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 127 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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: AI Token Budgets Will Outpace Engineering Salaries Within Three Years
“We'll get there in three years. Yeah. You just need to be like a really strong early adopter.”
Weitzman says GPU analysis helped identify and solve his father's prostate cancer
“It's already solved my dad's prostate cancer, because I figured out with a bunch of help from other people how to use GPUs to identify where in his body the lesion was.”
Weitzman: Cutting Costs Is Easy, Growing Revenue Takes Genius
“Any Harvard MBA can cut costs. If you're smart, you could do it. It takes a genius to grow revenue.”
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: Bay Area and NY Tech Workers Have Much Less Loyalty Than Europeans
“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 o…”
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: Union Square Ventures has storied name but lacks strong leadership
“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.”
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: Renting an H100 GPU costs 1.5 times more than buying it
“If I was to buy an H 100 for, let's say, 30,000 dollars, that's how much the, kind of, a single card would cost. If I wanted to rent an H 100 for one hour spot instance from GCP, it could cost me five dollars. If I rented it from, like, You know, Azure or AWS,…”
Weitzman: NVIDIA guarantees 25% GPU buybacks with Wall Street lenders
“So I believe earlier this month, NVIDIA did a huge deal with Blackstone, BlackRock, Apollo, and Goldman Sachs. And they said, listen, we want more people to buy more GPUs. We're going to underwrite for you up to 25% the value of a GPU. That if you lend money t…”
Weitzman: Buying Rubin GPUs yields one year advantage over cloud renters
“If I want a Reuben, which is like these much faster GPUs, I'll get it faster if I buy it than if I wait for Google to buy it, and then there's other people in front of me in line. So I'm gonna skip the queue by like a lot, and then I'm gonna have like a year o…”
Weitzman: AI data marketplaces are high-risk because revenue is not recurring
“The first problem to understand about the data marketplace is it's not ARR, right? It's not annual recurring revenue. It's one-time deals every single time. So the buyer of the data is not required to buy it from you again. So it's a very risky business.”
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…”
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: Sierra relies on third-party models and Bret Taylor's go-to-market
“Sierra doesn't have their own model team. They use other people's models, right? Because the value of Sierra is the go to market. It's Brett Taylor.”
Weitzman predicts voice will overtake screens as primary interface within five years
“Human computer interface is going to become primarily voice, as opposed to a screen.”
Weitzman: Meta would be ripping without GDPR and US data regulations
“If GDPR didn't exist and the other laws in the US didn't exist, Meta would be ripping. They just can't train on their data properly.”
Weitzman: Alex Karp inflates Palantir's P/E ratio while Zuckerberg depresses Meta's
“What Meta doesn't have is what Palantir has, which Palantir has the Alex Karp effect. Alex is really good at pumping up the PE ratio of the stock, and Zuck, I agree, is the opposite.”
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: OpenAI ads will be massive due to deep user context
“Of course. Yeah, massive. Massive, massive. Because it knows so much about you.”
Cliff Weitzman: Meta is one of the most underrated stocks right now
“Yeah, I think Meta is one of the most underrated stocks right now.”
Weitzman: Acquisition and QA become paramount as engineering commoditizes
“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, we can talk about later, and customer acquisition.”
Weitzman: LLMs provided confidence to challenge doctor and locate specialized scanner
“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.”
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: Meta is completely eating Snapchat's lunch
“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.”
Weitzman: Speechify holds 94% of the B2C voice agent market
“We have 94% of the B to C voice agents market.”
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: AirPods made more revenue than Spotify and audio competitors combined
“And by the way, AirPods made more money Then Spotify and almost every other audio company put together every single year for the last seven years.”
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: Networked GPUs have intrinsic utility and store value globally
“But a GPU, it has intrinsic value. Like, you can actually use that asset for something that's really, really valuable. And it doesn't matter where that GPU is. It could be in Iceland. It's still useful to anybody all over the world, as long as it's networked. …”
Weitzman: Speechify engineers concurrently run 5 to 18 autonomous coding agents
“Our engineers, really what I'm looking for is 10 really good decisions per day, which is very tiring, not like optimizing the random parts of the code. And each one has like, you know, five to 18 agents running at any point in time, doing long horizon tasks on…”
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: 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: OpenAI fumbled the AI coding space alongside voice
“LLMs are the core, and by the way, they also fumbled AI coding. Now they're trying to cache because it's such a big space.”
Weitzman: Seed-stage hiring is easier than ever, but growth-stage hiring is harder
“The competition for growth stage companies hiring exceptional leadership talent is more difficult. For seed companies, I would say it's the easiest time ever because the impact of even just the founder on their own is bigger because they can orchestrate agents…”
Weitzman: A good engineer today is essentially an exceptional QA tester
“Really a good engineer today is just an exceptional QA, right? The AI will make them feature. You will test the feature, see if it's good, you'll figure out where the edge cases are, you'll prompt it to fix it, and then you try to make it as efficient as possi…”
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: Whisperflow degraded product quality by switching to their own cheaper model
“Part of the reason they got worse is they switched their own model because it's a lot more affordable.”
Weitzman: Sierra's core value is tool calling, unlike ElevenLabs
“If you use a tool like Sierra, the wedge right now is voice, but the important part is tool calling. 11 Labs lets you do some tool calling, but that's not the bread and butter.”
Weitzman: ChatGPT voice AI is too slow and uses a dumber model
“If you use voice AI from ChatGPT right now, It sucks. It's too slow. The LLM is much dumber than the core LLM. The escalation to the higher quality LLM is pretty weak.”
Weitzman predicts he will solve his brother's rare autoimmune disease
“And I am, I know I'm going to solve this disease.”