Shishir Mehrotra is the CEO and co-founder of Coda, the all-in-one collaborative workspace for teams. He’ll step in to lead Grammarly as the new CEO of a combined Grammarly and Coda after the acquisition, which is expected to close in January. He and Grammarly’s co-founders, Max Lytvyn and Alex Shevchenko, share a common vision of where workplace productivity is headed in the age of AI, and we believe Shishir has the experience to lead us there.
Before founding Coda, Shishir had impressive stints at some of the most iconic tech companies, in executive roles at Google (mostly YouTube) and Microsoft (mostly on Office and Windows). He was named one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 in 2012, and he’s currently writing a book about his long-running obsession: the Rituals of Great Teams.
We met with him to discuss his exciting new role, the acquisition, and his thoughts on AI innovation.
How are you feeling about this next chapter, both professionally and personally?
I’m feeling unbridled excitement. We’re at an incredibly dynamic time as an industry. AI presents an opportunity to rethink the many products and workflows that make up our workdays and workplaces. The combination of Grammarly and Coda feels like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle—each focused on helping people as they create, innovate, and share their work.
The community and user base of both companies are especially thrilling. These are products that people don’t just use but genuinely love and rely on. It’s energizing to work with great people and serve customers who are passionate about your product.
From an outside perspective, this acquisition might not seem like an obvious fit. What drove this partnership?
Though I’ve heard that from others, the pairing feels obvious to me; we’re both focused on related problems with different approaches. One way to think about it is that Grammarly augments the blinking cursor for users across their applications, while Coda reinvented a new blinking cursor in a reimagined surface. So, it was not surprising that the compatibility was remarkable when we compared our long-term visions. We found similar phrases, graphics, and core ideas about where we want to go.
In the short term, we’re focused on two key areas. Grammarly’s AI assistant is one of the most widely used in the world, and we’ll focus on first making it smarter and second giving it a true home surface. First, we’ll make it smarter by integrating Coda Brain, which uses Coda’s hundreds of secure integrations to provide a more comprehensive context for your AI experience. With deeper context about what you’ve written, your emails, Slack conversations, Jira tickets, and more, you’ll be able to communicate more effectively, accurately, and quickly.
Second, we’ll give the Grammarly AI assistant a new surface through Coda Docs, providing a first-party experience for communication and collaboration. Coda Docs will offer customers a collaboration workspace that showcases what we can do in AI.
That’s what we’ll start with, and we’ve got plenty of ideas for how to enrich the user experience over time.
What do you wish everyone knew about Grammarly? And what about Coda?
First, Grammarly is much bigger than most people realize—it has 40 million daily active users and a community that loves the product.
Second, the user base is incredibly diverse. While many know Grammarly started with students, many users are actually professionals: from brand marketers perfecting their messaging to sales representatives closing customers to CEOs who want to communicate clearly and with confidence. Over 50,000 organizations like Ford, Chevron, and Salesforce use Grammarly to uplevel their communication.
Third, Grammarly is a meaningful player in AI, helping people communicate and create at a massive scale. It works across 500,000 applications and websites, processing 25 trillion tokens a year and analyzing 200 billion words daily. In a world of many new AI entrants, you can think of Grammarly as the original AI agent—it’s literally “been here for years.” 🙂
For those not familiar with Coda, it’s the all-in-one workspace that blends the best of docs, spreadsheets, and applications with the intelligence of AI into a space that brings teams and tools together. Coda has incredibly diverse use cases that would surprise many people. We have millions of users and tens of thousands of teams using Coda in innovative ways—from Qualtrics running their engineering, product, and design resource planning to Tonal streamlining their operations. I’ve met some very surprising Coda customers as well, like the team behind the Sphere in Las Vegas managing their video content to professional football and basketball teams planning their plays and drafts with Coda to some of the world’s most popular YouTubers managing their fast-growing YouTube channels.
Coda has also been trailblazing AI integration, realizing early on that our building blocks could form the basis of a much more interesting AI platform. When I talk to Coda customers, I hear how our products give them superpowers. They tell me how it has transformed workflows, automated menial tasks, and helped teams make decisions and collaborate more efficiently. With Coda, teams can operate completely differently, working up to 10 times as fast and with less context switching.
How do you see AI augmenting rather than replacing human talent?
I’m an AI optimist. We’ve seen technology get better and better over the past few decades, and in every case, we’ve seen fears about how it might change the way people are situated in the workforce. Technological advances have ultimately empowered humans to be more productive rather than replace them. I view AI as an opportunity for everyone to uplevel and reach their potential—people will be able to collaborate with AI agents to perform routine tasks, so they can focus on strategic decision-making. Through this, I believe we’ll gain new capabilities to focus on critical decisions and deeper thinking and innovation.
You’re writing a book about rituals. What have you learned?
Yes, rituals have become a bit of an obsession of mine! It started with a conversation with my friend Bing Gordon who told me that great companies have a small list of “golden rituals” that meet three tests: (1) they are named, (2) every employee knows them by their first Friday, and (3) they are templated. I loved this concept and started collecting examples from every person and company I could find, and then decided to assemble them into a book.
There are some amazing rituals there—from how teams handle meetings to strategy and planning to hiring and performance management. My latest focus has been on rituals for how teams make decisions. I gave a talk about it at Lenny Ratchitsky’s (awesome!) conference a few weeks back.
For anyone as interested in rituals as I am, feel free to sign up and join the “braintrust” of people pre-reading the draft manuscript: ritualsofgreatteams.com
What’s something people don’t generally know about you?
Many people know my wife and I have two wonderful teenage daughters, but most people don’t know how obsessed we are with Lego robotics. I coached my daughters’ Lego robotics team for seven years (we made it to the world championships four times!). We have a garage full of Legos and have built and rebuilt hundreds of robotic contraptions. If I’m ever bored, you can find me “playing with Legos.”
I find my lessons from Legos also carry into my approach to product development. I love working on products that feel like platforms, offering flexible building blocks that users can assemble into much richer structures. Most people don’t know it, but the main Lego spec was patented in 1958, and every Lego piece since then will fit with every other Lego piece ever produced. What a platform!
