- Platform: zoom
- Attendees: Ben Ornstein, Lawrence (Ambient.us), Lawrence’s assistant
- Source: Read.ai 01JCP7KYKEPPHBK3BNH17XBPAK (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Lawrence (Ambient.us): Hey, Lawrence, how’s it going? Ben Ornstein: Hey, Ben, how you doing? Lawrence (Ambient.us): Pretty good. Pretty good. How are you? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Good. Ben Ornstein: How’s your Thursday going? Going pretty well. Sorry for the delay. I hate when people do that to me. So when I say delay, I mean twofold, not only coming late today, but also the delay in the LinkedIn response. Lawrence (Ambient.us): No problem at all, man. I know how it is. So you guys are in Philadelphia? Ben Ornstein: I have listed greater Philly, but I’m in Newark, Delaware. Lawrence (Ambient.us): Yeah, that counts. I grew up in Ardmore. I was just back there visiting my mom. It’s like mainline Philadelphia. Ben Ornstein: So it’s super close. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Lawrence (Ambient.us): Well, thanks for taking the time. I noticed you’re using Read. And there’s definitely going to be some overlaps between Ambient and Read. How do you like Read? Honestly, I love it. Ben Ornstein: It’s a great tool. Feel free to kick him. I don’t need him for this meeting. So it’s up to you. Lawrence (Ambient.us): But what do you, what do you like about it? Ben Ornstein: What are your favorite parts? My favorite part is I use it for its transcriptions. Amazing. Um, never have any problem with the, um, I really have no, the only time I ever had an issue was two days ago where I did a call and I didn’t get the transcription, which is the entire reason I use read for like a day. It wasn’t the end of the world, but the transcription is amazing. And yeah, it just, anytime I needed to join a meeting, it joins a meeting. Yeah, it just works. Lawrence (Ambient.us): I feel like the whole AI note-taking category is so value-add. Like I still run into people that are not recording, transcribing their meetings. I’m like, oh man, like you’re missing out on so much. What do you use those transcriptions for? Ben Ornstein: Yeah, we’re doing these case studies where I’m interviewing venture-backed founders and I kind of ask them a whole bunch of questions and then we turn that into a case study. Awesome, cool. The other one that I used to use that was really good, there’s another one called circleback.ai. I love that. Yeah. That one, I used that at my last startup, was the summaries. Gave incredible email summaries of what was discussed and what the action items were. So yeah, those are my two that I really liked. Nice. Lawrence (Ambient.us): And why did you switch off of Circle back to Read? Ben Ornstein: So that was two different companies. Okay, gotcha. Lawrence (Ambient.us): And do you use the email feature with Read at all? I don’t. Ben Ornstein: I didn’t even know they had an email feature. Lawrence (Ambient.us): Yeah, they do AI summaries. Of email too. So they’re kind of like an adjacent competitor to us. So it’s, and like, we, we know who they are. They’re, they’re really smart guys that we, we respect them a lot. So you’re not going to hear me say anything bad, but let me, let me do this. Let me show you, actually, before I show you a couple of slides and show you the product, I’d love to just hear what, what operations means for you all. Like what are like, it sounds like you’re doing external stuff, interviewing founders. Are you just doing a little bit of everything startup style? Ben Ornstein: Pretty much. Yeah. I work for a founder named Michael Houck, who has a holding company, and I’m working across his entire portfolio of businesses. He’s got a newsletter that has a podcast and the case studies. He has a startup. He has other things he’s working on in the investments, like investor space. So tons of different things. So operations, I am truly doing a little bit of everything, just like a chief of staff. Lawrence (Ambient.us): Awesome. Cool. Yeah. So let me, and last question, what are the core systems? Are you all Zoom, Slack? Ben Ornstein: Big Slack guys, we use, we’re not, we don’t really like video. Often when we do, it’s sometimes Google Meet or Zoom. There’s not really, but Slack and Notion are the fundamentals. Awesome. Makes sense. Lawrence (Ambient.us): And everything you got, you put in Notion and it becomes like a knowledge base for the company. Is that the, is that how you use it? Ben Ornstein: Yeah. Zapier in between, we use it for everything. So there’s not really one core use case. Awesome. Okay. Lawrence (Ambient.us): I’m going to show you some stuff. Sure. And I think I’m going to start with just like three slides and then we’ll go into the product together. Is Ambient, are you guys a bot? Ben Ornstein: Is that why, is this that, Lawrence’s assistant, is that? Yeah, that is Ambient. Lawrence (Ambient.us): So yeah, we have a meetings assistant. Have an email assistant, we have a Slack assistant, and I’ll show you what we do with that and how it’s geared for the chief of staff, office of the CEO, head of ops. So yeah, we’re trying to build something purpose-built for a very small set of users, which is chief of staff, head of ops, head of strategy, sometimes EA, and founder. That’s our world. That’s who we’re building for. The way the product works, and we just said it, but there’s a meeting assistant there’s an email assistant, there’s a Slack assistant. We try and extract out the important bits. We have a real focus on action items, next steps, product owners, timelines, make it really easy for you to prioritize those, to route those. And one of the core value props is you have a lot of balls in the air, we can help you drop fewer balls. That’s the starting point. One of the big things that differentiates us is that privacy and security, we’re working with very confidential data with the CEO, the office of the CEO, So everything is do not share by default. We’re socked to really like precise settings on who gets to see what. So we kind of go overboard on the privacy security side. And then the last slide I’ll show you is like we really pitched two levels of value proposition. So the first is probably a little bit how you’re using read, which is execution. I got a lot going on. I get to the end of the day. I’ve been on seven, 10, 12 calls. I don’t want to drop anything. You a list. We make it easy to prioritize in something called an Eisenhower matrix. I’ll show it to you in the product in a second. Drag and drop, route things to other people, set priorities. But the more interesting thing is that we’re taking our customers’ meetings transcripts and we’re spinning them up in secure vector databases, almost like your own private chat GPT, where you can ask questions and you can do things like draft me a follow-up email, draft me a project plan, draft me an agenda. What are the three obstacles, what are the three obstacles that Ben raised to using Ambient? Like it becomes like this, like almost like 24-7 support desk about everything happening across your business. It’s pretty cool. Awesome. So I’ll show you a couple of things. I’m going to go into my Ambient instance. Ben Ornstein: How long have you guys been working on this? Lawrence (Ambient.us): We wrote the first line of code in March of 23. We came up with the idea in December of 22. 1.4 million in seed. Now we’re raising pre-seed. Now we’re raising seed. So we have about 90 customers. We’re growing like 30% month over month. So it’s, it’s cool. It’s like a, it’s, it’s starting to go. So the first thing that I see when I go to ambient is I see my calendar and you can see, I have these like very precise controls over where ambient shows up. And so if I’m going to be talking about something confidential, I can turn it off. Then the next thing that I see are, my priorities and these are coming right from my meetings. I can do some things like I can manage due dates here, I can drag and drop things around, I can assign things to other people. It’s like my air traffic control tower to run the business. I live in the pink, this is the stuff I got to get done. Then we also give you a list view, which is the same data, but in reverse chronological order. I’ll get to the my day today and I’ll have a bunch of new tasks that show up here and I can filter down by kind of just the ones that are coming to me. And so, um, you know, we pitched, uh, we pitched a VC fund yesterday. Um, I got to get the deck out. I actually already did that. So I’m going to knock it off. Um, so I’ll get to the end of my day. I’ll just start knocking off tasks. So this is the drop fewer balls. Now, where are these date where, where are these tasks coming from, where they’re coming from Um, kind of these, we call them artifacts, but they’re meeting summaries, they’re email summaries. And so let me pull up a good example here. Let’s see here. Let me find one that’s not super confidential. These are a lot of investor pitches. Let’s go to this one. So I had a call with a chief of staff at a surprisingly giant wine company called Cooper’s Hawk. They’re like 9,000 employees. I had no idea. And so just like Read, we give you nice tight AI summary of the call. We give you access to the transcript. We give you some good like kind of video playback experience where you can grab a clip and send it out, talk time, all that kind of stuff. But the core thing that we do is we extract out the action items, next steps, product owners, timelines. I can prioritize those on the spot and that rolls up into my dashboard view that I just showed you. And so we’re pulling out the tasks. But where it gets more interesting is we can spin up a secure vector database for each one of these meetings. This is like your own private GPT. And I can do things like, was any pricing discussed? So you can ask specific questions. But you can also save prompts, which is a way to automate some of the follow-up tasks. So right now, I’m basically chatting directly with the transcript I guess I didn’t talk about that. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, that’s cool. No, no, I figured that’s what that was. That’s really cool. That’s interesting. That’s something I don’t know. Are any of the competitors doing that? Lawrence (Ambient.us): I don’t think so. We actually want to get to the point where we’re AI note-taking agnostic, where you can pipe in your read summaries, and then I’ll show you where the analysis part gets really cool. But another example is I’ve saved this prompt, which is called my discovery prompt, which these are the same questions I ask. I can imagine you have one of these for your founders too, like just a nice tight snapshot. And so I ask these questions every call, like how many employees, what are the core systems that you use? I asked you some of these. So what I like to do is generate a tight summary of this and drop it into my HubSpot. So I have these like crystal clear views of everybody that I’m talking to. Other prompts that I do is like, I’ll do like a sales follow-up email. And so you can save the prompt in your own and like you can tune it a little bit. So you are Lawrence. The email should address the people on the call. We’re not Lawrence. The tone should be professional and cordial. So dear Jen, I hope this finds you well. Here’s what we talked about. Here are the next steps. So I’m saving time kind of every step of the way. Ben Ornstein: And you can kind of tune these prompts to your own preferences. Lawrence (Ambient.us): Make sense? Yeah, yeah, that’s interesting. Nice. Now where it gets more interesting is we think about every minute meeting summary and every email summary as something we call an artifact. And you can start to put these artifacts into projects or folders. So I have a project called PMF, which as you know, is product market fit. And it’s the most existential thing in our world. It’s the most important project in our company, every startup. And so when I have an interesting conversation with people that have cool insights about what we should build, I put it in this folder. And then I can chat with this whole collection of artifacts, hours and hours and hours of transcripts. And so I can say, what are some of the obstacles to using Ambient? And so it’s going back through, I think, something like 25 hours of conversations, long email threads. And I’m not stuck on recency bias. It’s going to give me a rank ordered list. So CEOs don’t like to learn new tools. Privacy and security, this is very confidential. Data. My CEO is 75 years old, doesn’t want to learn new stuff. Like these are the things that I need to tackle when we’re marketing and pitching the company. And so the next thing I’ll show you, I’m going to keep rolling here, is that today you have to sort of kind of organize your artifacts into these folders. It’s not ideal. CEOs are not going to do it. Maybe a chief of staff will do it. So what we’re trying to do is automatically organize your meetings into projects. And so this is an example. We do a daily stand up. It’s a recurring meeting. And so we know that they’re all part of the same folder. We can automatically put them in the same folder. We can run some analysis of like, OK, what are the big topics we’re talking about in this? We can generate an agenda and then you can chat with this whole folder. The other thing that we’re doing automatically as of today, this is pretty cool. Is we can detect if you’ve spoken to somebody before, and we can say, okay, we know that Ben and Lawrence spoke back in March. We’re gonna send you a pre-read an hour before that call with like, what did you talk about last time? What are some of the open action items? And that just shipped this morning. It’s super cool. It’s like a- That’s a cool feature, yeah. Push CRM. Yeah, and so like, we differentiate from the other AI note-takers is privacy security. The second thing is a focus on AI analysis and workflow automation, and then cross-channel, like Read. So we do email, we do meetings, and then we also do Slack. Ben Ornstein: Wow. Yeah, no, that’s really impressive. It’s a very cool product. I do see it being different than Read. What’s your long-term plan with this? Do you want to sell it? What’s the goal? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Lawrence (Ambient.us): You know, I’m a, I’m a four time founder. My last one man was a near miss. We were one of the fastest growing companies in the world for two years. We raised $90 million. We ended up hitting the wall and selling it to private equity Vista in 2019. So I'm working with the same guys again. And so like, God damn, you want to take this one all the way. So we're going to try and we're going to try and go for it. Ben Ornstein: Do you see it as being 10 X better than the reeds, the circle AIs, the auto AI? Do you see it that way? Lawrence (Ambient.us): I mean, that's a stupid question, obviously. No, it's not. I think that's a good question, but most of the world doesn't know who Read is. That's another good point. I think one of the worst mistakes founders make is they compete against another tiny little company that nobody cares. The big bogeyman out there is like, how do you tell the world about what you're doing? So what we're trying to do is pick a very specific buyer. Like Read is going after everybody. They just raised $50 million. They want to be a horizontal player. Everybody can use Read. We are not. We’re going after C-suite level insights. Like we’re going after like strict privacy controls. Our next module, Ben, is going to be a strategic planning module. Which is built on all this data. So you’ll be able to tap a button, pull out the biggest opportunities and threats, draft some key initiatives, set some project plans, all pulling data from your meetings and your email. So we’re building for someone else than read this. Ben Ornstein: Who are your typical customers in terms of size? Lawrence (Ambient.us): Yeah. So no big company will use this yet. And the reason is this confidentiality that any company than a thousand people has a general counsel. And the general counsel is like, oh no, we can’t record anything because we might get sued in 10 years. So all of our customers, I think 92 or something are series A, series B. They worry about privacy, but what they really worry about is dying. So they’re willing to kind of take some shots. That being said, we just got an inbound from HubSpot. Autodesk is putting us through information security review. So it’s about guessing where the puck is going, and we think that behaviors are going to change, and it’s so valuable. Can you imagine doing your job without Read now? It would be so much harder, right? And I feel like big companies are going to learn that, and they’re going to start losing if they don’t adopt the new tech. Ben Ornstein: Totally agree. What was my next question going to be? I had one. I lost it. Lawrence (Ambient.us): Yeah, I like the 10x question, but I think we’re 10x better than not having AI on your call for sure. And I think we can be 10x better in the office of the CEO. That’s the goal. Ben Ornstein: I think it’s one of those markets that has room for more than a couple of players as well. Like everyone’s going to have their own preferences. It’s one of those, I think. Yeah. Lawrence (Ambient.us): Can I show you an investor slide actually? Because I know you deal in this world. Ben Ornstein: I love this stuff. Yeah. Lawrence (Ambient.us): I just love it. Yeah. I pitched Andreessen Horowitz yesterday. So fresh on. Nice. Which partner? Ben Ornstein: Angela Strange. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Lawrence (Ambient.us): She’s like one of their AI top people. But we actually have a quote from her on our slide. But the pitch is that we’re entering the world where every white collar role is going to have an AI co-pilot. I totally agree with that. And it’s not going to be chat GPT. It’s going to be purpose built for the role. So if you look at sales, like you might’ve heard of Artisan 11X growing really fast, two really hot deals out here in California. I’m writing apps with Repl.it using English as my programming language, like the cursor poolside just raised 500 million bucks. The marketing folks have their own set of unicorns. The legal folks have their own set of unicorns. One of the core parts of my pitch is that you look at the CEO lane, it’s empty. Nobody’s going after that. And I feel like we’ve, We’ve stumbled onto like a big TAM lane that is surprisingly under-competed. So, yeah. Yeah. Oh, that was my other question. Ben Ornstein: Pricing. What does pricing look like, Yeah, we’re different on the pricing side too. Lawrence (Ambient.us): So, and tell me if you buy this. We believe that if you are a product-led growth, you cannot win in the office of the CEO because you’re building product to spread. Read depends on people sharing out, adding more teammates, land and expand. So we’re using that in our pitches. We are built to not spread. That’s the big difference. And so our pricing model, our business model matters a lot. So what we do is simple pricing based on the size of the buyer. So if you’re a five-person startup, we’re going to give you all licenses for 500 bucks year. If you’re a 250 person startup, you can buy enterprise wide for 5k. And if you use five licenses or you use 200, we don’t care. It’s up to you. We don’t want, we don’t want to be incentivized to spread within your org because that puts the wrong incentives on us. So we’re trying to innovate a little bit on pricing model. So flat rate, you can, of course, you can buy a single license for 500 bucks if you want. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: But yeah. Ben Ornstein: And so there’s nothing for a team of five below 500 bucks. That’s like, that is the lowest tier. Lawrence (Ambient.us): No, and it’s annual. It’s an annual thing where, yeah, we’re… It’s different. Ben Ornstein: I’m just fascinated because I love to lead these discussions in general. Sorry, yeah, keep going. Lawrence (Ambient.us): Yeah, no, the business model stuff is interesting. So we’re really trying to differentiate on privacy. And if you follow that thread, your pricing cannot be per user because that means you’re trying to spread. Your product led growth. Ben Ornstein: If I’m paying annually, am I allowed to cancel and get a refund? Yeah, we would do that. Lawrence (Ambient.us): It’s not like you would have to email us and you can’t just hit a button and do that. But yeah, we do seven day free trials. And then we do. Here’s what we do. We do paid trials. If you want to do a 60 day paid trial, we just divide the divide the annual cost. Ben Ornstein: So you can kind of hack your way into a monthly And in terms of industry, like if you slice it again, not the size, but the industry, what are your customers, where do they tend to be from Yeah. Lawrence (Ambient.us): So our go-to-market is interesting because no one has ever built software for the chief of staff before, so they’re not flooded in pitches, which is nice. So we have an agency that works through my LinkedIn, account and sends out to chiefs of staff, head of ops. And we get a lot of, we’re generating three or four ops a day using that tactic. So the industries we’ve learned are the one, it’s no surprise. It’s tech, it’s consulting, it’s media, it’s anybody that like is looking to gain an advantage and they’re technology fluent. Ben Ornstein: Oh yeah. I mean, tech obviously, but yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Huh. Ben Ornstein: Pretty cool. Yeah. Cool, man. Lawrence (Ambient.us): I love the questions. I can tell you’ve done this before. Ben Ornstein: I love this stuff. I love jamming on it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Nice. Lawrence (Ambient.us): Are you ever going to found your own company? Is that on your plans? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Someday. Ben Ornstein: I need to make more money first. Need to have a little bit more of a nest egg before I do that. I would love to. I want to. I love startups. I started my career at Morgan Stanley. I am never going back there. Really smart people. Just not the environment. Like how big is your team? Lawrence (Ambient.us): We are four people right now. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Ben Ornstein: Like it doesn’t get better than that. Lawrence (Ambient.us): It doesn’t get better, right? Like the pace, everyone’s super smart. Like you don’t have to worry about managing anybody. Ben Ornstein: It’s just like you’re all charging forward. Yeah. Well, who are you guys hiring next? Lawrence (Ambient.us): What’s your next role? Yeah. It’ll be two more senior engineers, a senior designer. And then at some point we’re going to pull the trigger on two sales reps. I always hire two. Because you want to get the side-by-side. We had 120 person sales team at my last company and we had 50 SDRs doing outbound. So I’m excited to build the outbound engine on this because I think it’s going to work, but I want to sell the first million bucks myself. I like that. Ben Ornstein: Is the first salesman, right? Founder led sales. Yeah, it’s a thing. Lawrence (Ambient.us): Well, let me know if I can get you set up with just like, I can gift you an account if you ever want to play with a new tool. You know what would be really interesting? Ben Ornstein: If you’re up for it, we do these case studies. I would love to do the case study on Ambient. Would you be down to do that? Lawrence (Ambient.us): It sounds super cool. Who watches it? Ben Ornstein: What’s your audience? Why would you do this? Why would you spend time? Your founder is very busy. Michael Houck has a newsletter of 60,000 people. Case study ends up going to the premium subscribers of that, which are, um, it’s a small subset of that to be very blunt. But what happens every Saturday when we upload a new case study, um, every, every one of those goes out to all 60,000 saying, Hey, we uploaded this new case study. It’s a part of the newsletter. Um, so you still get that exposure to 60,000 people who are in that audience, startup founders. These are, these could be, Startup founders, later stage founders, VCs, everyone in our niche. It is a startup newsletter. So, I mean, it certainly could benefit you to, you know, these things take, we could knock it out in 30 minutes. We’ve done 85 of them. Like we’ve done a ton of these. If it’s not worth your time, totally get it because you’re very busy. But I wanted to pitch that because it might actually end up benefiting you guys. So is it like an interview? Lawrence (Ambient.us): a 30 minute interview kind of thing. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, I have a preset list of questions. It’s very quick. We can roll through them. We could do it about Ambient or your last company. And yeah, it’s a ton of fun. But again, I know how busy you are. I can only imagine so. Lawrence (Ambient.us): Yeah, if we could push it out a couple of weeks, we’re right in the middle of it right now. Yeah, let’s do it. That’d be fun. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, I’ve enjoyed doing it on Ambient, I think could be just fun to test the product too. Awesome. Lawrence (Ambient.us): That’s a good idea. Awesome. So next step, I’ll shoot you my calendar and we can grab some time, maybe first week of December. That sounds great, man. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Awesome. Lawrence (Ambient.us): Good to talk to you, Ben. Take care.