William (Bill) Ferrell

Co-created Google Hangouts, Co-created an AdWords Keyword type. Likes to find and build things that grow.

LinkedIn

Jared Kopf

Hard things: startups (4x), incubators (2x). Made retargeting commonplace. Hired (5x). "Choosing greatness."

LinkedIn

We are a for-profit company that aims to make valuable AI products for consumers and businesses that are useful, reliable and personal. Behind the company, we are people.

Bill and Jared set out to win as partners, and began our journey in product discovery. Through our work, we stumbled across a big problem (weekly occurring) for a large population (500M that have conversations through a device)... "What to do when you know something you've heard is good, but you're not recording it?"

Playback is the result of ➀ figuring out what people wanted (taking notes effortlessly), ➁ figuring out the solution (turn AI into a time machine for conversations) and how to build it (so they could actually reach into the past to grab something good), and ➂ realizing we were the people to build.

So much of building a new thing is philosophical. We believe that putting the control over AI directly into the hands of the end user, in line with today's voice assistants, can solve a bigger problem than we stumbled across: enhancing an indivdual's natural listening, talking, and thinking abilities, with a real-time companion. We aim for Playback to embody this ethos, to be more than reliable software for capturing a conversation, or just a highlight.

Today there are dozens of AI note-takers that can be added to team huddles and customer meetings, and several enterprise-level sales and revenue optimization AIs for listening into calls. Playback is different. No other tool works if they don't get added to meetings or calls. They are focused on team work and sales, so, they are kind of expensive and work better for big businesses. Also, they feel different. As a product, Playback only has the end user, in our mind, at our heart. We are building our company to respond to what we hear, and learn and discover from users. We're thrilled with every new sign up and we can't wait to see what may emerge from all of us (you too!) creating this together. Let's make it fun.