AssemblyAI

“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…”

“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.”

“And so I submitted an application to YC for their summer batch. This is like summer of 20 17. And it was 30 days past the deadline. So I was like single founder past the deadline. There's no way I'm going to get in. You know, I was planning to just work on it,…”

“We had passed, like, a million dollars in ARR. Like, we had, like, decent traction at that time. We were growing pretty quickly, and we were still a super small team. I think we were, like, sub-ten people.”

“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.”

“Yeah, so one of our first customers was building this product where they were analyzing TV and radio stations, 24 seven, and then they were looking for certain brand mentions that were spoken and alerting those brands when their names were mentioned. That was …”

“No institutional funds invested. It was only angels that invested”

“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…”

“I would have advised my, myself to take a longer term view in the first year, especially coming out of YC, like slow down. Now that you're done YC, what do you want to accomplish over the next two years? Like, where do you want to be in two years? And then jus…”

“The first model I ever trained for speech to text Was on 10,000 hours of audio data. And then now the model that we're going to release soon, that's trained on 12 and a half million hours of audio data. It's on, you know, hundreds of TPUs.”

“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.”