This video summarizes a conversation on The Design VC between host Andy Budd and Sam Stevenson, co-founder of the AI notes app Granola. Sam shares an in-depth account of how Granola carved out its position in a fiercely competitive AI notes market and carried out a bold rebrand. He covers the origins of the idea, what competitors missed, and the product and UX strategies that set Granola apart. He also explains the challenges of raising funding without a technical co-founder, the key decisions made while finding product–market fit—including the decision to pull back a real-time AI notes feature—and what led the team to rebrand a product that users already loved. The conversation offers practical advice on product, fundraising, and growth for early-stage founders and designers.

1. Welcome to The Design VC 🎙️

Andy Budd, host of The Design VC, invites listeners into a show that explores the role of design in the startup world—where design meets business and creativity meets capital. This week's guest is Sam Stevenson, co-founder of Granola, one of the UK's hottest startups. Andy expresses genuine excitement about Sam's appearance, noting that Granola is in a period of explosive growth.

"Granola is one of the hottest startups in the UK. I'm really looking forward to this."

Sam Stevenson describes Granola as "an AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings"—familiar in feel to a traditional notes app, but with the ability to listen to and transcribe conversations, answer questions about what was discussed, enrich the notes you write with more useful summaries, and accumulate a growing body of knowledge about your meetings over time. Andy, a dedicated Granola user himself, praises the product for how he uses it in his coaching and advisory work—summarizing sessions and building personal templates. He specifically recalls a dinner with about ten people where Granola captured the conversation beautifully, expressing admiration for its speaker separation and audio quality.

2. How Granola Began: From a Personal Project to a Co-Founded Startup 🚀

Sam Stevenson recounts how the idea for Granola came about. At a previous job, he worked as the sole designer at an early-stage notes app company, and he found it deeply satisfying how much notes apps embed themselves in users' lives. After leaving that job, he wanted to build something on his own while improving his engineering skills. He had been curious about coding since his teens—learning HTML, CSS, and more—and during his freelancing years he found himself devoting spare time to personal projects, including React-based side projects. The challenge he set himself was to build "a reliable app he could use every day," and after several months of focused work he created his own personal notes app—one he still uses by himself today.

"If you build a notes app well, it seeps very deeply into your life and you rely on it for a huge number of things."

A few months later, Sam met his current co-founder Chris. Chris was actively looking for a co-founder and came across Sam through a community of people interested in notes apps. The two spent a lot of time together as friends, both figuring out their next moves. At the time, Chris was deeply interested in GPT-3 (before ChatGPT launched), while Sam was immersed in notes app development.

"Chris was really into GPT-3 at the time, and I was building a notes app."

They were drawn to the idea that these large language models would be the magical force transforming all everyday software, and that nobody had yet figured out how humans would ergonomically interact with this technology. They found exploring that problem deeply compelling, and while it took time to arrive at the current form of the product—a meeting notes app—this idea was Granola's starting point.

3. Differentiating in a Crowded Market: Granola's Strategy 🎯

Andy points out that at the time, many meeting summary apps already existed—most of them joined calls as a participant, captured recordings in the background, and sent transcripts via email. Granola, however, started as a notes app to which AI was added, giving it a different shape from its competitors.

Sam says Granola ultimately aimed to build "the future interface for doing knowledge work." While the team hesitated to enter the competitive meeting notes space, a few things gave them conviction.

1. Solving a genuine pain point: Through conversations with people, they found that remembering and acting on commitments made in meetings was still a major source of pain—even for people already using meeting summary tools. Granola had the potential to be a genuine painkiller, not just a vitamin.
2. The importance of context for AI: They recognized that how well AI performs depends on how much context it has about a user's life, and that for most people, meetings and conversations take up a large portion of the day. For AI to succeed in a work environment, understanding meeting content would be essential.

"AI is only as good as the context and life situation you provide it. Most people fill a large part of their day with meetings and conversations."

Early on, differentiating from other meeting summary apps and standing out was difficult—particularly during fundraising. The team had a different product vision, but convincing others was not easy.

4. A Challenging Fundraising Journey: Proving the Value of Product and Design 💸

Andy wonders what Granola's early fundraising process looked like. He suspects VCs—given the number of similar products already on the market—would not have been quick to embrace Granola. Sam acknowledges that fundraising was entirely new to him; co-founder Chris had some prior experience from running his previous company, Socratic, but for Sam it was a steep learning curve.

Through the process, they realized that for investors to believe in Granola's value, they had to accept a few key premises.

1. That AI will transform all productivity tools: Most people already agreed on this at the time.
2. That the new interface problem remained unsolved: Drawing on Chris's product background and Sam's design background, they argued that "there is an interface and design problem nobody has solved yet, and product people and designers are best placed to solve it."

"AI will change every work tool, and this interface problem hasn't been solved yet. And the right people to solve it are product people and designers."

Andy notes that VCs typically look for AI engineers, marketers, and sales people, and would likely question what product people and designers bring to the table. Sam admits that many VCs rejected them for exactly that reason.

Before fundraising, the Granola team spent about two months doing extensive user interviews and building prototypes. That process gave them a few firm beliefs:

• The limits of existing meeting summary tools: Existing tools were not useful enough for their users. Many people said, "I installed this but never look at it—it's not that helpful."
• The power of pen and paper: Even when companies encouraged staff to use meeting summary tools, people still kept a notepad and pen beside them to capture what mattered most. This was evidence that existing tools were missing what users cared about most.

Andy mentions the social awkwardness of having a bot join a meeting—noting that many people found bots disruptive, or even complained about them being hard to remove, like malware. Granola doesn't use that model, so it doesn't carry that awkwardness. Sam says Granola prioritized a more naturally integrated product experience over growth-hacking tactics; they may have sacrificed faster growth, but they stayed true to their values.

Sam mentions that Chris had early conversations with around 30 investors, though he doesn't know exactly how much pitching was done overall. He recalls fundraising as "a strange dance of being authentic while also presenting a grand vision." You have to paint an optimistic picture of the future, yet reality is always complicated—and he admits honestly that believing in himself and convincing investors was hard.

VCs receive thousands of pitches each year but invest in very few, making fundraising extremely difficult. Despite those odds, Granola managed to convince a handful of investors to begin the journey with them.

5. After Investment: Team Building and Product Development 👷‍♀️

The six months after securing investment marked Granola's true beginning. Where before it had been two co-founders crafting an idea and a story, the company now became real—incorporating, setting up an office, facing reality head-on.

The first order of business was finding a great engineer. Sam, who was technically very limited at the time, succeeded in bringing on an excellent engineer named Andre. Over the following year, the work was a continuous loop: finding users, persuading them to try the product, watching how they used it, collecting feedback, and iterating relentlessly.

"It was a constant cycle of finding users, getting them to use our product, watching how they used it, analyzing that, getting feedback, and improving the product."

Granola incorporated in March 2023 and launched the product in May 2024. During the more-than-a-year-long incubation period, they occasionally received pressure from investors to launch sooner—which turned out to be a positive force. Sam and Chris had a tendency to want the product to be perfect, but that pressure helped them ship earlier.

During fundraising, they had emphasized to investors: "If you believe we are the right people to solve this problem, understand that building a great product and designing it is not a predictable linear process—we cannot tell you how long it will take to arrive at the right solution." Lightseed's Mike, Granola's lead investor, was fully supportive of this approach.

6. MVP vs. Perfectionism 🤹‍♀️

Andy notes that people with a product or design mindset tend to want to ship high-quality products, but in a fast-moving market, getting an MVP out quickly matters. The Granola team had to find balance in that tension.

Advice from one of their early angel investors proved invaluable. He told them that "people treat a launch as a big event, but a launch is really just the process of getting users and learning how to improve the product"—and that you don't need a big splash; getting five friends to use it and collecting feedback counts as "launching."

That mindset allowed Granola to operate from very early on in a bare-bones state. For example:

• Only the laptop speaker worked—headphones were not supported 🎧
• There was no database, so notes had to be manually copied and saved 💾
• There was no authentication or security 🚫

Early users were friends, so they tolerated those inconveniences. But this approach meant the team could focus on the hardest problem—finding the right interface—while leaving authentication, infrastructure, and security to be solved later.

7. Organic Growth and Product–Market Fit 📈

Andy jokes that Granola must have acquired millions of customers the moment it launched, then makes the serious point that many founders believe customers will come automatically once a product exists—but reality is often a cold, quiet period of struggling to find anyone beyond friends and investors.

Sam says Granola's launch succeeded thanks to a "happy accident." During the closed beta, many investors and founder friends used the product, and on launch day the team asked them to tweet about it. Because these people had influential followings, Granola was able to generate significant attention and acquire early customers from day one—a small number compared to today's scale, but something the team felt proud of.

After launch, Granola didn't grow explosively, but experienced steady and powerful organic word-of-mouth spread. Sam admits this actually delayed his recognition of product–market fit by a few months.

"The product kept spreading organically through word of mouth, and we realized product–market fit a few months later than we expected."

In fact, Granola had likely already achieved product–market fit before launch. They shipped after securing 100 users who relied on the product heavily and used it every day. Though a small group, their behavior patterns signaled that the product would succeed at greater scale. The fact that investors themselves were actively using Granola in meetings suggested the product had reached a very high level of product–market fit.

8. The Paradox of Live Notes: A Courageous Withdrawal ❌

One of the most interesting product decisions in Granola's history was pulling back the Live Notes feature. Andy recalls thinking that live notes would make Granola even better, and was curious to learn that Sam had introduced the feature and then removed it.

Sam admits the team spent the first six months obsessing over live notes. The idea of AI writing notes in real time during a meeting "felt very sci-fi and obvious." They tried various interfaces:

• Auto-completing notes when you press Tab, like GitHub Copilot
• Pressing the spacebar whenever something interesting was said
• A split view where the user typed on one side and the AI interpreted on the other

Despite countless attempts, they ultimately concluded the feature simply didn't work. The fundamental problem was:

"We want to help users focus more on the meeting, maintain eye contact with the other person, and spend more time understanding what's being said. But if AI is writing the notes, the user has to keep checking whether the AI is getting it right. That's enormously distracting."

When users write notes themselves, their eyes can be elsewhere while their fingers type—but when AI writes the notes, users feel compelled to monitor the AI's output, which pulls them out of the conversation. Andy agreed that live notes would undermine meeting presence, and praised Sam's decision to abandon one of the product's original core features as "a courageous call."

9. The Power of the Name "Granola": A Rebranding Story ✨

Andy asks about the name "Granola." He wonders whether the product would have succeeded under a name like "Chatty Notes" or "Note Taker Pro," and what impact the name has had on branding and positioning.

Sam says the name Granola "helped the company enormously." It was actually a throwaway placeholder early on, but it fit the product remarkably well. Granola should feel like a comfortable, friendly companion that accompanies you throughout the day. And because it handles sensitive data, users need to trust it without worrying about security.

"The lightness, the positivity, the playfulness-without-going-too-far of the name itself has been a huge help to us."

"Granola" is friendly, approachable, and easy to remember. Andy observes that many people try to name products with complex names full of deep meaning, and that Granola's simplicity is its strength.

Granola recently completed a rebrand. Andy asks whether Sam felt nervous about changing the design of an already-beloved product—referencing the backlash Deliveroo faced after its rebrand—and how Sam felt in the days after pulling the trigger.

Sam says it had only been a few days since the rebrand went live, and by that point he had been convinced it was "the right call" for long enough that criticism didn't shake him. He had been thinking about it for a long time, and the previous brand was something he and a few friends had cobbled together on the fly whenever the website or app icon needed updating—with no real system behind it.

"Everything in the old brand was something I or a few friends had hastily put together whenever we needed a website or an app icon."

As the need for marketing and storytelling grew, the old brand made it increasingly hard for Granola to show up in a distinctly "Granola" way across different platforms. The team debated whether to extend the existing design into a proper system or start entirely fresh.

Ultimately Sam concluded that "the Granola brand is deeply loved—and that love comes from the product experience—but the existing visuals were too generic and indistinguishable from any other SaaS company."

"The Granola brand is genuinely loved, and I knew that before the rebrand and feel it even more now. And much of that love comes from the Granola product experience—from how it feels to use Granola."

The team believed a bold rebrand could produce something more distinctive, more fun, and more expressive, and they were confident it would be worth it in the long run.

Andy emphasizes that the best rebrands aren't driven by boredom—they happen strategically when the existing brand "can no longer do its job." In Granola's case, the main purpose of the rebrand was to build a flexible system and visual language that could grow in a new direction.

Sam notes that as the first marketers joined and Instagram advertising began, a consistent brand expression became critical. Previously, because he handled all design himself, a degree of consistency was naturally maintained. Now, the team needed a clear brand system that could give smart, creative people direction and the freedom to work within it.

Granola partnered with the well-known agency Ragged Edge for the rebrand. Sam had deliberated at length over whether to handle it internally, work with a freelancer, or engage an external agency—but he didn't want Granola to miss the opportunity to become "a truly iconic and beloved brand." He judged that internal resources alone couldn't bring sufficient firepower, and that having more than ten designers, copywriters, and other specialists spend several months thinking deeply about the Granola brand would produce better results. He describes the collaboration with Ragged Edge as "outstanding" and says he would strongly recommend them to other founders.

10. The Challenges of Scaling: Team Growth and Shifting Leadership 👥

Granola has grown to a team of around 50 people. Andy—noting that Sam describes the current size as "still not enough" and says he "feels his own inadequacy"—asks what it has been like to go from two people at the start to managing a team of fifty.

Sam says personally he is on "an enormously steep learning curve" and that he always feels like he is "a little behind where he needs to be." He had previously worked as an individual contributor designer and had never managed a team of more than ten people or made a hire, so everything is new. Fortunately, co-founder Chris and the second engineer—now the CTO—have experience scaling teams, which has been invaluable.

"It's an enormously steep learning curve where you always feel you're a little behind where you need to be."

Sam explains that his role is constantly changing—and he has to recognize that who he needs to be a few months from now is different from who he is today. He describes the pattern: "You feel like you're doing well at everything, then gradually realize you're floundering, and eventually reach a moment where you have to stop and ask 'what's going wrong?'" Most of the time, the answer is that he's trying to do too many things at once.

Andy empathizes—founders have to do everything themselves early on, but as the company grows, specific roles like HR, operations, and product management need dedicated hires. Sam says his responsibilities shift fundamentally every four to five months, and he feels he is navigating it well.

Sam's advice to other founders: "Hire for areas outside product, engineering, and design—like operations—sooner than you think you need to." The operations hires he made late turned out to handle things the core team was doing "extremely badly," saving everyone enormous amounts of time.

Andy wholeheartedly agrees, adding that designer and product founders tend to want to hire specialists in sales, marketing, operations, and HR—areas they don't enjoy—but that you can only find the right person for a role after you've done it yourself and gotten it to about 80% competency.

11. Advice for Designer-Founders: Where Design Process Meets Reality 💡

Andy asks Sam—as a designer-turned-founder—what advice he would give young designers considering starting a company, and whether there are areas where a design background is a particularly strong fit for founding.

Sam says it depends on what kind of company you want to build, but for a company like Granola, the most important thing early on is "building a great product that people genuinely want to use."

"Most of the early process of starting a company is the same as the design process. They are fundamentally the same thing."

Design is about understanding users' problems and finding the right form for a product to solve them—which is essentially identical to the early startup process. Sam also emphasizes that today, designers can build products themselves without learning a tremendous amount of extra skills, making it an incredibly good time for designers to start companies.

Sam says building Granola gave him an intense realization he had never experienced in other design work: when a product is ignored by users, "there is nowhere to hide." The feedback loop is "intense, powerful, and brutal."

"When you build a product from scratch and nobody likes what you're making, there's nowhere to hide. It's brutal. People just don't use it."

In previous jobs, working in more established teams had insulated him somewhat from that pain. At Granola, he learns instantly how his product performs in the real world—if it's good, it succeeds; if it isn't, the lesson comes fast. That's hard, but it's also the most compelling part.

Andy agrees that a designer's ability to understand user needs, build empathy, and differentiate through UX is vital. But he also flags the risk that a designer might fixate on the wrong things, or become dogmatic—insisting "this is absolutely the right thing for users"—and asks Sam whether there were moments as a founder where he had to take a different path than he would have as a designer.

Sam says without co-founder Chris, Granola would not be what it is today. On the product side, Chris played the role of constantly forcing the team to honestly confront "what is the real problem people have, and are we actually solving it?" Early on, whether meeting notes were genuinely useful after the fact was the core question, and the answer depended not on pixel positions on screen but on "good prompts."

"My brain is programmed to obsess over pixels. And I still have to constantly pull myself back to thinking about the actual problem."

Sam's brain is wired to fixate on pixels, but Chris kept him anchored to real-world problems. Andy observes that the pairing of a business-oriented person and a user-oriented person creates balance, and calls the Sam-and-Chris combination "a really good one."

12. AI and the Changing Design Process 🤖

Andy is curious how deeply AI and prompting have embedded themselves in Granola's design and engineering process—whether Figma is still the primary tool, or whether new roles like AI designer have emerged, as in the case of Intercom's Des.

Sam says he spends about a third of his time on design, of which 70% happens in code-based tools like Cursor or Rawcode, and 30% in Figma. Other designers on the team also use different tools depending on the nature of the problem.

For example, one designer does almost all new feature work exclusively through code-based prototypes—Cloak Code, Cursor, and similar—without touching Figma. Another designer, when facing complex systems design problems, finds it important to map everything out on a canvas and understand how pieces connect, so they lean on Figma.

"We now have so many more tools available to us. Making a pixel-perfect mockup in Figma is a waste of time in most cases."

Sam describes using Figma now more like a whiteboard—using it during the expansive, exploratory phase of the design process, while the converging phase (final implementation) happens entirely in code.

13. Closing: Granola's Future and Advice for Founders 🌟

Sam Stevenson invites anyone curious about Granola to sign up for the beta channel and join the community to stay up to date. He says he doesn't actively maintain personal social channels—all his time and energy goes into Granola.

Andy expresses admiration for Sam's complete focus on Granola and his refusal to waste time on social media, and closes by saying the conversation has been a genuine pleasure.

Conclusion 🚀

Granola's success story is a compelling illustration of how a deep understanding of user problems, a differentiated product vision, and bold product decisions can carry a startup to success in a fiercely competitive AI notes market. Sam Stevenson maintained a strong designer's commitment to product quality while finding balance through market feedback, investor pressure, and the grounding perspective of his co-founder. The withdrawal of the live notes feature and the strategic approach to branding reveal a philosophy that goes beyond technical advantage—a fundamentally human-centered set of values at Granola's core. Now at fifty people, Granola continues to pursue growth by adapting to the shifting demands of leadership at every new stage and actively leveraging outside expertise. It is a story that offers valuable insight and inspiration for every early-stage founder and designer.