forget who you’re meeting next. One of Sam’s principles is “Be calming: Granola should lower your blood pressure.” This has led to decisions like explicitly hiding the live transcript.
Design for agents using your app or product first. Sam felt “a pang of sadness” as a UI designer when people defaulted to using Granola through MCP and the API instead of the app. He resisted at first but now recognizes that many enterprises simply won’t adopt a tool that doesn’t plug into their internal agents. Some users will stick with the UI while others go through MCP, so design for both.
