[Highlight] Grammarly's Evolution into an AI Agent Platform with Shishir Mehrotra

Hey. Ben Kesnoka here, cofounder, general partner of Village Global, a network native venture firm. What you're about to hear is a clip from a longer conversation. If you'd like to listen to the full length version, find the link in the description, and, of course, subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Enjoy. Sashir, great to have you. You are, you know, a long time legendary product leader in The Valley, epic run at YouTube and Google, obviously, founder of Coda, and now running Grammarly, which is, one of the best kept secrets, in Silicon Valley in terms of scale and impact and revenue trajectory. And so we're really excited to have your insights today. Just to ground us, tell us, Grammarly and Coda recently merged, came together. Tell us what the business currently is doing, its current level of scale, and what the next couple years look like. And then we'll get into some questions for everyone's interest in, in leadership and management and hiring product, pricing, and, of course, AI and how you're thinking about it. But first, ground is Yeah. I'll I'll tell a little bit of the story of what happened, and they'll they'll, how to contextualize some of the stats and and so on. So, as Ben mentioned, I started Coda, about ten years ago. Before that, I was at Google for a long time. I used to run the YouTube group there. Coda, we, grew really well. Got to, a few million users, about 50,000 teams, bunch of big customers, New York Times, Amazon, Snap, bunch of, actually, one of my favorite Coda customers is, The Sphere in Las Vegas. Runs on Coda. Who's all the Backstreet Boys? The Sphere. Who wanted to see The Backstreet Boys? A lot of FOMO. They're doing Wizard of Oz now. They're doing Wizard of Oz? That's that's apparently remastered and done very well. Planned that whole thing in Coda. The, anyways, Coda was on, a good journey. And and one day, I got a call from, one of my investors, a guy named Hemantaneja from General Catalyst. And he says, I'd like to introduce you to the founders of Grammarly, and you should talk to them before before we're about to raise a round of round of financing. You should talk to them first. You know, that's a the it's one of those calls where it wasn't really an ask. It was like, you should go, talk to them. But I just said, well, I don't I don't quite get it. What what what, Grammarly and Koda didn't feel like they had that much to do with each other. And he said, no. No. Take the call. You'll you'll enjoy it. So I flew up to Vancouver, spent a couple days with Max and Alex, the cofounder. Company is based in Canada? No. The founders are. The company is based here. Well, the company was founded in Ukraine sixteen years ago. So I have a …