The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 63 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Weitzman: Speechify will soon spend more on AI tokens than salaries
“We're getting to the point where soon we're going to spend more on tokens than we spend on actual salaries.”
Weitzman: Google Hires Lack Hunger and Infest Startup Culture With Bad Habits
“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 i…”
Weitzman: Speechify favors older hires over younger engineers for AI coding
“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.”
Weitzman: Team Leaders Should Be Their Team's Strongest Individual Contributor
“Like 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 u…”
Weitzman: Speechify Simba 3.2 ranks number one globally for quality
“The newest Speechify Simba 3.2 model is ranked number one in the world for quality. Above all the frontier labs, 10 x more affordable and stuff like 11 Labs.”
Weitzman: Engineers who cannot orchestrate agents are not worth hiring
“They have to be able to orchestrate agents well, and if they're not doing that, It's kind of not worth to have the person.”
Weitzman: Speechify holds 98% of B2C text-to-speech App Store installs
“The first one is if you go to the App Store and you search text-to-speech, Speechify has 98% of the installs in text-to-speech for B to C.”
Weitzman: Speechify now prioritizes raw intelligence over handcrafted coding ability
“So one thing that we have changed about our hiring in the last even six months Is we really cared that you read a ton of textbooks about software engineering and that your handcrafted code was amazing. I still care that you read a lot of textbooks about softwa…”
Stebbings: Speechify entering B2B is a strategic mistake
“I think it's a strategic mistake for Speechify to go to B to B.”
Weitzman: Speechify holds 94% of the B2C voice agent market
“We have 94% of the B to C voice agents market.”
Weitzman: Speechify's early hires from Apple and Snapchat failed within three months
“We had two people that we hired from Apple and Snapchat, like very legit people. And they messed up the culture of the company. They would leave at 5:30 p.m. They like didn't live and breathe the company. And in the end, both of them quit after three months.”
Weitzman: Speechify engineers must respond to messages within 60 seconds
“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.”
Speechify is among 200 companies testing ads on OpenAI
“We're one of the 200 companies that's provisioned to test ads on OpenAI.”
Weitzman: ElevenLabs inference costs range from $30 to $100 per million characters
“For the like standard model is anywhere from 70 to a hundred bucks. And for the V three fast model, it's like 30 bucks.”
Weitzman: Speechify will fire employees who waste tokens unnecessarily
“We will let people go if they just go
Bananas with something for no reason.”
Weitzman: Speechify's Simba 3.2 API costs $10 per million characters
“11 charges 10, a hundred dollars per million characters. The OpenAI model on the benchmarks cost a 196 dollars per million characters. So ours, when we sell it to other B to B companies now, we just launched our API, Simba, 3.2, it costs 10 dollars per million…”
Weitzman: ElevenLabs leapfrogged Speechify by selling B2B while Speechify focused B2C
“11 Labs, huge credit to them, leapfrogged us because they sell to B to B. Well, historically we've only sold to B to C.”
Weitzman: ElevenLabs builds and operates its own physical GPU clusters
“11 Labs, I think Piotrek at 11 Labs literally bought a bunch of GPUs early, early on and set them up in his house, and then they just kept building bigger and bigger and bigger clusters. They do the same thing that we do.”
Weitzman: Speechify will never hire candidates motivated primarily by higher pay
“Terrible answer. Never would hire that person, not in a million years.”
Weitzman: Employees quit over unfulfilled life circumstances, not money
“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 it's mone…”
Weitzman: High-impact work requires over five continuous hours of problem solving
“The things that really move the company are on the other side of five hours of grappling with a hard problem.”
Weitzman: Meetings Become Central Only in Companies Lacking Clear Direction
“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.”
Cliff Weitzman: 15% of Speechify's users come organically from ChatGPT
“15% of our users come organically from ChatGPT.”
Weitzman: Speechify uploads 1,300 ad creatives daily to testing campaigns
“Every day we upload 1300 to our testing campaigns.”
Weitzman: Speechify reads to users more than any other AI product
“We read more to people than any other AI product in the world.”
Weitzman: Startups Must Commit to Six-Month 'Bulking or Cutting' Cycles
“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.”
Weitzman's Framework for New Roles: Read 100 Books, Interview 100 Experts
“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.”
Weitzman: Speechify has been profitable for a long time due to low inference costs
“And that's why the company has been profitable for so long.”
Weitzman: Replace Management Meetings with Daily Top Three Priorities
“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.”
Weitzman: Prior experience is a poor predictor of candidate AI skills
“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 …”
Speechify spends $500k monthly producing 20,000 ad creatives
“I'm okay spending 500,000 dollars a month making 20,000 pieces of creative because that is a creative investment.”
Speechify currently tests nearly 1,000 data-generated ads daily
“We test almost a thousand data generated ads a day right now.”
Speechify's engineering interview tests candidates on using LLM agents to fix code
“A prerequisite is we have like 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 i…”
Weitzman: All Speechify executives must remain hands-on practitioners who buy ads
“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.”
Weitzman: Speechify cut voice AI inference costs to single-digit dollars per million characters
“And we got it to the point of single digit dollars for a million characters.”
Weitzman: Speechify still runs inference operations on older NVIDIA K80 GPUs
“At Speechify, we still use K-eighty's for a lot of specific operations for inference, and we use older models of GPUs constantly.”
Weitzman: Engineers moved at one-seventh potential speed without sufficient compute
“The realization moment was when we realized that we had really talented engineers who were essentially moving at one seventh of the speed they could have if they had to compute one to one with their creativity and ideas.”
Weitzman: Large-scale AI training requires co-located memory and GPU clusters
“If you want to do large scale training like we do, You need the memory to be co-located with a large cluster of GPUs. I can't just rent from Google or Microsoft or even base 10 and run the size of training that I want because I need a gigantic memory card next…”
Weitzman: Speechify will pay $100k extra monthly for faster GPU delivery
“We're very willing to pay a hundred K per month extra to get them earlier.”
Weitzman: Speechify users do not churn because the tool is essential
“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.”
Weitzman: Speechify enterprise sales team will use forward-deployed engineers
“Now that is exactly what we're doing now, but like front deployed engineers.”
Weitzman: Internal AI coaches will become standard corporate roles in five years
“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.”
Weitzman: Speechify Ran Profitably for Four and a Half Years
“Speechify just finished four and a half years of running profitable.”
Weitzman: Feature adoption takes ~100 iterations internally and externally
“And what we found is it takes about a hundred iterations on a feature before the feature gets adopted. But once it gets adopted really well. So you need to do the same education for your B to C users as you need to do internally.”
Weitzman: Speechify Has Only Ever Had One Long-Term Employee Attrition
“We've only had one real case of attrition at Speechify of someone who, like, worked with us for a long time, and that person went to work for Elon Musk directly.”
Weitzman: Speechify rap song ad about dyslexia generated $3 million
“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 three million dollars on a rap song.”
Cliff Weitzman: Enforce deadlines using shared calendar invites, not meetings
“So always at a deadline. 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 three PM on Tuesday. Invite Rohan Simon-Cliff. Pankaj. So everybody knows. And then sometimes we have calendar in…”
Weitzman: Test Struggling Engineers in QA Before Firing Them
“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 a…”