'I Had To Close My Laptop': Granola Adds Coaching, Recipes To Its AI Meeting Notes

Upstarts is back for seconds today, reconnecting with Granola CEO Chris Pedregal about his note-taker's big Recipes launch, including one based on Matt Mochary's CEO coaching that shook him up.

Granola CEO Chris Pedgral, right, was shaken by the AI coaching his meeting notes unlocked. Credit: Granola

The Upshot

In early April, when Upstarts reached out to Granola to request an interview, co-founder and CEO Chris Pedregal was game to take a chance on our pre-launch, unknown new media startup.

It was a good call: our deep dive into Granola’s AI note-taking app went viral. We still hear from readers that they use Granola to this day, thanks in part to our profile.

So when Chris asked Upstarts if we had time this Sunday to check out a big new launch that Granola’s been cooking up since, we didn’t hesitate. Emergency second free Upstarts edition of the week: activated.

(You can read our regularly scheduled programming from this morning, an exclusive on a security startup raising $35 million for the race to secure AI agents, here.)

What’s got Granola so excited: a new Chat tool that allows users to pull info from all of their past meetings interchangeably, and a Recipes feature that makes Granola more powerful by adding automated workflows to its notes.

“Up until now, people would think of Granola and it’s getting meeting notes. And that’s true, and hopefully we’ll always be good at that,” Pedregal says. “But you’re sitting on so much valuable information inside of Granola, and I feel like this launch is the first time where we’re actually making that useful to people, opening it up.”

Cooking up Recipes

Granola spent the past three months building Recipes; a few hundred people have already played with them.

Recipes available at launch include a couple of high-profile collaborations: Lenny Rachitsky, the author of popular Substack publication Lenny’s Newsletter, has one called “Write PRD” to turn a meeting into a products requirement document to build a new feature; Silicon Valley CEO coach Matt Mochary’s “Coach me matt” provides advice on your past week of meetings, without the AI chatbot fluff.

Granola built it using a combination of Mochary’s publicly-available coursework and frameworks online, and a user’s Granola meetings notes as context, running an elaborate prompt for a large language model under the hood.

“The first time I ran ‘Coach me,’ I had to close my laptop and go for a walk,” Pedregal says. “It was basically like, stop acting like a product manager, and start acting like a CEO.”

The Granola CEO unsurprisingly has more personal data in his product than most – more than 2,000 meetings, including his notes from his personal therapy sessions. The feedback was unflinching: Delegate more, give projects clearer top objectives.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt that seen,” he says. He’s shared some of that feedback, lightly redacting private names and proprietary details, in the screenshot below.

Granola CEO Chris Pedregal’s coaching notes. Credit: Granola

These recipes should get more powerful over time, Pedregal says, with the ability to connect to other tools like Linear to generate a product ticket.

Granola also plans to allow for Recipe insights to generate documents that can live within Granola, making it easier for users to work off of them; it’s also working on making it easier to upload additional context and files.

The goal is still to work towards an all-encompassing deep research platform that can know as much about your job as you’re willing to share, and help you generate smart insights and shortcuts from it.

“Being able to do really fast in-depth analysis on lots of data, it’s going to be really key for us,” Pedregal says.

Does that mean Granola will need to fine-tune or train its own AI models eventually? Pedregal is non-committal. “My view is we’re going to have more and more models doing more things in the background for us,” he says. “For some things, a fine tuned model might be great. For others, it might not.”

Recipes include one from Substack author Lenny Rachitsky. Credit: Granola

In the meantime, users are asking for more basic features, he knows. Granola recently added phone call capabilities; it still needs to figure out how to distinguish between more than two speakers in a live meeting, and easily tag them by name.

“Real time diarization is really tough, but we’re working on it,” Pedregal says.

Others want something more basic: an Android app.

Granola has the funding to get to these things, one-by-one. In May, it got the Upstarts bump, raising $43 million in Series B funding. But it’s also in a highly competitive market where Notion and others aren’t going away.

Upstarts has one more selfishly valuable, but strategically dubious suggestion for Granola’s CEO: a Recipe for journalists who use Granola for story interviews. TBD on whether Pedregal taps us to help with that more niche launch someday.