Episode 25: Davit Baghdasaryan on the Science of Sound in a Distributed Work World
Description
Trying to sound your best as you work away from an office more than ever before?
As audio and video conferencing surge worldwide, Matt talks about the science of sound with Davit Baghdasaryan, the CEO of Krisp, a fast-growing company offering an AI-powered noise cancellation app for removing background noise on any conferencing platform. Krisp’s technology, including its proprietary deep neural network krispNet DNN, processes audio securely on the user’s computer.
Find out how Krisp started, why Davit foresees his company returning to a hybrid work model, and what it means to Work from Forest.
With employees in the United States and Armenia that shifted to working from home in 2020, Krisp surged this challenging year, announcing a $5M Series A round in August and growing to 600 Enterprise customers despite continuing to focus on consumer users. Check out this demo of how Krisp works in meeting room.)
A native of Armenia, Davit spends time in both countries leading Krisp. Prior to co-founding Krisp, Davit was a Security Product Lead at Twilio in San Francisco, among other security-focused technology leadership roles.
The full episode transcript is below.
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(Intro Music)
MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy everybody. Today we are going to talk to the Co-founder and CEO of a company whose technology makes it easier for those of us working from home to hear each other, even with all of life’s noisy distractions going on in the background behind us.
At Automattic we say, “Communication is oxygen.” We are advocates of anything that makes communication easier and more effective. And one of the tools I find myself recommending over and over again is Krisp, which is an app that uses machine learning to mute background noise in just about any communication apps you use.
For Krisp’s Davit Baghdasaryan, there is even more to the story. He is leading a young and fast-growing company through the challenges and opportunities of this year, balancing his own company’s transition to a remote workforce and a surge in demand for Krisp. He is a native of Armenia and also a global citizen and experienced technology leader at great companies Twilio and he has made his own adjustments to working and leading from a distributed point of view. So today we are going to chat. And thank you so much for being here.
DAVIT BAGHDASARYAN: Thank you, Matt. Thanks for the intro. Hi, everyone. I’m Davit, CEO and Cofounder at Krisp, as Matt mentioned. I’m so happy to join this podcast.
MATT: Was there any key biographical detail that was missed that you’d love to share, things that people usually don’t know?
DAVIT: Absolutely. I think that was a great introduction. I was born in Armenia, I’ve lived in ten years in the U.S. Right now I’m back in Armenia. I’m sure we will go deeper on my background and biography. I’m happy to share as much as needed.
MATT: In 2018, when you started Krisp, what was the thing that you were seeing? Because people weren’t on calls or Zoom nearly as much back then. What was the need you were seeing?
DAVIT: Yes, absolutely. Well the story behind Krisp is very personal. I was actually working at Twilio, which is a big communication platform, and actually at Squadcast. I just figured that Squadcast is powered by Twilio. But because my family and my friends were in Armenia, I was traveling a lot to Armenia at every chance, I guess.
And because of the time difference, almost 12 hours of difference, when I was connecting to meetings, it was evening time here. And in the evenings you want to go out with friends and family but that was the time that I needed to join meetings, like my daily meetings. I was heading the Product Security at Twilio so that means I have many meetings with different teams. And I always wished there was a button I clicked and get some privacy, like people don’t know where I am, [laughs] they don’t know that I’m joining from bars. Not necessarily bars of course, but still.
MATT: So almost like a virtual Zoom background but for audio.
DAVIT: Exactly. So I had the need but I had no idea how to build the technology. And I knew it must be done with machine learning. I knew about voice but not machine learning. But I mean that’s where I met my cofounder and that’s how things have started.
MATT: I think I first came across Krisp actually on the NVIDIA machine learning blog. It was very early on, it felt like the company was.. I think it was all still free at that time.
DAVIT: Yes. Well actually Krisp wasn’t released at that time yet, or maybe just launched. And then that blog post was very important for us. We worked on it for a very long time and that was the first exposure that our company received. And the blog post got actually a lot of visibility. So it was at some point I believe the most shared and visited blog post on NVIDIA developer AI section. So yeah, it brought us a lot of visibility.
MATT: I actually made a mistake early on when I was advocating for Krisp. I told people it was from NVIDIA, or spun out of NVIDIA, I was so.. Because the post had seemed so great I couldn’t imagine that it was a guest post.
DAVIT: Yeah. Well there is a fun story actually behind that. When we did that post and it was successful, we thought that we needed to put that post on Hacker News. And we put a title which sort of implied that it was from NVIDIA so that people open it more. It was a small hack from us and it worked out because Krisp, that blog post was in the top five of Hacker News that day. Yeah, exciting times.
MATT: That might’ve been where I saw it too. [laughter] I don’t recall exactly but that would certainly be plausible. So I imagine you’re able to kind of turn Krisp on and off on your set up right now. Can you demonstrate how it works?
DAVIT: Yes, absolutely. So Krisp is on right now. I’m going to clap. I’m clapping right now. And when I do this with video it’s much more impressive. And now I’m going to go, it’s a single button, when I turn it off and then I clap [clapping] you hear the clap. Right?
MATT: Yeah.
DAVIT: Yeah, that’s the easiest way to demonstrate it. But Krisp is.. with Covid and with everything that happened lately, people moving to home, Krisp was very handy with kids at home, with dogs barking at home. So it does a great job at removing noise. And I’m happy to actually dig more into how that works and where Krisp is going.
MATT: It reminds me of the Zen Koan, what’s the sound of one hand clapping. I guess it’s like Krisp. [laughter] Oh, one reason I have been advocating for it a lot is that for a good meeting you don’t need video, you could turn video off its not working, we’re not using any video now obviously, but if audio doesn’t work, the meeting stops. A meeting with video.. unless I guess you’re really good at American Sign Language or something, you really do need great audio.
And I find it so distracting when folks have just a ton going on in the background. But I also feel for them because we are all home, we have kids working from home, all sorts of things. What sort of Covid boost have you all seen?
DAVIT: Yes, absolutely. Well voice is, we believe that voice is going to continue being a key means of communication and it’s going to grow, actually, way bigger than it is now. With Covid we saw a very large boost in increased downloads and usage. I believe it’s now like.. It’s been 7X growth for Krisp.
MATT: Wow.
DAVIT: Because – yeah – there was no technology like this in the world. And when we were just starting, people didn’t really.. Every person that was seeing the download, they could relate so much to the app, to the problem. But they didn’t really know that the problem existed because we are so used to what we have. So it took us a while to market this. And early on, we were having a lot of struggles to explain that there is actually a pain here.
But with Covid things have changed because all of a sudden this has become a big problem because everyone is home and their kids are crying and there is just a lot of noise coming from the kitchen and everything. So yeah, people
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