How to Use AI to Survive (and Even Enjoy) Meetings | Sam Stephenson

Summary · 3 min read

Sam Stephenson is the co-founder of Granola, an AI meeting-notes app described as valued at $1.5 billion. He discusses how he uses Granola’s meeting briefs and recipes and how the team uses agents and design systems internally.

Stephenson says Granola is designed to lower stress in the rushed gaps between meetings, with pre-meeting briefs and post-meeting recipes helping users prepare and recover context. He says meeting notes can build a detailed company knowledge base, while access to shared material should respect privacy boundaries. He argues that Granola needs to work with other tools and agents, and that design systems and prototypes can help teams ship with quality. He also says teams need time to think about what to build and should keep improving a product until users get daily value, rather than treating version one as the finish line.

Minute by minute

1. 0:51

   Pre-meeting briefs reduce prep. Stephenson says he relies on pre-meeting briefs, especially when he is underprepared for a new candidate’s cultural interview. He says the team worked to make the brief show the information he needs before a meeting, and that he feels unprepared without it.

2. 1:41

   Post-meeting recipes restore context. Stephenson says an investor uses a recipe after meetings to review what they missed and what they could have asked. He says automatic notes cover his needs about 95% of the time, but he uses the most-clicked recipe to catch up when he zones out or multitasks.

3. 4:00

   Calm shapes the interface. Stephenson says Granola aims to make users feel calm during the rushed gaps between meetings. He says the team intentionally hides the transcript and removes distractions so users can focus on the person they are meeting, even though some users complain that the transcript is hard to find.

4. 7:53

   Meeting history builds company context. Stephenson says daily meeting notes accumulate detailed context about people, projects and the company, which can help identify work that is going off track or being overlooked. He uses that context to draft things such as presentations, job descriptions and feature-announcement posts.

5. 9:38

   Recipes turn meetings into drafts. Stephenson shows a team recipe for devil’s-advocate review and discusses prompts for brainstorming product ideas. He says conversations can also provide material for slide outlines, job descriptions and feature-announcement posts.

6. 10:52

   Shared notes preserve privacy boundaries. Stephenson says Granola cannot inspect reports’ private meetings, but team members can share notes in folders that others can search. He says shared sales calls can reveal trends. Some users use the API and MCP to create weekly reports; Yang says he uses Granola MCP with other sources to email himself a summary.

7. 13:53

   Agents can work beyond the UI. Stephenson says he initially resisted Granola being used outside its own interface, but enterprise customers need it to work with internal tools. He sees Granola supplying meeting context to workflows in other apps and says CEOs ask for an agent to handle recurring questions or let agents align before people meet.

8. 17:02

   AI work needs room for life. Stephenson says the team works hard but people need a life outside work, and that balance helps the work. He describes repeatedly checking coding-agent threads as addictive and exhausting. He also says Granola needs to help users manage meeting follow-ups without adding more stress.

9. 19:25

   Design systems keep shipping coherent. Stephenson says reusable tokens, components and markdown instructions for agents let more people ship code without making design a bottleneck. He says Figma now takes about 20% of his time, with teams moving between Figma and code prototypes depending on the problem. A rough in-app version of pre-meeting briefs appeared within a week to a week and a half so the team could dogfood it and see what needed work.

10. 26:11

    Nacho connects internal company tools. Stephenson says Nacho, Granola’s most-used internal tool, can access sources including Slack, Granola, Amplitude, logs and website analytics. Employees use it to investigate incidents and query data; it can also create Cursor agents that help turn an investigation into a code change. He says nobody owns the tool, which began as an engineer’s side project.

11. 30:55

    Build until users get daily value. Stephenson says making things is easy, but deciding what to make takes time and thought. He argues teams should keep improving past version one until users get daily value, rather than treating shipping as the goal. Granola ships early to internal users and small groups, but Stephenson says it holds a high bar before a broader release.

Published Oct 4, 2026.