Building a company is rarely (if ever) a straightforward journey. Jennifer Smith, CEO of Scribe, knows this better than most. In the latest episode of Barrchives, Jennifer shared insights on how she navigated the messy, nonlinear process of finding product-market fit, her philosophy on blending human expertise with AI, and what it takes to build a company that truly transforms how people work.
Here are some moments from the conversation with Jennifer:
”Find the thing about yourself you're always apologizing for, and then find a way to get paid for it… I think if you look at people who are at the top of their craft, they found a way to take something spiky about them and turned it into something productive.”
”I had investors tell me, ‘You’re throwing the company away.’ I had to politely say, ‘I have different information than you do. I’m talking to users, and you’re not… We literally packaged (our product) up, released it into the world, and saw if people cared...they sent us long notes, almost essays, about what they wanted to see.”
"Scribe is solving a problem that’s hiding in plain sight… A day a week of your time is a really significant amount to waste asking and answering questions. What if we could make that automatic?”
”AI is only as good as what it’s seen. Work is team-specific and requires human context for AI to truly assist… The right workflows will involve AI taking over parts, but humans will still have checks and balances, especially in mission-critical workflows.”
”If you want to do something very intensely and see rapid progress, you have to choose to live your life that way… Time is your biggest enemy in a fast-growing startup. Acting with extreme urgency is how you survive.”
”AI is going to become a bigger part of people’s lives as we figure out workflows and reduce the friction of knowledge sharing… Workplace knowledge sharing through oral tradition or osmosis will become obsolete in five years.”
“We have, I think, a pretty interesting data set in understanding how you work, how your team works, how your company works, the way that you use your tools, and the right configuration to create value there. And so we got really curious about the question of, well, what happens when we're able to take that insight and that data?”
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