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Don't even bother spending money on any platform that's not meta until we reach $100,000 a month and spend on meta. In our show today, we have Cliff Weitzman, founder and CEO of Speechify.
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[SPEAKER_01] So this is the guy who solved his dyslexia and ADHD by building a voice AI agent that's now used by over 60 million people and has over a million five-star ratings. We test almost a thousand a day. I generated ads a day right now. We're getting to the point where soon we're going to spend more tokens than we spend on actual salaries. If you don't spend a thousand credits a day, I'm disappointed in you. If you can really trust someone, you can afford to pay them significantly more. The world around us was built by people no smarter than you or I. You could do things. Ready to go?
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[SPEAKER_02] Cliff, I normally ask for great suggestions beforehand and honestly, most of the time they're six out of ten and I actually have to get really creative. I have to do so many references and I love that. But then you sent me yours and I was, oh my God, I actually sent them to the team and I was, this is wild. So we have some of the most insane stories coming up. First, thank you for making my life easier with the schedule. Second, thank you so much for joining me in person.
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My pleasure. It's great to be here. Now, I do just want to start university. University, you applied to 26 colleges when everyone else applied to eight. Can you talk to me about this and just the strategy behind that?
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Yeah. So I moved to the US when I was 13. I didn't speak English and my parents knew about three schools: Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. And we had a college counselor in my high school and she recommended applying to six schools. I was, okay. So I started filling out the applications and quickly I realized that even for kids with perfect SAT scores and perfect grades, you have about a one in 10 chance of getting in. And I was, okay, it's a lottery. How do you win a lottery? You buy more tickets than everybody else. And so most kids in my school didn't need to do seventh period when they were a senior, but I had academic workshop, which is the class you go to if you're on the short bus. And so I went to academic workshop every single day because I just couldn't read very well. And I just made it my goal, my job, instead of leaving school, I go back to academic workshop and I would apply to colleges. And when I finished the normal application, it just kept going. So my main essay, instead of making three variations or five variations, I wrote 48 drafts. And then I had to make a second common app account because I ended up applying not to 20 schools, which is the max, but 26. And in the end, I didn't get into many schools that I wanted, but I got into a lot of schools I didn't expect to get into. And so my overall principle in life is volume of work, more reps, more shots at goal, more three throws. And that's how you get, on the bell curve, unexpected outcomes.
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One of my favorite statements is actually Alex Wilmosi. I don't know if you know Alex Wilmosi, but he says, volume times leverage equals output. And I really think about that. I used to send hundreds of emails to sponsors for the show and I had zero leverage. And now with more leverage, the output is significantly more, but I always really think to that. I was talking about this show with my girlfriend last night and she was saying, did you create a text-to-speech app because it took you a long time to read?
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Yes. So I am super dyslexic. First, second, third, fourth grade could not figure out how to read. And I wanted to read fast, but I couldn't read fast. So we built a deep learning based text-to-speech model in 2015 that now reads more than 10 million books worth of words to people every year. Wow. So now if you want to read fast, but you can't, you can read fast.
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So you're a great guy. Very great guy. Great guy. And this was apparently the start in the yearbooks of 40 of my 14 year old friends in freshman. That is what you wrote. How did that lead to Speechify?
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Yeah. So when I was 14 years old, freshman year of high school, I was very self-conscious about the fact that I was very bad at spelling and you get a yearbook and typically people will sign the back of the yearbook and write some nice message about you. And I didn't want to misspell stuff in everybody's yearbooks. So I came up with a strategy. I would write the least number of words possible and I would write the same thing in everyone's yearbooks. David, you are a great guy. Steve, you are a great guy. Bill, you are a great guy. And then after the last day of school, we went to sleepover at one of my friend's houses. He goes upstairs to show his mom the yearbook. And I hear him scream from the top of the stairs. What the hell? Cliff, I'm not gay. And I'm, oh my God, what have I done? The crazy thing is eight years later, I was graduating college and I wrote a 30 page paper for one of my philosophy classes. And I submitted it before fully submitting it to a friend. They sent it back to me and I had three spelling mistakes. And I cried because if you had told 14 year old Cliff that he'd go to college, he wouldn't be sure about it. Definitely not expect himself to go to Brown, but for sure would never expect to be able to write a 30 page paper with three spelling mistakes. And the reason why I didn't have that many is because I can hear the spelling mistakes with Speechify.
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[SPEAKER_01] Dude, I was listening to you and Ali Abdel. Great show. And I heard in 2020, you made a list of the top 100 consumer subscription companies in the world by revenue, flew all over the world to meet the CEOs of each one of them, and then tried to basically learn from them. I really enjoyed the show with the greatest of respects. I was frustrated listening because you said that. And I was, amazing. What did you learn? Sure. And we didn't go into it in that conversation. So what did you learn from flying around the world and meeting the top 100 consumer subscription companies?
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[SPEAKER_01] So the first, at every point in Speechify history, I have led every department except for AI. And so design, engineering, QA, growth. And my rule is, I will read 100 books about the topic, listen to them with Speechify. I will identify 100 experts, and I'll go and have a conversation with them. So the first thing that I learned is if you send a good email, people will respond, no matter how amazing they are. So I did Mike Krieger from Instagram, I did Ev Williams from Twitter, I did the founders of Plaid, of 23andMe, of Honey, of Grammarly,
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[SPEAKER_01] consumer subscription companies? So the first, at every point in Speechify history, I have led every department except for AI. And so design, engineering, QA, growth. And my rule is, I will read 100 books about the topic, listen to them with Speechify. I will identify 100 experts, and I'll go and have a conversation with them. So the first thing that I learned is if you send a good email, people will respond, no matter how amazing they are. So I did Mike Krieger from Instagram, I did Ev Williams from Twitter, I did the founders of Plaid, of 23andMe, of Honey, of Grammarly, Vlad from Robinhood, and all those became Speechify investors very early on. But they would all respond to the emails. And the second rule was, again, volume of work. If the CEO didn't respond, I would message the CMO. And if the CMO didn't respond, I would message the head of growth. And if they didn't respond to my email, I would politely continue doing so until they either told me to stop, which is less to go on chat. And I would also message them on Instagram. And I would also ask people for intros, just be unlimited hungry to get the information. The second thing I learned is once we would get on a Zoom call, we'd chat. And there was one thing that always succeeded, which is I have listened to 100 books a year, every year for the last 15 years. So I'd ask them, what's your favorite books? And they'd tell me. And most likely, I read at least one of them. So we'd connect on the book. And then I'd be, oh my gosh, I'm going to be in Denmark this Sunday. Do you want to hang out if they were in Denmark? And they'd be, oh, sure. And then I'd book a flight to Denmark and I'd show up. And so I did this with Anton at Lovable recently. And I'm still doing the same thing. And after I did this with the heads of growth, I did this with CTOs, and I did this with every type of person that I want to learn from. And then I'd go and I'd watch how they bought Facebook ads, or I'd watch how they made content. And from that, I figured out what would work. And so the first thing that I learned is growth is just an arbitrage game. You are competing with every single other person in the world who wants to get their product in front of users. And that means that your lever points are either the content that you make or how you distribute that content. When it comes to buying ads, there's always new tricks that you can come. At the time, adding polls on your Instagram story was really helpful. Right now, whitelisting ads is really helpful. Volume of work of posting a ton of ads that you test is really, really important. There's different rules for SEO. There's different rules for how you structure your team as it comes to who is the creative director, who writes the scripts, how do you do the editing, et cetera. So every team does their own thing, but for every company, there's a different rule. So one person I learned from is the founder of Blinkist. A small thing he said, as an aside, that really helped me at the time was don't even bother spending money on any platform that's not meta until you reach $100,000 a month and spend on meta. And then I stopped spending on other places. And then the thing I also realized is that a lot of the people who were senior in these companies were already rusty. They were not very strong individual practitioners of the craft. And so I would go down a couple of levels to find the person who's actually buying the ads, who's actually editing the content, who's actually seeing what the CTA is and what the things are. And I made sure that everybody in our company, no matter how senior they got, always were still not just a fat general sitting at the back, but a warrior who could take out their sword and actually hands on keyboard by the ads. And we had a situation where we hired a head of growth 30 days in nothing, 60 days in nothing. And I was, all right, man, what's going on? And he's, well, we're trying to hire the people. I was, okay, look, well, okay, tell me what you're doing for hiring. Well, I gave the head of HR the brief of what I'm looking for, source the people yourself, message the people yourself, get on the calls yourself. You've got seven days in those seven days. I need to see you making ads in CapCut. I need to see you editing ads in Figma or Photoshop, whatever tool you want. And I just see you buying the ads. And if that doesn't happen, it's going to be very difficult to keep working together. And so—
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[SPEAKER_02] It reminds me very much of Keith Raboy, you want to hire barrels, not ammunition, which is someone who can go from one to 10 on their own and do full stack. I don't want to, oh, I can put the video on CapCut, but I can't do the editing. Someone else needs to do that. It's, I can take the video, I can edit it, and I can post it. I do all of it.
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We look for three things when we hire people, firing the bell for the product, high loyalty to the team, and the ability to learn fast and ship to production. And we have a principle even inside of engineering, which is you've got to respond to messages within 60 seconds because you want to unblock people and just inform them if you're able to unblock them or not. If you can't, that's fine. They're going to go learn it on their own. And so we have a rule if you ship a PR to a repo that your team is not responsible for, it gets fast-tracked and that team has to very quickly respond because I want to encourage people to learn how to contribute to other code bases. So the person in the company who learns the fastest is my brother Tyler who leads our AI team. And just the whole principle inside of our AI engineering team is just learn everything and then you win. Okay, there's many things that I want to unpack here. You can tell from my incredibly athletic physique that I am a fan of weights and gym work. You said before that growth is about bulking and cutting downstairs. I love this so much. Can you explain how you think about that?
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So companies go through cutting and bulking cycles like bodybuilders do. And there's a reason why cutting and bulking makes sense because you can't oscillate between the two in one week. You have to commit for about six months to doing one. And so for Speechify, for example, it took us four and a half years to find real product market fit. The product stays exactly the same. The vision today is very much the same as it was in the very beginning. But in 2020, we started growing really fast. And that was around the time where install to trial, trial to paid, renewals all went up. People use the product a ton. And I tried to figure out how do I pour fuel on the flame? And the reason why companies succeed
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Cutting and bulking makes sense because you can't oscillate between the two in one week. You have to commit for six months to doing one. And so for Speechify, for example, it took us four and a half years to find real product market fit. The product stays exactly the same. The vision today is very much the same as it was in the very beginning. But in 2020, we started growing really fast. And that was around the time where install to trial, trial to paid, renewals all went up. People use the product a ton. And I tried to figure out how do I pour fuel on the flame? And the reason why companies succeed is you have a person who puts their beating heart into the product and their will to power. That's the thing that makes the thing successful. And you can only do one of those things at a time. The second you split your even fundraising, you can't fundraise and do sales at the same time. You've got to do one. And so all I was thinking about at the time was growth, which is why it was a no brainer to fly to all these places to meet people. And there was a point where I was actually very annoyed because I didn't succeed in having the growth outcomes that I wanted. And so I started logging my time in 30 minute increments. So every day I'd have 48 units. And I noticed that 30% of my time I spent helping other people and 30% of my time I spent learning SEO. So I decided I'm not allowed to learn anything from that point on. I'm only allowed to execute. And the second I saw myself reading an article, I would delete the article and go do. And so the rule is you just have to go, you have to learn and you have to execute. So you have to have that maniacal focus on the one thing. And then we grew a lot. And now there was a focus on, okay, well, we got to get the margins to be good. And so that's a cutting year. And there you're focused on profits. And the conclusion that I've had across the almost decade I've spent working on Speechify is any Harvard MBA can cut costs. If you're smart, you could do it. It takes a genius to grow revenue. And that's why investors value exponential growth of revenue, even for companies that are not making a profit. But it's very difficult to do both at the same time. You're clicking the gas and clicking the brake at the same time. And so Speechify just finished four and a half years of running profitable. And now we're in a hyper growth phase. And so it doesn't matter whether you're a company or you're an athlete or you're a social media creator, you have bulking years and you have cutting years and you need to decide which year it is for you. So in a hyper growth phase, are we fully accepting CACs will go up and we are happy with that? No, not at all. So if you think about CAC, you have to consider, okay, what is my LTV and what's the first payment period? So we prefer to think about first payment period. So our product is $140. But if you're listening to this show, hit me up, Cliff at speechify.com, I'll give you a discount. I'm never willing to burn CAC for no reason. The blended CAC can go up, not the direct CAC. What does that mean? I'm okay spending $500,000 a month making 20,000 pieces of creative because that is a creative investment. I'm going to learn a format that is new that will unlock additional growth later. I'm okay doing an experiment on app lovin or a specific new product that Google dropped for YouTube videos. We're one of the 200 companies that's provisioned to test ads on OpenAI. So we're spending a ton of money on OpenAI right now. And we're learning it faster than everybody else. So by the time it rolls out to everybody else, we'll already be really, really good at running ads on OpenAI. So you grow, you grow, you grow, you test new channels, you test new creative, and I'm very happy to burn an unlimited amount of money and excellent engineers. I'm not okay setting money on fire, doing ads that are not attributable. Spending money on a billboard where I don't know if a user comes. I think about everything as a test. And if the test succeeds, then I do more. If the test fails, that's fine. The classic adage that you learn from CMOs, I learned this from Kelly at Netflix, they spent $1.7 billion of performance marketing in 2017. And you'll hear Brex also is really good at this. You know, I know I'm wasting half my spend. I just don't know which half. And so that's okay. Do that. And then do the work to figure out which half you're wasting, but don't just spend with increased CAC for the sake of growth. It always has to be an experiment you learn something from. When you look back at the consumer subscription companies and buying ad patterns, you said, I want to go in, I want to see how they buy ads. Who had the most atypical or weird process that stood out?
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[SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Greg at Ladder. So Ladder is a health and fitness company. Perfect example. He's the CEO of the company, but he buys the ads himself and he found a lot of arbitrage plays that other people have not found. And so you just got to go and figure out what those plays are. Do you think there are new plays to be figured out today? [SPEAKER_02] Every single day. Every single day. What is the play today that people don't know? [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Whitelisting ads on Instagram works really well. So what is whitelisting ads?
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[SPEAKER_02] So let's say you find a creator that is in your niche. For example, for us, maybe it's teachers. Maybe it's someone with ADHD or dyslexia. Maybe it's an AI creator. They make a video for you. And then you go, Hey, make me 20 videos. I don't need you to post them on your profile. I'll run them as ads myself. And actually, if some of them are good, we can post them from your account and we increase the spend. And so users might not see it as a normal organic video, but you get to test all of those videos, see which one performs. And then you have them post organically. The one that actually is successful.
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Isn't consistency important? And what I mean by consistency is consistency of personality. [SPEAKER_02] Not at all, because you're marketing for different demographics. So for example, you find this interesting. We test almost a thousand AI generated ads a day right now, on top of the roughly 8,000 organic creators we make with humans every single month. And one of the things we do is we reskin. So my sister Geffen leads our ads team and we have a bunch of great ads with Geffen. And then we'll turn her into a 60 year old lady and we'll turn her into a 40 year old man. And then we'll turn her into someone who's African-American or someone who's Asian.
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[SPEAKER_02] Isn't consistency important? And what I mean by consistency is consistency of personality.
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[SPEAKER_02] Not at all, because you're marketing for different demographics. So for example, you find this interesting. We test almost a thousand AI generated ads a day right now, on top of the roughly 8,000 organic creators we make with humans every single month. And one of the things we do is we reskin. So my sister Geffen leads our ads team and we have a bunch of great ads with Geffen. And then we'll turn her into a 60 year old lady and we'll turn her into a 40 year old man. And then we'll turn her into someone who's African-American or someone who's Asian. And we'll change the background from a coffee shop to a library, to a farm. But farm wouldn't convert for our users. And so you just test all the variations. And so I know that for us, highest converting demographics would be people in their thirties and forties in terms of paid, but we have crazy usage in the 18 to 28 year old market. But people who are 60 and above need reading glasses. So they use Speechify a ton. And now we're launching voice agents at symbol voices.ai. And so that's a different demographic. And so all the initial ads for Speechify were me. It was my face. And I would sit in my house, especially Saturday or Sunday with my phone and I'd record. I'd be like, as a medical student, I use Speechify to read while I'm working out. As a lawyer, I love working from home. And you need to read that contract and find that one gotcha. And Speechify can find that for you. You just need to listen asynchronously. And I'll be like, I have dyslexia and I would just play all the characters and it was my face and it converted really well, but I got maxed out. And so when Geffen joined and we hired other people to the team, suddenly we found that actually women convert a lot better than men as audiences. And so right now we have more women who use the product than men by a good margin at the moment. It's just because our team happens to be very woman focused. And you just have to test everything.
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[SPEAKER_02] On the video before we move on, what do you use? Because I see everyone say, "Oh, we do AI video," and we've seen a load of companies. I do remember Icon, the Peter Thiel funded one that said AI ads. What do you use for your AI ads?
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[SPEAKER_02] Because it's an arbitrage game. If you use the tool that everybody else uses, typically you're not going to win. So we just built our own platform. So there was a point several months ago where my girlfriend went to Disneyland. So I had four days free. And so in that time I went to school, Alex Hermossy, shout out. And I did a course for AI generated video ads. And then I hired everybody from inside of the community that was really good. And so I built a team. I hired four new engineers outside of our core team. In one week, I hired 10 people. And 24 seven, all I was thinking about was AI generated content. And my goal was to get to 1,300 ads that we tested every single day. And we just built tools for it. Initially, I built it on N8N and then all the N8N instances would time out. So then we built our own platform and our own website that does really good AI generated stuff that allows you to reskin. It automatically posts this to Meta and TikTok and YouTube and all the platforms. And it gives me all the data that I want. I'm obsessed with Manus. So I'd get reporting from Manus every single day. And then after those four days, I continued to monitor it, but I assigned a leader for that project. And that project has done really well. So we don't use any external tool. Obviously, we'll use all the LLMs, but that changes on a weekly basis, right? Well, one was really good. And then Kling was really good. And then C Dance was really good. And now ChatGPT's new image model. And then Banana, obviously. You just constantly test and iterate and find flows that work. So we just built our own.
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[SPEAKER_02] 1,300 ads a day.
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A day. That's wild. What do we look for in the outcomes? At the end of the day, I work for Speechify. I go, okay, Cliff, here's 1,300 ads. What now? Yeah. So what you want to do is you post, you throw a lot of things on the wall. No matter how smart you are, you're not going to know ahead of time which thing is going to convert. You really don't. You don't.
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You have no idea. So first you test. Once you test, you look for the following. In Meta, you can see the click-through rate on the ads and you can see the CPA, cost per action. And you can learn what the CPM, cost per thousand impressions, are. So if we see that the cost of acquiring a user and having it pay is less than a certain amount, we're like, "Oh, very interesting. This is a standard deviation better than everything else. Let me put it into the main campaign." Now it's going to compete against our best performing ads ever. And we let it breathe. And if it does well, it gets more spend. And if it does less well, it gets less spend and we cut it. And so you just iterate. It's evolution. You put it into the wild and you see if it performs. And so every day you'll take the top 10, you'll take the top 20.
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Every day we upload 1,300 to our testing campaigns. We'll take of those the ones that win. Might be nothing one that day, in which case nothing gets launched. Might be a lot one that day, in which case they all get launched. And then you let them breathe. It's March Madness in brackets. You just graduated to the next level of competition where you can get more spend. And it's almost like duplicating the algorithm that TikTok and Instagram have anyway, where when you post a video, a thousand people see it. And then if it does well, 10,000 people see it. And if it does well, a hundred thousand people see it. If it does well, 10 million people will see it. It's the same thing with performance marketing ads, except you're paying for every view.
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Totally get that. You said you use Manus a lot. A lot. I'm just intrigued. I don't know if you saw actually just this morning, the acquisition was blocked by China. Wow. Yeah. And it literally happened an hour ago. So that's interesting. That is interesting. What do you use Manus for? So when GPT-3 came out, actually even GPT-2, my youngest brother Eric has a neural inflammation It. It's the same thing with performance marketing ads, except you're paying for every view. Totally get that. You said you use Manus a lot. A lot. I'm just intrigued. I don't know if you saw actually just this morning, the acquisition was blocked by China. Wow.
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Yeah. And it literally an hour ago. So that's interesting. That is interesting. What do you use Manus for?
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So when GPT-3 came out, actually even GPT-2, my youngest brother Eric's has neural inflammation and psychosis and he's had it for a long time. It causes OCD. It causes paranoia. Me and my brother and my sister got really good at using GPT-3 for medical stuff. And when GPT-3 came out, we started using it even more. Then my main use for Manus is medical things. So I build on average a website or two a day. And so for example, I make a document of all the neuroencephalitis or Lyme doctors in the world. And then I'll auto message all of them. I'll upload all of Eric's medical records and then I'll build an interactive graph of them.
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I might go and look at a company that's similar for us. So Speechify is basically B2C version of 11 Labs. I'll go and find every article, every podcast, transcribe it and map out their entire business. And I'll understand how their business works. Or I'll go, hey, we're selling into education. Great. I'll make a website with a map of all the United States, every single school district in the United States, who is the district administrator for that school and make it into a website. And they'll send it to our B2B team.
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[SPEAKER_02] Why do I do it this way? Number one, it makes it easy for me to understand things. Number two, I can then plug that into another LLM and it has access to the entire website that it can scrape. So I'll then put that into Claude or I'll put that into GPT or I'll put that into Gemini. So that makes it really, really easy. Manus makes it really easy to post automatically for you. It's really great at deep research. So for example, my girlfriend and I went to Passover Seder the other day and she didn't know too much about Judaism. So I wrote a 120 page document on the history of Judaism for her. And that way she didn't get bored at Seder because she could listen to that with Speechify and you just listen to it in 25 minutes in the car on the way there. And so I'm constantly making things. And the thing is, it's very easy to use from my phone. It's very easy to use from a computer. I use Claude code all the time and dispatch from Claude as well. Manus is just a little bit faster, a little bit easier to use. And so Jarvis, which is the Speechify B2C voice agent is essentially Manus, but voice first. And so that's the places where I like Manus more than I like Claude code or Gemini.
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[SPEAKER_02] I do just want to go back to the ad spend as well. You had one ad drive $3 million of revenue. Can you just talk to me about that and the lessons learned from that?
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[SPEAKER_02] Sure. So rule of 100, I had gone and I had talked to all these people who were good at growth. And then I made a list of the top 100 creators and I talked to them and I'd live in their houses. And then I was making those ads in my apartment and some of them were good, but I was stuck in a local maxima and I wanted to break out to a global maxima. And my conclusion is the way that I would do that is I made a list of the top 100 best performing ads in history. Every Super Bowl ad that was really funny. Every ad that made me cry. Every ad that won an award. I made a list of maybe 500 ads and then I whittled them down to the top 100. And then I read the script for each one of them. And I rewrote the script to be about Speechify. And then what I would do is I would up the ante on the ad. So the rule in videos typically is you win or lose by the first three seconds. Do you have good retention in the first three seconds? But the rule I developed is actually you win or lose by the first image of the video, the first 1080 pixels. And so I wanted the first 1080 pixels to be as crazy as possible. So the way to represent Speechify is headphones. So I got bright red headphones. I put them on my head. I put a suit on and then I went into a hot tub. And so the first shot is me with red headphones and a suit in a hot tub at the time I had long hair. And I just threw behind me the most random knickknacks, weird photos and books and stuff. And I developed this character called Cruz Silver. Cruz Silver appears in many of our ads and he's a version of me. And he's very gullible. He's kind of dull, but he has great confidence. And so the ad starts,
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Hi, I'm Cliff, founder of Speechify. What is Speechify? Well, you give us stuff you need to read and we read it to you instantly. Yeah. Instantly. Are the voices any good? No. Our voices are great.
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[SPEAKER_02] And then it just goes into all these different scenes. And the video was really long. And so then I edited it and I made, like my college apps, almost 50 variations of that video. And I tested all of them and one did pretty good and another did better and 20 didn't perform at all. And one did amazing. And that YouTube ad basically launched the company, took it to a whole new stratosphere and performed for three years straight. That video got hundreds of millions of impressions on Instagram alone. And then every year I remake that video. So again, I did the nacho commercial from the Super Bowl. I did the Isaiah Old Spice commercial. I literally got a horse for the ad and just you take it as far as you can. Did it work?
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[SPEAKER_02] Which one? Did they work like you thought they would? [SPEAKER_02] It's a complete random distribution of what works and what doesn't work. [SPEAKER_02] What did you think would that really didn't? [SPEAKER_02] I thought that the Old Spice commercial would absolutely annihilate. It got 300,000 views. The one that I did not expect to work that worked amazing is I wrote a rap song about my experience with dyslexia and ADHD. And that thing made us three million, also $3 million on a rap song. [SPEAKER_02] Do you have no idea? You just have to test.
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[SPEAKER_02] Even the power of repurposing. We did a video the other day that went super viral on comparing American founders to French founders. And basically American founders have nothing and say, oh, we're a trillion dollar company right now. French founders have a hundred million in revenue. They're, yeah, you shit. Super viral. And the team is now repurposing it into 10 different. [SPEAKER_02] The one that I did not expect to work that worked amazing is I wrote a rap song about my experience with dyslexia and ADHD. And that thing made us like three million, also like $3 million on a rap song.
SPEAKER_02
You just have to test. Even the power of repurposing. We did a video the other day that went super viral on comparing American founders to French founders. And American founders have nothing and say, oh, we're a trillion dollar company right now. French founders have like a hundred million in revenue. They're like, yeah, you shit. Super viral. And the team is now repurposing it into 10 different formats.
SPEAKER_02
Formats are the thing that works, right? So one of the things that works really well for Mr. Beast is ladders, right? $1 hotel, $100 hotel, $1,000 hotel, million hotel, competing where you have people age one to 100 competing against each other in the same thing. I got trapped on an island, blah, blah, blah. He does the same formats, but changes the view and how it works. So American founder versus British founder is a perfect format. And then you switch it to French versus Ghanaian, whatever you want. And then repurposing works. You take the same piece of content and you put it on TikTok, you put it on Instagram, you put it on YouTube, you change the hook, especially in performance marketing. It doesn't matter how many times you post because you're not going to damage your brand by posting something that will not perform organically because it's behind the wall. It only gets served. It lives in the shadows. So just test 800 variations. Why not?
SPEAKER_02
Do you give a shit about conversion? And I know that's... I only care about conversion. So because we have TikTok and we get lots of views, conversion back to core podcasts and core products, very little. Would you say then not worth it? Don't bother? Yes. Fascinating.
SPEAKER_02
Right. Only do things that result in conversion. So we have more than 50 million people who use Speechify Now, the organic B2C product that makes it really easy to read. And if you don't download the app and you don't start a trial and you don't convert to paid, there's two options. The first one is I don't care. The second one is I actually do genuinely care that we solve dyslexia and ADHD. And so there's 2 billion people in the world that have either ADHD, low vision, autism, anxiety, concussion, second language learners. Our philosophy is we roll out the red carpet for the user. We give them the best experience possible. If you can't pay, that's fine. You still have a great experience. And so I think about that as that's our form of charity. We acquire the user and they can use the product for free. Amazing. But that's not what's going to cover the ad spend. So the ad spend is covered by the people who pay. If you don't get people who actually convert on your product, there's no point in doing the work that you're doing.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] Do you have a separate growth team for the ads testing, for the new channel testing, for the iterations? Is that all in marketing or is that a separate growth team? [SPEAKER_02] It's all in one. Yeah. It's not split. And there's sub teams inside of growth, but they all report into the same people. [SPEAKER_02] When you look at channel composition, what does yours look like today?
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] It's still word of mouth is the biggest way of us getting people, right? It's someone telling their friend, Hey, I know you like podcasts and audio books, and I can see that you're reading at a normal reading speed. Don't you want to read 3X faster? Use Speechify to make AI generated audio books. That's the biggest one. We crush it on Apple. We won the design award last year. We got featured by them 14 times last year. SEO is huge for us. 10%, 15% now, 15% of our users come organically from ChatGPT. Inside of performance marketing, meta is still the best winner. Google is the most profitable. YouTube is pretty good, especially on desktop. Apple oven is interesting. TikTok is interesting, but they're not as big. And you have this great halo effect. So the more that you get the message out there in different ways, the more you sow the seeds that results in people talking about it and telling each other about it. You said open AI that, and you said about being one of the first 200 on open AI ads. Biggest lessons from open AI ads? You just have to test. Everything else. Do you think it will be huge? Of course. Yeah. Massive, massive, massive, because it knows so much about you. It's the same thing as meta, right? The reason why meta ads are so good is because they know what you message on Instagram and what you message on WhatsApp. As a result, they can target really, really well. So people convert. Open AI knows everything about your history and what you're interested in inside of your psyche. And it's exactly the same way that Google has built such an amazing business because there's relatively high intent when you talk to it and the ads convert. Now it's extremely high CPMs, but if you find content that converts, the CPMs don't matter. And that's something that people really don't realize. It's okay to pay a high CPM as long as people convert and as long as you have attribution. So they just launched the SDK for tracking. That's really important.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] Would you buy meta today? [SPEAKER_02] Absolutely. Yeah. I think meta is one of the most underrated stocks right now. Why?
SPEAKER_02
[SPEAKER_01] Number one, Mark Zuckerberg is an absolute savage. He will hire people if they're right, no matter what. Number two, I think that in a world where engineering is commoditized and design for the most part is commoditized, the most important thing becomes excellent QA and customer acquisition. Google has pressure on it from all the LLMs, but meta doesn't. The only real pressure on meta now is TikTok. And TikTok has a lot of issues now that it's been separated. So Zuck also has proven that he is the number one acquirer in the world. No one acquires as well as meta. The leadership team is incredible. Crick Cox is amazing. Alex Schultz is amazing. And I think that also in AI world, data is everything. So they have more proprietary data than everybody else. They haven't figured out the model side yet, but I really do believe that they will. And I look at all the people who are vibe coding new products right now. Where do you think they're going to get their users? You said design commoditizes in some respects. Everyone talks about
SPEAKER_02
Zuck also has proven that he is the number one acquirer in the world. No one acquires as well as Meta. The leadership team is incredible. Crick Cox is amazing. Alex Schultz is amazing. And I think that in the AI world, data is everything. So they have more proprietary data than everybody else. They haven't figured out the model side yet, but I really do believe that they will. And I look at all the people who are building new products right now. Where do you think they're going to get their users? You said design commoditizes in some respects. Everyone talks about taste. It's the new world of 2026, which is, oh no, the value is in taste. Can you help me understand that? Is that bullshit? No, it's not bullshit. Everything is in taste as well. When I'm saying design, I mean the actual grind of sitting in Photoshop, sitting in Figma, sitting in Illustrator, sitting in Canva, and pixel perfect making things. We're already at the state that most of my leadership team is sending their emails from inside IDE, cloud code terminals. Design, when we want to launch a new product, we do not assign a designer in the beginning. We say, just use the default cloud code stuff, and then we'll bring designers after and they'll make it a lot better. And we definitely do use design for user experience interviews and stuff like that. That matters a lot. Design is a really important part of Speechify. But the hammer and chisel part of design is not as important. And therefore, the thing that's left is taste. Very few people have taste. I have taste in some things, but in other things, I have bad taste. So which is why we hire really great designers at Speechify to make up for my shortcomings. Taste really matters. Even if it's just telling you pick that one, not that one. I'm down 40% on my Figma position. Hold or sell?
SPEAKER_02
Hold. Dylan Field is a savage. Anything Dylan Field does, you should go for. So you think they survive in an Anthropic design?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I do. I also think that Figma is a relatively anti-fragile company, just because it's a really good team. They're excellent at sales. They have really good taste. Figma itself is a great product because Dylan coded the original thing. I think it was C++. It was the first product that would render vector-based architecture in a browser. They can do the same thing. And today what happens is you have a world where everything is moving really fast. Do I bet on an old incumbent that's really bad at innovating, or do I bet on the Figma team? I would bet on the Figma team. So it might be the product that they end up with. It's not the product that they have today, but I think it's a great company. I think they're actually benefited by being a publicly traded company. And I think that they'll continue to rise and do really great. Remember, Figma traded at 40X revenue, and now they're at 6X revenue. So it's less so that it's not a good company. It's more so that the market is making a correction, and that's fine.
SPEAKER_02
Claude code or cursor internally? What does everyone use engineering-wise?
SPEAKER_02
Claude code. We were huge adopters of cursor about two years ago. I got the Anthropic team plan in December. And it actually drives me crazy that not everybody has moved over to Claude code. A lot of people will use Claude code from inside the terminal in cursor. I prefer if they use Claude code inside of the Claude code IDE. I think it's more powerful, but it's fine to use it inside cursor as well. But most important is you have to use it to the max. And I'm always surprised. There's some limitations that you need to enable. It took people three months to ask for some of the features to be enabled. Why did it take you three months to ask me about this? I'm pushing people constantly to hit limits. And we're getting to the point where soon we're going to spend more in tokens than we spend on actual salaries.
SPEAKER_02
[SPEAKER_01] You're getting to the point where you spend more in tokens than you do in... Like next year, I expect we'll spend more in tokens than we'll spend on salaries. Is that atypical? It's atypical right now, but I don't think it'll be atypical in the long term. You don't? You think the majority of great high quality companies will? We'll get there in three years. Yeah. You just need to be a really strong early adopter. Across all functions or just engineering?
SPEAKER_02
No, across engineering. Across engineering. I would like to be spending more tokens on our growth team and creative. We're not there yet. We need a lot more testing mechanisms to be put in place for that to make sense. Are they AI native? I know that sounds really VC-ish, but I am pushing people to use AI internally, which honestly is kind of frustrating, especially on my growth stuff. We do clips here where basically they interview me for an hour and then turn it into a hundred clips. But you know what actually sucks? I'm in the same top, in the same studio, and when you look at the grids, it just looks boring. Yeah. It's very easy for you to change that already.
SPEAKER_02
It is, but I'm the one who's pushing them. My point is I'm dragging my team into an AI world. So I could tell you what we do. Remember Speechify is a voice agents ecosystem with 50 million users and 1.1 million five-star reviews across platforms. We need to educate even our users on how to use AI. And so our first agent was a text-to-speech tool that reads to you. The second one was a speech-to-text tool that does dictation. The third one was a podcast generator where you can be in the podcast as well as two new hosts. Then we launched teacher agents that will ask you questions about the document and then teach you back the content gap that you were missing. And now we just launched Jarvis, which is the speech-to-write for work. It lets you do productivity and then the enterprise Simba voices.ai. We're constantly educating our own users on how to use AI. And what we found is it takes about a hundred iterations on a feature before the feature gets adopted. But once it gets adopted, it gets adopted really well. So you need to do the same education for your B2C users as you need to do internally. Internally, I am constantly screaming from the rooftops that people have to use Cloud Code. And I'm more extreme about it than it needs to be because I need to move people from all the way over here on the right to all the way over here on the left. And I'm okay if they meet me in the middle. So I'm just extreme about it. I'm saying, if you don't spend a thousand credits a day, I'm disappointed in you. I need to see that.
SPEAKER_02
gets adopted. But once it gets adopted, it gets adopted really well. So you need to do the same education for your B2C users as you need to do internally. Internally, I am constantly screaming from the rooftops that people have to use Cloud Code. And I'm more extreme about it than it needs to be because I need to move people from all the way over here on the right to all the way over here on the left. And I'm okay if they meet me in the middle. So I'm just extreme about it. I'm like, if you don't spend a thousand credits a day, I'm disappointed in you. I need to see that happen. And so send me screenshots and I will get people on a Zoom call, screen share the entire engineering, and I'll show them how I use it. And they'll go, Tim, you're really good at this. Show us what you do. Tyler, you're amazing at this. Show us what you do. Simon, show us what you do. And we're just constantly demoing. And you just got to make sure that people are aware of how much other people are using it. And then I'm like, if you are not using this tool right now, it's a chat in everyone's Slack, comment, explain why. It's going to be very difficult to continue working together if you don't use it and you don't explain to me why. So they have to explain to me why, and then I will call them and convince them to use it. And I'm like, you have 24 hours. Send me a Loom video with what you used AI to make.
SPEAKER_02
What single thing do you use Anthropic or Claude for that has been most impactful?
SPEAKER_02
So the personal side is medical stuff. We talked a little about my brother, Eric, who has Lyme neural inflammation and psychosis. We took, we did a proteomics, mapped all of his genome, put it on Supabase, wrote an MCP for it, and then had it compare to every single article that had ever been published about anomalies in the genome. And we found four anomalies in how his genes expressed. And so that was amazing for breakthrough for us. The second thing that we did is my dad has had prostate cancer on and off for the last eight years. There was a point where his PSA continued to go up, which meant it came back. We just didn't know where it was in the body. And so the next thing you need to do is what's called a PSMA scan. And the doctor refused to do it because he was like, listen, the cancer is too small. What we need to do is sit and wait. And I was like, that sounds like the worst advice ever. If we know he has cancer, waiting for another three years is a terrible thing to do. And he's like, well, we don't know where it is. And so what I started to do is I went on Kaggle, which is the largest online competition for data scientists. And I started hiring people on Kaggle to help me diagnose my dad's cancer from the radiology reports. And it has a lot of open source repositories on data for what's called time series of PSMA PET scans for cancer. And so I came up with four theories. The first one is called tipping theory, which is like, you basically look at the level above and the level below where you think the cancer is, and you make the data really noisy and you see if you can figure out where it is. So we started making models for that. And then I basically took five different approaches inside of this research from talking to Gemini and talking to Grok and talking to ChatGPT. I realized that there was a machine that could help us. So in UCSF, there's a thing called the China Basin that does a normal PSMA PET scan, and it will scan a voxel of four millimeters in diameter. But there's another machine called the UExplorer that can scan a voxel of two millimeters in diameter. And there were three of them in the United States, and one of them was in UC Davis. And so I messaged the guy who was responsible for that lab. He agreed to test my dad and the doctor who I put a lot of pressure to give my dad the exam had scheduled it for the end of January. In December, we got to get the scan in this higher quality machine. And we found it. It was in his left seminal vesicle. I would have never had the confidence to push on the doctor so hard to get the scan if I didn't have LLMs open during the conversation with the doctor. I definitely would not have found another machine, got my dad scanned, and then figured out. So by January 7th, he had the left seminal vesicle excised. And so before he was even supposed to have the second scan, he had a surgery and he was good.
SPEAKER_02
Are you quite skeptical on the state of modern medicine? And what I mean by that is when you were a kid, you kind of just believe everything that doctors tell you. And the more I kind of grow up, the more doctors tell me, oh, don't worry, the scans were kind of fine. And I pay for my healthcare here and it's a lot. I'm like, kind of fine isn't great. Actually, send me the PDF and I'd love to actually go through it myself. And I put it in a chat. I'm like, kind of fine, yes. But there's a lot more you could have told me to optimize. Are you actually quite skeptical of the state of modern medicine?
SPEAKER_02
So three years into my dad having prostate cancer, we had a meeting with a doctor who was very renowned. And he was like, yeah, your dad's fine. We're just going to sit and monitor. And I was like, screw that. That's the same thing as us being a JV soccer team. No, I want to be coached like I'm Real Madrid or Barcelona. Give me, tell me exactly what to do. Do you want me to wake up at midnight and see the moon or put my feet on, or whatever you want me to do? I will do that thing. I just want my dad to live longer. And the problem is not the doctors. The problem is the system where doctors have to treat statistics and they need to make sure they don't get sued. And so in your case, in my case, because we're educating ourselves and we're willing to take the risk ourselves, we can do things that result in better outcomes, but they're a little bit more risky and that's fine. And so my contention is you should just learn as much as possible because the information is accessible to you. And then you are the quarterback of your own medical experience or that of your family members.
SPEAKER_02
So there were so many things that we were talking about regarding token maxing and spending more on tokens than we were on people. And then went on that tangent there. I think one thing that was so interesting for me was going through some of the notes. You said adversity quotient matters more than IQ or EQ. I don't think most people know what adversity quotient is. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. I had to expand upon it in my searches. What are the leading signals for you of a candidate slash person that is going to be successful at Speechify? Yeah. So people talk a lot about IQ, intelligent quotient, or EQ, emotional quotient, but the most important one is AQ, adversity
SPEAKER_02
medical experience or that of your family members. So there were so many things that we were talking about token maxing and spending more on tokens than we were on people. And then went on a tangent there. I think one thing that was so interesting for me was going through some of the notes. You said adversity quotient matters more than IQ or EQ. I don't think most people know what adversity quotient is. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. I had to expand upon it in my searches. What are the leading signals for you of a candidate slash person that is going to be successful at Speechify?
SPEAKER_02
[SPEAKER_01] Yeah. So people talk a lot about IQ, intelligent quotient, or EQ, emotional quotient, but the most important one is AQ, adversity quotient. How good are you when things get really tough? And so I think about it through a Jeep that's going through the Savannah. I don't want the Jeep that goes the fastest. I want the Jeep that's not going to have a flat tire. They're going to stick with it the longest. And so there's a heuristic I use for this, which is sometimes you look at an engineer and they're willing to grapple with a really hard problem for eight hours straight. Most people, if it's really hard, they quit after 30 minutes. But the things that really move the company are on the other side of five hours of grappling with a hard problem. And you have to be obsessed to do that. And so the way that I find that is I look for projects that people actually did that they published to production. Let's say you went and you spent four years learning computer science and we have a call together. My goal in that call is not to not hire you. Nothing will make me happier than hiring you. I just need to get you to give me the information that proves to me that I can underwrite hiring you. So the whole point to that call is for me to find out how awesome you are. And so I want to hear about your side projects that you've built. I want you to screen share and show me the things that you've made. But if you haven't made them, you're just not willing to deal with a little annoying thing that requires registering an Apple developer account and putting an app on the app store. The little annoying things that require setting up a Cloudflare instance and making sure that your website sticks around three years after you published it. I need to see that those things happen. And then ideally I want to see something novel that you created and you don't need to be a genius. You just need to be willing to do the thing. And so the last thing I'll say is I have a friend, Valentin Perez, who has a great line, which is a little bit of slope makes up for a lot of Y intercept. It doesn't matter where you start. It matters how fast you grow and the growth rate has to do directly with how much pain you're willing to bear. I think that this is exactly the same when I look for founders that I want to invest in. As awful as it seems, there are certain things we look for. One of them is struggles in parental relationships often signify very successful founders, sadly.
SPEAKER_02
If you were an investor today looking for adversity quotient or struggle duration in a founder, what would you advise me to ask, question, dig deep on with founders? There's a great question from Y Combinator, which is what is a non-computer science system you've hacked to your advantage? It's a really good one. Because I'm looking for the story that shows me your ability to A, build a system, B, learn something, and then C, have an inhuman amount of desire and will and grit. So that you have clearly.
SPEAKER_02
Are there any mega red flags on the flip side? Like for me, I hate the people that are founding GTM advisor. And it's like, no, no, no. You're just a GTM hire that was one of the first. You don't look like a founding. Everything needs to be a founding role.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. So there's a lot. The first one is any situation where you can discover dishonesty. So what I really don't like is when people give me a stat and they say, oh, I raised the stat XYZ. And the more questions you ask, the more you realize they changed the definition of what the denominator was. So that's one thing that I really dislike. The second thing is people who talk too much. The amount of signal per sentence that I get needs to be high. And if it's not, I don't want you wasting the time with the rest of the people on the team. We're all about execution here. And so sometimes I'll meet someone who I think is really talented. They might even be really technical, but they just talk so much. And I'm going to annoy everybody else and get us off track. I want someone who's hyper-focused on the one goal, the thing that really matters. And then the last thing is you don't want people who are too comfortable. You want people who will be loyal. And so I always ask people, what made you interested to interview with Speechify? And if the answer is bad, we shouldn't hire that person because there's no differentiating reason why they're here, not another company, and they might leave.
SPEAKER_02
What is a bad answer? I want to earn more money. Is that a bad answer? Terrible answer. Never would hire that person. Not in a million years. Why? Because someone else can come and offer you more money and then you leave. And after we spent a year coaching you up and making you amazing. And a good answer is?
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] I have a kid with dyslexia. I have a niece with ADHD. I use the product myself every single day. Those are great answers. I read the blog post by Tyler Weitzman on how he skipped four and a half years of math in high school and built 47 iPhone apps when he was there. And then he went and did his co-term at Stanford. And I really liked his explanation of how he shipped the first deep learning model that worked on the CPU of an iPhone. So I'd love to work with him. That's a great answer. Just do a little bit of research about the company. I want to see a reason why people are there.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] Yeah, that's a better answer. I agree. The cash one was always flimsy. [SPEAKER_02] You said about Tyler and ADHD or earlier you said about dyslexia. The best founders are dyslexic or have ADHD. Unpack that one.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] So Michael Dell has this great analogy, which is when you're running a company, it's like you're driving a car and you want the car to fit the driver. So you want the company to fit the person who's running the company. If you have dyslexia and you're nine years old and you suck at the one thing you're supposed to be good at, which is reading, there's two options. The first one is you think the world is stacked against you and school sucks and you go down this really dark path. 40% of people who are incarcerated have dyslexia, even though 17% of the population
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] or have ADHD. Unpack that one. So Michael Dell has this great analogy, which is when you're running a company, it's like you're driving a car and you want the car to fit the driver. So you want the company to fit the person who's running the company. If you have dyslexia and you're nine years old and you suck at the one thing you're supposed to be good at, which is reading, there's two options.
SPEAKER_01
The first one is you think the world is stacked against you and school sucks and you go down this really dark path. 40% of people who are incarcerated have dyslexia, even though 17% of the population has it. The second option is you keep trying and you try again and you try again and you develop this belief that it's okay to fail and that even in things that seem impossible, if you try enough, you'll succeed. So 40% of billionaires also have dyslexia. [SPEAKER_02] That's insane. 40% of billionaires?
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] 40% of billionaires, yeah. And it ends up being the case that you coach yourself that when it's okay to fail and that's exactly what startups are. You're stacking the odds against you. You're doing something that feels impossible, but you're developing this AQ to never give up. If you have ADHD, people with ADHD, they're definitely not slow and they're not lazy and they're not stupid. Their mind just works differently. And actually we find that for Speechify users, if your brain works at 600 words per minute, but you only read at 200 words per minute, of course you'll get distracted. If you start listening at 600 words per minute, you love that and you stay engaged. Running a company requires you to be responsible for and understand the engineering, the design, the quality assurance, the go-to-market. All these different things are stimulating you at the same time.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] Being ADHD is actually very good to be a CEO. The problem is how do you get from zero to one to 10? The 10 to 100 is an amazing place to be ADHD, but you got to go from zero to 100 where you're doing all the icy work yourself and you need to stay focused and that's really difficult. And so it's great to be dyslexic or ADHD as the person who is running a large company and it's not great as the individual person who needs to build the company. I'm being a terrible interviewer in this because I'm just jumping around so much, but I'm enjoying the spontaneity of the discussion. You mentioned the multiple different disciplines that you have to adopt in the early stages of the company. What role does not exist today that you think will be incredibly commonplace in five years' time?
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] Coach. So one thing that we do a lot in Speechify is coach people on how to use AI better, force them to use AI better. So we're still hiring people at a crazy rate. Last year we had 178,000 people who applied to work at the open engineering positions at Speechify. We have an asynchronous technical challenge. 19,800 people finished that challenge. So we're very good at hiring good people. Still, we much more focus on coaching the people who are inside of the company. And this is something that has been my battle internally actually convincing our leaders to do because they have a lot of things that they need to do. It almost feels like a waste of time to go and spend time teaching other people, but you have to do it. You have to, have to, have to do it. I have a friend, Austin Ray at RAMP and his entire job is teaching the organization how to use AI tools. And we almost had Austin join Speechify and it's one of my biggest mistakes that we didn't make that happen.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] Why didn't you make it happen? We hired him as a consultant. We worked with him for a while. I had super high conviction on him. I couldn't get to the level of conviction I needed from other people. And I made a huge mistake of because I didn't get a resounding, we have to hire him for everybody else. I didn't do it. I should have trusted my gut and done everything to give the sexiest offer possible because he was also obviously a very expensive hire. So there's a cost to it. We should have just given him that because it was clear. He was such Speechify DNA.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] Do you want to hear something nuts? I've been investing for 10 years. Basically what I've learned is I can't decide the difference between a seven out of 10 and a 10 out of 10, but I'm very good at guessing between a one out of 10 to a seven out of 10. And so anything that hits a seven out of 10 in terms of founder quality, I should invest. Right? If I'd invest in every founder that I'd met, every founder that I've met, I'd be 17x more successful. Wow. One 7x more successful. I would have had 2.5% of a deal. I'd have had 2% of 11 labs. I'd have a seed check in Flutterspot, seed check in Vanta. And I knew all these guys were great, but I wasn't sure they were a 10 out of 10. And the honest truth is the market. I saw shipping. I saw SOC 2 compliance. I saw payroll. Really interesting, huh?
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] I have the same philosophy about hiring. If you can really trust someone, you can afford to pay them significantly more. And it's actually just hire the person for more money. And if they don't work out, you part ways. It's fine. You should always be trigger happy to hire really good people if you see that they're really good. And just ignore the fact that they're expensive. Just make it work. [SPEAKER_02] Also, when you get spidey senses in the interview process, listen. It will only get worse post-hire. [SPEAKER_02] Oh, 100%.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] That is when someone, they just get the feeling that they really actually want to be an investor, not in finance. Trust me, when they get on the finance team of the investment firm, they'll be pushing to be on the investment team, not on the finance team. Listen to the early spidey senses. You said before, why we never hire from Google?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
SPEAKER_02
Why? So Speechify is an applied AI research lab that focuses on voice agents. There's 50 million people who use the product. We hire all over the world. And the benefit of having a lot of B2C users is people know about the product. When we try to hire from large organizations, we do have very similar DNA to Amazon. Typically we found, this is my personal experience, when we hire folks from Google, they come from a place of a ton of abundance. So the hunger is not the same hunger. And you need to coach them out of essentially bad habits. And that can infest your culture in a bad way. The other thing is, this is true in general of hiring in the Bay Area, the loyalty is a lot less high than you would get from hiring in Europe. Because in Europe, people really value a good company and a good job. And it's just not the same thing in New York or San Francisco.
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is people know about the product. When we try to hire from large organizations, we do have very similar DNA to Amazon. Typically we found, this is my personal experience, when we hire folks from Google. They come from a place of a ton of abundance. So the hunger is not the same hunger. And you need to coach them out of essentially bad habits. And that can infest your culture in a bad way. The other thing is, this is true in general of hiring in the Bay Area, the loyalty is a lot less high than you would get from hiring in Europe. Because in Europe, people really value a good company and a good job. And it's just not the same thing in New York or San Francisco. And sometimes you find diamonds in the rough, don't get me wrong, and you should definitely hire those people.
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[SPEAKER_01] But by and large, you're taking a big risk. Now for us, we really want to invest in people. It's extremely important to us. And so we've only had one real case of attrition at Speechify of someone who worked with us for a long time. And that person went to work for Elon Musk directly. Like, okay, makes sense. But generally, I don't want people who we coach and understand the context of the company to leave. And so we just find that people who come from companies like Google are more likely to do that. What do you do to retain people in a way that others don't? A lot. I'll give you an example from early, early days of Speechify. We had an amazing teammate. I loved him. He took time off school to work for us. And he told me that he wanted to leave because he wanted to have more friends. Like there were not a lot of friends in the Bay Area for him. He wanted to go back to where he was school. Okay, no worries. And the way I found that out is he said he was going to leave. And I was like, why? And he didn't really know. So I sat him down. I put my phone in his hand, notes file open. I was like, write the 10 top goals you have in life. And it became very clear that it was all around friendships. And I was like, okay, can you describe to him what you're looking for in his friends? He described what he looks for in his friends. Cool. My assignment for you for today, don't do any Speechify work. Give me by the end of the day, a Google sheet with 50 people in the Bay Area that you want to be friends with. So he gave me people who are Teal Fellows and people who won the award for being the best student at Stanford and Berkeley and whatever. And then I DMed all those people on Instagram. And I was like, hey, we have dinners on my patio every Friday. I know some of you. I don't know others of you. You're all invited this Friday and next Friday. So the 50 people, 35 people showed up. He was there and he made a ton of friends. And then he stayed. And so often it will be stuff like that. Early, early Speechify, the person who's now our COO, we couldn't get him a visa. And we went to 15 lawyers. No one would do the visa thing. So in the end, I read the immigration law myself and I figured out how to get him a green card directly. Took a lot of work, but we got it. And after that, we became really good at immigration. There was a person who worked at Speechify, really, really amazing engineer. And he was based in Ukraine. He was going to leave. This is right around when the war was about to start. I flew to Ukraine. I ignored the US restriction of you cannot go to Ukraine. Literally to board the plane, I had to sign a form saying the airline is not responsible for what happens beyond this point. I worked out with him there for three days. I ran a hackathon with other people there. We sorted out the problem and he stayed.
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Typically, this is not the case in Speechify. In most companies, this is true. People don't quit companies. They quit managers. That has not happened at Speechify. Typically, if there's an issue, we'd solve it very, very fast. But people typically leave not for money. They leave for another thing in their life that's not satisfying them. Because they're, for whatever reason, not satisfied. Figure out what's not satisfying and solve that thing. And sometimes it's money, in which case, just solve it. Are you worried by the number of layoffs that we're seeing? Of course. I'm super worried. I think the one thing that we think about, we don't think about enough is in a world where we create more value than ever before. And the Gini index gets really messed up and value accrues to the top 0.1% and not to the rest of the population. What happens? How do you upscale people? And I think about that a lot. And I don't know the answer. And if you look at this graduating class of computer science students, there's basically no jobs. You need to really make your own side projects to look impressive. And I don't have a great answer for it other than more people should be entrepreneurs.
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Do you have a bent towards younger hires today more than ever, given their proclivity to be more AI native? No. I have a bent towards older hires because they read textbooks about software engineering when they see what's coming out of the LLM output, they understand it. Not all of them are adopters of AI, but some of them are. So you can hire people who are both grizzled veterans and good at AI. Now, if I see a cracked young engineer who's great at cloud code and I can see the project, of course I'm going to hire that person on the spot. There's no question. Regardless, a prerequisite is we have this entrance exam. There's this gigantic code repo that you need to read very fast. You can't read it with your eyes. You have to use AI. You have to use LLMs to ship all the features. And then you get a test at the end, which is how much of the code repo did you break? And then you get 30 minutes to fix what you broke. And so we're already into our functional engineering challenge is not just challenges of how good you are at TypeScript and Python, but how do you use LLM coding agents? And that's key. And if you don't pass that, there's no way that we can work together. And the best are...
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[SPEAKER_01] You never know. You just have to try with everybody. You never know. Sometimes people tell you that they're great at AI and then you give them the challenge and they suck. You just got a test. And sometimes people have never used AI before and you force them to sit with it for 48 hours. And by the end of the 48 hours, they're phenomenal. You said before, literally 20 minutes ago, 60 second response times are the best predictor for any engineer's success. What do you mean by that? Yeah. And what should we know? Yeah. So Speechify is our remote first team. [SPEAKER_01] There's no way that we can work together. And the best are dot, dot, dot.
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[SPEAKER_01] You never know. You just have to try with everybody. You never know. Sometimes people tell you that they're great at AI and then you give them the challenge and they suck. You just got to test. And sometimes people have never used AI before and you force them to sit with it for 48 hours. And by the end of the 48 hours, they're phenomenal. You said before, literally 20 minutes ago, 60 second response times are the best predictor for any engineer's success. What do you mean by that? Yeah. And what should we know? Yeah. So Speechify is our remote first team. There's 45 AI engineers on our research team. There's about 150 product facing software engineers.
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And we have people in 36 countries now, 200 people in total. Everybody's really good at engineering. The communications become really important. And I can't have a situation where you're blocking somebody else. If someone else is blocking you, number one, it's your responsibility to inform them that they are your bottleneck and inform them multiple times a day that they are your bottleneck. But we also really believe in people learning. So if that person cannot unblock you, you should go and learn how to unblock yourself right now. But if that person doesn't give you an answer, you're stuck. You don't know whether you should invest the time to unblock yourself or
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you should wait for that person. Another principle that we have is managing up. If your team leader needs something from you, obviously you need to respond, but you should update them anyway about what you're doing. In the morning, the first thing that you should do is send your leader, hey, here's my top three goals for the day. And then they shouldn't respond unless you're going in the wrong direction, in which case they'll adjust your direction. But if someone is messaging you to get unblocked, it is beholden on you to give them a response. And that response can be, hey, busy right now, can give you the response by 4 p.m. Or hey, won't be able to get to you until
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three days from now. Just give me a timeline or just give me the answer. And then if you're the person asking and you didn't get the response, call them on the phone. I don't know why people don't use WhatsApp calls more. Just call on the phone. They'll give you the answer and then move on. Young people are scared to call. Everybody. Yeah. Young people are very scared to call. And I think that at this point, people above [SPEAKER_01] 45 are willing to call and below 45 are not because everybody's skill has atrophied. [SPEAKER_01] Just get the answer. Move on. [SPEAKER_01] We actually had a viral video the other day because I said that if you don't respond to a message
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within a three hour period, I call it the Titanic rule. The movie Titanic is three hours long. Everyone should be able to go to the cinema with their families. If you don't respond within three hours, it can be, hey, I'm busy. I'm at a football game. Cool. Fine. That's a good answer. But you need to respond within three hours, even on weekends. I got decimated for it. Decimated. Wrong culture. It's fine. [SPEAKER_01] If you're asleep, don't respond. If you're with, but even if you're with the kids, you could tell me I'm not free right now. Tell me I'm not free right now. Yeah. Dropping kids off in school back later. Yeah. Just inform me. Fine. Totally agree.
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And by the way, the reason is we are so privileged to live in a world where you can work from your house. You can work remotely. You could take vacation. You could do whatever you want. Be anywhere in the world. You don't even need to work nine to five. You want to work at 3 p.m. on a Monday or on a midnight Saturday. That's fine too. Take all of Tuesday off, but just get the work done that you said that you were going to do and make sure you have a responsibility for your team because it is a living organism. Help the organism win. You need a fire under your ass that said everything needs to have been shipped yesterday. Speed is the number
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one strategic advantage for any company, especially today. And if you're not adding to the speed, you're by definition distracting from the speed. It means this culture is wrong and either you fix that or you're not in the right culture. What can I do today to increase the speed of my company? Set daily deadlines or goals? No, deadlines are challenging. Goals are also, you definitely set goals. So a dream is a goal without a deadline. So always add a deadline. And it goes on a calendar with multiple people on the invite. So I'm going to ship this to production by Tuesday, by 3 p.m. on Tuesday. Invite Rohan Simon-Cliff.
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Pankaj. So everybody knows. And then sometimes we have calendar invites that start with, this is not a meeting. It's a deadline. And then if that day, the second you know it's not going to be released by that time, you're responsible to update everybody else. Hey, it's not going to be done by here. Here's why. I'm going to do it 24 hours later. That's fine. But just update us. And when you launch it, send me a screen recording or a Loom video showing me that it's done so I can give you feedback. I'd love to get a test flight link too, but ideally just send me [SPEAKER_01] a screen recording to begin. That's number one. And then the other thing is increased speed
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[SPEAKER_01] is show it yourself. When people message you, message back. When you need something, call people. [SPEAKER_01] If you are moving fast and it's clear that you are hungry and you need it to happen now, [SPEAKER_01] everybody will adapt to the way that you behave. [SPEAKER_01] What did you do too fast that you then later subsequently regretted in a major way? So I think you did an episode of Marc and Trier said he was, I don't introspect. Yeah. Because you don't want to learn the wrong lesson. I'm trying to think about it. I can't come up with something that was objectively a mistake. The closest thing I can think of is we
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had two people that we hired from Apple and Snapchat, very eligible people. And they messed up the culture of the company. They would leave at 5:30 p.m. They didn't live and breathe the company. And in the end, both of them quit after three months. And we got very lucky that they quit, but I didn't let them go within the first 30 days. Right. That was a mistake. But I was young. I didn't know what good meant later. I learned also, I was begging and borrowing for people to work.
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Come up with something that was objectively a mistake. The closest thing I can think of is we had two people that we hired from Apple and Snapchat, very eligible people. And they messed up the culture of the company. They would leave at 5:30 PM. They didn't live and breathe the company. And in the end, both of them quit after three months. And we got very lucky that they quit, but I didn't let them go within the first 30 days. That was a mistake. But I was young. I didn't know what good meant later. I learned also, I was begging and borrowing for people to work for my company at the time. We didn't have any, thank you for working for me at the time. At least I was thinking this going to bed last night, which is I've never ever not seen a young founder go for big logos. Right. Every single year. Yeah. It's just the canonical path. You will learn the lesson. The thing you learn as you get older, I'm sure you find this and you're a tiny bit older than me now. It's humans are kind of the same. We make the same mistakes. We do it continuously. Would you be long Snap? No. Why? One, we try to run ads on Snap all the time. We never succeed. So if you're a rep on the growth team of Snap, send me an email, teach me how to make Snap work. I haven't succeeded. I've been trying. Two, there is a portion of the population that uses Snapchat as their main form of communication, over iMessage, they message on Snapchat. I don't think that the way that they're dealing with their cash is fastidious today. I think they're overpaying creators left, right, and center. And I just think that the lunch is completely eaten by Meta at this point. We were talking about calls versus messages. Slack messages kill your company. Yeah. Any tips for me on Slack etiquette?
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[SPEAKER_01] Most long Slack messages should have been a phone call. Just call. You'll get the answer immediately. And then the person can ask you follow-up questions. That's so easy. And then all your engineers who are supposed to be coding are spending time reading Slack. I'd rather you put that in the PR commit message. There's just no reason. And so yes, there's things that you do need to communicate on Slack, but just call. The other thing is we have this internal voice agent. The world is getting eaten by voice agents now.
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It's so much faster to communicate by voice than to communicate by text, period. And text is great for asynchronous, but if you try to move fast, you don't want to go synchronous. You want to move now. You said something about the Apple and the Snap. Oh, they quit, but I should have got rid of them earlier. Normally you do a performance review, put them on a performance improvement plan. Why are performance reviews a waste of time?
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Total waste of time. Why? The problem is that you didn't communicate to them ahead of time what the goal was. So typically the reason why people end up on a PIP is because they didn't ship something to production. And I have a philosophy that if you made something amazing, but it's not in production, it's a waste of time. You get no credit unless it's in production. The analogy I always give someone is you're a farmer and you are a milk delivery guy and you have the best milk in the world and you put it in a bottle, but you didn't put it on my doorstep. You put it down the street and now the milk is spoiled. There's literally no points for all this milk that you created. It's like you're a football player and you didn't put the ball in the goal. You put it right before the line. You didn't cross the end zone. No credit. And so the problem that the leader has in that situation is they should have informed the person ahead of time that they have not shipped the thing to production. And so all you do is you get on a call. You go, "Hey, Matthew, Harry. Hey, Harry. Listen, we've worked together for 30 days. You still haven't shipped anything to production. We're a startup. And the only time that I, as a CEO, get excited is when things go to production. I need you to put your thing in production in the next, however big it is, 72 hours. If you can't reduce the scope of the feature, if it has eight features, only focus on one, but ship that thing to production. Get it through PR. And that doesn't need to approve your pull request. Get on the phone with them and get them to review live right now. Then you go and QA it. And if you're not allowed to QA it, call the QAs, get them to approve right now. And then if there's an issue, you go fix it. Just make all the timelines faster. Ride that feature until it is in production. And then I know that you're an actual outcome owner, not just an engineer. And as long as you communicate that the 72 hours end and you still didn't send the features to production, you don't need a performance review. The person is just not an outcome owner. And then you need to decide, are you okay with not having an outcome owner in the company? That's up to you then.
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[SPEAKER_01] You said something about QA there. QA is now the most valuable skill in the world. [SPEAKER_01] Totally. Why is that? And why do most people suck at it?
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All right. So in a world where software engineering is commoditized and design is commoditized, if you try to build stuff with cloud code, even if you give it all the tools in the world, it will not succeed in QAing itself to perfection. Definitely not on different devices and different phones. And when the wifi goes down and all that stuff, you still need a human to do that. I'm amazed to see, even with very good software engineers and designers, how often they fail to put themselves in the user's shoes and just test edge cases. I have a friend who works directly for Elon. Elon's the best QA. He'll always find your bugs. And it's super embarrassing. And I find the same thing at Speechify. I sometimes find more bugs than the actual QA team does. And because it's in production live, I see it. And so then I call people immediately or I send them a screen recording. I'm like, why do we have this bug? And either there's a good explanation for why the bug is there, in which case I'm cool. Got it. It's just a huge lift to fix this. And we'll fix it later. Maybe we'll tweak the scope to bury it a little bit. Or it's actually relatively simple to fix. Let's fix it. And so let's say you built a feature with one...
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And I find the same thing as Speechify. I sometimes find more bugs than the actual QA team does. And because it's in production live, I see it. And so then I call people immediately or I send them a screen recording. I'm like, why do we have this bug? And either there's a good explanation for why the bug is there, in which case I'm cool. Got it. It's just a huge lift to fix this. And we'll fix it later. Maybe we'll tweak the scopes to bury it a little bit. Or it's actually relatively simple to fix. Let's fix it. And so let's say you built a feature with one shot of a great prompt on clock code. And now it's on your phone. The next 48 hours is just you finding the bugs and making just indelible piece of software that does not break. And then you ship that thing to production. That's what separates a good product. Sorry. That's what separates a product from a great product. Just QA. So this is the other thing that we do. Let's say you have a person who's not an amazing outcome owner. They just can't ride people like that. Hey, that's okay. That's the personality trait. But if they're still a good software engineer, they will be good at QA. So before letting them go, I'd actually rather put them in QA for a little bit, see how well they do in QA. And if they do well there, that tells me something. And we should not get rid of that person. We should just coach them properly. But if they're also bad at QA, then you should let them go. So much of company interactions, assessing talent is done in meetings, in some respects. Why did you ban meetings? We hate meetings. So number one, I like having an asynchronous culture. I don't want you to not be able to go and take your kid to soccer practice. And I don't want you to not be able to go hang out with your wife at a movie. And if there's a meeting on your calendar and it's 60 minutes long, 30 minutes before that, you still need to be home. 30 minutes after that, you still need to be home. You can't think about the project that you're doing. It's better if I just call you for three minutes, or if I just text you, there's no reason for meetings. The other thing I hate about meetings is situations where one person is talking and five people are listening. That should have just been an email or that could have been a Slack message. Who needs this? Nobody needs this. You're just creating slowness for absolutely no reason. The places where meetings become a core of a company is companies that don't know their direction. And so the meetings are used to try and find the direction. In that case, just go work out with someone from your team or a group and chat about it. And you're doing something else at the same time. That's building togetherness. The other thing I really dislike is performance reviews. We used to have a situation where leaders, we don't have managers. We have leaders. I don't like the fat general sitting in the back saying, take that hill. I want the guy who's running up the hill first, engaging the enemy first. You should be the strongest individual contributor in your team if you're leading that team. If you need a people manager, we'll give you a people manager to manage the communication. But I want you mainly hands on keyboard coding, designing, talking to users. We had leaders who were spending eight hours a week in performance management meetings with eight direct reports. They're like, this is stupid. We're going to cut that to 15 minutes instead of 60 minutes. And we're going to do it every other week because there literally is no reason for doing that. Just have a habit of your team sends you their top three priorities every single morning. You don't respond unless the direction is bad, in which case you tell them this is the correct direction to go. Do you like HR? If by HR, you mean recruiting. I love recruiting. If by HR, you mean dealing with internal politics and issues, we for the most part have succeeded in sidestepping it so far. Amen. Thank you. I tweeted it recently. And the only people who criticized me criticized me because they were like, recruiting is really important. And I completely agree. But I think it's so important that I take talent out of HR. For me, talent is its own independent function. And HR is the management. There's the acquisition and then there's management. And bluntly, I don't think great people need that much management. Vacation monitoring is not something that great people need. The way I think about it is if we hire you, I'm not going to be your manager. You need to manage me. I need you to tell me where I need to unblock you. And if I know that, I will go and unblock you. And we had this a lot in the beginning of the company. I would just hire a ton of people and then I'd give them the goal. And then if they got it, I'll give them the next one. And if they got it, I give them the next one. But some people would just stop communicating. And they actually just stopped working at Speechify because they didn't keep communicating. You just need to be interested in the problem and think about it all the time and work towards it and send demos. And then you make progress. And that energy is the thing that I'm hiring for. Our leadership team is stacked because everybody is a savage. They think about the product constantly. They're constantly like Rohan just launched this great thing. If you go to speechifyvoices.ai and if you email me cliff at speechify.com, we'll give you a million minutes for free to use Speechify. He just thought about it in the shower, launched it. You just want to do a situation where your team pushes as hard as you do. That's it. Do you think everyone can be a doer? Or do you think, so you do, you don't think it's inbuilt in you? No, I think everybody can be a doer. I have this concept, which is I like awakening people. I meet people. And Steve Jobs has this great quote. It's like, you know, the world around us was built by people no smarter than you or I, right? You live your life. You want to try to not bump into the world too much, but you could do things. And someone just needs to tell you that you can do things sometimes. And the second you see it, especially if you're next to someone who's a really high quality operator, you're like, oh yeah, I can do those things. There's a great question that I like is, who's the first person who believed in you more than you believed in yourself. And so that's my favorite thing to do is I'll meet someone. I'll be like, this is such a talented person and I can see how amazing they are. And I just, I,
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by people no smarter than you or I, right? You live your life. You want to try to not bump into the world too much, but you could do things. And someone just needs to tell you that you can do things sometimes. And the second you see it, especially if you're next to someone who's a really high quality operator, you're like, oh yeah, I can do those things. There's a great question that I like is, who's the first person who believed in you more than you believed in yourself. And so that's my favorite thing to do is, I'll meet someone. I'll be like, this is such a talented person and I can see how amazing they are. And I just, I,
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[SPEAKER_01] and it gets to the point that I believe in their ability more than they believe in their ability. And so I just give them more responsibility and more opportunity. And they almost always rise to the occasion. Sometimes they don't, in which case we figure out how to help them get to that place. But yes, everybody can become a doer.
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[SPEAKER_01] You said you were hiring a lot of people quite quickly at one point. You never raised a lot of money and did a big splashy round. Can you just help me understand what did the fundraising profile look like for this business? Because it's such a weird business and we chatted before and I, in all honesty, I was like, it was weird for me going into meeting you, but we went for a walk around the park. Because I was like, I don't know. My friends are VCs, all of them are obviously. And there's nothing online. Help me understand this.
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Yeah. So I started Speechify when I was in college. I was 21 years old for four and a half years. It didn't grow really fast. I just iterated on it until it did. And then it started growing really fast. And then I did this blitz of finding all the people who could teach me. Four and a half years in, how much revenue were you making?
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By four and a half years in, yeah, we were making more than $5 million at that point. And so we started growing really fast from the $5 million upwards. And then a ton of the people who I talked to were the early investors. So Dylan Field from Figma, Mike Krieger from Instagram, Evan from Twitter, Zillow founders, Audible founders, Grammarly founders, Robinhood founders, Honey founders, 23andMe founders, Plaid founders, Medium, Brex, Richard Branson, Gary Cohn, who led all of Goldman. Charlie Songhurst was my very first investor. [SPEAKER_01] Charlie Songhurst was your first investor.
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[SPEAKER_02] My first investor. Yeah. And so we started scaling the business like that. And then we found product market fit and the business started to grow crazy. And what I realized is if you find lightning in a bottle, you don't want to tell other people about it. Speechify has 1.1 million five star reviews. We have 94% of the B2C voice agents market. We read more to people than any other AI product in the world. How much money have you raised? We don't share it publicly. You don't, you literally don't say it? [SPEAKER_02] No. Does your team know? [SPEAKER_02] No. [SPEAKER_02] Wow. [SPEAKER_02] Our leadership team knows, but yeah, no, we don't.
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And you don't say your valuation publicly?
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No. There's only three reasons people typically share these numbers. Number one, they want to bring more users in. We get a ton of users. We get almost a million, we get so many users every single week. There's no reason to. Number two, for hiring, 178,000 people applied to open engineering positions at Speechify last year. We don't need to make splashes about fundraising to hire. And number three is to get more investors in, but there's 10 investors in my inbox every week who are wonderful people who want to invest in the company. That's not what we need either. What I need is if you have grown a product to more than $10 million a month, please send me an email. Cliff at speechify.com. I would love to talk to you. Teach me how to get more users. We just launched the enterprise business, literally this week. If you know how to get enterprise users, great. I would love to talk to you. That's a new part of my business. What I want to learn—
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Are you building an enterprise sales team? That is exactly what we're doing now, but front deployed engineers. Yeah.
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Again, it was so funny. I was researching and on PitchBook, which is, you know, you pay at $50,000 a seat, you get data on everyone. There's nothing on you. It came out with news articles from like three years ago. I was like, this is impossible. We just avoid doing news as well. We just don't like it. I want users to come to Speechify because they want to use voice agents or because they want to read their PDFs. Not because I'm looking for competitors. You know, it was interesting. I'm going to ask about two people now because I had Jake Paul on the show recently and he was like, just relevance is everything. Relevance is everything. I really liked Jake and Logan, but the comments were like, less relevant now. And you were like, Logan actually doing WWE makes sense. Would you buy or sell the stock of Logan Paul?
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A hundred percent. Super hard. So what would you do?
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So here's what I think about Logan. I don't have a relationship with Jake. I know Logan super, super well. One of my favorite people. So Logan went super hard on Vine. He's the biggest person of Vine and then Instagram and then Facebook and then YouTube. And this is the concept we talked about, which is bulking and cutting cycles for companies also applies to creators. So at that point he was just dialed in, right? You're cutting, you're just creating value. You're not learning. You're not doing anything. Milked everything you can milk from YouTube. It was cool. All right. What's the next challenge? They both got into boxing. They did really well in boxing, really, really well. And then Logan got this seat in the WWE. Now people forget this, but WWE is like a top 20 YouTube channel in addition to having TV and Netflix and everything else. And so when I was 30, I was really concerned. I hadn't achieved the goals I had in life, not even close. So I got this cabin on a river in the UK and for four days in a row, all I did was make a list of the top 200 people who had accumulated the most power to impact the world by the age of 35.
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Milked everything you can milk from YouTube. It was cool. All right. What's the next challenge? They both got into boxing. They'd done really well in boxing, really, really well. And then Logan got this seat in the WWE. Now people forget this, but WWE is a top 20 YouTube channel in addition to having TV and Netflix and everything else. And so when I was 30, I was really concerned. I hadn't achieved the goals I had in life, not even close. So I got this cabin on a river in the UK and for four days in a row, all I did was make a list of the top 200 people who had accumulated the most power to impact the world by the age of 35.
SPEAKER_02
And one of the common themes I saw is people sometimes have this exponential growth between the age of 29 and 35. And one of the things that happens is they're a virus. They attach themselves to a larger organization from within. They leverage that organization and they use that organization to help them grow. And so the WWE is what launched The Rock. And so Logan is now accumulating all these amazing fans from the WWE that he could not have accumulated on his own.
SPEAKER_02
But in addition, obviously he did a great job with Trey launching Prime, a legit business in a very, very short period of time. And both Logan and Jake now have their fund. Jake was the meme of Sora. Great thing to do. And so I think that now in this bulking mode where they're exploring a bunch of different areas and they're seeing what takes. So Prime took, WWE took, there's all these different things that they're trying and like him or hate him. Part of the whole philosophy is being not likable, but still generating attention. Logan's a really, really smart guy in my personal experience.
SPEAKER_01
And I also think that there's very few people who are playing the game like he is. [SPEAKER_02] He's in a very unique situation. Is it a company? Is it a person? Is it a social media company? What's happening here? And so I think he's created a lot of leverage for himself, which is really interesting. [SPEAKER_02] Could you apply that same philosophy to me then?
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] Yes. As being a virus attack? But if I were to do that, that would mean joining Andreessen Horowitz or joining Sequoia. But you can't buy Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia. You cannot redirect the snake's head to be going in the direction that you want. Maybe you could. What I would do is I would join Union Square Ventures. I would join an institution that has a really storied name, but doesn't have particularly strong leadership. And I would become the leadership for that organization. [SPEAKER_02] Over just building it yourself and being a thrive.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] You can also just build it yourself. The other thing that you could do is find another way of doing it. So what's the besties called? The podcast? All In.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Great example. You can have a side chapter to your life. Let's say you now became a fourth or fifth host in All In podcast. That would be pretty good for your career. It wouldn't take that much time from you, but it would help grow you really fast. It would help grow them really fast too. And so let's say you went on Shark Tank or Dragon's Den. It would be amazing for you. Huge existing institution. It takes very little of your time, but you'd be the loudest voice in the room with the most interesting things to say. And you'd get a ton more views.
SPEAKER_02
By the way, a great example would be maybe you write a book, How I Became a VC by the age of 28. And then that book is available in all the airports and newsstands. And you're using Penguin Random House as your launching pad. Figure out what is a launching pad. For you, what's interesting is you started what, 10 years ago, 15 years ago? Podcasting was not a thing at the time. You were so early. You rode a wave that came up with you. The question is, can you go now to a different wave that is already big? And then because of the strategic position you are in, grow with it. So TV is a great option. YouTube is an interesting one.
SPEAKER_02
Mr. Beast is another of these characters. You slept at Mr. Beast's house for three weeks. What did you learn?
SPEAKER_02
So I first met Jimmy at a party at one of my friends' houses. And I had eight people working on the leadership team at Speechify at the time. I had a hundred people. He had a hundred people. He had eight leaders. And we just ended up talking for three hours and I was supposed to fly to New York. And he's like, don't fly to New York. Come back with me to North Carolina. I want you to meet the rest of my team. And I was like, all right, sounds pretty cool. So I flew there and I just ended up staying. We worked out. I would see how he filmed videos. I learned a ton. So the first thing I saw was him stop a shoot with a hundred people on set just to repaint the door pink. I say that no genius can figure out what's going to convert in ads. Jimmy knows what's going to convert in organic content. He has the algorithm in his head and it's data. He has spent between the age of 13 and today studying what converts. And his dial-in on human psychology is insane.
SPEAKER_02
The second thing is the formats. Their videos are so data driven and they figure out, okay, here's a format that works. How do we up the ante on this video and how do we make it even more amazing? The next thing is the content that converts the best is content that doesn't even require language because that works on every single continent of the world. And you want the most simple concepts in the video to the point where a great ad would be, for example, there's this ad for a storm proofing company, which is a very complicated concept. So their best ad is a bucket. You make a hole in the bucket. Water is coming out of the bucket. You put their material on duct tape. You put the duct tape on the bucket and it stops coming out. So what are the concepts? Bucket, hole, duct tape, water. Everybody understands these concepts. So make things simple. For example, for us, PDF is a complicated concept. Book is not a complicated concept. So our best performing ads include books, not PDFs. He's great at hiring. He hires a ton. He tests people. And then if they don't work, they don't work. But he'll always try and try and try and try. Maybe the most ambitious person that I know. Insane level of ambition as an operator, as a business person, as a creator. And I'll give him his flowers. He's done a really good job.
SPEAKER_02
His views are at their lowest point for several years. Why would you be bullish on Jimmy moving forwards? Not for several years. Last year, they had the highest views, but this year they're having example, for us, PDF is a complicated concept. Book is not a complicated concept. So our best performing ads include books, not PDFs. He's great at hiring. He hires a ton. He tests people. And then if they don't work, they don't work. But he'll always try and try and try and try. Maybe the most ambitious person that I know, insane level of ambition as an operator, as a business person, as a creator. And I'll give him his flowers. He's done a really good job.
SPEAKER_02
His views are at their lowest point for several years. Why would you be bullish on Jimmy moving forwards? Not for several years. Last year, they had the highest views, but this year they're having a little bit of challenge. One, the reason why is because we talked about platforms. YouTube was the number one place for a long time. Now the best place to be a creator is to be a streamer. Partly because streams get clipped. And then those clips can get watched 7 billion times in a week on TikTok and Instagram reels and all these other places. So he's already started big time on streaming. Last year, he also took on a huge project, which was Beast Games. They did really well on Beast Games. And then they also spent a ton of time with Feastables. And then they have two other big projects that they're running right now. And so I would say that Jimmy for the last, I don't know, 24 months, even more, has been operating as an entrepreneur, building the company, building the products even more than building the content while making the largest unscripted show in the history of the world in terms of number of people participating.
SPEAKER_02
[SPEAKER_01] So taking much bigger swings. And I would say that similar to Logan, went through a period of bulking, and now they're in a period of cutting and figuring out, okay, here is the next phase of the business. Let's figure it out and make it grow even bigger. [SPEAKER_01] I have a segment of this schedule, which is wild fucking stories, because you gave me so many options. Another one that I loved was what led us to buying a 3x levered option on NVIDIA in 2022 before the market caught on. And I was right, and I was like, what? Can you talk to me about that?
SPEAKER_02
[SPEAKER_01] Yeah. So it was not me, it was my brother, Tyler. It was the case that we were very excited about A100 GPUs back in the day. H100 GPUs were coming out, and they were three times faster than anything before. And we spent so much time trying to spend millions of dollars buying H100 GPUs, and no one would let us buy them. We're like, what the hell is going on here?
SPEAKER_02
And there was a presentation that Jensen made as part of the earnings call. And it was just this amazing example of how they could render a world. And we were like, this is a completely different level of technology. And so the benefit was we just had context. And it became very clear that the market was mispricing NVIDIA. And so Tyler had even higher conviction than me. I just bought a bunch of NVIDIA stock directly. Tyler bought a 3x levered option that's now 36x up.
SPEAKER_02
And Tyler leads our AI engineering team. He just had the context. Now, my undergrad was renewable energy engineering. I put one third of my money into Tesla in 2015. Because I had context. I had a capstone in photovoltaics engineering. I just understood what was going on. And so I think at the end of the day, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have this philosophy of the 20 punch card investment idea. Just everybody would be a much better investor if they only had 20 opportunities. But when you find the opportunity, lever as hard as you can into it in a responsible way.
SPEAKER_02
Do you know what, the biggest lesson I have in 10 years of investing is you have to diversify to concentrate. And what I mean by that, I should have invested in everything and I should have done to find the Alan Changs, the Adam Ferrogis, the Cliff Weitzmans. You have to be broad to have the luxury to really know. Yeah. And then triple down when that person is in your corner. But the other thing is, can you go deep into an area that other people are missing? And if you can do that well, you will find the honeypots. Would you still say NVIDIA is a buy today?
SPEAKER_02
I was, I mean, look, I don't know of a company in the history of the world that has made as much profit as NVIDIA today. Do you think it'll be a $10 trillion company? You just need to look at the multiple of the revenue and profits. What is it trading at now? [SPEAKER_01] $3 trillion? [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] What's the multiple? [SPEAKER_01] $4.2. [SPEAKER_01] $4.2. What's the multiple in revenue? [SPEAKER_01] I think $35. [SPEAKER_01] $35 is reasonable given how much they're growing. So yeah, I think they have a lot more juice. [SPEAKER_01] One thing that I'm spending more and more time on is energy, naturally. [SPEAKER_01] Yes.
SPEAKER_02
[SPEAKER_01] How do you think about energy requirements from AI given we're now 1% of energy utilization goes towards AI. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] That will increase 10 to 12 times in those years. [SPEAKER_01] Yep. [SPEAKER_01] How do you think about energy requirements where you would be investing? How you would advise me?
SPEAKER_02
So one thing that I was surprised by is hydro. All the dams that can be dammed have been dammed. Hydro power is the most efficient and easiest way to create. We just don't have the ability to invest in hydro more. So then it leaves you with fossil fuels or solar or nuclear. I do think that we are going to figure out fusion nuclear. I think that fission nuclear is also pretty great, but fusion nuclear is coming. We just don't know where it is, when it's coming. One of my biggest side projects that I really want to do is build a mini fusion reactor in my garage. I just haven't had a garage for a long time, but when I have one, that's one of the first things I want to do. Not one that creates energy just once that is contained, but I think that we will figure it out. So that's very exciting. But in the meantime, while we haven't figured it out, I'm very much a solar maximalist. I'm all in on solar.
SPEAKER_02
The kind of theoretical limit for solar, at least when I was in school, was something like 47% or 49% efficiency. And we're getting very close to it. The cost of solar typically is mostly borne in the installation and the manufacturing not of the cells. And China has done an amazing job in bringing the cost of solar down a lot. It's just such great investment amortized over time. We just have not installed enough solar in the United States to the degree that we should, where China is outdoing us.
SPEAKER_02
That is contained, but I think that we will figure it out. So that's very exciting. But in the meantime, while we haven't figured it out, I'm very much a solar maximalist. I'm all in on solar. The theoretical limit for solar, at least when I was in school, was something like 47% or 49% efficiency. And we're getting very close to it. The cost of solar typically is mostly born in the installation and the manufacturing, not of the cells. And China has done an amazing job in bringing the cost of solar down a lot. It's such great investment amortized over time. We just have not installed enough solar in the United States to the degree that we should. China is outdoing us tremendously. And there's so much essentially public land that nobody wants that could have solar installations. There's just a lot of regulation and zoning that stops it. This is the easiest way for us to solve the energy problem right now. And so if I were you, I would look for either A, those types of amazing founders that you discussed who are working in the fusion space, or those types of amazing founders that you discussed who are working in the solar space and have some go-to-market that is amazing. Let's talk for a second about SolarCity. The reason why I invested in Tesla way back in the day was because I found Elon Musk from a Wikipedia article from the co-CEOs of SolarCity. And I was like, who is this guy walking with Obama with rockets in the background on his Wikipedia? So I read the Wikipedia and then I found more information. SolarCity was not a technology company. They were a finance company that had convinced, I think it was JP Morgan, to amortize the value of a solar panel over 30 years. And they got loan money to consumers to install solar panels on their house. And they became the largest installer of solar panels for consumers in the United States by far. And so the innovation doesn't always have to be technological. It could be a go-to-market innovation around finance or customer acquisition or something else. So I would look for those howling pods. What do you know about product market fit that most founders don't know or think about? What do I know about product market fit that most founders don't know or think about? The first one is the importance of iterations. When we started Speechify, I was living in Palo Alto. I was a solo founder at the time. And I just had a bunch of interns. And I tried so hard to hire and I found it really difficult. And the main problem was people were not using the product. So I would rock onto Stanford's campus every single day with a roll of duct tape, and I'd put it over my mouth and I'd give my phone to users and I'd see where they'd click. And they'd always click on the wrong buttons. And I'd go back and I'd fix it. And I'd try it again. And I was constantly embarrassed by the fact that my user experience was not good enough until we got it to be really good. It took a long time. And then what we did is I added in the bottom right corner of the app a big red button that said help slash message us. And if you opened it, it didn't go to intercom. It didn't go to email. It went to my personal text message, to my iMessage. The nice thing about that is if it was 3am and you messaged me, I'd respond back. And you didn't need to enable notifications because I was not iMessaging you. And if it was not 3am, if it was the middle of the day, I would call you and I'd solve that problem on the spot.
SPEAKER_02
[SPEAKER_01] And then every day, I would export the people who had churned, given that it was 30 days since they downloaded. And I would call them because I had their email. So that gave me the ability to call them via FaceTime audio call. And I'd figure out why they churned. And that took a ton of energy because it's getting kicked in the teeth every single time someone tells you your baby is ugly. But it allowed me to solve the problems. And so if I was starting a solar company, I would do the same thing. Every single time I'd have an installation, I would personally call the person and say, how did it go? And I would follow up. Or at this point, I'd have a voice agent do it. Just follow up with users constantly. It's the normal YC model of just talk to users. And then the other thing is just because users don't use the thing that you made doesn't mean that you have the wrong direction. It means the implementation is wrong, but the idea could still be correct. And so the old Henry Ford, you can have any color that you want as long as it's black, or I would have given people a faster horse. And the Steve Jobs idea of, this is one thing that Brian Chesky and Dylan Field are very right about. AB tests are abdicating decision-making to the user. Sometimes you want to just have a very clear vision, go for a very big goal and just work towards that goal until it's in the market. And then when it lands, sometimes people think if you build it, they will come. They will not come.
SPEAKER_02
[SPEAKER_01] You have to build it and then you have to convince them to join you. And then you have to iterate on the product sometimes for years until the fit is correct. And so it goes back to AQ. The most important thing for product market fit is not repositioning your product or do it. Just stay in the game, keep making iterations until it fits like a glove and then you'll find success. It's so funny. We actually have a very strong product perspective on YouTube versus Spotify. Spotify, we do not offer video. You cannot watch this on Spotify. You can watch it on YouTube and we have shorts across IG and TikTok and Instagram. But why? Because the quality of edit you can make on an audio-only file versus a video file is infinitely better. So if you want a very curt, precise edit, which is significantly shorter, about 10 minutes shorter, that's a lot shorter, then you listen on audio versus on YouTube where you have the full video.
SPEAKER_02
Wow. I like that. That's very opinionated. It's very taste-based. By the way, the CEO of Spotify is actively annoyed at that. So why don't you use AI to make the frame transitions work and then the edit can be the same? Why don't you take the audio clip? I would love to. AI is not there to make the frame transitions work. I like the taste. So hey, the CEO is not Daniel Ek anymore. Who is it? Gustav? So Gustav, Harry is asking for a solution. Please give it to him. Oh, I would love it. One should be able to upload the video file. Yeah. And then it should sync to the audio file.
SPEAKER_02
Because one thing that it does do is it automatically plays video and then you switch to audio. And that means when you switch between different apps, you don't get the annoying video thing in the corner. That's solving a different style of problem. Different problem. Correct. I would love to. AI is not there to make the frame transitions work. I like the taste. So hey, the CEO is not Daniel Ek anymore. Who is it? Gustav? So Gustav, Harry is asking for a solution. Please give it to him. Oh, I would love it. One should be able to upload the video file. Yeah. And then it should sync to the audio file.
SPEAKER_02
Because one thing that it does do is it automatically plays video and then you switch to audio. And that means when you switch between different apps, you don't get the annoying video thing in the corner. That's solving a different style of problem. Different problem. Correct. But it'd be great if you could have two separate files attached and you could choose one, curt or not curt. Absolutely. Super interesting one there. Another one that I just have to ask is you got hacked, you found the hacker, and then you hired him. Yes. And he ended up living with you for a year.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] Yes. [SPEAKER_02] What?
SPEAKER_02
We had a security vulnerability that did not expose user data, but could cost us a lot of money. Essentially, someone could use our models for free. I was aware of this. And it was a trade-off between that or launching new features on the AI model. And I was like, no, launch the new feature. And then it came back to me. I was like, no, launch the new feature. The worst that can happen is they can abuse us. And then it happened again. And then we got hacked. I deserved it.
SPEAKER_02
But it's okay because the amount that we lost was a couple of hundred thousand dollars, but it was not crazy. Anyway, this happened. And I was like, God damn it. And I just went on this search of figuring out who hacked us. Found the person. The attack came from a school domain. And so I ended up messaging the provost of the school. I found the person. We got on a Zoom call. I was like, do you want to tell me what happened here? And they fessed up to it. And they were just like, [SPEAKER_01] they were a kid. They were young. They didn't know that. I mean, I don't know how they didn't know, but they didn't know this was not okay. Like I see. And then I asked them to stop.
SPEAKER_02
They stopped. They took down the thing that they did. I was like, to be honest with you, this is pretty impressive. Like, this is exactly what I would have loved to have done at your age if I didn't know that it was not okay. But I was not ready for hiring them for speech. I was like, this person's got it. Like they got it. So I hired him to do personal projects for me, like little side projects, like optimization of my email drive, all these small apps that I wanted to improve my life that didn't exist. He was my personal engineer for a long time.
SPEAKER_02
So all the early voice projects at Speechify, like the very first version of Jarvis that I could call on the phone and talk to, he built it for me. And I had the core team and then I would text him, Hey, can you do this? Like, here's a cool repo I found. And he would just do it.
SPEAKER_02
Like we built a translation to all these things. And then eventually he came and lived with me first in LA and then in Miami. And then at that point we built enough trust that he joined the core team and worked in real products. But my philosophy is if you find someone that is talented, you better work with them. And most people, if they get hacked, that person is my enemy. They are evil. I do not want to interface with them ever again. And you'll see in world history, the most successful leaders are the people who end up having some confrontation with someone, but recognize that that person is amazing and find a way to still work together. So that's my philosophy in general. I do have to ask just a couple more. One, we are seeing insane revenue ramps from consumer AI companies and it's distorting our minds in a lot of ways. When we are looking at insane revenue ramps on consumer AI companies, you mentioned churn earlier. What do we not know, think, analyze when it comes to churn, usage, retention? Advise me.
SPEAKER_02
[SPEAKER_01] The main thing to look for is inference costs bring those companies alive. Like early days of ChatGPT, they're just burning billions of dollars in inference costs. And so we had exactly that revenue ramp in 2022 because we were just early. We started doing this in 2015 dyslexia. And we had built models and they were great, but once users probably started to use Speechify, Speechify, it stopped being a business and started to be a charity. And so the whole focus of the 40 person at the time AI engineering team at Speechify, and all the GPUs that we had bought and the data center that we set up was to reduce inference costs. And we got it to the point of single digit dollars for a million characters. If you go to any other model, it'll be anywhere from 30 to a hundred dollars per million characters. So there's like two order deviations cheaper now.
SPEAKER_02
What is 11 labs? For the standard model, it's anywhere from 70 to a hundred bucks. And for the V3 fast model, it's 30 bucks. So literally more than 10X cheaper. That was just our whole focus for two and a half years. And we solved it. And that's why the company has been profitable for so long.
SPEAKER_02
And so when you look at a company that is hyper growing like that, you just got to ask yourself, are they just giving away free money? So let's take cursor, for example, which is a really great example. Like cursor is one of my favorite examples ever because the market demanded that tool. Every software engineer who was coding inside of conversation with ChatGPT wanted an integration into their IDE. So all they did was take two separate tools, fork the open source repository for VS Code and add Claude Sonnet at the time. And all the electrons on the right side were dying to go to the left side. And the second you put a bar of metal on top of it, of course you had the flow of money. And so that flow of money, as we all know, went straight through cursor and to anthropic.
SPEAKER_02
That is actually great because they didn't lose real money in the process. They just up to revenue that did not become profit. But very often you'll have a company that raises $50 million and they're just burning the $50 million alive. So make sure that there's a plan of how to reduce costs with time. However, here's the most important thing. Any Harvard MBA can figure out how to cut costs. It just requires being smart. It takes a genius to increase revenue. So still, if that company has an amazing growth lover, as long as there's some differentiator, they have better design, they have community, community is so important. They have community around it.
SPEAKER_02
That is actually great because they didn't lose real money in the process. They just gave up to revenue that did not become profit. But very often you'll have a company that raises $50 million and they're just burning the $50 million alive. So make sure that there's a plan of how to reduce costs with time. However, here's the most important thing. Any Harvard MBA can figure out how to cut costs. It just requires being smart. It takes a genius to increase revenue. So still, if that company has an amazing growth lever, as long as there's some differentiator, they have better design, they have community, community is so important. They have community around it. Then that's probably a pretty good bet.
SPEAKER_02
Are we about to see churn rates hit companies in a way that we haven't expected? Not if it's a product that you really need. Like if you have a disability and the tool, if you are blind and you need glasses, you will never churn from glasses. If you need a wheelchair, you're not going to churn from your wheelchair in the same way that people don't churn from Speechify. But if it's a frivolous use case, that's not important. Then yes, a meme maker. Sure. But if it's something that is a tool that you need to survive, then no. Does Apple buy Whisper Flow? No. Apple launches a competitor. Really? Why are they so incapable?
SPEAKER_02
Okay. So Apple bought the Siri team way back in the day. Apple has this philosophy of on-device security, and therefore they're not using models that run on the cloud by and large. The keyboard does not give you access to the full RAM. So therefore it's very difficult to run either a Wi-Fi call that does text-to-speech, a speech-to-text, or something that connects to the app. Whisper Flow has done an amazing job. I'm super proud of that team. Such great marketing, everything. Obviously you could do the same things with Speechify, but they just did such a good job with the marketing. Organic. Incredible. Great growth story. Here's the thing. It's very difficult, as you said, to be AI first, AI native, audio first, AI first, mobile first. Apple has built such an amazing ecosystem that by and large has become lazy. This is the cycle, the circle of life for startups. You need the hungry, small startups to go after. Look, even Apple makes so much money off the app store. I can't even get an API to get a receipt for a user that makes a purchase. It's so difficult to work with the app store at this point. And we love Apple. It's made our business so much money. But it's just hard. I'm very excited about the transition of the new CEO at Apple. Let's see what comes out of that.
SPEAKER_02
I don't understand. I actually don't understand. Why are you excited? I think that the new CEO is more of an engineer. And so I'm excited to hypothetically have more support of good engineering tools for people to build excellent things for the platform. Tim Cook is a god when it comes to supply chain. No one comes even close. And I think that Apple just won that race, right? AirPods were absolutely a huge win. Apple Watch was a huge win. Costs for producing iPhones, amazing. Have you ever heard of Apple having a supply shortage? The first time I ever heard one is Mac minis were out of stock. But they always had the product to sell. Amazing, amazing company. And by the way, AirPods made more money than Spotify and almost every other audio company put together every single year for the last seven years. The amount of listening is absolutely unhinged since podcasts and audiobooks have 40% penetration in most markets today. And markets that they don't, Mexico, they're growing exponentially. So you have picked the correct career. Speechify is AI generated podcast, AI generated audiobook. So the time is really big. But Apple drove that with AirPods. So they won. They locked in the supply chain side and obviously the brand side and everybody trusts them. Okay. Time to go back from cutting mode into bulking mode. That's it.
SPEAKER_02
Dude, we're going to do a quick fire because otherwise I could talk to you all day. So I'm going to mix it up a little bit. You can buy OpenAI at 850 or you can buy Anthropic at 850. Oh, damn. I like to be contrarian when it comes to these. So most people in my seat would say Anthropic right now because I love Claude. Oh my God. I would marry Claude. Very hard decision. Very hard decision. To be contrarian, I would say OpenAI. [SPEAKER_01] Why? I often will look at the founders and though I get that Sam Altman rubs a lot of people the wrong way and comes off slimy. I think he's really good as a company operator. Really good. Back that up with data for me.
SPEAKER_02
Sure. No one has raised as much money as Sam Altman in the history of Silicon Valley. Completely ridiculous. True. The recruiting for OpenAI was absolutely insane. You get Greg Brockman, you get Ilya Sutskever. Greg Brockman? This was years and years ago. This was 10 years ago. Recruiters in the last five years. Mega bomb. Mega bomb.
SPEAKER_02
You had the whole coup and the internal team did support Sam. Right. So when it comes to enterprise deals, he's so good at it that it looks like black magic and looks like fraud. Right. Here's the analogy I give people. And again, I want to give them credit for they did it first. There's a lot of AQ in that company because OpenAI actually started in 2015. ChatGPT didn't come out until 2022. The way I liken it is you had Columbus going to the richest man in the world at the time, the king of Spain and saying, hey, I want to get to India. AGI. And on the way he found the United States. Right. America. ChatGPT. That's exactly what happened. Sam and Ilya and Greg and Elon went and got a ton of money from essentially Bill Gates. Right. Microsoft tried their best to get to AGI, found ChatGPT along the way. And then they made it into a really great experience and product. Anthropic is running circles around them right now. Especially in the coding arena. Let's see what happens. I right now use Anthropic for everything and I do not use ChatGPT for almost anything. And one of my least favorite things in the world is ChatGPT click baiting me at the end of its responses. I've literally written a prompt, a shortcut on my computer to tell it off every time it does it to get it to stop. But I think that they're in a very good, not in the tech community, but outside the tech community. Their brand is pretty good outside the tech community.
SPEAKER_02
[SPEAKER_01] ChatGPT along the way. And then they made it into a really great experience and product.
SPEAKER_02
[SPEAKER_01] Anthropic is running circles around them right now, especially in the coding arena. Let's see what happens. I right now use Anthropic for everything and I do not use ChatGPT for almost anything. And one of my least favorite things in the world is ChatGPT clickbaiting me at the end of its responses. I've literally written a prompt, a shortcut on my computer to tell it off every time it does it to get it to stop. But I think that they're in a very good position, not in the tech community, but outside the tech community. Their brand is pretty good outside the tech community. I think that they have a ton of cash. I think they have a pretty strong team. And I prefer to be contrarian than say the obvious answer. But Anthropic is so good. So good. Either give me more options or let me have an opportunity to be contrarian here. Is Groot going to be a meaningful competitor?
SPEAKER_02
[SPEAKER_01] Good question. Yes. Yes, it will. Same thing. Elon is the savage. There's a rule that everybody should know, which is never bet against Elon. You just shouldn't do it. [SPEAKER_01] What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?
SPEAKER_02
[SPEAKER_01] Last year, Mr. Beast, Jimmy was like, "Hey, I want to do this video where someone starts off with no money, no phone, no computer in the middle of America, and they need to start a business. And I think that you would be a hilarious person to do it." And I was like, "Jimmy, I don't have time for this." And he's like, "I'll do this many Speedify integrations." Okay, that's a really good deal. Let's do it. So I spent 11 days sleeping in a Walmart parking lot in the middle of America. It took me three days to make enough money to get an iPhone, five days to make enough money to have a laptop. I started working at a company, worked at a pizza restaurant, worked at a gym. And the video essentially fell apart. There were a lot of challenges. It didn't work. So I was really upset about it. And typically I take 100 percent responsibility, 200 percent responsibility for everything I do. And I couldn't figure out what I could have done more to make the video work. And it took me a couple of months to figure it out, but eventually I figured it out. I became resentful. I thought that part of the production team said they would do this and then they didn't. And they said they did this and then they didn't. And I forgot to be grateful for the fact that I was doing something so cool. It could inspire hundreds of millions of people. And what I realized is I often tell myself that my greatest advantage is that I have this AQ thing. I'm really good at keeping going when other people stop. I put more reps in than everybody else, but that's actually not my biggest advantage. My biggest advantage is I'm typically very grateful and I'm really optimistic. And in that moment, when things got really tough around day nine, where I was very hungry, I forgot to be grateful and I forgot to be optimistic. And I think that one of the core inputs for allowing someone to have super strong AQ is they can find the goodness in every situation. They can find a way to be grateful about things. When I got into coding, I would misspell everything. An assignment that would take a normal person four hours would take me 17 hours. So I had a notebook and every day I would write before I go to sleep and before right as I woke up, "I'm good at computer science. I'm good at computer science. I'm good at computer science." And I found it really challenging, but I really appreciated that I got to learn because I wanted to. And so the thing I changed my mind on is that the most important thing is even when things are shitty, you got to find something to be grateful for.
SPEAKER_02
Do you worry about wealth inequality in a world of AI?
SPEAKER_02
All the time, constantly, constantly. And especially after that experience, I was generous with people who were living on the street before. Now I'm way more generous. I just buy people phones because that's the thing that I wanted. I'll go into the convenience store and just buy any Android that's there and give it to them. Because you just saw how difficult it was starting from zero. Not having a phone is insane. It's literally madness. And I came into the project with a full meal beforehand and I have a lot of random skills. And eventually I did succeed in getting an iPhone. But it was really hard. And if you don't have a phone, you don't have Google Maps. You literally can't navigate. You don't have Wi-Fi. You can't put a phone down to get a job. You can't even drive for Grubhub or Uber Eats or do Deliveroo because you don't have a phone. And phones get stolen in those situations too. So first of all, my personal opinion, the government should give a free Android to everybody who wants one. You should be able to go to the social security office and just get a phone. It's a basic human right at this point, in my opinion. The second thing is the Gini index now is getting really messed up. All the value is accruing to essentially buffoons like me who built a consumer subscription product or an AI product that gets a ton of people to pay for it. And it becomes a standard in their life. And as long as you figure out the inference costs, you just print profit. And that doesn't make any sense. It's too few people getting too much leverage. Not to mention the hyperscalers. So what happens to everybody else? And so the solution is don't be a Luddite about it. Embrace using these tools. Number one, you're going to get more entrepreneurs, which is an amazing thing. It's easier than ever to be an entrepreneur. And that's why I'm really long Meta. In a world where it's easy to do engineering and design, more things launch and go to market. It becomes the most important thing. And the second thing is how do you rescale people? So I do believe that you can get people who are old and grizzled, veterans to learn how to use AI, but most people don't naturally do that. That's an unnatural behavior. But go back to the principle of a little bit of slope makes up for a lot of Y intercept. People just need to be awakened and you need to convince them that it's fun to learn and you need to learn. But not everybody will do that. And that's the whole point of having a government system. There should be a way to reeducate. And especially now, as you see K to 12 kind of falling apart and universities falling apart, I think there will come a wave of people going back to school after the age of 40. But school will be different. I don't know what that looks like, but I think this is the most important topic that we're not thinking about.
SPEAKER_02
Would you suggest your children to go to university? Slope makes up for a lot of Y intercept. People just need to be awakened and you need to convince them that it's fun to learn and you need to learn, but not everybody will do that. And that's the whole point of having a government system is there should be a way to reeducate. And especially now, as you see K to 12 falling apart and universities falling apart, I think there will come a wave of people going back to school after the age of 40, but school will be different. I don't know what that looks like, but I think that this is the most important topic that we're not thinking about.
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Would you suggest your children to go to university? I had the best time in university of anyone I've ever met. My cheeks started to hurt from smiling so much three months in. I found my people. And I was so lucky to go to a place where I had an open curriculum, half my classes I didn't have the prerequisites for. I got to make my own major. And I met so many people who have stayed my friends for life. And I would just have two dinners every single night. And I'd sit with a table of six people I didn't know. [SPEAKER_01] And I'd do that again. Actually, I didn't do that again. So three dinners a night. So yes, I would, because it was the best experience of my life.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] But I would not tell them that the university is the thing that's responsible for their education. You are the quarterback of your own education. You need to be constantly reading. The reason I'm the person that I am today is because from the age of 13 till today, I have listened to a hundred audiobooks every single year. I will say that in the last 24 months, half of the content that I've consumed is deep research outputs from Speechify, where I go, hey, give me a comparative analysis of Catholicism versus Protestantism versus Mormonism versus Islam. And then I'll listen to that 200 page document. And I'll be like, hey, I saw this cool company called Etched. Explain what this company does. Hey, explain to me how to build a fusion nuclear reactor. And then I'll listen to—I'm just constantly listening to these things. And my workflow is I'll ask a question, I'll get back a hundred pages and I'll listen to it on Speechify while I'm walking around. Everybody should constantly be doing this. And my thought is when I have kids, which I'm excited to one day have, I want the teacher agents inside of Speechify to be amazing. So they could skip all the classes in school. My brother and I skipped most of the math classes when we were in high school because we got bored of the normal math. But math is the only class that's easy to skip because you just take the test and if you pass it, you're good. Everything else is subjective. But if you have an agent that asks you all the questions about the American Revolution and all the questions about Greek history, and it shows that you're very accurate, it's a signal that you can move on.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] What purchase under $1,000 has been the most impactful? [SPEAKER_02] Oh, there is a protein powder on Amazon called Earth Chimp, which is pea-based protein powder. And you take that and a 32-ounce bottle of shaker instead of the 16-ounce. And I have that three scoops every morning and every evening. And I don't need to worry about food because I get the amount of protein I need every single day automatically. And I'd say half my body at this point is pea-based protein. And you don't eat food in the day?
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] I do eat food in the day, but I travel a lot. And so I have that 80 grams of protein in the morning, 80 grams of protein before I go to sleep. And I know I'm good for food. [SPEAKER_02] 80 grams each?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Isn't the ingestion rate something like 20 grams per— Per hour? Yeah. No. You see that in some studies and by and large, that's not true. If you talk to people who are bodybuilders, it's just not reflected. It's a very small optimization. So you can ingest 80 and it's not futile? Yeah. You'll fart more.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_02] You fart a lot? [SPEAKER_02] You would if you ate, yeah. [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. With 80 and 80, dude. I don't want to be next to you on a flight. [SPEAKER_02] What's the workout routine? [SPEAKER_02] And any tips for doing it while traveling?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Okay. So great new hack that I have. Take photos of yourself and upload them to ChatGPT. Ask it what body fat percentage am I and what do I need to improve? And it's so good at giving you information now. And then ask it for the workout routine to take the parts of your body that you want to improve and it'll just give you the workout routine. It's really good.
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So most of my sport is tricking, parkour, and gymnastics. And so I'll go to a gym wherever I'm going. There's a great one here in East London called Over Gravity. And I'll go train and I'll find the best athlete in the gym. And they'll go up to him and say, hey, what's your name? John, I'm Cliff. Nice to meet you. Hey, you seem amazing. Can I hire you to coach me one-on-one? How much would that cost? I don't know, 75 pounds, whatever. So from that point on, I will go train and I'll train with them. And gymnastics, I just love to do. So I'll do it for three hours in a row. And I'd love to have somebody else who's better than me watching me and giving me tips. And so it doesn't matter whether it's a sport I'm trying to learn or guitar or whatever, I'll hire someone to watch me do the thing and coach me to be better.
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When it comes to lifting, obviously compound movements are great. DEXA scans are incredible. So you can find the breakdown between fat, muscle, and bone density in your body. And you can figure out exactly what your body fat percentage is. And it's all macros. So if you're my size or your size, you want to have about one gram of protein per pound of body weight. You want to have about 50 to 80 grams of fat every single day. And then you cut or you bulk. So if I cut, I eat 130 grams of carbs a day. If I'm bulking, I'm eating 260, 270 grams of carbs a day. And then your body's just a science equation. You can change it. Have you ever done fasting?
SPEAKER_02
I have done fasting for Yom Kippur, but I haven't done it for health reasons. I've tried. It's just very hard. A bit depressing, I have to say. pound of body weight. You want to have about 50 to 80 grams of fat every single day. And then you cut or you bulk. So if I cut, I eat 130 grams of carbs a day. If I'm bulking, I'm eating 260, 270 grams of carbs a day. And then your body's just a science equation. You can change it. Have you ever done fasting? I have done fasting for Yom Kippur, but I haven't done it for health reasons. I've tried. It's just very hard. A bit depressing, I have to say. Yeah. One nougat bar a day.
SPEAKER_02
That is depressing. That is one of the worst things ever. Okay. Final one. What excites you most about the next 10 years? When you look forward, what are you like? I'm pumped about this.
SPEAKER_02
I think humanity is essentially going through a new form of evolution. It took us a million years. If you look at evolution, right, to begin with, humans are what the last minute on the clock, or getting to a point where evolution is not a matter of your physiology, but of your brain's ability to intake information faster and understand that information and use it in a different way. And I love fantasy audiobooks. And sometimes there's this thing called a familiar in fantasy audiobooks. It's this animal, like a dire wolf, that can connect with you mentally. And I feel the same way about my computer and my phone and all the tools that I get to use. And my team, by the way. It's like Speechify is one live organism around the world. You can just achieve more. Even if I just look at what happened to my dad with his experience with cancer and my brother, who's still ill, but we're going to figure it out. I just have this Promethean view that we can solve everything. And when you talk to a doctor, you can very easily educate yourself to be as sophisticated. When you don't know how to solve your AC, you just take a video, which actually tells you how to set the AC and how to work your stove and how to set a fusion reactor in your backyard. You can learn everything. You can do stuff. You can build stuff more easily than ever before. And our kids are going to grow up with this mentality ingrained. So my dream for the world is everybody believes they have a higher level of agency than we do today. And hopefully that will be the case. The negative side of that is people think they have less agency because they abdicate all the decision-making to AI. And so you need to have people be in the driver's seat and use the tools instead of having the tools use them. I think Sam Altman said it very well when he said, older people use it as a replacement to Google and younger people use it as their operating system for life. As you said there, how do I make aircon work? How do I get better shoulder density or whatever that is? Cliff, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for putting up with my wandering questions, but you've been amazing.
SPEAKER_02
Thanks for having me. have attribution. So they just launched the SDK for tracking. Like that's really important. Would you buy meta today? Absolutely. Yeah. I think meta is one of the most underrated stocks right now.
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Why? Number one, Mark Zuckerberg is an absolute savage. Like he will hire people if they're right, no matter what. Number two, I think that in a world where engineering is commoditized and design for the
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most part is commoditized, the most important thing becomes excellent QA. We can talk about later and customer acquisition. Google has pressure on it from all the LLMs, but meta doesn't. The only real pressure on meta now is TikTok. And TikTok has a lot of issues now that it's been separated, yada, yada. So, and Zuck also has proven that he is the number one acquirer in the world. Like no one acquires as well as meta. The leadership team is incredible. Like Crick Cox is amazing. Alex Schultz is amazing. And I think that also in AI world, data is everything. So they have more proprietary data
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than everybody else. They haven't figured out the model side yet, but I really do believe that they will. And I look at all the people who are vibe coding new products right now. Where do you think they're going to get their users? You said design commoditizes in some respects. Everyone talks about taste. It's like the new world of 2026, which is like, oh no, the value is in taste. Can you help me understand that? Is that bullshit? No, no, it's not bullshit. Everything is in taste as well. When I'm saying design, I mean the actual grind of sitting in Photoshop, sitting in Figma,
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sitting in Illustrator, sitting in Canva, and pixel perfect making things. So we're already at the state that most of my leadership team is sending their emails from inside of IDE, like cloud code terminals. Definitely like design, when we like want to launch a new product, we do not assign a designer in the beginning. Like we say, just use the default cloud code stuff, and then we'll bring designers after and they'll make it a lot better. And we definitely do use design for user experience, interviews and stuff like that. And like that matters a lot. Like design is a really important
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part of Speechify. But the like hammer and chisel part of design is not as important. And therefore, the thing that's left is taste. Like very few people have taste. I have taste in some things, but in other things, I have bad taste. So which is why we hire really great designers at Speechify to make up for my shortcomings. And so no, taste really, really matters. Even if it's just telling you pick that one, not that one. I'm down 40% on my Figma position. Hold or sell? Hold. Dylan Field is a savage. Anything Dylan Field does, you should go for. So you think they survive in an anthropic design? Yeah, I do. I also think that Figma is a relatively anti-fragile company,
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just because it's a really good team. They're excellent at sales. They have really good taste. Figma itself is a great product because Dylan coded the original thing. I think it was a C++. It was the first product that would render vector-based architecture in a browser. They can do the same thing. And today what happens is you have a world where everything is moving really fast. Do I bet on an old incumbent that's really bad at innovating, or do I bet on the Figma team? I would bet on the Figma team. So it might be the product that they end up with. It's not the product that they have today,
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but I think it's a great company. I think they're actually benefited by being a publicly traded company. And I think that they'll continue to rise and do really great. Remember, Figma traded at 40X revenue, and now they're at 6X revenue. So it's less so that it's not a good company. It's more so that the market is making a correction, and that's fine. Claude code or cursor internally? What does everyone use engineering-wise? Claude code. So we were huge adopters of cursor about two years ago. I think I got the Anthropic team plan in December. And it actually drives me crazy that not everybody
SPEAKER_02
has moved over to Claude code. A lot of people will use Claude code from inside the terminal in cursor. I prefer if they use Claude code inside of the Claude code ID. I think it's more powerful, but it's fine to use it inside a cursor as well. But just most important is you have to use it to
SPEAKER_01
the max. And I'm always surprised. There's some limitations that you need to enable. It took people like three months to ask for some of the features to be enabled. And it's like, why did it take you three months to ask me about this? I'm pushing people constantly to hit limits. And we're getting to the point where soon we're going to spend more in tokens than we spend on actual salaries. You're getting to the point where you spend more in tokens than you do in...
SPEAKER_02
Like next year, I expect we'll spend more in tokens than we'll spend on salaries. Is that atypical? It's atypical right now, but I don't think it'll be atypical in the long term. You don't? You think the majority of great high quality companies will? We'll get there in three years. Yeah. You just need to be like a really strong early adopter. Across all functions or just engineering? No, across engineering. Across engineering. I would like to be spending more tokens on our growth team. And creative, we're not there yet. We need a lot more testing mechanisms to be put in place for that to make sense. Are they AI native? I know that sounds really kind of VC wanky,
SPEAKER_02
but I am pushing people to use AI internally, which honestly is kind of frustrating, especially on my growth stuff. So we do clips here where basically they interview me for like an hour and then turn into a hundred clips. But you know what actually sucks? I'm in the same top, in the same studio, and when you look at the grids, it just looks fucking boring. Yeah. It's very easy for you to change that already. It is, but I'm the one who's pushing them. My point is I'm dragging my team into an AI world. So I could tell you what we do. So remember like Speechify is a voice agents ecosystem with 50 million
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users and 1.1 million five-star reviews across platforms. We need to educate even our users on how to use AI. And so our first agent was a text-to-speech tool that reads to you. The second one was a speech-to-text tool that does dictation. The third one was a podcast generator where you can be in the podcast as well as two new hosts. Then we launched teacher agents that will ask you questions about the document and then teach you back the content gap that you were missing. And now we just launched Jarvis, which is the speech-to-write for work. It like lets you do productivity and then the enterprise Simba voices.ai. We're constantly educating our own users on how to
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use AI. And what we found is it takes about a hundred iterations on a feature before the feature gets adopted. But once it gets adopted, it gets adopted really well. So you need to do the same education for your B2C users as you need to do internally. Internally, I am constantly screaming from the rooftops that people have to use Cloud Code. And I'm more extreme about it than it needs to be because I need to move people from all the way over here on the right to all the way over here on the left. And I'm okay if they meet me in the middle. So I'm just extreme about it. I'm like, if you don't spend a thousand credits a day, I'm disappointed in you. Like I need to see that
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happen. And so send me screenshots and I will get people on a Zoom call, screen share the entire engineering, and I'll show them how I use it. And they'll go, Tim, you're really good at this. Show us what you do. Tyler, you're amazing at this. Show us what you do. Simon, show us what you do. And we're just constantly demoing. And you just got to make sure that people are aware of how much other people are using it. And then I'm like, if you are not using this tool right now, like it's like a chat in everyone's Slack, comment, explain why. It's going to be very difficult to continue working together if you don't use it and you don't explain to me why.
SPEAKER_02
So they have to explain to me why, and then I will call them and convince them to use it. And I'm like, you have 24 hours. Send me a Loom video with what you used AI to make. What single thing do you use Anthropic or Claude for that has been most impactful? So the personal side is medical stuff. We talked a little about my brother, Eric, who has Lyme neural inflammation and psychosis. We took, we did a proteomics, mapped all of his genome, put it on Supabase, wrote an MCP for it, and then had it compare to every single article that had ever been published about anomalies in the genome. And we found four anomalies in how his
SPEAKER_02
genes expressed. And so that was like amazing for breakthrough for us. The second thing that we did
SPEAKER_01
is my dad has had prostate cancer on and off for the last eight years. There was a point where his PSA continued to go up, which meant it came back. We just didn't know where it was in the body. And so the next thing you need to do is what's called a PSMA scan. And the doctor refused to do it because he was like, listen, the cancer is too small. What we need to do is sit and wait. And I was like, that sounds like the worst advice ever. If we know he has cancer, waiting for another three years is a terrible thing to do. And he's like, well, we don't know where it is. And so what I started to do is I
SPEAKER_01
went on Kaggle, which is the largest online competition for data scientists. And I started
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hiring people on Kaggle to help me diagnose my dad's cancer from the radiology reports. And it has a lot of open source repositories on data for what's called time series of PSMA PET scans for cancer. And so I came up with four theories. The first one is called tipping theory, which is like, you basically look at the level above and the level below where you think the cancer is, and you make the data really noisy and you see if you can figure out where it is. So we started
SPEAKER_01
making models for that. And then I basically like took five different approaches inside of this research from talking to Gemini and talking to Grok and talking to Chachupudy, I realized that there was a machine that could help us. So in UCSF, there's a thing called the China Basin that does a
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normal PSMA PET scan, and it will scan a voxel of four millimeters in diameter. But there's another machine called the U Explorer that can scan a voxel of two millimeters in diameter. And there were three of them in the United States, and one of them was in UC Davis. And so I messaged the guy who was responsible for that lab. He agreed to test my dad and the doctor who I put a lot of pressure to give my dad the exam had scheduled it for the end of January. In December, we got to get the scan in this higher quality machine. And we found it. It was in his left seminal vesicle. I would have never had
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the confidence to push on the doctor so hard to get the scan if I didn't have LLMs open during the conversation with the doctor. I definitely would not have found another machine, got my dad scanned, and then figured out. So by January 7th, he had the left seminal vesicle excised. And so before he was even supposed to have the second scan, he had a surgery and he was good. Are you quite skeptical on the state of modern medicine? And what I mean by that is like, when you were a kid, you kind of just believe everything that doctors tell you. And the more I kind of grow up, the more like doctors tell
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me, oh, don't worry, the scans were kind of fine. And I pay for my healthcare here and it's a lot. I'm like, kind of fine isn't great. Actually, send me the fucking PDF and I'd love to actually go through it myself. And I put it in a chat. I'm like, kind of fine, yes. But there's a lot more you
SPEAKER_01
could have told me to optimize. Are you actually quite skeptical of the state of modern medicine?
SPEAKER_02
So three years into my dad having prostate cancer, we had a meeting with a doctor who was very renowned. And he was like, yeah, like your dad's fine. We're just going to sit and monitor. And I was like, screw that. Like, that's the same thing as us being like a JV soccer team. No, I want to be coached like I'm Real Madrid or Barcelona. Like, give me, like, tell me exactly what to do. Do you want me to like wake up at midnight and like see the moon or put my feet on like, like whatever you want me to do? I will do that thing. Like, I just want my dad to live longer. And the problem is not the
SPEAKER_02
doctors. The problem is the system where doctors have to treat statistics and they need to make sure they don't get sued. And so in your case, in my case, because we're educating ourselves and we're willing to take the risk ourselves, we can do things that result in better outcomes, but they're a little bit more risky and that's fine. And so my contention is you should just learn as much as possible because the information is accessible to you. And then you are the quarterback of your own medical experience or that of your family members. So there were so many things that we were talking
SPEAKER_02
about kind of token maxing and spending more on tokens than we were on people. And then went on site tangent there. I think one thing that was so interesting for me was going through some of the notes. You said adversity quotient matters more than IQ or EQ. I don't think most people know what
SPEAKER_01
adversity quotient is. Yeah. I had to expand upon it in my searches. What are the leading signals for you of a candidate slash person that is going to be successful at speechify? Yeah. So people talk a lot about IQ, intelligent quotient, or EQ, emotional quotient, but the most important one is AQ, adversity quotient. How good are you when things get really tough? And so I think about it, think it through a Jeep that's going through the Savannah. I don't want the Jeep that goes the fastest. I want the Jeep that's not going to have a flat tire. They're going to stick with it the longest. And so there's a
SPEAKER_01
heuristic I use for this, which is sometimes you look at an engineer and they're willing to grapple with a really hard problem for eight hours straight. Most people, if it's really hard, they quit after 30 minutes. But the things that really move the company are on the other side of five hours of grappling with a hard problem. And you kind of have to be obsessed to do that. And so the way that I find that is I look for projects that people actually did that they published to production. Let's say you went and you spent four years learning computer science and we have a call together. My goal in
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that call is not to not hire you. Nothing will make me happier than hiring you. I just need to get you to give me the information that proves to me that I can underwrite hiring you. So I just, the whole point to that call is for me to find out how awesome you are. And so I want to hear about your side projects that you've built. I want you to screen share and show me the things that you've made. But if you haven't made them, you're just not willing to deal with a little bit annoying thing that requires to register an Apple developer account and put an app on the app store. The little
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annoying things that require to set up a Cloudflare instance and like make sure that your website like sticks around three years after you published it. Like I need to see that those things happen. And then ideally I want to see something novel that you created and you don't need to be a genius. You just need to be willing to do the thing. And so the last thing I'll say is I have a friend, Valentin Perez, who has a great line, which is a little bit of slope makes up for a lot of Y intercept. It doesn't matter where you start. It matters how fast you grow and the growth rate has to do directly with how much pain you're willing to bear. I think that this is exactly the
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same when I look for founders that I want to invest in. As awful as it seems, there are certain things we look for. One of them is like, but struggles in parental relationships often signify very successful founders, sadly. If you were an investor today looking for adversity quotient or struggle duration in a founder, what would you advise me to ask, question, dig deep on with founders? There's a great question from YC, which is what is a non-computer science system you've hacked to your advantage? It's a really, really good one. Because I'm looking for the story that shows me your ability to A, build a system, B, learn something, and then C, have an inhuman amount
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of desire and will and grit. So that you have clearly. So I'm then looking for the rest. Are there any mega red flags on the flip side? Like for me, I'm like, I hate the people that are like founding GTM advisor. And it's like, no, no, no. You're just a GTM hire that was one of the first. You don't look like a founding. It's like, everything needs to be a founding role. Fuck off. Yeah. So no, there's a lot. The first one is any situation where you can discover dishonesty. So what I really don't like is when people give me a stat and they say, oh, I raised the stat XYZ. And the more questions you ask, the more you realize they changed the definition of what
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the denominator was. So like, that's one thing that I really dislike. The second thing is people who talk too much. Like the amount of signal per sentence that I get needs to be high. And if it's not, I don't want you wasting the time with the rest of the people on the team. Like we're all about execution here. And so sometimes I'll meet someone who I think is really talented. They might even be really technical, but they just talk so much. And I'm like, you're just going to annoy everybody else and get us off track. I want someone who's hyper-focused on the accurately one goal, the
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thing that really matters. And then the last thing is you don't want people who are too comfortable. You want people who will be loyal. And so I always ask people, what made you interested to interview with Speechify? And if the answer is bad, we shouldn't hire that person because there's no differentiating reason why they're here, not another company, and they might leave. What is a bad answer? I want to earn more money. Is that a bad answer? Terrible answer. Never would hire that person. Not in a million years. Why? Because someone else can come and offer you more money and then you leave. And after we spent like a year coaching you up and making you amazing.
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And a good answer is? I have a kid with dyslexia. I have a niece with ADHD. I use the product myself every single day. Okay. Those are great answers. I read the blog post by Tyler Weitzman on how he skipped four and a half years of math in high school and built 47 iPhone apps when he was there. And then he went and did his co-term at Stanford. And I really liked his explanation of how he shipped the first deep learning model that worked on the CPU of an iPhone. So I'd love to work with him. That's a great answer. Just do a little bit of research about the company. I want to see a reason why people are there.
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Yeah, that's a better answer. I agree. Yeah. The cash one was always flimsy. You said there about Tyler and ADHD or earlier you said about dyslexia. The best founders are dyslexic or have ADHD. Unpack that one. So Michael Dell has this great analogy, which is when you're running a company, it's like you're driving a car and you want the car to fit the driver. So you want the company to fit the person who's running the company. If you have dyslexia and you're nine years old and you suck at the one thing you're supposed to be good at, which is reading, there's two options.
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The first one is you think the world is stacked against you and school sucks and you go down this really dark path. 40% of people who are incarcerated have dyslexia, even though 17% of the population has it. The second option is you keep trying and you try again and you try again and you develop this
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belief that it's okay to fail and that even in things that seem impossible, if you try enough, you'll succeed. So 40% of billionaires also have dyslexia. That's insane. 40% of billionaires? 40% of billionaires, yeah. And it ends up being the case that you coach yourself that when it's okay to fail and that's exactly what startups are. You're stacking the odds against you. You're doing something that feels impossible, but you're developing this AQ to never give up. If you have ADHD, people with ADHD, they're definitely not slow and they're not lazy and they're not stupid. Their mind just works
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differently. And actually we find that for speechify users, if your brain works at 600 words per minute, but you only read at 200 words per minute, of course you'll get distracted. If you start listening at 600 words per minute, you love that and you stay engaged. Running a company requires you to be responsible for and understand the engineering, the design, the quality assurance, the go-to-market. All these different things are stimulating you at the same time. Being ADHD is actually very good to be a CEO. The problem is how do you get from like zero to one to 10? Like the 10 to 100, amazing place to be ADHD, but you got to go from the zero to 100 where you're
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doing all the icy work yourself and you need to stay focused and that's really difficult. And so it's great to be dyslexic or ADHD as the person who is running a large company and it's not great as the individual person who needs to build the company. I'm being a terrible interviewer in this because I'm just jumping around so much, but I'm so enjoying the kind of spontaneity of the discussion. You mentioned the multiple different disciplines that you have to adopt in the early stages of the company. What role does not exist today that you think will be incredibly commonplace in five years' time?
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Coach. So one thing that we do a lot in Speechify is coach people on how to use AI better, force them to use AI better. So we're still hiring people at a crazy rate. Last year we had 178,000 people who applied to work at the open engineering positions at Speechify. We have an asynchronous technical challenge. 19,800 people finished that challenge. So we're very good at hiring good people. Still, we much more focus on coaching the people who are inside of the company. And this is something that has been my battle internally actually convincing our leaders to do because they have a lot of things that they need to do. It almost feels like a waste of time to go and spend time
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teaching other people, but you have to do it. You have to have to have to do it. I have a friend, Austin Ray at RAMP and like his entire job is teaching the organization how to use AI tools. And we almost had Austin join Speechify and it's one of my biggest mistakes that we didn't make that happen. Why didn't you make it happen? We hired him as a consultant. We worked with him for a while. I had super high conviction on him. I couldn't get to the level of conviction I needed from other people. And I made a huge mistake of because I didn't get a resounding, we have to hire him for everybody else. I didn't do it. I should have trusted my gut and done everything to give
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the sexiest offer possible because he was also like obviously a very expensive hire. So there's like a cost to it. We should have just given him that because it was clear. He was such speechified DNA. Do you want to hear something nuts? I've been investing for 10 years. Basically what I've learned is I can't decide the difference between a seven out of 10 and a 10 out of 10, but I'm very good at guessing between a one out of 10 to a seven out of 10. And so basically anything that hits a seven out of 10 in terms of founder quality, I should invest. Right? If I'd invest in every founder that I'd met, every founder that I've met, I'd be 17x more successful. Wow. One 7x more
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successful. I would have had 2.5% of deal. I'd have had 2% of 11 labs. I'd have a seed check in Flettersport, seed check in Vanta. And I knew all these guys were great, but I wasn't sure they were like 10 out of 10. And the honest truth is the market. I saw shipping. I saw SOC 2 compliance. I saw payroll. Really interesting, huh? I have the same philosophy about hiring. If you can really trust someone, you can afford to pay them significantly more. And it's actually just, just hire the person for more money. And if they don't work out, you part ways. Like it's fine. You should always be trigger happy to hire really good people if you see that they're really good.
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And just ignore the fact that they're expensive. Just make it work. Also, when you get spidey senses in the interview process, listen. Like it will only get worse post-hire. Oh, 100%. That is when someone, they just get the feeling that, you know, they really actually want to be an investor, not in finance. Trust me, when they get on the finance team of the investment firm, they'll be pushing to be on the investment team, not on the finance team. Like listen to the early spidey senses. You said before, why we never hire from Google? Yeah. Why? So Speechify is an applied AI research lab that focuses on voice agents. There's 50 million
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people who use the product. We hire all over the world. And the benefit of having a lot of B2C users is people know about the product. When we try to hire from large organizations, we do have very similar DNA to Amazon. Typically we found, this is my personal experience, when we hire folks from Google. They come from a place of a ton of abundance. So the hunger is not the same hunger. And you need to coach them out of essentially bad habits. And that can infest your culture in a bad way. The other thing is, this is true in general of hiring in the Bay Area, the loyalty is a lot less
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high than you would get from hiring in Europe. Because in Europe, people really value a good
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company and a good job. And it's just not the same thing in New York or San Francisco. And sometimes
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you find diamonds in the rough, don't get me wrong, and you should definitely hire those people.
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But by and large, you're taking a big risk. Now for us, we really like to invest in people.
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It's extremely important to us. And so we've only had one real case of attrition at Speechify of
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someone who worked with us for a long time. And that person went to work for Elon Musk directly. Like, okay, makes sense. But generally, I don't want people who we coach and understand the context
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of the company to leave. And so we just find that people who come from companies like Google are more likely to do that. What do you do to retain people in a way that others don't? A lot. I'll give you an example from early, early days of Speechify. We had an amazing teammate. I loved him. He took time off school to work for us. And he told me that he wanted to leave because he wanted to have more friends. Like there were not a lot of friends in the Bay Area for him. He wanted to go back to where he was
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school. Okay, no worries. And the way I found that out is he said he was going to leave. And I was like, why? And he didn't really know. So I sat him down. I put my phone in his hand, notes file open. I was like, write the 10 top goals you have in life. And it became very clear that it was all around friendships. And I was like, okay, can you describe to him what you're looking for in his friends? He described what he looks for in his friends. Cool. My assignment for you for today, don't do any Speechify work. Give me by the end of the day, a Google sheet with 50 people in the
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Bay Area that you want to be friends with. So he gave me like Teal Fellows and people who won the award for being the best student at Stanford and Berkeley and whatever. And then I DMed all those people on Instagram. And I was like, hey, we have dinners on my patio every Friday. I know some of you. I don't know others of you. You're all invited this Friday and next Friday. So the 50 people, 35 people showed up. He was there and he made a ton of friends. And then he stayed. And so often it'll be stuff like that. Early, early Speechify, the person who's now our COO, we couldn't get him a visa.
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And we went to 15 lawyers. No one would do the visa thing. So in the end, I read the immigration law myself and I figured out how to get him a green card directly. Took a lot of work, but like we got it. And after that, we became really good at immigration. There was a person who worked at Speechify, really, really amazing engineer. And he was based in Ukraine. He was going to leave. This is like right around when the war was about to start. I flew to Ukraine. I ignored the US restriction of you cannot go to Ukraine. Literally to board the plane, I had to sign a form saying the airline is
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not responsible for what happens beyond this point. I worked out with him there for like three days. I ran a hackathon with other people there. We sorted out the problem and he stayed. Typically, this is not the case in Speechify. In most companies, this is true. People don't quit companies. They quit managers. That has not happened at Speechify. Typically, if there's an issue, we'd like solve it very, very fast. But people typically leave not for money. They leave for another thing in their life that's not satisfying them. Because they're, for whatever reason, not satisfied. Figure out what's not satisfying and solve that thing for the purpose. And sometimes
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it's money, in which case, just solve it. Are you worried by the number of layoffs that we're seeing? Of course. I'm super worried. I think the one thing that we think about, like we don't think about enough is in a world where we create more value than ever before. And the Gini index gets really, messed up and value accrues to the top 0.1% and not to the rest of the population. Like what happens? How do you upscale people? And I think about that a lot. And I don't know the answer. And if you look at this graduating class of computer science students, there's basically no jobs. Like you
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need to really make your own side projects to look impressive. And I don't have a great answer for it other than more people should be entrepreneurs. Do you have a bent towards younger hires today more than ever, given their proclivity to be more AI native? No. I have a bent towards older hires because they read textbooks about software engineering when they see what's coming out of the LLM output, they understand it. Not all of them are adopters of AI, but some of them are. So you can hire people who are both grizzled veterans and good
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at AI. Now, if I see a cracked young engineer who's great at cloud code and I can see the project, of course I'm going to hire that person on the spot. Like there's no question. Regardless,
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a prerequisite is we have like this entrance exam. There's this gigantic code repo that you need to
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read very fast. You can't read it with your eyes. You have to use AI. You have to use LLMs to ship all the features. And then you get a test at the end, which is how much of the code repo did you break? And then you get 30 minutes to fix what you broke. And so we're already like into our functional engineering challenge is not just challenges of like how good you are at TypeScript and Python, but like, how do you use LLM coding agents? And that's key. And like, if you don't pass that, like there's no way that we can work together. And the best are dot, dot, dot. You never know. Like you just have to try with everybody. Like you never know. Sometimes people
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tell you that they're great at AI and then you give them the challenge and they suck. You just got a test. And sometimes people have never used AI before and you force them to sit with it for 48 hours. And by the end of the 48 hours, they're phenomenal. You said before, literally 20 minutes ago, 60 second response times are the best predictor for any engineer's success. What do you mean by that? Yeah. And what should we know? Yeah. So Speechify is our remote first team. There's 45 AI engineers on our research team. There's about 150 product facing software engineers. And we have people in 36 countryness now, 200 people in total. Everybody's really good at
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engineering. The communications become really important. And I can't have a situation where you're blocking somebody else. Like if someone else is blocking you, number one, it's your responsibility to inform them that they are your bottleneck and inform them multiple times a day that they are your bottleneck. But we also really believe in people learning. So if that person cannot unblock you, you should go and learn how to unblock yourself right now. But if that person doesn't give you an answer, you're stuck. You don't know whether you should invest the time to unblock yourself or
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you should wait for that person. Another principle that we have is managing up. If your team leader needs something from you, obviously you need to respond, but you should update them anyway about what you're doing. Like in the morning, the first thing that you should do is send your leader, hey, here's my top three goals for the day. And then they shouldn't respond unless you're going in the wrong direction, in which case they'll adjust your direction. But if someone is messaging you to get unblocked, it is beholden on you to give them a response. And that response can be, hey, busy
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right now, can give you the response by 4 p.m. Or hey, won't be able to get used to you until like three days from now. Just like give me a timeline or just give me the answer. And then if you're the person asking and you didn't get the response, call them on the phone. Like I don't know why people don't use WhatsApp calls more. Just call on the phone. They'll give you the answer and then move on. Young people are scared to call. Everybody. Yeah. Young people are very scared to call. And I think that at this point, like people above
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45 are willing to call and below 45 are not because everybody's like that skill has atrophied. Just get the answer. Move on. We actually had a viral video the other day because I said that if you don't respond to a message
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within a three hour period, I call it the Titanic rule. The movie Titanic is three hours long. Everyone should be able to go to the cinema with their families. If you don't respond within three hours, it can be, hey, I'm busy. I'm at a football game. Cool. Fine. That's a good answer. But you need to respond within three hours, even on weekends. I got decimated for it. Decimated. Wrong culture. It's fine. Like obviously,
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if you're asleep, don't respond. If you're with, but even if you're with the kids, like you could
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tell me I'm not free right now. Tell me I'm not free right now. Yeah. Dropping kids off in school back later. Yeah. Just inform me. Fine. Totally agree. And by the way, the reason is we are so privileged to live in a world where you can work from your house. You can work remotely. You could take vacation. You could do whatever you want. Be anywhere in the world. You don't even need to work nine to five. Like you want to work at 3 p.m. on a Monday or on a midnight, Saturday. That's fine too. Like take all of Tuesday off, but just get the work done that you said that you were going to do and make sure you have a
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responsibility for your team because it is a living organism. Help the organism win. You need a fire under your ass that said everything needs to have been shipped yesterday. Like speed is the number one strategic advantage for any company, especially today. And if you're not adding to the speed, you're by definition distracting from the speed. It means this culture is wrong and either you fix that or you're not in the right culture. What can I do today to increase the speed of my company? Like set daily deadlines or goals? No, deadlines are challenging. Goals are also like, you definitely set goals. So a dream is a goal without a deadline. So always at a deadline.
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And it goes on a calendar with multiple people on the invite. So I'm going to ship this to production by not Tuesday, by 3 p.m. on Tuesday. Invite Rohan Simon-Cliff. Pankaj. So everybody knows. And then sometimes we have calendar invites that start with, this is not a meeting. It's a deadline. And then if that day, the second you know it's not going to be released by that time, you're responsible to update everybody else. Hey, it's not going to be done by here. Here's why. I'm going to do it 24 hours later. That's fine. But just update us. And when you launch it, send me a screen recording or a Loom video showing me that
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it's done so I can give you feedback. Like I'd love to get a test flight link too, but ideally just send me
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a screen recording to begin. That's number one. And then the other thing is just increased speed is show it yourself. Like when people message you, message back. When you need something, call people. Like if you are moving fast and it's clear that you are hungry and you need it to happen now, everybody will adapt to the way that you behave. What did you do too fast that you then later subsequently regretted in a major way?
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So I think you did a episode of Marc and Trier said he was like, I don't introspect. Yeah. Because you don't want to learn the wrong lesson. I'm trying to think about it. I can't come up with something that was objectively a mistake. The closest thing I can think of is we had two people that we hired from Apple and Snapchat, like very eligible people. And they, they messed up the culture of the company. They would leave at 5 30 PM. They like didn't live and breathe the company. And in the end, both of them quit after three months. And I, we got very lucky that they quit, but I didn't let them go within the first 30 days.
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Right. Like that was a mistake. Um, but I was young. I didn't know, like, I didn't know what to, like what, what good meant later. I learned also, I was like begging and borrowing for people to work for my company at the time. Like we didn't have any, like, thank you for working for me at the time. At least I was thinking this going to bed last night, which is like, I've never, ever not seen a young founder, not for, for big logos ever. Right. Every single year. Yeah. It's just like the canonical path. You will learn the lesson. The thing you learn as you get older, I'm sure you find this and you're a tiny bit older than me now. It's like, humans are kind of the
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same. We make the same mistakes. We do it continuously. Um, would you be long snap? No. Why? One, we try to run ads on snap all the time. We never succeed. So if you're a rep on the growth team of snap, send me an email, teach me how to make snap work. I haven't succeeded. I've been trying. Um, two, there is a portion of the population that uses Snapchat as their main form of communication. Like over I message, they message on Snapchat. I don't think that the way that they're dealing with their, uh, cash is fastidious today. I think they're overpaying creators, left right in the center. Um, and I just think that the lunch is
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completely eaten by meta at this point. We were talking about like calls versus messages, Slack messages kill your company. Yeah. Any tips for me on Slack etiquette? Oh, most long Slack message should have been a phone call. Just call. You'll get the answer
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immediately. And then the person can ask you follow up questions. Like that's so easy. And then all your engineers who are supposed to be coding are spending time reading Slack. Like I'd rather you put that in the PR commit message. Like there's just no reason. And so,
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yes, there's things that you do need to communicate on Slack, but just, just call. The other thing is,
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we have this internal voice agent, like the world is getting eaten by voice agents now.
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It's just so much faster to communicate by voice to communicate by text, period. And so text is great for asynchronous, but if you try to move fast, you don't want to go in synchronous. You want to move now. You said about the Apple and the Snap. Oh, we, they quit, but I should have got rid of them earlier, whatever, whatever. Normally you do a performance review, put them on a performance improvement plan. Why are performance reviews a waste of time? Total waste of time. Why? So the problem is that you didn't communicate to them ahead of time what the goal was. So typically the reason why people end up on a pip is because they didn't ship something to
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production. And so I have a philosophy that if you made something amazing, but it's not a production, it's a waste of time. Like you should, like you get no credit unless it's in production. The analogy I always give someone is you're a farmer and you are a milk delivery guy and you have the best milk in the world and you put it in a bottle, but you didn't put it on my doorstep. You put it down the street and now the milk is spoiled. There's literally no points for all this milk that you created. It's like you're a football player and you didn't put the ball in the goal. You put it right before the line. You didn't cross the end zone. No credit. And so the problem that
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the leader has in that situation is they should have informed the person ahead of time that they have not shipped the thing to production. And so all you do is you get on a call. You go, hey, Matthew, Harry. Hey, Harry. Listen, we've worked together for 30 days. You still haven't shipped anything to production. We're a startup. And so like the only time that I, as a CEO, get wrecking that is when things go to production. I need you to put your thing in production in the next, whatever, how big is it? 72 hours. If you can't reduce the scope of the feature, if it has eight features,
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only focus on one, but ship that thing to production, like get it through PR. And that doesn't need to approve your pull request. Get on the phone with them and get them to review live right now. Then you go and QA it. And if you're not allowed to QA it, call the QAs, get them to approve right now. And then if there's an issue, then you go fix it. Just all the timelines, make them faster. Ride that feature until it is in production. And then I know that you're an actual outcome owner,
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not just an engineer. And so as long as you communicate that the 72 hours end, you still didn't send the features to production. You don't need a performance review. The person is just not an outcome owner. And then you need to decide, are you okay with not having an outcome owner in the company? That's up to you then. No. You said about QA there. QA is now the most valuable skill in the world. Totally.
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Why is that? And why most people shit at it? All right. So in a world where software engineering is commoditized and design is commoditized, if you try to build stuff with cloud code, even if you give it all the tools in the world, it will not succeed in QAing itself to perfection. Definitely not on different devices and different phones. And like when the wifi goes down and all that stuff, you still need a human to do that. I'm amazed to see, even with very good software engineers and designers, how often they fail to put themselves in the user's shoes and just test age cases. Like I have a friend who works directly
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for Elon. Elon's like the best QA. He'll always found your bugs. And it's like super embarrassing. And I find the same thing as Speechify. Like I sometimes find more bugs than the actual QA team does. And because it's in production live, like I see it. And so then I call people immediately or I send them a screen recording. I'm like, why do we have this bug? And like, either there's a good explanation for why the bug is there, in which case I'm cool. Got it. It's just a huge lift to fix this. And like, we'll fix it later. Maybe we'll tweak the scopes to like bury it a little bit. Or like,
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it's actually relatively simple to fix. Like, let's fix it. And so let's say you built a feature with one shot of like a great prompt on clock code. And now it's on your phone. The next 48 hours is just you finding the bugs and making just indelible piece of software that does not break. And then you ship that thing to production. That's what separates a good product. Sorry. That's what separates a product from a great product. Just QA. So this is the other thing that we do. Let's say you have a person who's not an amazing outcome owner. They just, they can't ride people like that. Hey,
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that's okay. That's the personality trait. But if they're still a good software engineer, they will be good at QA. So before letting them go, I'd actually rather put them in QA for a little bit, see how well they do in QA. And if they do well there, that tells me something. And we should not get rid of that person. Like we should just coach them properly. But if they're also bad at QA, then you should let them go. So much of company interactions, assessing talent is done in meetings, in some respects. Why did you ban meetings? We hate meetings. So number one, I like having an
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asynchronous culture. I don't want you to not be able to go and take your kid to soccer practices. And I don't want you to not be able to go hang out with your wife at a movie. And like, if there's a meeting on your calendar and it's 60 minutes long, 30 minutes before that,
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you still need to be home. 30 minutes after that, you still need to be home. You can't think about the project that you're doing. It's better if I just call you for three minutes, or if I just text you, there's no reason for meetings. The other thing I hate about meetings is situations where one person is talking and five people are listening. That should have just been an email or that could have been a Slack message. Like who needs this? Nobody needs this. You're just creating slowness for absolutely no reason. The places where meetings get like become a core of a company is companies that don't know
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their direction. And so the meetings are used to try and find the direction. In that case, just go work out with someone from your team or a group and like chat about it. And you're doing something else at the same time. That's like building togetherness. The other thing I really dislike is performance reviews. We used to have a situation where leaders, we don't have managers. We have leaders. I don't like the fat general sitting in the back saying, take that hill. I want the guy who's running up the hill first, engaging the enemy first. Like you should be the strongest individual
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contributor in your team if you're leading that team. If you need a people manager, we'll give you a people manager to manage the communication. But I want you mainly hands on keyboard coding, designing, talking to users. We had leaders who were spending eight hours a week in performance management meetings with eight direct reports. They're like, this is stupid. We're going to cut that to 15 minutes instead of 60 minutes. And we're going to do it every other week because there literally is no reason for doing that. Just have a habit of your team sends you their top three priorities every single morning. You don't respond unless the direction
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is bad, in which case you tell them this is the correct direction to go. Do you like HR? If by HR, you mean recruiting. I love recruiting. If by HR, you mean like dealing with internal politics and issues, we for the most part have succeeded in this dyestepping it so far. Amen. Thank you. I tweeted it recently. And basically, the only people who shit on me, shit on me because they were like, recruiting is really important. And I completely agree. But I think it's so important that I take talent out of HR. Like for me, talent is its own independent function. And HR is the management. There's the acquisition and then there's management. And bluntly, I don't think great
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people need that much management. Vacation monitoring is not something that great people need. The way I think about it is I, like if we hire you, I'm not going to be your manager. You need
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to manage me. I need you to tell me where I need to unblock you. And if I know that, I will go and unblock you. And we had this a lot in the beginning of the company. I would just hire a ton of people and then I'd give them the goal. And then if they got it, I'll give them the next one. And if they
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got it, I give them the next one. But some people would just stop communicating. And like they actually just stopped working at Speechify because they didn't keep communicating. Like you just need to be interested in the problem and think about it all the time and work towards it and send demos. And then you make progress. And that energy is the thing that I'm hiring for. Like our leadership team is stacked because everybody is a savage. They think about the product constantly. They're constantly like Rohan just launched this great thing. If you go to speechifyvoices.ai and if you email me cliff at speechify.com, we'll give you a million minutes for free to use Speechify.
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He just like thought about it in the shower, launched it. Like you just want to do a situation where your team pushes as hard as you do. That's it. Do you think everyone can be a doer? Or do you think, so you do, you don't think it's like inbuilt in you? No, I think everybody can be a doer. I have this concept, which is I like awakening people. Like I meet people. And like Steve Jobs has this great quote. It's like, you know, the world around us was built by people no smarter than you or I, right? You live your life. You want to try to not bump into the world too much, but like you could do things. And like someone just needs to tell you that you
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can do things sometimes. And the second you see it, especially if you're next to someone who's like a really high quality operator, you're like, oh yeah, I can do those things. There's a great question that I like is like, who's the first person who believed in you more than you believed in yourself. And so that's my favorite thing to do is like, I'll meet someone. I'll be like, this is such a talented person and I can see how amazing they are. And I just, I,
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and it gets to the point that I believe in their ability more than they believe in their ability. And so I just give them more responsibility and more opportunity. And they almost always
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rise to the occasion. Sometimes they don't, in which case we figure out how to help them get to that place. But yes, everybody can become a doer.
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You said you were hiring a lot of people quite quickly at one point. You never like raised a lot of money and did a big splashy round. Can you just help me understand what did the like fundraising profile look of this business? Cause it's such a weird business and we chatted before and I, in all honesty, I was like, I, it was weird for me going into meeting you, but we went for a walk
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around the park. Cause I was like, I don't know. I don't know. My friends are VCs, all of them are obviously. And like, there's nothing online. Help me understand this. Yeah. So I started speechifying when I was in college. Um, I was like 21 years old for four and a half years. It didn't grow really fast. I just like iterated on it until it did. And then it started growing really fast. And then I did this blitz of like finding all the people who could teach me. Four and a half years in, how much revenue were you making? By four and a half years in, yeah, we were making more than $5 million at that point.
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Um, and so we started growing really fast from the $5 million upwards. Um, and then a ton of the people who I talked to were the early investors. So Dylan Field from Figma, uh, Mike Krieger from
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Instagram, ever from Twitter, uh, Zillow founders, Audible founders, Grammarly founders, Robinhood founders, Honey founders, 23andMe founders, Plaid founders, Medium, Brex, Richard Branson, Gary Cohn, who led all of, um, Goldman. Charlie Songhurst was my very first investor. Charlie Songhurst was your first investor. My first investor. Yeah. And so we started scaling the business like that. And then we like, we just found product market fit and the business started to grow like crazy. And what I realized is if you find lighting in a bottle, you don't want to tell other people about it. Like speechify has
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1.1 million five star reviews. We have 94% of the B2C voice agents market. Um, like we read more to people than any other AI product in the world. Um, how much money have you raised? We don't share it publicly. You don't, you literally don't say it? No. Does your team know? No.
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Wow. Our leadership team knows, but yeah, no, we don't. And you don't say your valuation publicly? No. There's only three reasons people typically share these numbers. Number one, they want to bring more users in. We get a ton of users. We get almost a million, like we get so many users every single week. There's no reason to. Number two, for hiring, 178,000 people applied to open engineering positions of speechify last year. We don't need to make splashes about fundraising to hire. And number three is to get more investors in, but there's 10 investors in my inbox every week who are wonderful people who want to invest in the
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company. That's not what we need either. Like what I need is if you have grown a product to more than $10 million a month, please send me an email. Cliff at speechify.com. I would love to talk to you. Like teach me how to get more users. We just launched the enterprise business. Like literally like in this week, if you know how to get enterprise users, great. I would love to talk to you. Like that's a new part of my business. What I want to learn- Are you building an enterprise sales team? Now that is exactly what we're doing now, but like front deployed engineers. Yeah. Again, it was so funny. I was researching and on pitch book, which is, you know,
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you pay at 50,000 bucks a seat, like you get data on everyone. There's nothing on you. It came out with like news articles from like three years ago. I was like, fucking hell. This is impossible. We just avoid doing news as well. Like we just don't like it. I want users to come to speechify because they want to use voice agents or because they want to read their PDFs. Not, not because I'm looking for competitors. You know, it was interesting. Um, I'm going to ask about two people now because I had Jake Paul on the show recently and he was like, just relevance is everything. Relevance is everything. Um,
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I really liked Jake and Logan, but the comments were like, ah, less relevant now. And you were like, ah, Logan actually doing WWE makes sense. Would you buy or sell the stock of Logan Paul? Oh, a hundred percent. Super hard. So what would you do? So here's what I think about Logan. Um, I don't have a relationship with Jake. I know Logan's super, super well. Um, one of my favorite people. So Logan went super hard on Vine. He's like the, the biggest person of Vine and then Instagram and then Facebook and then YouTube. And, uh, this is the concept we talked about, which is bulking and cutting cycles for companies also
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applies to creators. So at that point he was just dialed in, right? It's like, you're cutting, you're just creating value. You're not learning. You're not doing anything. Milked everything you can milk from YouTube. It was a cool. All right. What's the next challenge? They both got into boxing. They'd done really well in boxing really, really well. And then Logan got this seat in the WWE. Now people forget this, but like WWE is like a top 20 YouTube channel in addition to having TV and Netflix and everything like that. And so when I was 30, I was really like concerned. I hadn't achieved the goals I had in life, not even close.
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So I got this cabin on a river in the UK and for four days in a row, all I did made a list of the top 200 people who had accumulated the most power to impact the world, but the age of 35. And one of the common themes I saw is people sometimes have this exponential growth between the age of 29 and 35. And one of the things that happens is they're like a virus. They attach themselves to a larger organization from within. They license that organization and they use that organization to help them grow. And so the WWE is what launched The Rock. And so Logan is now accumulating all these amazing fans from the WWE that he could not have accumulated on his own.
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But in addition, obviously he did a great job with Trey launching Prime, like a legit business in a very, very short period of time. And both Logan and Jake now have their fund. Like Jake was like the meme of Sora. Great thing to do. And so I think that then now in this bulking mode where they're exploring a bunch of different areas and they're seeing what takes. So Prime took, WWE took, there's all these different things that they're trying and like him or hate him. Part of the whole philosophy is
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being not likable, but still generating attention. Logan's a really, really smart guy in my personal experience. And I also think that there's very few people who are playing the game like he is.
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He's like a very unique situation. Like, is it a company? Is it a person? Is it a social media company? Like what's happening here? And so I think he's created a lot of leverage for himself, which is really interesting. Could you apply that same philosophy to me then? Yes. As being a virus attack? But if I were to do that, that would mean joining Andreessen Horowitz or joining Sequoia. But you can't lie Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia. You cannot redirect the snake's head to be going in the direction that you want. Maybe you could. What I would do is I would join Union Square Ventures. I would join an institution that has a really storied name,
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but doesn't have particularly strong leadership. And I would become the leadership for that organization. Over just building it yourself and being a thrive. You can also just build it yourself. The other thing that you could do is find another way of doing it. So what's the besties called the podcast? All In. Yeah. Great example. You can have a side chapter to your life. Like let's say you now became a fourth or fifth host in All In podcast. That would be pretty good for your career. It wouldn't take that much time from you, but it would help grow you really fast. It would help grow them
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really fast too. And so let's say you went on Shark Tank or Dragon's Den. It would be amazing for you. Huge existing institution. It takes very little of your time, but you'd be the loudest voice in the room with the most interesting things to say. And you'd get a ton more views. By the way, a great example would be maybe you write a book, How I Became a VC by the age of 28. And then that book is available in all the airports and newsstands. And you're using Penguin Random House as your launching pad. Like figure out what is a launching pad. And for you, what's interesting is you started what, 10 years ago, 15 years ago? Podcasting was not a thing at the time. Like
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you were so early. So you wrote a wave that came up with you. The question is, can you go now to a different wave that is already big? And then because of the strategic position you are in, grow with it. So TV is a great option. YouTube is an interesting one. Mr. Beast is another of these characters. You slept at Mr. Beast's house for three weeks. What did you learn? So I first met Jimmy at a party of one of my friends' houses. And I had eight people working on the leadership team at Speechify at the time. I had a hundred people. He had a hundred people. He had eight leaders. And we just ended up talking for like three hours and I was supposed to fly to
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New York. And he's like, don't fly to New York. Come back with me to North Carolina. I want you to meet the rest of my team. And I was like, all right, sounds pretty cool. So I flew there and I just ended up staying. Like we worked out. I would see how he filmed videos. I learned a ton. So the first thing I like once basically saw him stop a shoot with like a hundred people on set just to like essentially repaint the door pink. Like I say that it's like no genius can figure out what's going to convert in ads. Jimmy knows what's going to convert in organic content. He just like, he has the
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algorithm in his head and it's just data. Like he has spent between the age of the 13 and today just studying what converts. And he just like, his dialed in on human psychology is insane. The second thing is the formats. So their videos are so data driven and they just figure out, okay, here's a format that works. How do we up the ante on this video and how do we make it even more amazing? The next one is the content that converts the best is content that doesn't even require language because that works at every single continent of the world. And you want the most simple concepts to be in the video to the point where like a great ad would be, for example, there's
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this ad for a storm proofing company, which is a very complicated concept. So their best ad is a bucket. You make a hole in the bucket. The water is coming out of the bucket. You put their material on duct tape. You put the duct tape on the bucket and it stops coming out. So what are the concepts? Bucket, hole, duct tape, water. Everybody understands these concepts. So make things simple. So for example, for us, PDF is a complicated concept. Book is not a complicated concept. So our best performing ads include books, not PDFs. He's great at hiring. He hires a ton. He tests people. And then if they
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don't work, they don't work. But like, he'll always try and try and try and try. Maybe the most ambitious person that I know, like insane level of ambition as an operator, as a business person, as a creator. And I'll give him his flowers. Like he's done a really good job. His views are at their lowest point for several years. Why would you be bullish on Jimmy moving forwards? Not for several years. Last year, they had the highest views, but this year they're having a little bit of challenge. One, the reason why is because, like we talked about platforms, YouTube was the number one place for a long time. Now the best place to be a creator is to be a
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streamer. Partly because streams get clipped. And then those clips can get watched 7 billion times
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in a week on TikTok and Instagram reels and all these other places. So he's already started big time on streaming. Last year, he also took on a huge project, which was Beast Games. They did really well on Beast Games. And then they also spent a ton of time with Feastables. And then they have like two other big projects that they're running right now. And so I would say that Jimmy for the last, I don't know, 24 months, even more, has been operating as an entrepreneur, building the company, building the products even more than building the content while like making the largest unscripted show in the history of the world in terms of number of people participating.
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So taking much bigger swings. And I would say that similar to Logan, went through a period of bulking, and now they're in a period of cutting and figuring out, okay, like here is the next phase of the business. Let's figure it out and make it grow even bigger. I have a segment of this schedule, which is wild fucking stories, because you gave me so many options. Another one that I loved was what led us to buying a 3x levered option on NVIDIA in 2022 before the market caught on. And I was right, and I was like, what? Can you talk to me about that? Yeah. So it was not me, it was my brother, Tyler. It was the case that we were very excited about A100
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GPUs back in the day. H100 GPUs were coming out, and they were like three times faster than anything
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before. And we spent so much time trying to spend millions of dollars buying H100 GPUs, and no one would let us buy them. We're like, what the hell is going on here? And there was a presentation that Jensen made as part of the earnings call. And it was just like this amazing example of how they could render a world. And we were like, this is a completely different level of technology. And so the benefit was like, we just had context. And it became very clear that the market was mispricing NVIDIA. And so Tyler had even higher conviction than me. I just bought a bunch of NVIDIA stock directly. Tyler bought a 3x levered option that's now like 36x up.
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And Tyler leads our AI engineering team. He just had the context. Now, my undergrad was renewable energy engineering. I put one third of my money into Tesla in 2025. Sorry, 2015. Because I had context. I had like, did a capstone in photovoltaics engineering. Like I just, I understood what was going on. And so I think at the end of the day, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have this philosophy of the 20 punch card investment idea. Like just everybody would be a much better investor if they only had 20 opportunities. But when you find the opportunity, lever as hard as you can into it in a responsible way.
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Do you know what, the biggest lesson I have in 10 years of investing is you have to diversify to concentrate. And it actually, what I mean by, I should have invested in everything and I should have done to find the Alan Changs, the Adam Ferrogis, the Cliff Weitzmans. You have to be broad to have the luxury to really know. Yeah. And then triple down when that person is in your corner. But the other thing is, can you go deep into an area that other people are missing? And if you can do that well, you will find the honeypots. Would you still say NVIDIA is a buy today? I was, I mean, look, I don't know of a company in the history of the world that has made as much
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profit as NVIDIA today. Do you think it'll be a $10 trillion company? You just need to look at the multiple of the revenue and profits. What is it trading at now?
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$3 trillion? Yeah. What's the multiple? $4.2. $4.2. What's the multiple in revenue? I think $35. $35 is reasonable given how much they're growing. So yeah, I think they have a lot more juice. One thing that I'm spending more and more time on is energy, naturally. Yes. How do you think about kind of energy requirements from AI given we're now 1% of energy utilization goes towards AI. Yeah. That will likely 10 to 12 times in those years. Yep. How do you think about energy requirements where you would be investing? How you would
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advise me? So one thing that I was surprised by is hydro. So all the dams that can be dammed have been dammed. Hydro power is like the most efficient and easiest way to create. We just don't have ability to invest in hydro more. So then it leaves you with fossil fuels or solar or nuclear. I do think that we are going to figure out fusion nuclear. I think that fission nuclear is also pretty great, but fusion nuclear is coming. We just don't know where it is, when it's coming. One of my biggest side projects that I really want to do is build a mini fusion reactor in my garage. I just haven't had a garage for a long time, but when I have one,
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like that's one of the first things I want to do. Not one that creates energy just once that is contained, but I think that we will figure it out. So that's very exciting. But in the meantime, while we haven't figured it out, I'm very much a solar maximalist. I'm all in on solar. The kind of theoretical limit for solar, at least when I was in school, was something like 47% or 49% efficiency. And we're getting very close to it. The cost of solar typically is mostly born in the installation and the manufacturing not of the cells. And China has done an amazing job in bringing the cost of solar down a lot. It's just such great investment amortized over time. We just have not
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installed enough solar in the United States to the degree that we should, like China is outdoing us tremendously. And there's so much essentially public land that nobody wants that could have solar installations. There's just a lot of regulation and zoning that stops it. This is like the easiest way for us to solve the energy problem right now. And so if I were you, I would look for either A, those types of amazing founders that you discussed who are working in the fusion space, or those types of amazing founders that you discussed who are working in the solar space and have some go-to-market that is amazing. Let's talk for a second about SolarCity.
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The reason why I invested in Tesla way back in the day was because I found Elon Musk from a Wikipedia article from the co-CEOs of SolarCity. And I was like, who is this guy walking with Obama with rockets in the background on his Wikipedia? So I read the Wikipedia and then I found more information. SolarCity was not a technology company. They were a finance company that had convinced, I think it was JP Morgan, to amortize the value of a solar panel over 30 years. And they got loan money to consumers to install solar panels on their house. And they became the larger installer
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of solar panel consumer in the United States by far. And so the innovation doesn't always have to be technological. It could be a go-to-market innovation around finance or customer acquisition or something else. So I would look for those howling pods. What do you know about product market fit that most founders don't know or think about? What do I know about product market fit that most founders don't know or think about? The first one is the importance of iterations. When we started Speechify, I was living in Palo Alto. I was a solo founder at the time. And I just had a bunch of interns.
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And I tried so hard to hire and I found it really difficult. And the main problem was people were not using the product. So I would rock onto Stanford's campus every single day with a roll of duct tape, and I'd put it over my mouth and I'd give my phone to users and I'd see where they'd click. And they'd always click on the wrong buttons. And I'd go back and I'd fix it. And I'd try it again. And I was just like constantly embarrassed by the fact that my user experience was not good enough until we got it to be really good. Like it took a long time. And then what we did is I added in the
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bottom right corner of the app, a big red button that said help slash message us. And if you opened it, it didn't go to intercom. It didn't go to email. It went to my personal text message, like my iMessage. The nice thing about that is if it was 3am and you messaged me, I'd respond back. And you didn't need to enable notifications because I was not iMessaging you. And if it was not 3am, about the middle of the day, I would call you and I'd solve that problem on the spot.
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And then every 30 days, sorry, every day, I would export the people who had churned, given that it was 30 days since they downloaded. And I would call them because I had their email. So that gave me the ability to call them via FaceTime audio call. And I'd figure out why they churned. And that took a ton of energy because it's like getting kicked in the teeth every single time someone tells you your baby is ugly. But it allowed me to solve the problems. And so if I was starting a solar company, I would do the same thing. Every single time I'd have an installation, I would personally call the person and say, how did it go? And I would follow up. Or at this point,
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I'd have a voice agent do it. Just follow up with users constantly. It's like the normal YC model
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of just talk to users. And then the other thing is just because users don't use the thing that you made doesn't mean that you have the wrong direction. It means the implementation is wrong, but the idea could still be correct. And so the old like Henry Ford, you can have any color that you want as long as it's black or, you know, I would have given people a faster horse. And like the Steve Jobs idea of, this is one thing that Brian Chesky and Dylan Field are very right about. AB tests are abdicating decision-making to the user. Sometimes you want to just have a very clear vision, go for a very big goal and just work towards that goal until it's in the market.
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And then when it lands, sometimes people think if you build it, they will come. They will not come.
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You have to build it and then you have to convince them to join you. And then you have to iterate on the product sometimes for years until the fit is correct. And so it goes back to AQ. The most important thing for product market fit is not repositioning your product or do it. Just stay in the game, keep making iterations until it fits like a glove and then you'll find success. It's so funny. We actually have a very strong product perspective on YouTube versus Spotify. Spotify, we do not offer video. You cannot watch this on Spotify. You can watch it on YouTube and we have shorts across IG and TikTok and Instagram. But why? Because the quality of edit you can make
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on an audio-only file versus a video file is infinitely better. So if you want a very curt, precise edit, which is significantly shorter, about 10 minutes shorter, that's a lot shorter, then you listen on audio versus on YouTube where you have the full video. Wow. I like that. That's very opinionated. It's very taste-based. By the way, the CEO of Spotify is actively annoyed at that. So why don't you use AI to make the frame transitions work and then the edit can be the same? Like, why don't you take the audio clip? I would love to. AI is not there to make the frame transitions work. I like the taste. So hey, the CEO is not Daniel Ek anymore. Who is it? Gustav?
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So Gustav, Harry is asking for a solution. Please give it to him. Oh, I would love it. One should be able to upload the video file. Yeah. And then it should sync to the audio file. Because one thing that it does do is it automatically plays video and then you switch to audio. And that means when you switch between different apps, you don't get the annoying video thing in the corner. That's kind of solving a different style of problem. Different problem. Correct. But it'd be great if you could have two separate files attached and you could choose one, curt or not curt. Absolutely. Super interesting one there. Another one that I just have to ask is you got hacked,
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you found the hacker, and then you hired him. Yes. And he ended up living with you for a year. Yes. What? We had a security vulnerability that did not expose user data, but could cost us a lot of money. Essentially, someone could use our models for free. I was aware of this. And it was basically a trade-off between that or launching new features on the AI model. And I was like, no, no, launch the new feature. And then it came back to me. I was like, no, no, launch the new feature. The worst that can happen is they can abuse us. And then it happened again. And then we got hacked. I deserved it.
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But it's okay because the amount that we lost was a couple of hundred thousand dollars, but it was not crazy. Anyway, this happened. And I was like, God damn it. And I just went on this search of figuring out who hacked us. Found the person. The attack came from a school domain. And so I ended up messaging the provost of the school. I found the person. We got on a Zoom call. I was like, do you want to tell me what happened here? And they fessed up to it. And they were just like,
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they were a kid. They were young. They didn't know that. I mean, I don't know how they didn't
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know, but they didn't know this was not okay. Like I see. And then like, I asked them to stop. They stopped. They took down the thing that they did. I was like, to be honest with you,
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this is pretty impressive. Like, this is exactly what I would have like loved to have done at your
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age if I didn't know that it was not okay. But I was not ready for hiring them for speech. I was like, this person's got it. Like they got it. So I hired him to do personal projects for me, like little side projects, like optimization of like my email drive, like all these like small apps that I wanted to improve my life that didn't exist. He was my personal engineer for a long time. So all the early voice projects at Speechify, like the very first version of Jarvis that I could call on the phone and talk to, he built it for me. And like, well, I like I had the core team and then I
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would text him, Hey, can you do this? Like, here's a cool repo I found. And he would just do it. Like we built a translation to all these things. And then eventually he came and lived with me first in LA and then in Miami. And then at that point we built enough trust that he joined the core team and like worked in real products. But my philosophy is if you find someone that is talented, you better work with them. And like most people, like if they get hacked, like that person is my enemy. They are evil. I do not want to interface with them ever again. And like, you'll see in world history,
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the most successful leaders are the people who end up having some confrontation with someone, but recognize that that person is amazing and find a way to still work together. So that's my philosophy in general. I do have to ask just a couple more is one, we are seeing insane revenue ramps from consumer AI companies and it's distorting our minds in a lot of ways. When we are looking at
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insane revenue ramps on consumer AI companies, you mentioned churn earlier. What do we not know, think, analyze when it comes to churn, usage, retention? Advise me. The main thing to look for is inference costs, bring those companies alive. Like early days of SGPT, they're just burning billions of dollars in inference costs. And so we had exactly that revenue ramp in 2022 because we were just early. We started doing this in 2025, sorry, 2015 dyslexia. And we had built models and like, they were great, but like once users probably started to use Speechify, Speechify, it stopped being a business and started to be a charity. And so the whole focus of the 40
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person at the time, AI engineering team at Speechify, and all the GPUs that we had bought
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and the data center that we set up was to reduce inference costs. And we got it to the point of single digit dollars for a million characters. If you go to any other model, it'll be anywhere from 30 to a hundred dollars per million characters. So there's like two order deviation, standard deviations cheaper now. What is 11 labs? For the like standard model, it's anywhere from 70 to a hundred bucks. And for the V3 fast model, it's like 30 bucks. So like literally more than 10X cheaper. That was just our whole focus for two and a half years. And we solved it. And that's why the company has been profitable for so long.
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And so when you look at a company that is hyper growing like that, you just got to ask yourself, are they just giving away free money? So let's take cursor, for example, which is a really great example. Like cursor is one of my favorite examples ever because the market demanded that tool. Every software engineer who was coding inside of conversation with ChatGPT wanted an integration into their IDE. So all they did was to take two separate tools, fork the open source repository for VS code and add Claude Sonnet at the time. And all the electrons on the right side were dying to go to
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the left side. And the second you put a bar of metal on top of it, of course you had the flow of money. And so that flow of money, as we all know, went straight through cursor and to anthropic.
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That is actually great because they didn't lose real money in the process. They just up to revenue that did not become profit. But very often you'll have a company that raises $50 million and they're just burning the $50 million alive. So make sure that there's a plan of how to reduce costs with time. However, here's the most important thing. Any Harvard MBA can figure out how to cut costs. It just requires being smart. It takes a genius to increase revenue. So still, if that company has an amazing growth lover, as long as there's some differentiator, they have better design, they have community, community is like so important. They have community around it.
SPEAKER_02
Then that's probably a pretty good bet. Are we about to see churn rates hit companies in a way that we haven't expected? Not if it's a product that you really need. Like if you have a disability and the tool, like if you are blind and you need glasses, you will never churn from glasses. If you need a wheelchair, you're not going to churn from your wheelchair in the same way that people don't churn from Speechify. But if it's a frivolous use case, that's not important. Then yes, like a meme maker. Sure. But if it's something that is a tool that you need to survive, then no. Does Apple buy Whisperflow? No. Apple launches a competitor. Really? Why are they so incapable?
SPEAKER_02
Okay. So Apple bought the Siri team way back in the day. Apple has this philosophy of on-device security, and therefore they're not using models that run on the cloud by and large. The keyboard does not give you access to the full RAM. So therefore it's very difficult to run either a Wi-Fi call that does text-to-speech, a speech-to-text, or something that connects to the app. Whisperflow has done an amazing job. I'm super proud of that team. Like such great marketing, everything. Obviously you could do the same things with Speechify, but they just did such a good job with the marketing. Organic. Incredible. Great growth story. Here's the thing. It's very difficult,
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like you said, to be AI first, like AI native, like audio first, AI first, mobile first. Apple has built
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such an amazing ecosystem that by and large, kind of become lazy. This is the cycle, the circle of life for startups. Like you need the hungry, small startups to go after, look, look, even like Apple makes so much money off the app store. Like the, like I can't even get an API to get a receipt for a user that makes a purchase. Like it's so difficult to work with the app store at this point. And we love Apple. Like, you know, it's made our business so much money. But it's just hard. I'm very excited about the transition of the new CEO at Apple. Let's see what comes out of that.
SPEAKER_02
I don't understand. I actually don't understand. Why are you excited? I think that the new CEO is more of an engineer. And so I'm excited to hypothetically have more support of good engineering tools for people to build excellent things for the platform. Tim Cook is like a god when it comes to supply chain. Like no one comes even close. And I think that Apple just won that race, right? AirPods were absolutely a huge win. Apple Watch was a huge win. Costs for producing iPhones, amazing. Like, have you ever heard of Apple having a supply shorter, the first time I ever heard one is like Mac minis were out of stock. But like, they always
SPEAKER_02
had the product to sell. Amazing, amazing company. And by the way, AirPods made more money than Spotify and almost every other audio company put together every single year for the last seven years. Like the amount of listening is absolutely unhinged since podcasts and audiobooks have 40% penetration in most markets today. And markets that they don't like Mexico, they're growing exponentially. So you have picked the correct career. Speechify is just AI generated podcast, AI generated audiobook. So the time is really big. But Apple drove that with AirPods. So they won. They locked in the supply chain side and obviously the brand side and
SPEAKER_02
everybody trusts them. Okay. Time to go back from cutting mode into bulking mode. That's it. Dude, we're going to do a quick fire because otherwise I could talk to you all day. So I'm going to mix it up a little bit. You can buy OpenAI at 850 or you can buy Anthropik at 850. Oh, damn. I like to be contrarian when it comes to these. So most people in my seat would say Anthropik right now because I love Cloud Code. Oh my God. I would marry Cloud Code. Very hard decision. Very hard decision. To be contrarian, I would say OpenAI.
SPEAKER_01
Why?
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I often will look at the founders and though I get that Sam Altman rubs a lot of people the wrong way and comes off slimy. I think he's really good as a company operator. Really good. Sorry, back that up with data for me. Sure. No one has raised as much money as Sam Altman in the history of Silicon Valley like that. Completely ridiculous. True. The recruiting for OpenAI was absolutely insane. You get Greg Brockman, you get Ilyas Eskiver, terrible. Greg Brockman? This was years and years ago. This was 10 years ago. Latest recruiters in the last five years. Mega bomb. Mega bomb.
SPEAKER_02
You had the whole coup and the internal team did support Sam. Right. So also when it comes to like enterprise deals, he's so good at it that it looks like black magic and looks like fraud. Right. Here's the analogy I give people. And again, I want to give them credit for they did it first. There's a lot of AQ in that company because OpenAI actually started in 2015. ChatGPT didn't come out until 2022. The way I liken it is you had Columbus going to the richest man in the world at the time,
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the king of Spain and saying, hey, I want to get to India. AGI. And on the way he found the United States. Right. America. ChatGPT. That's exactly what happened. Sam and Ilya and Greg and Elon went and got a ton of money from essentially Bill Gates. Right. Microsoft tried their best to get to AGI, found ChatGPT along the way. And then they made it into a really great, really great experience and product. Anthropic is running circles around them right now. Like especially in the coding arena. Let's see what happens. I right now use Anthropic for everything and I do not use ChatGPT for almost anything. And
SPEAKER_01
one of my least favorite things in the world is ChatGPT click baiting me at the end of its responses. I've literally written a prompt, like a shortcut on my computer to like tell it off every time it does it to get it to stop. But I think that they're in a very good, not in the tech community, but outside the tech community. Their brand is pretty good outside the tech community. I think that they have a ton of cash. I think they have a pretty strong team. And I prefer to be contrarian than say the obvious answer. But Anthropic is so good. So good. So like either give me more options or let me give me an opportunity to be contrarian here.
SPEAKER_01
Is Groot going to be a meaningful competitor? Good question. Yes. Yes, it will. Same thing. Elon is the savage. Like there's a rule that everybody should know, which is never bet against Elon. You just shouldn't do it. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? Last year, Mr. Beast, Jimmy was like, hey, I want to do this video where someone starts off, no money, no phone, no computer in the middle of America, and they need to start a business. And I think that you would be a hilarious person to do it. And I was like, Jimmy, I don't got time for this. And he's like, I'll do this many speedify integrations. Like, okay, that's a really good
SPEAKER_01
deal. Let's do it. So I spent 11 days sleeping in a Walmart parking lot in the middle of America. It took me three days to get an iPhone, make enough money to get an iPhone, five days to make
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enough money to have a laptop. I started working at a company, worked at a pizza restaurant, worked at a gym. And the video essentially fell apart. Like there were a lot of challenges. It didn't work. So I was really upset about it. And typically I like take a hundred percent responsibility, 200 percent responsibility for everything I do. And I couldn't figure out what I could have done more to make the video work. And it took me a couple of months to figure it out, but eventually I figured it out. I became resentful. I thought that part of like the production team, like they, they said they do this and then they didn't. And they said they did this and then they
SPEAKER_02
didn't. And I forgot to be grateful for the fact that I was doing something so cool. It could inspire hundreds of millions of people. And what I realized is I often tell myself that my greatest advantage is that I have this AQ thing. I'm really good at keep, I keep going when other people stop.
SPEAKER_01
I put more reps in than everybody else, but that's actually not my biggest advantage. My biggest advantage is I'm typically very grateful and I'm really optimistic. And in that moment, when things got really tough is around day nine, where I was very hungry. I forgot to be grateful and I forgot to be optimistic. And I think that one of the core inputs for allowing someone to have super strong AQ is they can find the goodness in every situation. They can find a way to be grateful about things. When I got into coding, I would misspell everything. An assignment that would take
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a normal person four hours or take me 17 hours. So I had a notebook and every day I would write before I go to sleep and before like right as I woke up, I'm good at computer science. I'm good at computer science. I'm good at computer science. And I found it really challenging, but I really appreciated that I got to learn because I wanted to. And so the thing I changed my mind on is that the most important thing is even when things are shitty, you got to find something to be grateful for. Do you worry about wealth inequality in a world of AI?
SPEAKER_02
All the time, constantly, constantly. And especially after that experience, like I was generous with people who were living on the street before. Now I'm way more like I just buy people phones because that's the thing that I wanted is like, I'll go into the convenience store and just buy any Android that's there and give it to them. Because you just saw how difficult it was starting from zero. Not having a phone is insane. It's literally madness. And like I came into the project, like I had a full meal beforehand and I have a lot of random skills. And like eventually I did succeed
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in getting an iPhone. But it was really hard. And if you don't have a phone, you don't have Google Maps. Like you literally can't navigate. You don't have Wi-Fi. You can't put a phone down to get a job. You can't even drive for Grubhub or Uber Eats or do Deliveroo because you don't have a phone. And phones get stolen in those situations too. So like, first of all, my personal opinion, the government should give a free Android to everybody who wants one. Like you should be able to go to the social security office and just get a phone. Like it's a basic human right at this point,
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in my opinion. The second thing is the Gini index now is getting really messed up. All the value is accruing to essentially buffoons like me who built a consumer subscription product or a AI product that gets a ton of people to pay for it. And it becomes like a standard in their life. And as long as you figure out the inference costs, you just print profit. And that doesn't make any sense. It's too few people getting too much leverage. Not to mention like the hyperscalers. So what happens to everybody else? And so the solution is don't be a Luddite about it. Embrace using these tools
SPEAKER_02
because number one, you're going to get more entrepreneurs, which is an amazing thing. It's easier than ever to be an entrepreneur, which is by the way, why I'm really long meta in a world where it's easy to do engineering and easy to do design more things launch and go to market. It becomes the most important thing. And the second thing is how do you rescale people? So I do believe that you can get people who are old and grizzled and have our veterans to learn how to use AI, but most people don't naturally do that. That's an unnatural behavior, but go back to the principle of a little bit of
SPEAKER_02
slope makes up for a lot of Y intercept. People just need to be awakened and you need to convince them that it's fun to learn and you need to learn, but not everybody will do that. And that's the whole point of having a government system is there should be a way to reeducate. And especially now, as you see K to 12 kind of falling apart and universities falling apart, I think there will come a wave of people going back to school after the age of 40, but school will be different. I don't know what that looks like, but I think that this is like the most important topic that we're not thinking about. Would you suggest your children to go to university?
SPEAKER_02
I had the best time in university of anyone I've ever met. My cheeks started to hurt from smiling so much three months in. I found my people. And I was so lucky to go to a place where I had an open curriculum, half my classes I didn't have the prerequisites for. I got to make my own major. And I met so many people who have stayed my friends for life. And I would just have two dinners every single night. And I'd sit
SPEAKER_01
with a table of six people I didn't know. And I'd do that again. Actually, I didn't do that again. So three dinners a night. So yes, I would, because it was the best experience of my life.
SPEAKER_02
But I would not tell them that the university is the thing that's responsible for their education. You are the quarterback of your own education. You need to be constantly reading. Like I, the reason I'm the person that I am today is because from the age of 13 till today, I have listened to a hundred audio books every single year. I will say that in the last 24 months, half of the content that I've consumed is deep research outputs from Speechify, where I go, hey, give me a comparative analysis of Catholicism versus Protestantism versus Mormonism versus Islam. And then I'll listen to that 200 page document. And I'll be like, hey, I saw this cool
SPEAKER_02
company called Etched. Explain what this company does. Hey, explain to me how to build a fusion nuclear reactor. And then I'll listen to, like, I'm just constantly listening to these things. And like my workflow is I'll ask a question, I'll get back a hundred pages and I'll listen to it on Speechify while I'm walking around. Everybody should constantly be doing this. And my thought is like when I have kids, which I'm excited to one day have, I want the teacher agents inside of Speechify to be amazing. So they could skip all the classes in school. Like my brother and I skipped
SPEAKER_02
basically most of the math classes when we were in high school because we got bored of the normal math. But math is the only class that's easy to skip because you just take the test and if you pass it, you're good. Everything else is subjective. But if you have an agent that asks you all the questions about the American Revolution and all the questions about Greek history, and it shows that you're very accurate, it's a signal that you can move on. What purchase under $1,000 has been the most impactful? Oh, there is a protein powder on Amazon called Earth Chimp, which is pea-based protein powder.
SPEAKER_02
And you take that and a 32-ounce bottle of like shaker instead of the 16-ounce. And I have that three scoops every morning and every evening. And I don't need to worry about food because I get the amount of protein I need every single day automatically. And I'd say like half my body at this point is pea-based protein. And you don't eat food in the day? I do eat food in the day, but like I travel a lot. And so I have that like 80 grams of protein in the morning, 80 grams of protein before I go to sleep. And like, I know I'm good for food. 80 grams each? Yeah. Isn't the ingestion rate something like 20 grams per? Per hour? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02
No. Like you see that in some studies and by and large, that's not true. Like if you talk to like people who are like bodybuilders, it's just like not reflected. Like it's like a very small optimization. So you can ingest 80 and it's not futile? Yeah. You'll fart more. You fart like a trooper? You would if you ate, yeah. Yeah. With 80 and 80, dude. Dude, I don't want to be next to you on a flight. What's the workout routine? So- And any tips for doing it while traveling? Yeah. Because when I travel, I'm- Okay. So great new hack that I have. Take photos of yourself and upload them to ChatGPT.
SPEAKER_02
Ask it what body fat percentage am I and what do I need to improve? And it's so good at giving you information now. And then ask it for the workout routine to take the parts of your body that you think you want to improve and it'll just give you the workout routine. It's really good. So most of my sport is tricking, parkour, and gymnastics. And so I'll go to a gym wherever I'm going. There's a great one here in East London called Over Gravity. And I'll go train and I'll find the best athlete in the gym. And they'll go up to him and say, hey, what's your name? John, I'm Cliff. Nice to meet you. Hey, you seem amazing. Can I hire you to coach me one-on-one?
SPEAKER_02
How much would that cost? I don't know, 75 pounds, whatever. So from that point on, I will go train and I'll train with them. And like gymnastics, I just love to do. So I'll do it like for three hours in a row. And I'd love to have somebody else who's better than me watching me and giving me tips. And so it doesn't matter whether it's like a sport I'm trying to learn or guitar or whatever, like I'll hire someone to watch me do the thing and coach me to be better. When it comes to lifting, I mean, obviously compound movements or whatever are great. DEXA scans are incredible. So you can find the breakdown between fat, muscle, and bone density
SPEAKER_02
in your body. And you can figure out exactly what your body fat percentage is. And it's just all macros. So if you're my size or your size, you want to have about one pound of one gram of protein per pound of body weight. You want to have about 50 to 80 grams of fat every single day. And then you cut or you bulk. So if I cut, I eat 130 grams of carbs a day. If I'm bulking, I'm eating like 260, 70 grams of carbs a day. And then like your body's just science equation. You can change it. Have you ever done fasting? I have done fasting for like Yom Kippur, but I haven't done it for health reasons. I've tried. It's just very hard. A bit depressing, I have to say.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. One nougat bar a day. That is fucking depressing. That is one of the worst things ever. Um, okay. Final one. What excites you most about the next 10 years? When you look forward, what are you like? I'm pumped about this. I think humanity is essentially going through a new form of evolution. Um, it took us a million. I mean, if you look at evolution, right, to begin with, like humans are what the last minute on the clock, um, or getting to a point where evolution is not a matter of your physiology, but of your brain's ability to intake information faster and understand that information
SPEAKER_02
and use it in a different way. Um, and I love fantasy audio books. And sometimes there's this thing called a familiar and fantasy audio books are like, it's, you know, this animal, like a dire wolf, like can connect with you mentally. And like, basically I feel the same way about my computer and my phone and all the tools that I get to use. And my team, by the way, it's like speechify is one live organism around the world. You can just achieve more. Like, even if I just look at what happened to my dad with his experience with cancer and my brother, who's still ill, but we're going to figure it out. Like I just have this Promethean view that we can solve
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everything. And when you talk to a doctor, you can very easily educate yourself to be as sophisticated. When you don't know how to solve your AC, you just take a video, which actually tells you how to set the AC and how to work your stove and how to set a fusion reactor in your backyard. Like you can learn everything. You can do stuff. You can build stuff more easily than ever before. And our kids are going to grow up with this mentality ingrained. So my dream for the world is everybody believes they have a higher level of agency than we do today. And hopefully that will be the case. The negative side of that is people think they have less agency because they abdicate
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all the decision-making to AI. And so you need to have people be in the driver's seat and use the tools instead of having the tools use them. I think Sam Altman said it very well when he said, you know, older people use it as a replacement to Google and younger people use it as their operating system for life. As you said there, how do I make aircon work? How do I get a better shoulder density or whatever that is? Cliff, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for putting up with my wandering questions, but you've been amazing. Thanks for having me. How do you feel. How do you feel.
SPEAKER_01
How do you feel. How do you feel.
SPEAKER_02
How do you feel. How do you feel. How do you feel. How do you feel. How do you feel. How do you feel. How do you feel. How do you feel. How do you feel. How do you feel. How do you feel. How do you feel.