Circleback CEO Ali Haghani: Why Your Company Should Be Recording More Meetings
In a Nutshell
CircleBack CEO Ali Haghani's core thesis is that companies should record every meeting because as AI agents handle more work, conversation context becomes increasingly valuable and the cost of not capturing discussions is rising. The platform serves as both an AI note-taker and company brain, automatically transcribing meetings, extracting action items, and connecting insights to CRMs, Slack, and other tools while maintaining strict quality standards for human-like notes. Ali has shifted from hands-on coding to agent orchestration, using AI extensively for operations while keeping human oversight on critical decisions like emails, product copy, and security architecture.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
CircleBack is an AI note-taker that captures and organizes everything from conversations. The system records and transcribes meetings, writes notes, and assigns action items. It enables users to build automations that pull custom information from meetings and update connected applications including CRM systems, issue trackers, and Slack. The platform also supports asking questions across all team conversations, connecting agents to it, and using it as a company brain that remembers everything.
Ali maintains a minimal setup both in tools and software, as well as physical desk items. He is a fan of mechanical keyboards and has explored high-end options extensively. His current keyboard is a membrane keyboard called Topre, which stands for Tokyo Precision. This keyboard was difficult to obtain and arrived with Japanese instruction manuals. It provides a nice typing feel without being loud and registers key presses early, eliminating the need to bottom out each key. While he also enjoys blue and brown switches on mechanical keyboards, these are louder and potentially disruptive in an open office environment.
A small vehicle on Ali's desk came from Temu during an onboarding process research session. He was drawn into the app's onboarding flow and nearly completed a purchase with significant cashback incentives, but removed items from his cart except for this fidget toy. He uses it during discussions or while dictating as a fidget item. He also has AirPods Max headphones that serve more as a status signal to the team indicating he is locked in, rather than for frequent use.
Ali uses CircleBack as an ATS system with a dedicated view for meetings and action items to track outstanding tasks from interviews. This allows him to monitor which candidates need follow-up and track who is conducting interviews. When excited about a candidate, he visits their person page to review the full timeline of touchpoints including emails and meetings, check upcoming interview bookings, and review past interview performance. He also uses the platform to track people and companies they are engaging with, such as viewing the Y Combinator company page to see all YC contacts, outstanding action items, their activities, conversation timelines, and upcoming meetings.
Ali used CircleBack to prepare for this interview by having it review all exchanged emails and past conversations to understand the context, then generate preparation materials sourced from his calendar, potential preparation topics from emails, and past meetings to identify relevant showcase items. He frequently uses a single action button press to start recordings, which is helpful for quickly capturing information without phone interaction. A watch app is being released that allows starting recordings via a watch complication, useful when away from the phone or during walks.
Ali spends approximately 10-20% of his time with OpenClaw agents, which he prefers to keep running continuously. He spends more time with coding tools, recently focusing on code review rather than writing or creating PRs. He has created several agents including a main claw agent plus specialized agents for finance, customers, and people ops. The company is transitioning processes from OpenClaw to Slack channels, creating visibility for customer inquiries and inbound sales while making these company-wide efforts.
The company serves both traditional businesses using primarily Microsoft products and growth-stage startups including YC companies. Engineers participate in a weekly rotation handling incoming support and customer conversations. CircleBack captures feedback from customer fireside chats and office visits, allowing users to review meeting recordings, jump to specific sections, and ask questions about content like wish lists, then follow up on completed items.
Ali consciously reduces his coding time as the company has grown its engineering team, recognizing that the bottleneck has shifted to recruiting more great people rather than individual coding capacity. Thursdays are designated as no-meeting days for focused work, allowing him to work with headphones on and attempt to ship complete items end-to-end within a single day.
Ali previously wrote extensive code personally, including during Christmas, then began using Claude Code around that period. He now primarily uses orchestrating agents to initiate tasks and later reviews the results. He still manually edits code for copy changes to see immediate visual context, and for small styling adjustments where direct file editing is faster. However, the team has built sufficient scaffolding and infrastructure that AI agents can handle most end-to-end tasks. The bottleneck has shifted to code review, where multiple agent types review PRs for code quality, architecture, product considerations, and copy consistency.
The team maintains evals for quantifiable items or those with clear right/wrong answers, such as action item identification. They specifically avoid creating action items for items completed during meetings to prevent redundant noise. Writing style is a major focus, with the goal of making CircleBack notes appear human-written. They are opinionated about quality standards, specifically avoiding the word "discussed" in notes as it adds no value since meetings inherently involve discussion. These standards are incorporated into their evaluation systems when testing model updates or prompt changes.
The company culture emphasizes not just completing tasks but doing them in ways that make future iterations easier or produce better outputs. They extensively use AI for task automation, particularly ops tasks that shouldn't require human attention. The team has an unlimited AI usage budget with trust in individual judgment, though this may need adjustment at larger scale. During show-and-tells, team members share new tools and usage methods with each other.
Ali's workflow has shifted significantly over six months, moving away from direct editor work to primarily using lightweight editors only for quick diff reviews and small changes. Most coding work now happens through agents. He has automated many ops-related tasks that previously consumed founder time, such as payroll software management. He identifies several areas where agents are not permitted to operate independently: sending emails requires human approval even when drafts are acceptable, product copy needs human oversight before production deployment, and data access and security decisions require human architecting before AI agents can build implementations.
As LLMs and AI agents become more capable and handle more company work, conversation context becomes increasingly critical since agents working in isolation lack awareness of prior discussions or customer statements. The opportunity cost of not recording conversations is already substantial and will continue increasing. More companies will default to recording everything and sharing conversation context across the organization. CircleBack focuses not only on easy capture but also on ensuring captured information reaches the right people without inadvertent sharing, particularly addressing concerns about one-on-one conversation content being shared company-wide.
Ali views the current period as an exciting time for software development where the limits of possibility are defined more by imagination than by team skills or bandwidth constraints. As software development costs decrease, the critical factors shift from shipping speed to decisions about what to build and how to build it for system composability and interoperability. He finds the rapid evolution of software engineering every few weeks particularly exciting, especially for startups that can experiment with latest tools without bureaucratic constraints.
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