{"id":1258,"date":"2026-03-20T03:40:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T03:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/2026\/03\/20\/they-sold-ai-that-didnt-exist-then-built-a-1-billion-company\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T11:19:50","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T11:19:50","slug":"they-sold-ai-that-didnt-exist-then-built-a-1-billion-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/2026\/03\/20\/they-sold-ai-that-didnt-exist-then-built-a-1-billion-company\/","title":{"rendered":"They sold AI that didn&#8217;t exist.  Then built a $1 billion company."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>They sold AI that didn&#8217;t exist. <br \/>Then built a $1 billion company.<\/p>\n<p>In 2017, Sam and Krish had $0. <\/p>\n<p>Six failed startups behind them. <br \/>Backs against the wall in San Francisco.<\/p>\n<p>They had an idea &#8211; an AI that joins meetings and takes notes.<\/p>\n<p>People loved it.<\/p>\n<p>One problem. The AI didn&#8217;t exist.<\/p>\n<p>So they became the AI.<\/p>\n<p>Logged in silently as &#8220;Fred from Fireflies.&#8221; <br \/>Took notes by hand. <br \/>Sent the summary 10 minutes later. <br \/>$100\/month. 100+ meetings. <br \/>Zero technology.<\/p>\n<p>But here&#8217;s what they actually built in those 100 meetings .. Certainty.<\/p>\n<p>They knew the pain was real before writing a single line of code.<\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\" href=\"http:\/\/Fireflies.ai\"><strong>Fireflies.ai<\/strong><\/a> is now valued at $1 billion.<\/p>\n<p>My take after starting from zero five times:<\/p>\n<p>Most founders build first. Validate later.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s backwards.<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t fall in love with the technology. <\/p>\n<p>Fall in love with the problem. <\/p>\n<p>The product is just the delivery mechanism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>They sold AI that didn&#8217;t exist. Then built a $1 billion company. In 2017, Sam and Krish had $0. Six&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linkedin-posts","wpcat-18-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1258"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1269,"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258\/revisions\/1269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakamsani.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}