The Exchanges

Q How do you think about energy requirements where you would be investing, how you would advise me?

A So one thing that I was surprised by, uh, 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, like that's one of the first things I want to do. Um, 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 maximal, maximist, maximalist. I'm all in on solar. Um, 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. Um, it's just such great investment amortized over time. We just have not installed enough solar in the United States to t…

AI assessment note: “I'm very much a solar maximal, maximist, maximalist. I'm all in on solar.”

Q 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?

A No, no, it's not bullshit. Everything is in taste as well. Um, 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. 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. Um, 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 clock 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 part of speechify, but the, um, 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. Uh, 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. Um, and so, no, taste really, really matters. Even if it's just telling you, pick that one, not that one.

AI assessment note: “No, no, it's not bullshit. Everything is in taste as well.”

Q Are you worried by the number of layoffs that we're seeing?

A Of course. I'm super worried. Um, 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. Um, 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 need to really make your own side projects to look impressive. Um, and I don't have a great answer for it other than more people should be entrepreneurs.

AI assessment note: “Of course. I'm super worried.”

Q And any tips for doing it while traveling? Because when I travel, I'm.

A 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 think you want to improve, and it'll just give you the workout routine. It's really good. Uh, 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, um, 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, 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. Um, when it comes to lifting, I mean obviously compound movements or whatever are great, uh, DEXA scans are incredible, so you can find the breakdown between fat, um, musc…

AI assessment note: “I'll go to a gym wherever I'm going. There's a great one here”

Q 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 a company. What role does not exist today that you think will be incredibly commonplace in five years' time?

A 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. Um, so we're still hiring people at a crazy rate. Last year we had a 178,000 people who joined, 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. Uh, I have a friend, Austin Ray at RAMP, and like his entire job is teaching the organization how to use AI tools. Um, and we almost had Austin join Speechify, and it's one of my biggest mistakes that we didn't make that happen. Um.

AI assessment note: “Coach. So, One thing that we do a lot in Speechify is coach people”

Q So much of company interactions assessing talent is done in meetings in some respects. Why did you ban meetings?

A 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 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, 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 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. Um, the other thing I really dislike is performance reviews. Um, 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…

AI assessment note: “We hate meetings. So, number one, I like having an asynchronous culture.”

Q Why is that, and why most people shit at it?

A Alright, 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 queuing 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 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. Um, and I, 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 scope to like bury it a little bit, or like 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 …

AI assessment note: “How often they fail to put themselves in the user's shoes and just test”

Q Mr. Beast is another of these characters. You slept at Mr. Beast's house for three weeks. What did you learn?

A So I first met Jimmy at a party of one of my friends' houses. Um, 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 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 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? Um, the next one is the content that converts the best is content that doesn't even require language because that wor…

AI assessment note: “I learned a ton. So the first thing I like once basically saw him”

Q Mr. Beast is another of these characters. You slept at Mr. Beast's house for three weeks. What did you learn?

A So I first met Jimmy at a party of one of my friends' houses. Um, 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 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 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? Um, the next one is the content that converts the best is content that doesn't even require language because that wor…

AI assessment note: “I learned a ton. So the first thing I like once basically saw him”

Q So you, sorry, you'll call up Pierre in France and say, you know, hey, we'll give you an extra hundred K kicker if you get them here in a month?

A Uh, even more than that. So in that France situation, which is something that happened to me, um, I was like, Pierre, what the heck? We have a contract. You're not delivering on time. And so it is the case that we had a contract with another company beforehand. And they were, I don't know, a few weeks late, and I called them and I was like, listen, I've got a better deal. I'm canceling our contract because you're, you're out, like, you didn't deliver, so I'm gonna go with this other contract. But if you have a better price, like, we'll go with you, but like, I just need the GPU now. And remember, I'm paying for the renting space of my data center. So the most expensive part of a delivery of a GPU is if it's late, I'm still paying rent for that data center space. Now that GPU, and so, you know, you put pressure on Pierre to send you the thing when he said he was going to send it to you, and then you go to Nvidia or Dell or whatever, and you're like, oh, it's a market. Hey, can I pay more to get it earlier? Skip the queue. Yeah, you can. Cool. Now, there's a truck somewhere in the United States with a GPU whose value is the value of a house that's coming to my data center, right? Well, I should have insurance from that, right? Because if that truck gets hit, or there's too much humidity, or the GPU gets flipped, like I lost multiple houses worth of GPUs. So, okay, the insurance i…

AI assessment note: “Uh, even more than that. So in that France situation, which is something that happened”

Q 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?

A 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 like six months to doing one. Um, 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. Um, 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 their, 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, you 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, um, 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. Um, and I noticed t…

AI assessment note: “companies go through cutting and bulking cycles like bodybuilders do”

Q What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

A 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 speechify integrations. Like, 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 get an iPhone, 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. 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% 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, they said they 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 reali…

AI assessment note: “that's actually not my biggest advantage”

Q Would you suggest your children to go to university?

A 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. Um, 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, and I'd do that again. Actually, I didn't do that again, so three dinners a night. Um, so yes, I would, because it was the best experience of my life. Uh, 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 am 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. Um, hey, Explain to me how to build a fusion nuclear reactor, and then …

AI assessment note: “so yes, I would, because it was the best experience of my life.”

Q What do you do to retain people in a way that others don't?

A 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 and wanted to go back to where he was. 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 was became very clear that it was all around friendships. And I was like, okay, can you describe to me what you're looking for in his friends? He described what he looks like in his friends.

AI assessment note: “I'll give you an example from early, early days of Speechify.”

Q Why is that, and why most people shit at it?

A Alright, 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 queuing 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 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. Um, and I, 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 scope to like bury it a little bit, or like 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 …

AI assessment note: “How often they fail to put themselves in the user's shoes and just test”

Q 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 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.

A The main thing to look for is inference costs bring those companies alive. Like, early days of KGPT, they're just burning billions of dollars in inference costs. And so, we had exactly that revenue ramp in twenty-twenty-two, because we were just early. We started doing this in twenty-twenty-five. Sorry, twenty-fifteen dyslexia. Uh, and we had built models, and like, they were great, but like, once users probably started to use Speechify, it stopped being a business and started to be a charity. Um, 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 in 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.

AI assessment note: “The main thing to look for is inference costs bring those companies alive.”

Q 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 do you like? I'm pumped about this.

A 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, and use it in a different way. Um, and I love fantasy audiobooks, and sometimes there's this thing called a familiar, and fantasy audiobooks are like, this, you know, this animal, like a dire wolf, like, can connect with you mentally, and like, dude, 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 gonna figure it out. Like, 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. Like you can learn everything. You can do stuff. You can build stuff…

AI assessment note: “I think humanity is essentially going through a new form of evolution.”

Q How do you think about energy requirements where you would be investing, how you would advise me?

A So one thing that I was surprised by, uh, 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, like that's one of the first things I want to do. Um, 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 maximal, maximist, maximalist. I'm all in on solar. Um, 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. Um, it's just such great investment amortized over time. We just have not installed enough solar in the United States to t…

AI assessment note: “in the meantime, while we haven't figured it out, I'm very much a solar maximalist.”

Q What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

A 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 speechify integrations. Like, 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 get an iPhone, 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. 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% 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, they said they 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 reali…

AI assessment note: “what I realized is I often tell myself that That my greatest advantage... is actually not”

Q So how many GPUs do you buy then?

A So let's talk about Rubens, for example. So Rubens come in the form of 72 cards in one rack. So we'll buy multiple racks of Rubens. And on top of that, we'll buy B 300, which are like the newest form of Blackwells, uh, because we can get them earlier. And then the same thing, like, you know, when we bought our first instances of, uh, DGX H 100 GPUs, we bought just like a bunch of racks of those. And then those get delivered in a truck to the data center. Uh, we rent the data center, uh, space. And so the data center provides the, uh, networking capability It provides the energy, which is actually the largest constraint now, and it provides, like, physical engineers that take it off the truck, they install it, if it has an issue, they fix it, um, and then it just runs.

AI assessment note: “So we'll buy multiple racks of Rubens.”

Q What happens in that market? Whisperflow take majority and then there's thousands of ankle biters?

A I don't know. I mean, I want them in that market, right? I think that market becomes oligopical as well. Um, obviously, and this, by the way, I think it's another mistake that I made. I built my own speech to text, uh, experience that I've been using on my computer for the last like seven years. Um, side loaded on my iPhone and on my computer, but I figured it's a commoditized product, right? Apple's going to release it instead of the button. It'll be great. And like, there you go. But Apple keeps not doing it. If you remember two years ago, Apple announced a partnership with ChatGPT that will improve Siri. Nothing happened. And so that's also the reason why I never went after Siri. And so now we've launched a product to compete with Siri, and we've launched a product to compete with Whisperflow, and we launched a product to compete with Open, with 11 Labs, because I learned a lesson that I should have learned before, which is the same lesson from 11 Labs. The way that you win is you offer an excellent product for free, and then you have a wedge, and then you add more and more and more things. So I don't know what happens with the Whisperflow space. I just know that if you're a founder, you should also always try.

AI assessment note: “I think that market becomes oligopical as well. Um, obviously, and this, by the way”

Q And we didn't go into it in that conversation, so what did you learn from flying around the world and meeting the top a hundred consumer subscription companies?

A So the first, basically at every point in Speechify history, I have led every department except for AI. Um, and so design, engineering, QA, growth. And my rule is I will read a hundred books about the topic, listen to them with Speechify. I will identify a hundred 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, 23 and me of Honey, of Grammarly, Flat from Robin Hood, and all those became Speechify investors very early on. Um, but they would all respond to the emails. Um, 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 than one percent of the time, or they agreed to go on chat. And I would also message them on Instagram, and I would also ask people for intros. Just like, 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 a hundred books a year, every year for the last 15 years. So I'd…

AI assessment note: “first thing that I learned is if you send a good email, people will respond”

Q How do you think about token allocation internally? I mean, we've seen leaderboards be used, which is, I think, the most fucked up form of incentive, kind of playing, ah, you don't want to, Prevent.

A There's a lot of people who are a lot of talk, and I'll ask for examples, and I'll read the examples, and like, you know, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, and then you look, and I'm like, eh. And so I think about it in terms of demos. Can we hop on a Zoom call, and you'll show me what you built, and then I use it myself, and I'm like, wow, that's amazing. Or you send me a screen recording of a feature or technology that you built, and I'm like, wow, that's so good. And so we give credit when things get shipped to production to users. So even inside of the AI team, if you build a really amazing, and this is part of why Speechify ended up winning. You asked how did you build bigger labs? The answer is we ship to production all the time. That's how we won. We are not in the theory space. We are an applied AI company. That's why we win. And so if you're an engineer at Speechify, the analogy I always give people is imagine that you are in the milk delivery business, and you make me a beautiful bottle of milk, and you leave it down the road. The milk will spoil. You have to get it to my door. Knock. If you didn't do that, you get no credit. If you carry the football, All the way to the line, but you don't cross over to the end zone. If you don't kick it into the goal, you get no credit. If you bring the ball just to the rim, you don't put it in the rim, you get no cred…

AI assessment note: “we give credit when things get shipped to production to users”