Jordan Dearsley
Co-Founder and CEO, Vapi. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveLinkedIn ↗vapi.ai ↗
Jordan Dearsley is the co-founder and CEO of Vapi, a platform providing infrastructure and APIs for real-time AI voice agents. A Y Combinator alumnus, he previously co-founded meeting assistant startup Superpowered before pivoting to launch Vapi.
1shows
1appearances
26statements
1resolved
0supported
1contradicted
0%fully supported
Everything Jordan Dearsley said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Founders Refunded $500K in Revenue to Users to Force a Startup Pivot
“We grew to about half a million in revenue over like three years, and we just gave all the money back to all of the users and then just kind of moved to SF”
Dearsley: AI Meeting Notes Cannot Build a Generational Business
“It kind of worked, you know, half million revenue is something, but it's not, Enough to build like something generational or a grander vision than notes. I think we can't realize. Yeah. People don't like notes.”
Air AI Built the First Voice AI Business but Overpromised Capabilities
“There was this one player called air AI at the time, and they were the first ones who ever were able to like build a business doing like AI phone calls, but they did fall into the trap of like over promising to users.”
Vapi Encountered 70% Hallucination Rates Using GPT-3.5 for Early Voice Agents
“We would see, like, 70% hallucination rates, like, 3.5 at the time”
Dearsley: Voice AI Interfaces Will Become Significantly More Popular Than Text
“Everyone just so focused on text, like, what was going on with LLMs, that no one realized that, oh, of course, like, other mediums are gonna be way more human and popular than the text medium.”
Dearsley: Developer-tuned voice APIs are physically impossible to shortcut
“And hard to actually physically impossible to shortcut. Like every single parameter in our API is from like us, like hearing from a developer, figuring out like the core pain that they have and shipping it and like seeing how they did and then tuning it again …”
Jordan Dearsley: Product-market fit can be achieved with a single user
“I think product market fit can be achieved with, like, one person and one user. I think it's as easy as that. You can have product market fit immediately with an extremely, extremely, extremely small market. End of one. And then you just need to achieve produc…”
Dearsley: No Speech-to-Speech Models Existed in October 2023
“There was not a single like speech to speech model in existence at the time. And there was no research that was far along anything like that.”
Vapi Targets Lower-Level Developer Control Compared to ElevenLabs' Abstracted Platform
“Now they have, like, a separate voice agent, like, platform that they've started to release, but it's a bit more abstracted. Whereas we're much more like low level, we expose all the raw pieces. So developers can like build like entire products on top of it.”
Dearsley: Only GPT-3.5 and Poor TTS Models Achieved Sub-2s Latency
“The only models that could run at real time speed, like we're talking like under two seconds of, you know, to response time were like GPT, 3.5. Or like really shitty text-to-speech models.”
Closing Customer Slack Channels Unexpectedly Boosted Vapi's Brand Reputation
“We actually had to shut down all of our Slack channels. We had to close them with all of our customers, just because, like, we could not focus on what was important. And actually, it had this, like, weird, like, rebound effect. Where, like, you think it would …”
Dearsley: Strong PMF Makes Startup Work Harder, Not Easier
“It's not easier. Like, it's harder. It's, there's a difference between, like, the feeling of uncertainty, and that being easy or hard, and, like, actually the work being easy or hard, if that makes sense. Like, it went from, things are hard because I don't kno…”
Dearsley: GPT-4o expanded voice AI awareness rather than displacing Vapi
“GPT-Foro just, like,
Grew everyone's awareness that voice was important.
It didn't really like displace us by any means.
It just made it more popular.”
Dearsley: Google and Amazon will build enterprise voice agent platforms
“And I'm sure Apple and Google, or sorry, Google and Amazon are gonna work on some very large enterprise facing versions of what we have.”
Vapi Scaled to $4M ARR in Six Months via Organic Self-Serve Growth
“Within six months, we were at about, like, four million in, in revenue annually recurring. Something, like, very small, small section of it was enterprise, now that's larger, but most of it was just, like, self-serve organic. We did zero ads. We did zero, like…”
Vapi Confirmed Product-Market Fit When an Outage Sparked Severe Customer Outrage
“Probably, maybe even, like, after we were at, like, a couple million in revenue, and, like, we had an outage, and everyone was just, like, so fucking mad that, that was probably it. But still, I wouldn't, I don't know if I would call that product market fake, …”
Dearsley: Relocating to SF Escaped Multi-Year Local Maxima
“I think it's more to do with moving, I think, is the, it was the biggest thing for us, like, I think we got stuck in a rut of, like, chasing a local Maxima, working on what we worked on before, which is like a Calendar app for three, four years. That moving wa…”
Dearsley: Michael Seibel Accurately Predicted Team Would Pivot Every Three Months
“Michael Seibel, he was one of our group partners at YC. He told us quite early on, I'm Skeptical that you guys are going to continue doing what you're doing for more than three months if it isn't working after three months. And he was right every single time. …”
Dearsley: Vapi charges five cents a minute plus passthrough model costs
“I'll charge you, let's say, like, five cents a minute. Sure. And I'll pass on the model cost at cost, because, at cost, because I have no idea what you're going to spend. And so that actually pricing model actually ended up being, you know, the same pricing mo…”
Vapi Initially Planned to Raise $500M to Train a Master Speech Model
“We actually thought for the longest time that what we were building was, like, the proxy to eventually becoming, like, the voice model company. Like, we thought we were going to raise five hundred million dollars. We're naive. We're gonna raise five hundred mi…”
Dearsley: Vapi processed approximately 32,000 calls in January 2024
“In like January, 20, 24, we had like 32,000 calls on the platform. If I even zoom back further than that, and that's all just sales roleplay training, basically.”
Dearsley: Vapi call volume tripled to 164,000 after March 2024 Product Hunt launch
“Then we started to get some other folks like trickling in and we kind of hit like 52 K calls. We're looking at February. March was like 164,000 calls. We launched on product. So that was the first time, like, we ever launched publicly, and so immediately we ju…”
Dearsley: Vapi started by solving an existential pain for an AI sales startup
“What we did is we found a 10 out of 10 pain for this one specific AI sales role play training company where it was existential that they figured it out or their company would die. We just so happened to be in a place where lots of other people were going to st…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jordan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Vapi | 1 | 26 | 0% 0/1 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |