The Exchanges, every show

Q Final one for you. What are you most excited by?

A We talked about Jeff Dean. I'm, Jeff Dean? Yeah. Uh, I'm most excited by applications of AI. To pharmacology and biology. So, uh, I have a family member who has very severe autoimmune neural inflammation. He's had it for six years. I took a blood sample from him every week for 15 weeks, sent it to a lab, sequenced his genome, uh, did proteomics on it to figure out how the proteins are expressing in his body, and run an RNA analysis in each one of those weeks, and then I compared that to self-reporting data on what the quality of life is and what his mood effect was, Uh, every day I have, like, six years worth of data on him, and ran it on a GPU cluster, and, like, I found so many things that no doctor could ever tell me, and he has a very rare disease. It was called an, like, an orphan disease, because there's not that many people. There's a Facebook group for this disease. I'm buying now, uh, basically, like, you know, it's like a 5000 dollar device you can fit in your pocket, but if you put a piece of hair or saliva or blood into it, it can sequence your entire genome, And so I'm organizing meetups with all the people who have this disease to sequence all of their genomes and then compare them all on a gigantic GPU cluster to figure out what epigenetic common thread there is between them. And I am, I know I'm going to solve this disease. I would have never had an edge to do t…

AI assessment note: “I'm most excited by applications of AI. To pharmacology and biology.”

Q Isn't consistency not important? And what I mean by consistency is that consistency of personality?

A Not at all, because you're marketing for different demographics. So for example, you find this interesting. We test almost a thousand data generated ads a day right now, on top of the roughly 8000 Organic creatives we make with humans every single month, and one of the things we do is we risk 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 sixty-year-old lady, and we'll turn her into a forty-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, uh, like, uh, I was gonna say 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 like crazy usage in the 18 to twenty-eight-year-old market. Um, but people who are 60 and above need reading glasses, so they use Speechify a ton. And now we're launching voice agents at Symbavoices.ai, and so that's a different demographic. And so all the initial ads for Speechify were me. It was my face. Um, 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 work…

AI assessment note: “Not at all, because you're marketing for different demographics.”

Q What does no one know about buying chips that they should know? What's the, like, oh my god, people are so naive about this.

A I mean, it's not that people are naive. It's just they haven't been in the space. So I'll give you an example. Imagine you're buying a GPU. Well, you're going to buy it, you know, it's an NVIDIA produced product, but NVIDIA is not going to waste the time talking to Cliff Weitzman. So who do I buy it for? Well, one of the best rated vendors is Dell. So everybody thinks Dell is a personal computer company. No, Dell is a GPU rack, uh, supplier at this point. And then, okay, I want to buy it from Dell. Well, Dell has a constraint because there's not a lot of, like, you know, Blackwells out there. Well, it happens to be that they have some in France. All right, well, I'm going to order mine from France. Okay. Shoot, it was supposed to come a month ago, and it's still not here, right? Because of whatever, like, you know, there's demand. So then you need to negotiate to make sure that you get it, which is why we're very willing to pay a hundred K per month extra to get them earlier.

AI assessment note: “Dell is a GPU rack, uh, supplier at this point”

Q Great gay. And this was apparently the start. In the yearbooks of 40 of my fourteen-year-old friends in freshman, that is what you wrote. How did that lead to Speechify?

A 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 earbooks, 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 earbooks. 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's earbook, and I hear him scream from the top of the stairs, what the hell? Cliff, I'm not gay. And I'm like, Oh my God. What have I done? Um, the crazy thing is, Eight years later, I was graduating college, and I wrote a thirty-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 fourteen-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 thirty-page paper with three spelling mistakes, and the reason why I didn't have that many Is because I can hear the spelling mist…

AI assessment note: “the reason why I didn't have that many Is because I can hear the spelling mistakes with Speechify.”

Q I do just want to go back to the ad spend as well. Um, you had one ad drive three million dollars of revenue. Can you just talk to me about that and the lessons learned from that?

A 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 hundred creators, and I talked to them, and I 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 hundred best performing ads in history. Every Superbowl ad that was really funny. Every ad that I made me cry. Um, every ad that one had won an award, I made a list of maybe 500 ads, and then I whittled them down to the top hundred. 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 1:03 seconds. Do you have good retention in the 1:03 seconds? But the rule I developed is actually you win or lose by the first image of the video, like the first 10 80 pixels. And so I wanted the first 10 80 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 hot tub at the time I had long hair. And I just threw behind…

AI assessment note: “the rule I developed is actually you win or lose by the first image”

Q Great gay. And this was apparently the start. In the yearbooks of 40 of my fourteen-year-old friends in freshman, that is what you wrote. How did that lead to Speechify?

A 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 earbooks, 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 earbooks. 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's earbook, and I hear him scream from the top of the stairs, what the hell? Cliff, I'm not gay. And I'm like, Oh my God. What have I done? Um, the crazy thing is, Eight years later, I was graduating college, and I wrote a thirty-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 fourteen-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 thirty-page paper with three spelling mistakes, and the reason why I didn't have that many Is because I can hear the spelling mist…

AI assessment note: “and the reason why I didn't have that many Is because I can hear”

Q I do just want to go back to the ad spend as well. Um, you had one ad drive three million dollars of revenue. Can you just talk to me about that and the lessons learned from that?

A 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 hundred creators, and I talked to them, and I 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 hundred best performing ads in history. Every Superbowl ad that was really funny. Every ad that I made me cry. Um, every ad that one had won an award, I made a list of maybe 500 ads, and then I whittled them down to the top hundred. 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 1:03 seconds. Do you have good retention in the 1:03 seconds? But the rule I developed is actually you win or lose by the first image of the video, like the first 10 80 pixels. And so I wanted the first 10 80 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 hot tub at the time I had long hair. And I just threw behind…

AI assessment note: “the rule I developed is actually you win or lose by the first image”

Q What single thing do you use Antropic or Claude for that has been most impactful?

A So the personal side is medical stuff. Um, we talked a little about my brother, Eric, who has Lyme neural inflammation and psychosis. Uh, we took, we did a proteomics, mapped all of his genome, um, put it on Supabase, wrote an MCP for it, and then had it, um, compared 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 like 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 Um, PSMA PET scans for cancer. And so…

AI assessment note: “So the personal side is medical stuff. Um, we talked a little about my brother”

Q 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 three x levered option on Nvidia in 2022, before the market caught on, and I was writing this like, what? Can you talk to me about that?

A Yeah, so it was not me, it was my brother Tyler. Um, it was the case that we were very excited about a 100 GPUs back in the day. H 100 GPUs were coming out, and they were like three times faster than anything before, and we spent so much time trying to spend millions of dollars buying H 100 GPUs, no one will let us buy them. We're like, what the hell is going on here? And there was a presentation that Jensen made, um, 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 three X levered option. It's now like 36 X up. 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 20, 25, sorry, 2015. Because I had context. I had like did a capstone in photovoltaics engineering. Like I just, I understood what was going on. Uh, and so I think at the end of the day, uh, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett had this philosophy of the 20 punch card investment idea. Like, just, everybody would be a much better investor if they only had 20 opportunities…

AI assessment note: “Tyler bought a three X levered option. It's now like 36 X up.”

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

Q Isn't consistency not important? And what I mean by consistency is that consistency of personality?

A Not at all, because you're marketing for different demographics. So for example, you find this interesting. We test almost a thousand data generated ads a day right now, on top of the roughly 8000 Organic creatives we make with humans every single month, and one of the things we do is we risk 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 sixty-year-old lady, and we'll turn her into a forty-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, uh, like, uh, I was gonna say 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 like crazy usage in the 18 to twenty-eight-year-old market. Um, but people who are 60 and above need reading glasses, so they use Speechify a ton. And now we're launching voice agents at Symbavoices.ai, and so that's a different demographic. And so all the initial ads for Speechify were me. It was my face. Um, 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 work…

AI assessment note: “Not at all, because you're marketing for different demographics.”

Q When you look at channel composition, what does yours look like today?

A Um, it's still word of mouth is like 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 like a normal reading speed. Like, don't you want to read three X faster? Like use speechify to make AI generated content, AI generated, um, audio books. Uh, that's the biggest one we crush it on Apple. So we were like, uh, we won the design award last year. We got featured by them like 14 times last year. SEO is huge for us. 10%, 15% now. 15% of our users come organically from ChatGPT. Um, inside of performance marketing, Meta is still the best winner. Google is the most profitable. YouTube is pretty good, especially on desktop. Um, AppLovin 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.

AI assessment note: “it's still word of mouth is like the biggest way of us getting people”

Q Claude code or cursor internally? What does everyone use engineering wise?

A Claude code. So we were huge adopters of cursor about two years ago. Um, I think I got the anthropic, uh, team plan in December. Um, and it actually drives me crazy that not everybody has moved over to cloud code. A lot of people will use cloud code from inside the terminal in cursor. I prefer if they use cloud code inside of the cloud 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 the max. Uh, and I'm always surprised, like 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? Like I'm pushing people constantly to hit limits. Um, and we're spending more and we're getting to the point where soon we're going to spend more in tokens than we spend on actual salaries.

AI assessment note: “Claude code. So we were huge adopters of cursor about two years ago.”

Q His views are at their lowest point for several years. Why would you be bullish on Jimmy moving forwards?

A Not for several years. Last year they had the highest views, but this year they're having a little bit of challenge. Um, 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 streamer. Partly because streams get clipped, and then those clips can get watched seven 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, 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, Like making the largest unscripted show in history of the world in terms of number of people participating. 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.

AI assessment note: “Jimmy, for the last, I don't know, 24 months, even more, has been operating as an entrepreneur”

Q What do you know about product market fit that most founders don't know or think about?

A 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 sole 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 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 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 three AM 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 three AM by the middle of the day, I would call you. And I'd solve that problem on the spot. And then every 30 days, uh, sorry, every day, I would export t…

AI assessment note: “The first one is the importance of iterations.”

Q So you think they survive in an anthropic design?

A Yeah, I do. I also think that, uh, Figma is a relatively anti-fragile company. Um, just because it's a really good team. They're excellent at sales. They have really good taste. Uh, Figma itself is a great product because Dylan coded the original thing. I think it was in C++. It was like 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 is 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, to rise and do really great. Remember Figma traded at 40 X revenue and now they're at six X 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.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I do. I also think that, uh, Figma is a relatively anti-fragile company.”

Q What single thing do you use Antropic or Claude for that has been most impactful?

A So the personal side is medical stuff. Um, we talked a little about my brother, Eric, who has Lyme neural inflammation and psychosis. Uh, we took, we did a proteomics, mapped all of his genome, um, put it on Supabase, wrote an MCP for it, and then had it, um, compared 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 like 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 Um, PSMA PET scans for cancer. And so…

AI assessment note: “So the personal side is medical stuff.”

Q What can I do today to increase the speed of my company? Like set daily deadlines or goals?

A No, deadlines are challenging. Goals are also, like you definitely said goals. So, uh, uh, a dream is a goal without a deadline. 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. Uh, so everybody knows. And then, uh, sometimes we have calendar invites that start with, this is not a meeting. It's a deadline. Um, and then if that day, the second you know it's not gonna be released by that time, you're responsible to update everybody else. Hey, it's not gonna be done by here. Here's why. I'm gonna 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. Um, like, I'd love to get a test flight link too, but like ideally just send me a screen recording to begin. Um, 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.

AI assessment note: “So always at a deadline. And it goes on a calendar with multiple people”

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 Do you think the circular economy fears that people often cast against NVIDIA are justified or not? We saw their CFO push back on them and say, enough, enough of this bullshit. Do you think that justified or not?

A Uh, I think that a lot of the things that about a year ago, like we're going on between Oracle and open AI, like that was way too much. Like that was ridiculous. I think the Nvidia stuff is not because you're talking about a real asset. So if you think, for example, about the logic behind the value of Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin, what is the intrinsic value of Bitcoin? I can't really tell you, right? What's the intrinsic value of gold? Well, gold, you can use it for some medical stuff because it's a really amazing metal and, you know, it's jewelry, whatever. 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. And so, actually, it has a pretty good store of value, even if new GPUs come online. Really, my one question, and this is the math for everybody to come back to, is how many teraflops per second can this device do? And that is, like, essentially a token. That's the value. And so, like, there is intrinsic value. So yes, you can have all these, like, circular things, but at the end of the day, NVIDIA is making a project, a product that's real. It's not complete tulip mania. Like, there's a real, real intrinsic value here.

AI assessment note: “I think the Nvidia stuff is not because you're talking about a real asset.”

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 Claude code or cursor internally? What does everyone use engineering wise?

A Claude code. So we were huge adopters of cursor about two years ago. Um, I think I got the anthropic, uh, team plan in December. Um, and it actually drives me crazy that not everybody has moved over to cloud code. A lot of people will use cloud code from inside the terminal in cursor. I prefer if they use cloud code inside of the cloud 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 the max. Uh, and I'm always surprised, like 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? Like I'm pushing people constantly to hit limits. Um, and we're spending more and we're getting to the point where soon we're going to spend more in tokens than we spend on actual salaries.

AI assessment note: “Claude code. So we were huge adopters of cursor about two years ago.”

Q What can I do today to increase the speed of my company? Like set daily deadlines or goals?

A No, deadlines are challenging. Goals are also, like you definitely said goals. So, uh, uh, a dream is a goal without a deadline. 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. Uh, so everybody knows. And then, uh, sometimes we have calendar invites that start with, this is not a meeting. It's a deadline. Um, and then if that day, the second you know it's not gonna be released by that time, you're responsible to update everybody else. Hey, it's not gonna be done by here. Here's why. I'm gonna 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. Um, like, I'd love to get a test flight link too, but like ideally just send me a screen recording to begin. Um, 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.

AI assessment note: “a dream is a goal without a deadline. So always at a deadline.”

Q and I, 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 into ChatGPG, and 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?

A 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, uh, the problem is not the doctors. The problem is the system where doctors have to treat Um, statistics and they need to make sure they don't get sued. Um, 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. Um, and so my, uh, 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.

AI assessment note: “The problem is the system where doctors have to treat Um, statistics”

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 What do you know about product market fit that most founders don't know or think about?

A 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 sole 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 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 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 three AM 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 three AM by the middle of the day, I would call you. And I'd solve that problem on the spot. And then every 30 days, uh, sorry, every day, I would export t…

AI assessment note: “The first one is the importance of iterations.”

Q His views are at their lowest point for several years. Why would you be bullish on Jimmy moving forwards?

A Not for several years. Last year they had the highest views, but this year they're having a little bit of challenge. Um, 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 streamer. Partly because streams get clipped, and then those clips can get watched seven 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, 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, Like making the largest unscripted show in history of the world in terms of number of people participating. 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.

AI assessment note: “the reason why is because, like we talked about platforms”

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 So you think they survive in an anthropic design?

A Yeah, I do. I also think that, uh, Figma is a relatively anti-fragile company. Um, just because it's a really good team. They're excellent at sales. They have really good taste. Uh, Figma itself is a great product because Dylan coded the original thing. I think it was in C++. It was like 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 is 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, to rise and do really great. Remember Figma traded at 40 X revenue and now they're at six X 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.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I do. I also think that, uh, Figma is a relatively anti-fragile company.”

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: “number one, I like having an asynchronous culture.”