Brought to you by Granola
During my interview with the founder of Duolingo Luis von Ahn I asked a question I thought had an obvious answer.
How much more productive is your company with AI compared to a year ago?
Luis, whose company is valued at $16 billion, said: "I don't know of any larger company that has seen a 10x speedup."
I was not expecting that. This is the same company that released 148 language courses in one year (the first 100 took 12 years). Two people with no engineering background built a chess course from scratch using AI, and it became Duolingo's fastest-growing product ever.
Where's the bottleneck then?
"Most engineers don't spend eight hours a day coding. They have to go to meetings. There's a part of it you just cannot speed up."
The biggest time drain in my team was never the work itself but the coordination around the work.
We have people in different cities, different time zones, sometimes different continents on the same call. By the time I finish my last meeting of the day, context from the first one has already drifted. My COO remembers one version of what we agreed on, my channel producer remembers another, and I'm somewhere in between.
Luis actually solved a version of this at Duolingo. His product managers stopped bringing him written proposals, they now show up with prototypes they built using AI.
Because a written doc can't show you whether something works. You have to see it, interact with it, react in real time. He changed the format of how decisions get made, and it made everything faster.
That got me thinking: I can't change the number of calls I'm on. But I can change what happens to the information after those calls end.
This is actually why I started using Granola.
You know that feeling when you leave a meeting and immediately forget half of what you agreed to? When you're back-to-back all day, there's just no time to process or write the follow-up before the next call starts.
Granola helps you become the person who actually does what they said they'd do.
You jot down notes during the meeting the way you normally would, quick bullets, nothing formal. Granola transcribes your computer's audio in the background and turns those notes into structured summaries with actual next steps. No bots joining your call. No one else in the meeting sees a thing. (I do let people know when I'm transcribing, which takes two seconds.)
After the call, you can share your notes with the team so everyone's aligned. Or chat with Granola to pull out exactly what you need to do next without re-reading the whole thing.
Another thing that is super helpful is Recipes — pre-made prompts you can use before, during, or after a call. I use one to draft follow-up emails straight from my notes. "Write a recap for my sales manager Monica about what we decided." Done in 15 seconds.
And if you use Claude or ChatGPT for work, Granola connects to both through MCP so your meeting context flows into your AI workflows automatically.
No more "wait, what did we decide?" moments. No more dropping the ball because you had three calls in a row and couldn't keep track.
Works across Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Slack, and even in-person conversations on your phone.
Download Granola and try it on your next meeting. Free month with the code MARINA.
Back to Luis.
Duolingo's stock dropped 82% after he announced a shift in strategy. I asked if that affects his mood. It used to.
Then Luis stopped checking the stock price daily. He didn't stop obsessing, just moved the obsession to a different number. Daily active users. The report lands at 5am. He wakes up at 5:01.
I laughed because I do the same thing with my YouTube views. It's not healthy. But his point was real: at least it's a metric we can actually control.
His other mental trick: when something goes wrong, one question. "Will this matter in six months?" Most things won't.
I wrote it on a sticky note and now keep it on my monitor.
Talk soon,
Marina 💜