00:00 Speaker A
What should investors look for in these software companies? How do they know if they are durable?
00:04 Speaker B
You know, I think, uh, I mean I’ve looked at these cycles as mobile, cloud and so on. You know, I guess you want to see which companies are adapting to it. So, I think the big thing is, companies that bury their heads in the sand are going to sink. But I think a lot of the companies that are being punished now are actually responding well, and they’re going to be fine.
00:23 Speaker A
Do you see them themselves? Do you see them reinventing themselves?
00:26 Speaker B
I think so. Yes. Yes.
00:27 Speaker A
Tell us about the work you do at Grammarly.
00:29 Speaker B
Yeah, so, um, so grammar is unfamiliar to people and we’re one of the most popular communication assistants in the world. Uh, about 40 million daily active users and over $700 million in revenue. I think it’s one of the best kept secrets in the world.
00:43 Speaker A
I didn’t even realize how big it was now.
00:44 Speaker B
Yes, it’s a much bigger business than people think. Uh, but actually what people misunderstand the most is they think it’s about grammar. Well, that’s a perfectly reasonable assumption. But actually what Grammarly does is the OG AI assistant. It is an assistant working beside you. We see a million unique surfaces every day. So every desktop application, web application, and mobile application, we can watch what you’re doing. We can annotate it in a way that’s unobtrusive to you and make changes on your behalf. Now we’re only doing this for grammar, the biggest change is that we’re going to do it for everything. So anyone can run an agent like Grammarly on the same platform.
01:21 Speaker A
How will this change the user experience?
01:23 Speaker B
Yeah, so maybe uh a simple example, let’s say I’m writing I’m a salesperson and I’m writing an email to uh a customer. Today uh grammar feels like your high school grammar teacher sitting on your shoulder with a red and blue marker and uh marking everything. Now you feel like, you know, all the other agents are sitting with you. So your sales coach might say, hey, you’re going to recommend the wrong product. It could be your supporters who say, hey, this guy had a breakdown yesterday and you should acknowledge that. It could just be that your electronic device or digital assistant says you said you would meet tomorrow night at 7:00 PM, but your daughter has a recital then. All of this helps you, just like we’ve helped millions of people learn grammar. We will now be able to help millions of people do the other things they do.
02:08 Speaker A
As someone who actually does this work, I mean, it’s an amazing technology. I mean, are you worried about Anthropic’s next update?
02:14 Speaker B
I mean we’re a big customer. I mean Anthropic’s customers. Oh, yes, we are a customer of Anthropic Open AI. We handle more than 100 billion LLM calls every week. Well, I mean, if you just think of us as an artificial intelligence industry, we’re probably one of the largest industries in the world. But the way we do it is by delivering it directly to the user so you don’t have to think about it.
02:35 Speaker A
Are you worried that they will make products like yours obsolete?
02:39 Speaker B
I don’t think so. I mean, what we’re doing is a little bit different in terms of bringing AI directly to people’s surfaces. I think they’ve done a lot of work on the model, a lot of work on what we call the chat interface. But if you think about the major metaphors in AI, a lot of people are focused on chatting, you know, we want to talk to AI bots. There’s a lot of focus on what we call “do,” which is task automation. We are dedicated to a job called Assistance. So if I like my statistics of 100 billion LM calls a week to 40 million people, that means for the average Grammarly user, we’re making a few thousand AI calls a day. So, you know, if you’re a really good chat user, a really good cloud user, maybe you can do a dozen a day. But every time you type a character, open a new document, open a new application, which we do, we call all the artificial intelligence systems on your behalf. I think it’s just a very different paradigm for thinking about AI at this scale and level of integration.
03:37 Speaker A
What about Superman? Now these businesses are merged. Like what is the next generation of Superman?
03:42 Speaker B
Yeah, so we’ve put together four different products. So, um, the original Superman product, we now call it Superman Mail, uh Grammarly, uh my old product was called Coda and the new one we call Go. Go is Grammarly’s platform layer, and anyone can build an agent that looks like Grammarly. Well, so we got four people together and we decided to change the name of the company and we had a lot of ideas about how to do it. We decided to take one of the
04:10 Speaker A
Sounds cool. No grammatical offense intended. I mean Superman sounds cool.
04:12 Speaker B
Well, I think so, it sounds cool. This is obviously a starting point. That’s it. Sounds cool. It must sound cool. Well, it’s broad, which I think is really important, so you can cover a lot of things. But actually our favorite is the word “people”. Uh, because if you think about it most people working on artificial intelligence are really worried about, uh, you know, that they’re trying to replace humans. We have opposite views. Grammarly has always been a product that we work with you on, but at the end of the day, you write the article, you submit the blog post, you’re the one submitting the paper. Well, that’s it, we’re here to help you. So I would say we spent the last 16 years turning people into super writers, and now we can spend the next few decades turning people into super humans.
