This Tech Tools miniseries is brought to you by Prezzi, the presentation tool that makes your ideas easy to follow, hard to forget, and faster than ever to create with Prezzi AI. The best investment is in the tools of one's own trade. At Think Fast Talk Smart, we're taking this quote by Benjamin Franklin, the famous U.S. inventor and founding father very seriously.

As you know, our show strives to share tips and techniques to help you hone and improve your communication and careers.

These practices and approaches can be augmented with tools and technology.

I'm Matt Abrams. I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Welcome to this tech tools mini-series of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.

In this multi-part mini-series, we'll introduce you to tools we use at Think Fast Talk

Smart to help us be better at our spoken and written communication.

And you'll learn best practices from the founders who created them. Taken together, we hope these

communication tools will help you find new ways to think fast and talk smart. I am excited today to

speak with Max Litvin, who is one of the co-founders of Grammarly.

Max, welcome. Thanks for being here.

I always love to learn what was the origin of Grammarly. What led you to create it?

First, my co-founder, Alex, and I previously ran a company that did plagiarism detection.

And we often had to answer a question why so many people plagiarize,

and actually staggering number of people plagiarize.

In our user interviews, we learned that actually the biggest reason for plagiarism

is the difficulty and even perceived difficulty of just taking thoughts from your head

and putting them in writing.

So many people, most people who plagiarize, they actually knew what they want to say.

And it just putting it in writing was the barrier that they couldn't overcome because of lack of time or lack of confidence or a combination of things.

And they resorted to plagiarism.

So that gives us an idea.

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