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Fireflies.ai
Notes That Write Themselves While You Pretend to Pay Attention
Product Designer, 2017-2020
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Building the Future of Meetings from the Ground Up
Teams are drowning in meetings and drowning in notes nobody reads. Manually logging everything wastes hours every week. Most tools expect you to listen, transcribe, and remember everything all at once. Nobody wins. Important decisions and customer intel slip through the cracks, and productivity tanks.
We knew there had to be a better way, give teams their time and focus back, by turning conversations into actual usable data.
Me, Krish, Sam, and a Crew of 7
How did this start? Two friends at MIT and UPenn realized every important idea, deal, and inside joke got lost in calls. Instead of letting it all vanish into the aether, they built Fireflies: a bot that actually listens, remembers, and never asks for a bathroom break.
Back in 2016 it was just Krish (CEO), Sam (CTO), myself (Lead Product Designer), and five other teammates. No fancy playbook, no reference platform — it was raw invention driven by vision and sheer will.
We built Fireflies AI from scratch, neck and neck, day and night. Every feature, every pixel, and every design decision was made in intense collaboration — often burning the midnight oil to push through ambiguity and unknowns.
We invented the user experience as we went — with no roadmap but passion and user research as our guides.
Now? Over 20 million people in 500,000 companies trust Fred (our pink mascot) to catch every "wait, what did they just say?"
My Role: The Design Engine
Ran deep user research and crafted real personas reflecting actual team workflows
Mapped authentic conversations instead of idealized flows
Defined the AI product roadmap and feature scope, adjusting constantly to real-time feedback and technical breakthroughs
Created the playful and intuitive "no training needed" interface
Designed Fred, the lovable Fireflies mascot who still leads the brand today
Make Meetings Effortless and Actually Useful
Cut the Noise, Keep the Gold
Teams were wasting hours on manual note-taking, scrambling to find critical info after meetings, and drowning in unsearchable mountains of text. Most tools expected users to listen, record, remember, and jot all at once—a recipe for lost context and tanked productivity. The result? Key insights slipped through the cracks, and everyone paid the price.
Meetings That Actually Work for You
We built Fireflies AI to replace that tedious note-taking nightmare with automatic, jaw-droppingly accurate transcription and lightning-fast search. Designed to plug into sales, marketing, recruiting, and support workflows, Fireflies captures, organizes, and shares every word so teams can focus on action, not admin.
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The Real Pain & The Real Fix
During lean UX research, users told us they’re way more comfortable with recordings when everyone can access the finished transcription. We built Fireflies specifically so marketing, sales, support, and recruiting people spend less time chasing lost info and more time on high-value leads.
How We Crafted Fireflies For Real Productivity
The magic? Fireflies lets users instantly leverage the most valuable, but previously lost, info from calls and meetings, no more extra searching, no more missed clues.
And unlike most products, our success isn’t measured by time spent in the app, but by time saved.
Customer Insights Shaping the Product
If you want your team to actually get the gold out of conversations without turning meetings into another task, Fireflies is the hook and it works because we listened to what users really needed.
Hook
Engagement periods are longer when notes are easy to access
Empathy
Phone calls are still king—most-used channel even now
Gold
The biggest risk is losing data and time during meetings, especially when actions and decisions go unrecorded
Design That Actually Move the Needle
We Designed Integration To Be Invisible
We made Fireflies so easy, it feels invisible.
It jumps into Zoom, Meet, Teams, and 50+ other apps, no plugins, no setup war, just instant sync.
Why? Because real teams don’t have time for onboarding chaos.
Decision: One-tap invite from calendar or meeting link, with passive presence and zero modal interruptions.
Rationale: Onboarding friction kills trust. Invisible entry respects flow and reduces error states.
Outcome: Higher first-meeting completion and fewer “how do I add this?” support pings.
An AI Interface Before Patterns Existed
Back in 2016-17, we created a real AI interface before most people even knew what AI looked like.
Fireflies was ahead of its time, delivering live, speaker-aware, ultra-accurate transcription when others were still catching up.
Decision: Real-time transcript with progressive confidence tinting, speaker chips, and inline correction.
Rationale: 2016-17 had no reference UI. We used visual affordances to signal reliability while making fixes delightful, not punitive.
Outcome: Fewer post-call edits, higher trust in automation, faster path to share.
Tagging Turns Boring Calls Into Playlists
Why pin, comment, and tag live? Because in a dull call, you gotta tell your teammate exactly where the juice is when you leave your chair. We designed tagging to make calls interactive and action-driven, so nobody hunts blindly for key moments later.
Decision: Timestamp pins, quick-reaction tokens, and @mentions that jump to the exact second.
Rationale: Boring calls still have hot moments. Tagging had to feel playful and zero-lift so teammates know exactly what to review.
Outcome: Skips skyrocketed to insights. Hand-offs became links, not paragraphs.
Sharing Built Like a Highlight Reel
Fireflies lets you send out the full transcript or just the golden nuggets instantly, whether to your boss, your team, or your inbox. We're in the business of helping you dodge the “listen to a full 60-minute call for one answer” trap. Time saved is money earned.
Decision: Clip-to-share, auto-summarized snippets, and role-based access that defaults to the room.
Rationale: People don’t read transcripts; they scan moments. Short, permission-aware shares reduce rework and context loss.
Outcome: Faster decisions, fewer “can you send notes?” loops, cleaner audit trails.
Meet Fred, The Brand That Stole Everyone's Heart
Built in Illustrator, Powered by Fine Arts
I designed both Fred and the Fireflies logo in Illustrator, pulling from my Fine Arts background.
"Fred isn't just cute—he's a teammate who shows up, gets the job done, and somehow makes boring calls less painful. The logo? Clean, geometric, unforgettable." - VC from Khosla Ventures
Election Time (Where Real Candidates Win)
I ran a social media vote. Team weighed in. Designs got roasted, refined, and voted again. The winners? They became the brand.
When your team votes for Fred, he stops being a mascot and becomes theirs and that ownership is everything.
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System Design Choices That Scale
Started in XD for speed, but as Fireflies grew, we migrated to Figma for real scalability. Figma's variants and live libraries meant design updates hit every file instantly, no sync lag.
Tokenized Grammar and Motion Rules
Speaker chips, timestamps, tags built once and reused everywhere. Motion semantics at 120-160ms signal state changes without stealing focus. Consistency by default, at scale.
Component Variants and Smart Color
Figma's nesting beat XD's rigid states. Size, color, interaction, density all in one. Passive transcripts stay neutral gray. User actions pop with color and motion. Earn attention, don't demand it.
Accessibility from the Start without any baiting
WCAG AA compliance baked in. High-contrast palettes, semantic color beyond decoration, keyboard navigation first. Monospace for data, humanist sans for narrative so users parse "signal vs. story" instantly.
Why This Worked
All In, Hands On
This was never a “design and pass off” gig. I was shoulder-to-shoulder with Krish and Sam crafting and coding product miracles. Every moment involved raw grit and laser focus.
Built for Humans, Not Robots
Real feedback every week shaped every iteration. The focus was ruthless simplicity and clarity so anyone could use it instantly.
Collaboration Without Friction
The tools help teams actually work together—pin, highlight, search, share without headaches.
Numbers That Matter
Started with Krish, Sam, and me burning midnight oil. Now? 20 million people rely on Fireflies to make meetings matter. That's not a coincidence, that's what happens when you get the design right from day one.
How it looks like ?
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20M
7 Founders to 20 Million Users
Started with Krish, Sam, and me burning midnight oil. Now? 20 million people rely on Fireflies to make meetings matter.
18x
Growth in 18 Months
Viral growth isn't luck—it's proof the product actually works. Every rep using Fireflies told three more. Every meeting saved became word of mouth.
500,000+
500K Companies take notes
From scrappy startups to enterprises, teams everywhere ditched the manual note grind. Fireflies became the default move for teams who refused to lose another call.
300M+
Hours Reclaimed Every Year
Real teams, real time saved. The biggest win? They stopped asking "how do we take better notes" and started asking "why aren't we using Fireflies?"
Note: Hour savings estimated based on 20M users, 2-3 meetings weekly, 10-15 minutes saved per meeting through automated transcription.
What I Took Away
"Less is more"
Building Fireflies with Krish and Sam taught me that obsessing over simplicity is harder than adding features. Every design choice was a trade-off between power and ease, and users always won.
Invisible Design Wins
Invisible design is the goal. If people forget they're using Fireflies and just live in their meetings, that's the win. No manual, no complaints, no friction, but just results.
Time Back is the Product
Teams don't want better tools. They want their time back. When you focus on that first, the product design, the growth, the impact... it all follows.