Feb 23, 2026 · 55m · product-market-fit
His startup powers OpenAI's Voice Mode. Last month, they became a unicorn. | Russ d’Sa, Co-Founde... · PMF Show
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In this episode of the PMF Show, LiveKit co-founder Russ d'Sa shares his founder journey, offering strategic insights on startup acquisitions, open-source viral growth, and how powering OpenAI's ChatGPT Voice Mode drove LiveKit to enterprise scale and true product-market fit.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Pablo holds 11.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Pablo as informed peer 4.6 Guest teaching 4.6 Guest disagreement 1.1 Pablo pushing back 1.6
speaking balance: gold is Pablo, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 49:18 Rejecting OpenAI customer dominance
Russ directly dismisses the premise that OpenAI overshadows the entire market, arguing that global telephony workflows represent a vastly larger market opportunity than ChatGPT voice mode.
Hardest push from Pablo ▶ 48:09 Is OpenAI the only customer that matters?Pablo challenges the guest directly on whether having a customer as massive as OpenAI renders all other customer relationships and revenue streams essentially irrelevant.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 44:20 Stateless vs stateful infrastructure schoolingRuss gives a comprehensive technical explanation of why conversational voice AI cannot be deployed like standard stateless web servers, using multiplayer Fortnite matchmaking as an analogy for session-based load balancing.
Pablo holds their own ▶ 11:02 Pablo's M&A positioning breakdownPablo exhibits deep strategic expertise by articulating the psychological dynamics of acquihires and explaining why selling top talent retains leverage while trying to sell unproven technology exposes weakness.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Pablo as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Pablo pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Early Founder Journey, Y Combinator, and Building Evie | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Pablo asks targeted foundational questions regarding Evie's recommendation algorithm and monetization challenges. Russ shares his background across early YC batches and the failure to monetize through Verizon ad networks. | |
| Strategic Playbook for Selling and Acquihiring a Startup | 6 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Russ explains how a banker advised leveraging runway to form strategic partnerships before selling. Pablo demonstrates sharp M&A intuition by synthesizing why pitching talent from strength works better than trying to sell failing tech. | |
| Negotiating the Medium Acquisition and Protecting Team Economics | 5 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Russ details refusing Coinbase's partial acquihire to protect his team, negotiating with Medium, and playing good cop/bad cop against his own investors. Pablo contributes insights on negotiating dynamics with acquirers and investor incentives. | |
| The Inception of LiveKit and Open Source Viral Traction | 3 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Russ educates the host on the historical technical constraints of WebRTC versus HTTP and how LiveKit organically transformed from a failed internal tool into a viral open-source infrastructure repo. | |
| Enterprise Scale Use Cases and Launching LiveKit Cloud | 5 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Russ lists unexpected enterprise use cases like 911 dispatch networks and Spotify live audio. Pablo pushes on whether the post-COVID drop in remote work and streaming demand impacted their growth. | |
| OpenAI Secretly Builds Voice Mode on LiveKit Cloud | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Russ describes the early low-latency voice prototype he built, a tense acquisition meeting with a hyperscaler, and the surprise inbound email from OpenAI using LiveKit Cloud in secret. | |
| Building the Stateful Framework and Infrastructure for Voice AI | 5 | 7 | 1 | 2 | Russ provides a masterclass on the difference between stateless HTTP architecture and stateful persistent WebRTC agents, comparing load balancing to multiplayer gaming. Pablo probes on low-code competitors like Vapi. | |
| Powering ChatGPT at Scale and Recognizing Product-Market Fit | 5 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Pablo questions whether having OpenAI makes all other customers negligible. Russ pushes back on the premise by outlining the massive scale of global telephony and reflects on the non-binary nature of product-market fit. |
Statements from this episode (13)
d'Sa confirms LiveKit raised $45 million Series B
“Raised 45 male, raising two girls at the same time.”
Evie hit 2.5M DAUs and raised $13M but stalled at $1M ARR
“We raised about thirteen million dollars across a couple of rounds, a seed and an A... Across both, yeah, total about two and a half million DAU. So a lot of users, but we just couldn't figure out how to monetize it... I think we got to about a million in erro…”
Russ d’Sa: Turning down Coinbase acquisition cost founders high eight figures
“And in the end, if you look at like Coinbase's stock performance and you look at the offers that my co-founder and me and three other people at the company got, it would have been like way more of a like, you know, like eight figures, higher eight figures deci…”
d'Sa: Public company tried acquiring LiveKit on its open-source release day
“Like the day that we put out the first release in open source, it wasn't a company. It was just me, DZ and our kind of who is now our first employee at the time, just, you know, a contributor that we knew from Evie, actually one of our old Evie employees. It w…”
d'Sa: LiveKit hit GitHub's top 10 repos within two weeks of launch
“And so then like in the first two weeks, it was like trending across all of GitHub top 10 repo across every language and Spotify and Oracle and Reddit and X and these like large companies were starting to deploy it and start the repo.”
d'Sa: Roughly 35% of US 911 calls route through LiveKit
“When you call nine-one-one for about 35 or so percent of the calls, that's actually going through LiveKit infrastructure,”
d'Sa: LiveKit reached $1 million run rate in August 2023
“We'd done about, I think at that time, August 23 is when we hit a million in, in run rate.”
d'Sa: OpenAI secretly built Voice Mode on LiveKit via a personal Gmail
“I get an email from open AI and it's like, Hey, so we signed up for a live kit cloud in secret with a personal Gmail address three weeks ago, and we've built this voice interface, like on top of you guys. And now we're like fans and we want to like talk commer…”
d’Sa: Most Voice AI Platforms Like Vapi Run on LiveKit
“So VAPI and like land and retail and some of these, most of them actually are built on top of LiveKit. And so they use our infrastructure for all of the transport.”
d’Sa: Voice AI Startups Must Eventually Move From Low-Code to Code
“But my personal opinion is that eventually you need to go to code. Eventually, if you have like 10 people that all come into a low code solution and through clicking some buttons, And getting a system prompt together, have like a viable product. Eventually tho…”
d'Sa: B2B telephony AI market is several times larger than ChatGPT Voice
“If you take all of those different pockets of use cases together, It's like several, several times bigger than like chat GPT voice mode. So yeah, open AI is like a big customer and like has a lot of traffic, but at the same time, like the pie is a lot bigger t…”
Russ d’Sa: Voice will become the primary computer interface in 5-10 years
“Most of the internet is still built around text and that is going to shift in a huge way over the next five to 10 years as the models become smarter and more human-like you interact with them in more human-like ways like voice, right? Is the primary way we int…”