Dylan Fox
Founder & CEO, AssemblyAI. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@YouveGotFox ↗LinkedIn ↗assemblyai.com ↗
Dylan Fox founded AssemblyAI in 2017 to build speech AI models and APIs for speech-to-text transcription and audio intelligence. Before starting AssemblyAI, he worked as a machine learning and software engineer at Cisco Systems developing AI and NLP products.
3shows
3appearances
44statements
6resolved
4supported
2contradicted
67%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Dylan Fox said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Fox: Coding Agents Have Expanded AssemblyAI's TAM by 100x
“So I think about this as like our TAM has just increased by a hundred X because we're not just selling to engineering teams within product companies. It's now like any, anyone.”
Fox: Most AI note-takers use AssemblyAI as voice infrastructure
“And so the reason, you know, most AI note takers are using assembly as the voice infrastructure is because our models are the most scalable, right?”
Fox: Training data drives roughly 75 percent of AI model performance
“It's really, probably, like, 75% of it is, like, the data that you're training on. Like, I would say for any AI model, it's like, there's always, like, you know, like, these, like, step functions and, like, algorithms and architectures and stuff, but the data …”
Fox: Callers hang up immediately if voice agents disclose they are AI
“If our customers, if they're building a voice agent and you disclose up front that you're an AI, people just hang up versus if you don't, people continue.”
Fox: AssemblyAI processes four times YouTube's daily audio volume on peak weeks
“And so now, you know, on a given week, on a peak week, there'll be something like over a hundred and twenty million conversations, voice conversations going through our platform, over two million hours of voice, which as of December of this past year was four,…”
Fox: Lawn care chains use Lovable and Cursor to build on AssemblyAI
“We saw this, like, small business, like, lawn care chain sign up, and, you know, we're like, what do they do with the API? And a lot of these small businesses are automating parts of their back office using Lovable, or Cloud Code, or Cursor, or whatever, Repli…”
Fox: Big tech AI labs build models disconnected from actual customer needs
“We have an amazing team of engineers, of researchers that just operate so closely to customers that they really understand, like, how this stuff is being deployed. I think that's the biggest difference between us and, like, a lab at a bigger company. So, you k…”
Fox: AssemblyAI used Claude to rebuild and migrate its entire website
“Like, you know, the most recent example is we had Cloud rebuild our whole website off of Webflow and just deployed on Vercel.”
Fox: Customers abandon fine-tuned open-source voice models due to maintenance burdens
“We've seen some customers maybe six months ago or a year ago, they'll take an open source model and fine tune it or something. And then, you know, they're now like, okay, this is like, shit, this is like really behind and it's like nightmare to maintain and I …”
Fox: Voice will augment, not replace, screens over the next couple years
“And so I don't think that means that computers are just going to be like a screen and you just talk to it, because actually we'd get tired of talking, but I think it's going to be a dimension that's added to everything, and so that over the next couple years w…”
Fox: Local voice AI vendors beat global generalists through cultural nuance
“If you look at, like, local voice AI vendors in, you know, certain countries, like, they actually are typically the best, because it's, you know, they speak the language, they understand it, and they can more quickly identify, like, which data is good and stuf…”
Fox: AssemblyAI would have moved faster by prioritizing accuracy over early GTM
“In the early days, I think we could have actually gone a lot faster if we had said, okay, let's do nothing but pick accuracy metrics that we feel like we want to surpass. And once we surpass those metrics, then let's go and Take this thing to market.”
Major cloud providers are too big to ship good developer products
“I'm surprised the big cloud companies, and apologies if anyone here works there, I'm surprised they can't ship, you know, better developer products, but it's, I think they're maybe just too big at this point.”
Fox: Voice AI Follows Self-Driving Cars in Tech-Threshold Adoption
“I always viewed this journey as similar to self-driving cars, where You know, it wasn't a question of like, oh, is the product market fit going to come? It was like, no, the technology just sucks. And as it gets better and better, you're going to continuously …”
Fox: Voice AI became reliable data capture only in the past year
“Like for the first time probably ever in the past year, it's like a reliable form of data capture.”
Fox: In five years, kids will expect all devices to understand voice
“Across humanoid robots, consumer electronics, like, you're gonna see voice as this dimension that you just, like, expect And what, the example I think about is, you know, when you see pictures of, like, kids, like, trying to, like, swipe on TVs or something, b…”
Fox: Consumer voice hardware and software applications will surge within a year
“I think over the next year, we'll see a lot of, a lot more consumer applications, hardware and software, where voice is a core dimension. So, toys, games consumer electronics”
Fox: Beyond a certain point, more resources hinder product development
“I believed at the time and still believe that to create the best product is not just a function of resources. You know, you don't just like put a budget and people in a bottle and shake, and then out comes this like amazing product. You can definitely increase…”
Fox: Founders should privately draft answers to every anticipated investor objection
“Every time I fundraise, and this is actually maybe a good tip for like startup founders that are fundraising, I actually write up like a big document with all of the objections I anticipate to get. And I write out like lengthy answers to all of them. And I don…”
Fox: RLHF and dialogue crossed the capability threshold that triggered LLM adoption
“It was the RLHF and the dialogue component of ChatGBT that triggered the takeoff. And that was the capability threshold. Like it was at that time that this capability threshold passed where now it is a prior, like LLMs are a priority for every organization.”
Fox: First MVP customers can derail startups with disproportionate influence
“You might have a customer that will want to use your early kind of MVP, but if that customer pulls you in the wrong direction, they're going to have a ton of influence because they're your first customer. And then you have to build for them.”
Fox: Level 5 autonomous vehicles have guaranteed PMF, bounded only by unit economics
“Similar to self-driving cars, like, you know, that level five self-driving cars will have product market fit, even though they don't exist yet. Now, of course, if they cost a million dollars per vehicle, the addressable market's probably much smaller versus if…”
Most speech AI value comes from downstream workflows, not just transcription
“Where a lot of value is created is you're taking the transcription, and then you're using it as an input to do something else.”
Fox: AssemblyAI delays exploratory model investment until developers prove value
“Some of these other things that are more exploratory, like, we're not gonna put a ton of effort into those until we see that our customers the developers that use our API are actually able to find value and create value with those.”
The other half of the tape: Dylan Fox's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Pablo Srugo 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
A Product Market Fit Show 1
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dylan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 SOURCERYLEDGER | Founder & CEO, AssemblyAI | 1 | 19 | — | full record on Sourcery → |
 MADLEDGER | Founder & CEO, AssemblyAI | 1 | 13 | 67% 2/3 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
| PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Founder & CEO, AssemblyAI | 1 | 12 | 67% 2/3 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |