Why we're building an agent, not a notetaker
Otter, Fireflies, Fathom and friends made meeting capture a commodity. We think the interesting product starts one step after the summary — and that's a different company, not a feature.
Meeting transcription is a commodity. That isn't a criticism — it's a genuine achievement by a handful of very good companies, and it means the hard, unglamorous work of getting words right at scale is largely done.
Which raises an obvious question: if the transcript is free, what is the product?
The summary is the input
Watch what actually happens after a meeting ends. Someone opens the summary. They read it. Then they open Jira and create three tickets. Then Slack, to tell two people. Then the CRM, to log what the customer said. Then a doc, because the decision needs to live somewhere findable.
The summary saved them the recall. It saved them none of the work. Every one of those steps is a human acting as a transport layer between a document and an API.
The best meeting summary in the world still leaves you with a to-do list. We'd rather you not have one.
Two different products
- A notetaker
- Optimizes for the artifact. Success = you read a good summary. The metric is accuracy and readability.
- An agent
- Optimizes for the outcome. Success = the work is already in your tools and you never opened the summary. The metric is actions correctly completed.
These pull architecture in different directions. A notetaker needs a great reading surface. An agent needs identity resolution, connector permissions, confidence thresholds, idempotency, undo, and an audit trail. You don't bolt the second onto the first — you build for it from the start.
Isn't the category crowded?
The capture category is crowded. The execution category has a lot of demos and very little trust. Nobody has yet made a team comfortable letting software write to their Jira, their CRM, and their Slack based on what it heard in a call — because nobody has made it accurate and accountable enough.
That's the bet. Not "better notes." The thing that makes the hour after the meeting stop existing.
The short version
- The summary is the input to the product, not the product.
- Notetakers optimize for reading; agents optimize for the work disappearing.
- Being late to a crowded category is fine if you're solving the next problem.
Give your company a second brain.
Squirrel captures every meeting, remembers every decision, and files the follow-up work for you.