Wild: Turns out the first version of AI meeting assistant Fireflies didn’t even have any AI 😳

It was just the founder joining the calls, taking notes manually, and sending the summary back.

Every time a customer scheduled a “meeting with our AI,” they’d manually dial in, sit silently, and take notes by hand.

100+ meetings later, they’d proven people wanted it.

is now valued at $1 billion 🤯

This is Paul Graham’s “Do Things That Don’t Scale” taken to the extreme.

But it also raises a deeper question:

→ When does validation cross into deception?

Some call it genius.

Others call it fraud.

And in the AI era - where “automation” and “authenticity” collide - that line is razor-thin 🤖

Yes, Fireflies clarified: there was early AI tech behind the scenes.

The manual hustle was just the bridge to automation.

But the story still exposes a truth most founders avoid:

You can’t code your way to product-market fit.

You have to live it.

Bleed for it.

Be the product before you build it.

So my takeaway here is this:

→ Validation before automation.

→ Transparency before scale.

→ Trust before hype.

Maybe the real artificial intelligence was human grit all along.