“I’ve been in meetings for five years and never truly heard a single one of them.”

Tom Pritsky runs 30+ meetings a week. As a founder, he can’t afford to miss any of them. Scriben is the first tool that finally worked.

Tom Pritsky · Founder & CEO, Captify · Stanford '23

The short version

Tom has had bilateral hearing loss since age three. As a founder, his entire job is hearing every conversation clearly — and handwritten notes were his biggest obstacle to doing exactly that. Scriben is the first tool that let him put down “capturing” entirely and just be present.

“I had to choose — until Scriben”

“Before Scriben, I had to make a choice every day that shouldn’t exist: listen properly, or write it down. Either way, I lost something.”

Tom Pritsky is the Founder and CEO of Captify. 30+ meetings a week — investors, customers, team, partners — any one of which could change the company’s direction.

He’s more attuned to whether a conversation actually lands than most founders. He’s had bilateral hearing loss since he was three. At Stanford, where he earned his BS/MS in Biomedical Informatics, he founded the university’s first club for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Whether a conversation truly arrives isn’t a work skill for him. It’s a life instinct.

Which is exactly why, for the past five years, he hadn’t really listened to a single meeting all the way through.

“The two seconds I’m looking down writing — that’s when I miss a sentence. And in my meetings, the sentence that actually matters is almost always hiding in those two seconds.”

He had tried everything

Voice recorders, AI meeting summarizers, human note-takers, note-taking apps — Tom worked his way through the entire market.

“Every one of them solved half the problem and created the other half. Voice recorders meant two hours of cleanup afterward. The AI tools — the moment you turn one on, people start choosing their words carefully, and the whole energy of the meeting shifts. A human note-taker? I still had to spend 20 minutes after every call reconstructing context with them.”

“I didn’t want more notes. I wanted to take ‘capturing’ out of my head entirely.”

What Scriben actually does

Tom’s workflow now is simple: he tells everyone at the start of the meeting that he’ll be using Scriben, gets their consent, then puts it on the table and forgets about it.

Scriben captures the full audio in the background. The moment the meeting ends, he has structured, searchable notes on his phone — investor quotes, product feedback, action items, who said what — all organized and ready.

“What used to eat at me was the anxiety: ‘Did I just miss something important?’ Now I know — every word is there. I can go back to anything, anytime. That mental release is worth more than any note-taking workflow.”

“Last week an investor asked me a really specific product question. I answered it and moved on. The next day I went back to that section of the transcript and realized — there was a hook inside his question I hadn’t picked up on. That’s now a key thing we’re preparing for the next round. If I were relying on memory, that moment would’ve been gone forever.”

A tool that doesn’t change the room

Tom is emphatic that recording any meeting requires everyone in the room knowing and consenting. It’s his rule, and it’s a boundary Scriben designs around.

“I would never record anyone without telling them. Ten seconds at the top of a meeting — ‘Just so you know, I’m using Scriben to take notes’ — and almost everyone says yes. Because deep down, everyone wants what they said to be taken seriously.”

What he appreciates most is how Scriben sits in the room:

“Put a phone or a dedicated recorder on the table and the energy shifts. People get careful. They say less. Scriben doesn’t do that. It just sits there quietly and does its job. It’s present, but it doesn’t intrude.”

What his meetings look like now

Tom estimates he gets back at least 5–7 hours a week — time that used to go into post-meeting cleanup, asking his assistant to clarify what someone said, scrubbing through recordings for one sentence, and the most invisible cost of all: the second round of communication caused by missing something the first time.

But the time isn’t the main thing, he says:

“What changed is the relationship between me and the person across from me. I’m actually looking at their eyes now. Reading their pauses. Responding to what they didn’t say. Investors feel it. Customers feel it. My team feels it.”

“The core belief behind Captify is that every person deserves to be fully heard. Scriben is the tool I use every day to do that for the people I work with.”