Sam Stephenson

Sam Stephenson, co-founder of Granola, explains how a deliberately minimalist design philosophy helped turn the AI note-taking app into one of the fastest-growing products in the market. He shares why Granola focuses on doing one job exceptionally well, how note sharing drives growth, and what they’ve learned from surprising use cases, recipes, and constant user research. The conversation also covers privacy and consent, transcription and cost choices, team collaboration, and Sam’s hopes for AI products that create less screen time and more space for reflection. Google: Try Gemini’s image creation model, Nano Banana, to create original art in seconds with easy iterative prompting via Google AI Studio or the Gemini app. Sponsors: Roboflow: Roboflow gives robotics and embodied AI teams the visual AI infrastructure to turn messy, real-world perception into precise, reliable action. Learn how leading robotics companies solve bin picking and more at https://roboflow.com VCX: VCX, by Fundrise, is the public ticker for private tech, giving everyday investors access to high-growth private companies in AI, space, defense tech, and more. Learn how to invest at https://getvcx.com Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator that understands your entire workflow, from drafting and research to coding and complex problem-solving. Start tackling bigger problems with Claude and unlock Claude Pro’s full capabilities at https://claude.ai/tcr Tasklet: Build your own Cognitive Revolution monitoring agent in one click. Try it for free and use code COGREV for 50% off your first month at https://tasklet.ai CHAPTERS: (00:00) About the Episode (03:52) Special Sponsor (05:52) Granola growth and users (17:14) System2 goals and context (Part 1) (17:19) Sponsors: Roboflow | VCX (20:15) System2 goals and context (Part 2) (33:09) Costs, pricing, and transcription (Part 1) (33:22) Sponsors: Claude | Tasklet (37:12) Costs, pricing, and transcription (Part 2) (47:38) Meeting privacy and consent (54:13) Agents, memory, and simplicity (01:03:49) Recipes, use cases, and growth (01:11:52) AI product design culture (01:28:08) Future risks and vision (01:33:33) Episode Outro (01:36:59) Outro PRODUCED BY: https://aipodcast.ing

Sam Stephenson

Co-founder

Granola37signals

Adam and Wynn caught up with Sam Stephenson from 37Signals to talk about his his many open source projects and developing Basecamp Mobile. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Show Notes: Nathan Smith, friend of the show, creator of 960.gs, Adapt, Formalize, and featured in Episode 0.3.2 Sam Stephenson, programmer at 37signals, creator of massive amounts of open source. Pow is a zero-config Rack server for Mac OS X. Pow supports multiple rubies via RVM. Powder is a CLI for Pow. Prototype.js is a JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications. Sprockets is a Ruby library that preprocesses and concatenates JavaScript source files. Stitch stitches your CommonJS modules together for the browser ExecJS runs JavaScript code from Ruby. Josh Peek, Rubyist and GitHubber. Nack - Node.js adapter for Rack Sam loves CoffeeScript and hopes to never write JavaScript again. Sam debunks the FUD of debugging CoffeeScript. “Command-F is your friend.” Jeremy Ashkenas, creator of CoffeeScript ported his Underscore library as a demonstration. Sam weighs in on the micro framework movement and loves Zepto, Underscore, and Backbone. “We’re living in a WebKit world on mobile.” The goal of the Basecamp Mobile app was to “feel like a web app.” Basecamp Mobile was a team effort by Sam, Josh, and Jason Zimdars. “Responsive Web Design”, a term coined by Ethan Marcotte. Less Framework is an adaptive grid CSS framework for desktop and mobile. Cinco is the yet-to-be-released framework behind Basecamp Mobile built on Stitch, Backbone, CoffeeScript, and Zepto. Sprockets powers the new Rails 3.1 Asset Pipeline Jammit is an alternative to Sprockets. The Ruby Racer from Charles Lowell embeds the V8 Javascript Interpreter into Ruby The Git commit heard round the world. Baren generates images from Processing source. Jamie Dihiansan is the design talent behind the great Pow web site Pow uses docco for documentation. Rack-legacy allows you to serve up PHP from Pow. Be sure and snag Trevor Burnham’s excellent CoffeeScript book Josh and DHH are Sam’s programming heroes. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Sam Stephenson

Co-founder

Granola37signals