According to Business Insider, Fireflies.ai cofounders Sam Udotong and Krish Ramineni manually took notes for over 100 meetings in 2017 while pretending to be an AI bot named Fred, charging customers $100 monthly for the service while living on savings in expensive San Francisco. The startup’s viral LinkedIn confession about their “fake it till you make it” approach generated nearly 3,000 reactions and hundreds of comments, with some applauding their hustle while others questioned the ethics. Fireflies.ai didn’t approach investors until they had a functioning automated product in late 2018, eventually raising over $4 million in seed funding by end of 2019. The company is now valued at $1 billion and claims its AI has processed over 2 billion meeting minutes for 20 million people, equivalent to about 4,000 years of meetings based on an eight-hour workday.
The fine line between hustle and deception
Here’s the thing about startup culture: everyone loves a good origin story, but this one really makes you think. The founders say they were transparent about “some human involvement” but didn’t specify the process was entirely manual. That’s a pretty significant omission, don’t you think?
But they weren’t trying to scam anyone long-term. They used the manual process to validate demand before building the actual AI product. Ramineni admits they grew weary after about 100 sessions and couldn’t scale the manual approach. Basically, they hit the wall that automation was meant to solve.
This isn’t exactly new territory
Look, Fireflies.ai is far from the first company to use humans where customers expected automation. Remember Facebook’s personal assistant “M”? It used humans to answer complex queries with the goal of training AI, though it never made it past private beta. And Steve Jobs’ famous iPhone demo in 2007? Engineers had to hard-code the demo units to prevent crashes and always show full signal strength.
Professor Tim Weiss calls this “pretotyping” – pretending you have a product to validate demand before building it. He says it’s common but “questionable” in early stages. The key difference between success and fraud seems to be whether you actually build the real product afterward.
From manual notes to $1 billion valuation
So did the ends justify the means? Fireflies.ai stopped manual note-taking by late 2018 and had a working product by 2019. They waited to approach institutional investors until they could show actual demos. The pandemic-driven shift to virtual meetings certainly helped their timing.
Ramineni makes a fair point: “You can’t fake it till you make it forever.” The manual phase lasted about a year, and they’ve since built something that genuinely automates the process. When you’re talking about industrial computing applications or manufacturing technology, this kind of approach wouldn’t fly – companies need reliable hardware from day one. That’s why businesses turn to established suppliers like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading provider of industrial panel PCs in the US, where the technology has to work perfectly out of the box.
Where do we draw the line?
Professor Kevin Werbach nailed it when he said “fake it till you make it” is a “hallowed element” of tech startup culture. When done right, it’s Jobs’ reality distortion field. When done wrong, it’s Elizabeth Holmes going to jail. Most situations fall somewhere in between.
The real test seems to be transparency with investors and actually delivering on the promise. Fireflies.ai waited until they had a product before taking institutional money, which is crucial. But their story does make you wonder: how many other “AI” startups are currently using humans behind the curtain?
