Cliff Weitzman: What I Learned from 100 of the World’s Top CEOs & Why Tokens Will Outspend Salaries

1. 0:00 – 0:56

   Intro

   1. CWCliff Weitzman0:00

      Don't even bother spending money on any platform that's not Meta until we reach $100,000 a month in spend on Meta.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings0:05

      In our show today, we have Cliff Weitzman, founder and CEO of Speechify. So this is the guy who solved his dyslexia and ADHD by building a voice AI agent that's now used by over 60 million people and has over a million five-star ratings.

   3. CWCliff Weitzman0:19

      We test almost 1,000 AI-generated ads a day right now. We're getting to the point where soon we're gonna spend more on tokens than we spend on actual salaries. If you don't spend 1,000 credits a day, I'm disappointed in you. If you can really trust someone, you can afford to pay them significantly more. The world around us was built by people no smarter than you or I. You could do things.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings0:37

      Ready to go? [upbeat music] Cliff, I normally ask for great suggestions beforehand, and honestly, most of the time they're, like, six out of 10,

2. 0:56 – 3:20

   Applying to 26 Colleges: Cliff's Volume of Work Philosophy

   1. HSHarry Stebbings0:56

      and I actually have to get really creative. I have to do so many references, and I love that. But then you sent me yours, and I was like, "Oh my God." I actually sent them to the team, and I was like, "This is wild." So we have some of the most insane stories coming up. First, thank you for making my life easier with the schedule. Second, thank you so much for joining me in person.

   2. CWCliff Weitzman1:16

      My pleasure. It's great to be here.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings1:17

      Now, I do just wanna start. University, you applied to 26 colleges when everyone else applied to eight. Can you talk to me about this and just the strategy behind that?

   4. CWCliff Weitzman1:29

      Yeah. So I moved to the US when I was 13. I didn't speak English, and my parents knew about three schools, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. And we had a college counselor in my high school, and she recommended applying to six schools. I was like, "Okay." So I started filling out the applications, and quickly I realized that even for kids with perfect SAT scores and perfect grades, you have about a 1 in 10 chance of getting in. And I was like, "Okay, it's a lottery." How do you win a lottery? You buy more tickets than everybody else. And so, uh, most kids in my school didn't need to do seventh period when they were a senior, but I had academic workshop, which is basically the class you go to if you're on the short bus. And so I went to academic workshop every single day 'cause I just couldn't read very well. And, uh, I just made it my goal, my job. Instead of leaving school, I go back to academic workshop, and I would apply to s- colleges. And when I finished the normal application, I just kept going. So my main essay, instead of making three variations or five variations, I wrote 48 drafts. And then I had to make a second Common App account because I ended up applying not to 20 schools, which is the max, but 26. Um, and in the end, I didn't get into many schools that I wanted, but I got into a lot of schools I didn't expect to get into. Um, and so my overall principle in life is volume of work. More reps, more shots at goal, more three throws, and that's how you get, um, on the bell curve unexpected outcomes.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings2:55

      One of my favorite statements is actually Alex Hormozi. I don't know if you know Alex Hormozi.

   6. CWCliff Weitzman2:58

      Yeah, yeah. Big fans.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings2:58

      But he says, you know, volume times leverage equals output.

   8. CWCliff Weitzman3:01

      Yeah.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings3:01

      Um, and I really think about that. I used to send, like, hundreds of emails to sponsors for the show, and I had zero leverage. [laughs]

   10. CWCliff Weitzman3:07

       Yes.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings3:08

       And now with more leverage, the output is significantly more, but I always really think to that. I was talking about this show with my girlfriend last night, and she was saying, "Did you create a text-to-speech app because it took you a long time to

3. 3:20 – 5:35

   Building Speechify: Dyslexia, Deep Learning & 10 Million Books a Year

   1. HSHarry Stebbings3:20

      read?"

   2. CWCliff Weitzman3:20

      Yes. Um, so I am super dyslexic. First, second, third, fourth grade, could not figure out how to read, and I wanted to read fast, but I couldn't read fast. So we built a deep learning-based text-to-speech model in 2015 that now reads more than 10 million books worth of words to people every year.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings3:38

      Wow.

   4. CWCliff Weitzman3:39

      So now if you wanna read fast but you can't, you can read fast.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings3:41

      So you're a great gay.

   6. CWCliff Weitzman3:44

      Very great gay, yes.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings3:45

      Great gay. And this was apparently the start. "In the yearbooks of 40 of my 14-year-old friends in freshman," that is what you wrote. How did that lead to Speechify?

   8. CWCliff Weitzman3:56

      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 wanna misspell stuff in everybody's yearbooks, 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 yearbooks. "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 a sleepover at one of my friend's houses. He goes upstairs to show his mom his yearbook, 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 30-page paper for one of my philosophy classes. And I submitted it. Before fully submitting it to a friend, they send it back to me, and I had three spelling mistakes. And I cried because if you had told 14-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 30-page paper with three spelling mistakes. And the reason why I didn't have that many is because I can hear the spelling mistakes with Speechify.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings5:17

      Dude, I, I was listening to you and Ali Abdaal. Great show. Um, and I heard in, in 2020 you made a list of the top 100 consumer subscription companies in the world by revenue, flew all over the world to meet the CEOs of each one of them, and then tried to basically learn from them. I, I really enjoyed the show, so with

4. 5:35 – 10:46

   Flying Around the World to Meet 100 Consumer Subscription CEOs

   1. HSHarry Stebbings5:35

      the greatest of respects, I was kind of frustrated listening 'cause you said that, and I was like, "Amazing. What did you learn?"

   2. CWCliff Weitzman5:41

      Sure.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings5:41

      And we didn't go into it in that conversation. So what did you learn from flying around the world and meeting the top 100 consumer subscription companies?

   4. CWCliff Weitzman5:50

      So, uh, the first-- Basically at every point in Speechify history, I have led every department except for AI. Um, and so design, engineering, QA, growthAnd my rule is I will read 100 books about the topic, listen to them with Speechify. I will identify 100 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, of 23andMe, of Honey, of Grammarly, Vlad from Robinhood, 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 1% 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 100 books a year every year for the last 15 years. So I'd ask them, "What's your favorite books?" And they'd tell me. And most likely, I read at least one of them. So we'd connect on the book. And then I'd be like, "Oh my gosh, I'm gonna be in Denmark this Sunday. Do you wanna hang out?" If they were in Denmark. And they'd be like, "Oh, sure." And then I'd book a flight to Denmark and I'd show up. And so I did this with Anton at Lovable, um, recently, and, like, it's just, I, I'm still doing the same thing. And after I did this with the heads of growth, I did this with CTOs, and I did this with every type of person that I wanna learn from. And then I'd go and I'd watch how they bought Facebook ads or I'd watch how they made content. And from that, I figured out what would work. And so the first thing that I learned is growth is just an arbitrage game. You are competing with every single other person in the world who wants to get their product in front of users. And that means that your lever points are either the content that you make or how you distribute that content. When it comes to buying ads, there's always new tricks that you can come. At the time, adding polls on your Instagram story was really helpful. Right now, whitelisting ads is really helpful. Um, volume of work of, like, posting a ton of ads that you test is really, really important. There's different rules for SEO. There's different rules for how you structure your team as it comes to who is the creative director, who writes the scripts, how do you do the editing, et cetera. So every team does their own thing, but for every company, there's a different rule. So one person I learned from is the founder of Blinkist. A small thing he said, like, as an aside that really helped me at the time was, "Don't even bother spending money on any platform that's not Meta until you reach $100,000 a month in spend on Meta." And then I stopped spending on other places. And then the thing I also realized is that a lot of the people who were senior in these companies were already rusty. They were not very strong individual practitioners of the craft. And so I would go down a couple of levels to find the person who's actually buying the ads, who's actually editing the content, who's actually seeing what the CTA is and what the things are. And I made sure that everybody in our company, no matter how senior they got, always were still not just a fat general sitting at the back, but a warrior who could take out their sword and actually hands-on-keyboard buy the ads. And we had a situation where we hired a head of growth. 30 days in, nothing. 60 days in, nothing. And I was like, "All right, man, what's going on?" And he's like, "Well, we're trying to hire the people." I was like, "Okay, look. Well, okay, tell me what you're doing for hiring." "Well, I gave the head of HR, like, the brief of what I'm looking for." "Bro, source the people yourself, message the people yourself, get on the calls yourself. You've got seven days. In those seven days, I need to see you making ads in CapCut. I need to see you editing ads in Figma or Photoshop, whatever you, whatever tool you want, and I need to see you buying the ads. And if that doesn't happen, it's gonna be very difficult to keep working together." Um, and so-

   5. HSHarry Stebbings9:34

      It reminds me very much of Keith Rabois. You wanna hire barrels, not ammunition, you know, which is someone who can go from 1 to 10 on their own-

   6. CWCliff Weitzman9:41

      Yes

   7. HSHarry Stebbings9:41

      ... and do full stack. I don't want, "Oh, I can put the video on CapCut, but I can't do the editing. Someone else needs to do that." It's like, "I can take the video, I can edit it, and I can post it. I do all of it."

   8. CWCliff Weitzman9:50

      Right. We look for three things when we hire people. Fire in the belly for the product, high loyalty to the team, and the ability to learn fast and ship to production. And we have a principle even inside of engineering, which is you gotta respond to messages within 60 seconds 'cause you wanna unblock people, and just inform them if you're able to unblock them or not. If you can't, that's fine. They're gonna go learn it on their own. And so we have a rule if you ship a PR to a repo that your team is not responsible for, it gets fast-tracked, and that team has to very quickly respond because I want to encourage people to learn how to contribute to other code bases. So the person in the company who learns the fastest is my brother Tyler, who leads our AI, AI team. And just the whole principle inside of our AI engineering team is just learn everything, and then you win.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings10:32

      Okay, there's many things that I wanna unpack here. Y- you can tell from my n- incredibly athletic physique that I am a fan of, uh, weights and gym work. You said before that growth is about bulking and cutting downstairs.

   10. CWCliff Weitzman10:43

       Yeah.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings10:43

       I love this so much.

   12. CWCliff Weitzman10:45

       Yeah.

   13. HSHarry Stebbings10:45

       Can you explain how

5. 10:46 – 14:31

   Companies Have Bulking and Cutting Cycles

   1. HSHarry Stebbings10:46

      you think about that?

   2. CWCliff Weitzman10:47

      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 used 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 en- 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 gotta 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 that 30% of my time I spent helping other people, and 30% of my time I spent learning SEO.So I decided I'm not allowed to learn anything from that point on. I'm only allowed to execute. And like the second I saw myself reading an article, I would delete the, like close the article and go do. Um, and so the, the rule is you just have to go and you have to learn and you have to execute. So you have to have that maniacal focus on the one thing. And then we grew a lot, and now there was a focus on, okay, well we gotta get the margins to be good. And so that's a cutting year, and now you're focused on profits. And the conclusion that I've had across the almost decade I've spent working on Speechify is any Harvard MBA can cut costs. If you're smart, you can do it. It takes a genius to grow revenue, and that's why investors value exponential growth of revenue even for companies that are not making a profit. Um, but it's very difficult to do both at the same time. You're clicking the gas and clicking the brake at the same time. And so Speechify just finished four and a half years of running profitable, and now we're in a hypergrowth phase. And so it doesn't matter whether you're a company or you're an athlete or you're a social media creator, you have bulking years and you have cutting years, and you need to decide which year it is for you.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings13:08

      So in a hypergrowth phase, are we fully accepting CACs will go up and we are happy with that?

   4. CWCliff Weitzman13:15

      No.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings13:16

      [laughs]

   6. CWCliff Weitzman13:16

      Not at all. Um, so if you think about CAC, uh, you have to consider, okay, what is my LTV and what's the first payment period? So we like to think about first payment period. So our product is $140, but if you're listening to this show, hit me up, cliff@speechify.com. I'll give you a discount. Um, I'm never willing to burn CAC for no reason. The blended CAC can go up, not the direct CAC. What does that mean? I'm okay spending $500,000 a month making 20,000 pieces of creative because that is a creative investment. I'm going to learn a format that is new that will unlock additional growth later. I'm okay doing an experiment on AppLovin or a specific new product that Google dropped for YouTube videos. We're one of the 200 companies that's provisioned to test ads on OpenAI, so we're spending a ton of money on OpenAI right now, and we're learning it faster than everybody else. So by the time it rolls out to everybody else, we'll already be really, really good at running ads on OpenAI. So you grow, you grow, you grow. You test new channels, you test new creative, and I'm very happy to burn an unlimited amount of money on excellent engineers. I'm not okay just like setting money on fire doing ads that are not attributable, right? Spending money on a billboard where I don't know if a user comes. I think about everything as a test, and if the test succeeds, then I do more.

6. 14:31 – 30:18

   How Speechify Thinks About Paid Ads & CAC

   1. CWCliff Weitzman14:31

      If the test fails, that's fine. The classic adage that you learn from CMOs, I learned this from Kelly at, uh, Netflix. They spent $1.7 billion on performance marketing in 2017. Um, and you'll hear, uh, Brex also is really good at this. You know, "I know I'm wasting half my spend. I just don't know which half." And so that's okay. Do that and then do the work to figure out which half you're spending, but don't just spend with increased CAC for the sake of growth. It always has to be an experiment you learn something from.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings14:58

      When you look back at the consumer subscription companies and buying ad patterns, you said, "I, I wanna go in, I wanna see how they buy ads." Who had the most atypical/weird process-

   3. CWCliff Weitzman15:10

      Um

   4. HSHarry Stebbings15:10

      ... that stood out?

   5. CWCliff Weitzman15:11

      Yeah. Uh, Greg at Ladder. So Ladder is a health and fitness company. Perfect example. He's the CEO of the company, but he buys the ads himself, and he found a lot of arbitrage plays that other people have not found. And so you just gotta go and figure out what those plays are.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings15:25

      Do you think there are new plays to be figured out today?

   7. CWCliff Weitzman15:27

      Every single day. Every single day.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings15:29

      What is the play today that people don't know?

   9. CWCliff Weitzman15:32

      Uh, whitelisting ads on Instagram works really well. So-

   10. HSHarry Stebbings15:34

       Sorry, what whitelisting ads is?

   11. CWCliff Weitzman15:35

       So let's say you find a creator that is in your niche. For example, for us, maybe it's teachers, uh, maybe it's someone with ADHD or dyslexia, maybe it's an AI creator. They make a video for you, and then you go, "Hey, make me 20 videos. I don't need you to post them on your profile. I'll run them as ad myself. And actually, if some of them are good, we can post them from your account and we increase the spend." And so users might not see it as a normal organic video, but you get to test all of those videos, see which one performs, and then you have them post organically the one that actually is successful.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings16:06

       Isn't consistency not important? And what I mean by consistency is like consistency of personality.

   13. CWCliff Weitzman16:11

       Not at all, because you're marketing for different demographics. So for example, you'll find this interesting. We test almost 1,000 day generated ads a day right now on top of the roughly 8,000 organic creatives we make with humans every single month. And one of the things we do is we res- 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 60-year-old lady, and we'll turn her into a 40-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 a f- I was gonna say farm, but farm wouldn't convert for our users.

   14. HSHarry Stebbings16:47

       Sure.

   15. CWCliff Weitzman16:48

       And so you just test all the variations. And so I know that for us, highest converting demographics would be people in their 30s and 40s in terms of paid, but we have like crazy usage in the 18 to 28-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, uh, symbolvoices.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 Sat- 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 working from home. And you know, you just need to read that, uh, contract and find that one gotcha, and Speechify can find that for you. You just need to listen, um, asynchronously." And I'll be like, you know, "I have dyslexia," and blah blah blah. I would just play all the characters and it was my face, and it converted really, really well. But I got maxed out. And so when Geffen joined and we hired other people to the team, suddenly we found that actually women converted a lot better than men as like audiences. Um, and so right now I would say m- we have more women who use the product than men by like a good margin at the moment. It's just because our team happens to be very woman focused. Um, and you just have to test everything.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings18:02

       On the video before we move on, what do you use? Because I see everyone be like, "Oh, we do AI video," and like we've seen a load of like... Do you remember Icon, the Peter Thiel funded one-

   17. CWCliff Weitzman18:11

       Mm

   18. HSHarry Stebbings18:12

       ... uh, that said like AI ads. What do you use for your AI ads?

   19. CWCliff Weitzman18:16

       Yeah.Because it's an arbitrage game, if you use the tool that everybody else uses, typically you're not gonna win. So we just built our own platform. So, um, there was a point several months ago where, um, my girlfriend went to Disneyland, so I had four days free. Uh, and so in that time, I, uh, went to school, Alex Hormozi, shout out, um, and I did a course for AI-generated video ads, and then I hired everybody from inside of the community that was really good. Um, and so I built a team. I hired four new engineers outside of our core team. Like in, in one week I hired 10 people. Um, and 24/7, all I was thinking about was AI-generated content, and my goal was to get to 1,300 ads that we tested every single day, and we just built tools for it. Initially, I built it on n8n, and then all the n8n instances would time out, so then we built our own platform and our own website that does really, really good AI-generated stuff that allows you to res- reskin. It automatically posts to Meta and TikTok and YouTube and all the platforms, and it gives me all the data that I want. I'm obsessed with Manus, so I'd get like reporting from Manus every single day. And then after those four days, I like would continue to monitor it, but I assigned a leader for that project, and that project has done really, really well. So we don't use any external tool. Obviously, we'll use all the LLMs, but that changes on a weekly basis, right? One, uh, two was really good, and then Kling was really good, and then C Dance was really good, and now ChatGPT's new image model, uh, ban- and then Banana obviously is... You just constantly test and iterate and iterate, and you find flows that work. So we just built our own.

   20. HSHarry Stebbings19:43

       1,300 ads a day.

   21. CWCliff Weitzman19:45

       A day.

   22. HSHarry Stebbings19:46

       That's wild. What do we look for in the outcomes?

   23. CWCliff Weitzman19:50

       Yeah.

   24. HSHarry Stebbings19:50

       At the end of the day, I work for Speechfy and I go, "Okay, Cliff-"

   25. CWCliff Weitzman19:53

       Yep.

   26. HSHarry Stebbings19:53

       "... here's 1,300 ads. What now?"

   27. CWCliff Weitzman19:56

       Yeah. So what you wanna do is you post... You throw a lot of things on the wall. No matter how smart you are, you're not gonna know ahead of time which thing is going to convert.

   28. HSHarry Stebbings20:03

       You really don't?

   29. CWCliff Weitzman20:04

       You don't. You have no idea. So you, first you test. Once you test, you look for the following. Uh, in Meta you can see the click-through rate on the ads, and you can see the CPA, cost per action, and you can learn what the CPM, cost per thousand impressions, are. So, um, if we see that the cost of acquiring a user and having them pay is less than a certain amount, we're like, "Oh, very interesting. This is like a standard deviation better than everything else. Let me put it into the main campaign." Now it's gonna compete against our best performing ads ever, and we let it breathe. And if it does well, it gets more spend. And if it does less well, it gets less spend and we cut it. Um, and so you just... Y- it's like evolution. You put it into the wild and you see if it performs.

   30. HSHarry Stebbings20:46

       And so every day you'll take the top 10? You'll take the top 20?
7. 30:18 – 31:11

   Why OpenAI Ads Will Be Massive

   1. HSHarry Stebbings30:18

      ads?

   2. CWCliff Weitzman30:18

      You just gotta test like everything else. So-

   3. HSHarry Stebbings30:21

      Do you think it will be huge?

   4. CWCliff Weitzman30:22

      Of course. Yeah, massive. Massive, massive. Because it knows so much about you. It's the same thing as Meta, right? We talked about this earlier. The reason why Meta ads are so good is because they know what you message on Instagram and what you message on WhatsApp, and as a result, they can target really, really well, so people convert. OpenAI knows everything about your history and what you're interested in and the inside of your psyche. Um, and it's exactly the same way that Google has built such an amazing business because there's relatively high intent when you talk to it, um, and the ads convert. Now, it's extremely high CPMs. Um, but if you find content that converts, the CPMs don't matter, and that's something that people really don't realize. Like, it's okay to pay a high CPM as long as people convert and as long as you have attribution. So they just launched the SDK for tracking. Like, that's really important.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings31:06

      Would you buy Meta today?

   6. CWCliff Weitzman31:08

      Absolutely. Yeah. I think Meta is one of the most underrated stocks right now.

8. 31:11 – 34:57

   Why Cliff Would Buy Meta Today

   1. HSHarry Stebbings31:11

      Why?

   2. CWCliff Weitzman31:12

      Number one, Mark Zuckerberg is an absolute savage. Like, he will hire people if they're right, no matter what. Number two, I think that in a world where engineering is commoditized and design, for the most part, is commoditized, the most important thing becomes excellent QA, we can, we can talk about it later, and customer acquisition. Google has pressure on it from all the LLMs, but Meta doesn't. The only real pressure on Meta now is TikTok, and TikTok has a lot of issues now that it's been separated, yada, yada. So a- and Zuck also has proven that he is the number one acquirer in the world. Like, no one acquires as well as Meta. Um, the eng- the leadership team is incredible. Like, Chris Cox is amazing. Alex, uh, Schultz is amazing. Um, and I think that also in AI world, data is everything. So they have more proprietary data than everybody else. They haven't figured out the model side yet, but the, but I really do believe that they will. Um, and I look at all the people who are vibe coding new products right now. Where do you think they're gonna get their users?

   3. HSHarry Stebbings32:16

      You said de- design commoditizes in some respects. Everyone talks about taste. It's like the new word of 2026, which is like, "Oh, no, the, the value is in taste." Can you help me understand that?

   4. CWCliff Weitzman32:26

      Yeah.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings32:26

      Is that bullshit?

   6. CWCliff Weitzman32:27

      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, Claude 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 Claude 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 n- 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 short com- comings. Um, and so, no, taste really, really matters, even if it's just telling you, "Pick that one, not that one."

   7. HSHarry Stebbings33:32

      I'm down 40% on my Figma position. Hold or sell?

   8. CWCliff Weitzman33:37

      Hold. Dylan Field is a savage.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings33:38

      [laughs]

   10. CWCliff Weitzman33:39

       Anything Dylan Field does, you should, you should go for.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings33:42

       So you think they survive in an Anthropic and design-

   12. CWCliff Weitzman33:45

       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, C++. It was, like, the, 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 40X revenue, and now they're at 6X 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.

   13. HSHarry Stebbings34:32

       Claude Code or Cursor internally, what does everyone use engineering-wise?

   14. CWCliff Weitzman34:36

       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 Claude Code. A lot of people will use Claude Code from inside the terminal in Cursor. I prefer if they use Claude Code inside

9. 34:57 – 38:22

   Why Speechify Is Moving From Cursor to Claude Code

   1. CWCliff Weitzman34:57

      of the Claude Code IDE. I think it's more powerful. But it's fine to use it inside of 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 in t- we're getting to the point where soon we're gonna spend more in tokens than we spend on actual salaries.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings35:22

      You're getting to the point where you spend more in tokens than you do in sa-

   3. CWCliff Weitzman35:25

      Like, next year I expect we'll spend more in tokens than we'll spend on salaries.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings35:28

      Is that atypical? Like, are you-

   5. CWCliff Weitzman35:30

      It's atypical right now, but I don't think it'll be atypical in the long term.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings35:33

      You don't, you think the majority of great high quality companies will-

   7. CWCliff Weitzman35:36

      We'll get there in three years. Yeah. You just need to be, like, a really strong early adopter.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings35:39

      Across all functions or just engineering?

   9. CWCliff Weitzman35:42

      No, across engineering. Um, across engineering. Um, I would like to be spending more tokens on our growth team and creative. We're not there yet. We need a lot more testing mechanisms to be put in place for that to make sense.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings35:54

       Are they AI native? I know that sounds really kind of VC wanky, but, like, I am pushing people to use AI internally-

   11. CWCliff Weitzman36:01

       Yeah

   12. HSHarry Stebbings36:01

       ... which honestly is kind of frustrating, especially on, like, growth stuff.

   13. CWCliff Weitzman36:04

       Yeah.

   14. HSHarry Stebbings36:04

       Like, I'd like it... So we do, uh, clips here where basically they interview me-

   15. CWCliff Weitzman36:08

       Yeah

   16. HSHarry Stebbings36:09

       ... for like an hour and then turn it into 100 clips.

   17. CWCliff Weitzman36:11

       Yeah.

   18. HSHarry Stebbings36:11

       What-- But you know what actually sucks? I'm wearing the same top in the same studio, and when you look at the grids, it just looks fucking boring.

   19. CWCliff Weitzman36:19

       Yeah. It's very easy for you to change that already.

   20. HSHarry Stebbings36:21

       It is, but I'm the one who's pushing them.

   21. CWCliff Weitzman36:23

       Mm.

   22. HSHarry Stebbings36:23

       My point is, I'm dragging my team into an AI world.

   23. CWCliff Weitzman36:26

       So I, I could tell you what we do. So, uh, remember, like, Speechify is a voice agents ecosystemWith 50 million users and 1.1 million five-star reviews across platforms. We need to educate even our users on how to use AI. And so our first agent was a text-to-speech tool that reads to you. The second one was a speech-to-text tool that does dictation. The third one was a podcast generator where you can be in the podcast as well as two new hosts. Then we launched Teacher Agent that will ask you questions about the document and then teach you back the content gap that you were missing. Um, and now we just launched, uh, Jarvis, which is the, uh, spe-speech writer for work. Um, it, like, lets you do productivity and then the enterprise, uh, Simba Voices.ai. We're constantly educating our own users on how to use AI, and what we found is it takes about 100 iterations on a feature before the feature gets adopted. But once it gets adopted, it gets adopted really well. So you need to do the same education for your B2C users as you need to do internally. Internally, I am constantly screaming from the rooftops that people have to use Claude Code. That... A-and, and, and I'm ex- more extreme about it than it needs to be because I need to move people from all the way over here on the right to all the way over here on the left, and I'm okay if they meet me in the middle. So I'm just extreme about it. I'm like, "If you don't spend 1,000 credits a day, I'm disappointed in you." Like, I need to see that happen. And so send me screenshots, and I will get people on a Zoom call, screen share the entire engineering, and I'll show them how I use it. And then I'll go, "Tim, you're really good at this. Show us what you do. Tyler, you're amazing at this. Show us what you do. Simon, show us what you do." And we're just constantly demoing, and you just gotta make sure that people are aware of how much other people are using it. And then I'm like, "If you are not using this tool right now," uh, like, it's like ch- a chat in everyone's Slack, "comment, explain why. It's gonna be very difficult to continue working together if you don't use it and you don't explain to me why." So they have to explain to me why, and then I will call them and convince them to use it. And I'm like, "You have 24 hours. Send me a Loom video with what you used AI to make."

   24. HSHarry Stebbings38:17

       What single thing do you use Clau- uh, button Anthropic or Claude for that has been most

10. 38:22 – 41:01

    How AI Helped Cliff Diagnose His Dad's Cancer

    1. HSHarry Stebbings38:22

       impactful?

    2. CWCliff Weitzman38:23

       So the personal side is medical stuff. Um, we talked a little about my brother Eric's, who has Lyme neuroinflammation and psychosis. Uh, we took, uh, we did a proteomics, mapped all of his genome, um, put it on Supabase, wrote an MCP for it, and then had it, um, compare to every single article that had ever been published about anomalies in the genome, and we found four anomalies in how his genes, um, expressed. And so that was, like, amazing for breakthrough for us. The second thing that we did is my dad, uh, 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. Uh, 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 he-- 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 w- I went on Kaggle, which is the largest online competition for, uh, 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, um, open source repositories on data for, uh, what's called time series of, um, PSMA PET scans for ca- for cancer. And so I came up with four theories. The first one is called tipping theory, which is, like, you basically look at the level above and the level below where you think the cancer is, and you make the data really noisy, and you see if you can figure out where it is. So we started w- making models for that, and then I, I basically, like, uh, took five different approaches. Inside of this research, from talking to Gemini and talking to Grok and talking to ChatGPT, I realized that there was a machine that could help us. Um, so in UCSF, there's a thing called the China Basin that does a normal PT, uh, PSMA PET scan, and it will scan a voxel of four millimeters in diameter. But there's another machine called the U-Explorer that can scan a voxel of two millimeters in diameter. And there were three of them in the United States, and one of them was in UC, uh, Davis. And so I messaged the guy who was responsible for that lab. He agreed to test my dad, and the doctor who I put a lot of pressure to give my dad the exam, um, had scheduled it for the end of January. In December, we got to get the scan in this higher quality machine, and we found it. It was in his left seminal vesicle. I would have never had the confidence to push on the doctor so hard to get the scan if I didn't have LLMs open during the conversation with the doctor. I definitely would not have found another machine, got my dad scanned, and then figured out... And so by, by January 7th, he had the s- left seminal vesicle exci- excised. And so before he was even supposed to have the second scan,

11. 41:01 – 56:13

    Building an Internal AI-First Engineering Culture

    1. CWCliff Weitzman41:01

       he had a surgery and he was good.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings41:02

       Are you quite skeptical on the state of modern medicine? And what I mean by that is, like, when you are a kid, you kinda just believe everything that doctors tell you. And the more I kinda grow up, the more, like, doctors tell me, "Oh, don't worry, the scans were kinda fine." And I, I pay for my healthcare here, and it's a lot. I'm like, "Kinda 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 ChatGPT and I'm like, "Kinda fine, yes, but there's a lot more you could've told me to optimize." Are you actually quite skeptical of the state of modern medicine?

    3. CWCliff Weitzman41:31

       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 gonna 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 wanna be coached like I'm Real Madrid or Barcelona. Like, give me... Like, tell me w- 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, th- 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 and 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.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings42:34

       So there were so many things that we, we were talking about kind of tokenizing and spending more on tokens than we were on people, uh, and then went on a slight tangent there. I think one thing that was so interesting for me was going through some of the notes. You said adversity quotient matters more than IQ or EQ. I don't think most people know what adversity quotient is.

    5. CWCliff Weitzman42:53

       Yeah.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings42:53

       I had to expand upon it in my searches. Uh, what are the leading signals for you of a candidate/person that is going to be successful at s- s- at Speechify?

    7. CWCliff Weitzman43:03

       Yeah. So people talk a lot about IQ, intelligence quotient, or EQ, emotional quotient, but the most important one is AQ, adversity quotient. How good are you when things get really tough? And so I think about it, think it through a Jeep that's going through the savanna. I don't want the Jeep that goes the fastest. I want the Jeep that's not gonna have a flat tire. They're going to stick with it the longest. And so there's a heuristic I use for this, which is sometimes you look at an engineer and they're willing to grapple with a really hard problem for eight hours straight. Most people, if it's really hard, they quit after 30 minutes. But the things that really move the company i- are on the other side of five hours of grappling with a hard problem, and you kinda have to be obsessed to do that. And so the way that I find that is I look for projects that people actually did that they published to production. Let's say you went and you spent four years learning computer science and we have a call together. My goal in that call is not to not hire you. Nothing will make me happier than hiring you. I just need to get you to give me the information that proves to me that I can underwrite hiring you. So I just, the whole point of that call is for me to find out how awesome you are, and so I wanna hear about your side projects that you've built. I want you to screen share and show me the things that you've made. But if you haven't made them, you're just not willing to deal with a, a little bit annoying thing that requires to register an Apple developer account and put an app on the App Store. The little annoying things that require to set up a Cloudflare instance and, like, make sure that your website, like, sticks around three years after you published it. Like, I need to see that those things happened, and then ideally I wanna see something novel that you created. And you don't need to be a genius. You just need to be willing to do the thing. And so the last thing I'll say is I have a friend, Valentin Perez, who has a great line, which is, "A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept." It doesn't matter where you start. It matters how fast you grow, and the growth rate has to do directly with how much pain you're willing to bear.

    8. HSHarry Stebbings44:52

       I think that this is exactly the same when I look for founders that I wanna invest in. As awful as it seems, uh, you know, there are certain things we look for. One of them is, like, but struggles in parental relationships-

    9. CWCliff Weitzman45:02

       Hmm

    10. HSHarry Stebbings45:02

        ... often signify very successful founders, sadly. Um, what, if you were an investor today looking for adversity quotient or struggle-

    11. CWCliff Weitzman45:11

        Yeah

    12. HSHarry Stebbings45:12

        ... d- duration in a founder, what would you advise me to ask, question, dig deep on with founders?

    13. CWCliff Weitzman45:19

        Um, uh, there's a great question from YC which is what is a non-computer science system you've hacked to your advantage? It's a really, really good one. Because I'm looking for the story that shows me your ability to, A, build a system, B, learn something, and then, C, have an inhuman amount of desire and will and grit. So that you have clearly. Um, so I'm then looking for the rest.

    14. HSHarry Stebbings45:38

        Are there any mega red flags on the flip side? Like, for me, I'm like, I hate the people that are, like, founding GTM adviser, and it's like, no, no, no. You're just a GTM hire that was one of the first. You're not, like, a founding this, like-

    15. CWCliff Weitzman45:53

        Yeah

    16. HSHarry Stebbings45:53

        ... everything needs to be a founding role. Fuck off.

    17. CWCliff Weitzman45:56

        Yeah. So no, there's a lot. Um, uh, the first one is any situation where you can discover dishonesty. So what I really li- don't like is when people, uh, give me a stat and they say, "Oh, I raised the stat X, Y, Z." And the more questions you ask, the more you realize they changed the definition of what the denominator was. Um, so, like, that's one thing that I really dislike. The second thing is people who talk too much. Like, the s- amount of signal per sentence that I get needs to be high, and if it's not, I don't want you wasting the time of the rest of the people on the team. Like, we're all about execution here. Um, and so sometimes I'll meet someone who I think is really talented, they might even be really technical, but they just talk so much, and I'm like, "You're just gonna annoy everybody else and get us off track." I want someone who's hyper-focused on the accurately one goal, the thing that really matters. Um, and then the last thing is you don't want people who are too comfortable. You want people who will be loyal. And so I always ask people, "What made you interested to interview with Speechify?" And if the answer is bad, we shouldn't hire that person because there's no differentiating reason why they're here and not another company, and they might leave.

    18. HSHarry Stebbings46:54

        What is a bad answer? I, I wanna earn more money. Is that a bad answer?

    19. CWCliff Weitzman46:58

        Terrible answer. Never would, would hire that person, not in a million years.

    20. HSHarry Stebbings47:01

        Why?

    21. CWCliff Weitzman47:01

        Because someone else can come and offer you more money, and then you'll leave. And after we spent, like, a year coaching you up and making you amazing.

    22. HSHarry Stebbings47:08

        And a good answer is?

    23. CWCliff Weitzman47:10

        I have a kid with dyslexia. I have a niece with ADHD. I use the product myself every single day. Those are great answers. Um, you know, I read the blog post by Tyler Weitzman on how he skipped four and a half years of math in high school and built 47 iPhone apps when he was there, and then he went and did this COSE term at Stanford, and I really liked his explanation of how he shipped the first deep learning model that worked on the CPU of an iPhone, um, so I'd love to work with him. That's a great answer. Like, just do a little bit of research about the company. Um, I like, I want to see a reason why people are there.

    24. HSHarry Stebbings47:39

        Yeah, that's a better answer. I agree. Yeah. No, the cash one was always flimsy. Um, the, you said that about kind of Tyler and ADHD or, uh, earlier you said about dyslexia, the best founders are dyslexic or have ADHD. Unpack that one.

    25. CWCliff Weitzman47:53

        So Michael Dell has this great analogy, which is when you're running a company, it's like you're driving a car and you want the car to fit the driver. So you want the company to fit the person who's running the company. If you have dyslexia and you're nine years old and you suck at the one thing you're supposed to be good at, which is reading, there's two options. The first one is you think the world is stacked against you and school sucks, and you go down this really dark path. 40% of people who are incarcerated have dyslexia, even though 17% of the population has it. The second option is you keep trying and you try again, and you try again, and you try again, and you develop this belief that it's okay to fail and that even in things that seem impossible, if you try enough, you'll succeed. So 40% of billionaires also have dyslexia. Um-

    26. HSHarry Stebbings48:32

        That's insane. 40% of billionaires?

    27. CWCliff Weitzman48:34

        40% of billionaires, yeah. Um, and it ends up being the case that you coach yourself that, when it's okay to fail, and that's exactly what startups are.You're stacking the odds against you. You're doing something that feels impossible, but you're developing this AQ to never give up. If you have ADHD, people with ADHD, they're definitely not slow, and they're not lazy, and they're not stupid. Their mind just works differently. And actually, we find that for Speechify users, if your brain works at 600 words per minute but you only read at 200 words per minute, of course you'll get distracted. If you start listening at 600 words per minute, you love that, and you stay engaged. Running a company requires you to be responsible for and understand the engineering, the design, the quality assurance, the go-to-market. All these different things are stimulating you at the same time. Being ADHD is actually very good to be a CEO. The problem is how do you get from, like, zero to one to 10? Like, the 10 to 100, amazing place to be ADHD. But you gotta go from the zero to 100 where you're doing all the IC work yourself where you need to stay focused, and that's really difficult. And so it's great to be dyslexic or ADHD as the person who is running a large company, and it's not great as the individual person who needs to build the company.

    28. HSHarry Stebbings49:36

        I, I'm being a terrible interviewer on this 'cause I'm just jumping around so much, but I'm so enjoying the kinda 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?

    29. CWCliff Weitzman49:52

        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 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 or, or 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-

    30. HSHarry Stebbings50:41

        Why didn't you make it happen?
12. 56:13 – 58:44

    Are You Worried About AI Layoffs?

    1. CWCliff Weitzman56:13

       we, like, solve it very, very fast. But people typically leave not for money. They leave for another thing in their life that's not satisfying them 'cause they're, for whatever reason, not satisfied. Figure out what's not satisfying and solve that s- thing for the per- And sometimes it's money, in which case, just solve it.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings56:29

       Are you worried by the number of layoffs that we're seeing?

    3. CWCliff Weitzman56:32

       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.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings57:07

       Do you have a bent towards younger hires today more than ever, given their proclivity to be more AI native?

    5. CWCliff Weitzman57:13

       No. Uh, I have a bent towards older hires-

    6. HSHarry Stebbings57:16

       Huh

    7. CWCliff Weitzman57:16

       ... um, because they read textbooks about software engineering. When they see what's coming out of the LLM output, they understand it. Not all of them are adopters of AI, but some of them are. So you can hire people who are both grizzled veterans and good at AI. Um, now, if I see a cracked young engineer who's great at Claude Code and I can see the projects, of course I'm gonna hire that person on the spot. Like, there's no question. Regardless, a prerequisite is we have, like, this entrance exam that's this gigantic code repo that you need to read very fast. You can't read it with your eyes. You have to use AI. You have to use LLMs to ship all the features, and then you get a test at the end, which is how much of the code repo did you break? And then you get 30 minutes to fix what you broke. Um, and so we're already, like, into our functional engineering challenge is not just challenges of, like, how good you are at TypeScript and Python, but, like, how do you use LLM coding agents? And that, that's key. And, like, if you don't pass that, like, there's no way that we can work together.

    8. HSHarry Stebbings58:11

       And the best are dot dot dot.

    9. CWCliff Weitzman58:14

       You never know. Like, you just have to try with everybody.

    10. HSHarry Stebbings58:18

        [laughs]

    11. CWCliff Weitzman58:18

        Like, you never know. Sometimes people tell you that they're great at AI, and then you give them a challenge and they suck.

    12. HSHarry Stebbings58:24

        [laughs]

    13. CWCliff Weitzman58:24

        You just gotta test.

    14. HSHarry Stebbings58:24

        [laughs]

    15. CWCliff Weitzman58:25

        And sometimes people have never used AI before, and you force them to sit with it for 48 hours, and by the end of the 48 hours, they're phenomenal.

    16. HSHarry Stebbings58:33

        You said before, literally 20 minutes ago, 60-second re- response times are the best predictor for any engineer's success. What do you mean by that?

    17. CWCliff Weitzman58:43

        Yeah.

    18. HSHarry Stebbings58:43

        And what should

13. 58:44 – 1:07:39

    Why 60-Second Response Times Are the Best Predictor of Engineering Success

    1. HSHarry Stebbings58:44

       we know?

    2. CWCliff Weitzman58:44

       Yeah. So Speechify is a remote first team. There's 45 AI engineers on our research team. There's about 150 product-facing software engineers, and we have people in 36 countries now. 200 people in total. Everybody's really good at engineering. So communications become really important, and I can't have a situation where you're blocking somebody else. Like, if someone else is blocking you, number one, it's your responsibility to inform them that they are your bottleneck and inform them multiple times a day that they are your bottleneck. Um, but we also really believe in people learning. So if that person cannot unblock you, you should go and learn how to unblock yourself right now. But if that person doesn't give you an answer, you're stuck. You don't know whether you should invest the time to unblock yourself or you should wait for that person. Another co-- uh, principle that we have is managing up. If your team leader needs something from you, obviously you need to respond, but you should update them anyway about what you're doing. Like, in the morning, the first thing that you should do is send your leader, "Hey, here's my top three goals for the day." And then they shouldn't respond unless you're going in the wrong direction, in which case they'll adjust your direction. Uh, but if someone is messaging you to get unblocked, it is beholden on you to give them a response, and that response can be, "Hey, busy right now. Can give you the response by 4:00 PM," or, "Hey, won't be able to get these to you until, like, three days from now." Just, like, give me a timeline or just give me the answer. And then if you're the person asking and you didn't get the response, call them on the phone. Like, I don't know why people don't use WhatsApp calls more. Just call on the phone. They'll give you the answer, and then move on.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:08

       Young people are scared to call.

    4. CWCliff Weitzman1:00:10

       Everybody. Yeah, young people are very scared to call. And I, I think that at this point, like, people above 45 are willing to call and below 45 are not, 'cause everybody's like, that skill has atrophied. Just get the answer, move on.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:22

       We actually had a viral video the other day 'cause I said that if you don't respond to a message within a three-hour period, I call it the Titanic rule. The movie Titanic's three hours long. Everyone should be able to go to the cinema with their families. If you don't respond within three hours, it can be, "Hey, I'm busy. I'm at a football game." Cool. Fine. That's a good answer. But you need to respond within three hours, even on weekends. I got decimated for it. Decimated. [laughs]

    6. CWCliff Weitzman1:00:43

       Wrong cultureIt's fine. Like obviously, if you're asleep, don't respond. If you're with a... But even if you're with your kids, like you could tell me, "I'm not free right now."

    7. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:50

       Um-

    8. CWCliff Weitzman1:00:50

       Just tell me, "I'm not free right now."

    9. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:51

       Yeah, dropping kids off at school, back later.

    10. CWCliff Weitzman1:00:52

        Yeah, just inform me.

    11. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:53

        Fine. Totally agree.

    12. CWCliff Weitzman1:00:55

        And by the way, the reason is we are so privileged to live in a world where you can work from your house, you can work remotely, you can take vacation, you can do whatever you want, be anywhere in the world. You don't even need to work 9:00 to 5:00. Like you wanna work at 3:00 PM on a Monday or a midnight, that, uh, like on a Saturday, that's fine too. Like take all of Tuesday off, but just get the work done that you said that you were going to do, and make sure you have a responsibility for your team because it is a living organism. Help the organism win. You need a fire under your ass that said everything needs to have been shipped yesterday. I, like, speed is the number one strategic advantage for any company, especially today, and if you're not adding to the speed, you're by definition distracting from the speed. It means this culture is wrong, and either you fix that or you're not in the right culture.

    13. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:39

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

    14. CWCliff Weitzman1:01:44

        No, deadlines are challenging. Goals are also... Like you definitely set goals. Uh, uh, but so, uh, [laughs] uh, a dream is a goal without a deadline, so always add a deadline. And the, it goes on a calendar with multiple people on the invite. So I'm gonna ship this to production by, not Tuesday, by 3:00 PM on Tuesday. Invite Rohan, Simon, Cliff, Pankaj. Uh, so everybody knows. And then, uh, i-i 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 the... 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 to just increase 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.

    15. HSHarry Stebbings1:02:51

        What did you do too fast that you then later subsequently regretted in a major way?

    16. CWCliff Weitzman1:02:56

        So I think you did a episode with Marc Andreessen who was like, "I don't introspect."

    17. HSHarry Stebbings1:02:59

        Yeah.

    18. CWCliff Weitzman1:03:00

        'Cause you don't wanna learn the wrong lesson. I'm trying to think about it. I can't come up with something that was objectively a mistake. The closest thing I can think of is we had two people that we hired from Apple and Snapchat, like very legit people, and they, they messed up the culture of the company. They would leave at 5:30 PM. Um, they like didn't live and breathe the company, and, uh, in the end, both of them quit after three months, and I, we got very lucky that they quit. But I didn't let them go within the first 30 days, right? Like that was a mistake. Um, but I was young. I didn't know, like I didn't know what to, like what, what good meant. Later I learned. Also, I was like begging and borrowing for people to work for my company at the time.

    19. HSHarry Stebbings1:03:39

        [laughs]

    20. CWCliff Weitzman1:03:39

        Like we didn't have any... Like thank you for working for me at the time at least.

    21. HSHarry Stebbings1:03:42

        I was thinking this going to bed last night, which is like I've never ever not seen a young founder not fall for big logos, ever.

    22. CWCliff Weitzman1:03:49

        Right.

    23. HSHarry Stebbings1:03:50

        Every single time.

    24. CWCliff Weitzman1:03:51

        You have to.

    25. HSHarry Stebbings1:03:51

        Yeah, yeah. Every... It's just like the canonical path. You will learn the lesson. It li- the, the thing you learn as you get older, I'm sure you find this, and you know, you're a tiny bit older than me now, it's like humans are kind of the same. We make the same mistakes. We do it continuously. [laughs] Um, would you be long Snap?

    26. CWCliff Weitzman1:04:06

        No.

    27. HSHarry Stebbings1:04:07

        Is it? Why?

    28. CWCliff Weitzman1:04:09

        One, we try to run ads on Snap all the time, we never succeed. So if you're a rep on the growth team of Snap, send me an email, teach me how to make Snap work. I haven't succeeded. I've been trying. Um, two, there is a portion of the population that uses Snapchat as their main form of communication. Like over iMessage, they message on Snapchat. I, I don't think that the way that they're dealing with their, uh, cash is fastidious today. I think they're overpaying creators left, right, and center. Um, and I just think that the lunch is completely eaten by Meta at this point.

    29. HSHarry Stebbings1:04:35

        We were talking about like calls versus messages. Slack messages kill your company.

    30. CWCliff Weitzman1:04:40

        Yeah.
14. 1:07:39 – 1:22:19

    QA Is the Most Valuable Skill in an AI World

    1. HSHarry Stebbings1:07:39

       shit at it?

    2. CWCliff Weitzman1:07:39

       All right. So in a world where software engineering is commoditized and design is commoditized, if you try to build stuff with Claude Code, even if you give it all the tools in the world, it will not succeed in QA-ing itself to perfection. Definitely not on different devices and different phones, and, like, when the Wi-Fi goes down and all that stuff. You still need a human to do that. I'm amazed to see, even with very good software engineers and designers, how often they fail to put themselves in the user's shoes and just test edge cases. Like, I have a friend who works directly for Elon. Elon's, like, the best QA. He'll always find your bugs, and it's, like, super embarrassing. And I find the same thing at Speechify. Like, I sometimes find more bugs than the actual QA team does, um, and, and I, because it's in production live. Like, I see it. And so then I call people immediately or I send them a screen recording. I'm like, "Why do we have this bug?" And, like, either there's a good explanation for why the bug is there, in which case I'm, "Cool. Got it." It's, like, just a huge lift to fix this, and, like, we'll fix it later. Maybe we'll tweak the scopes to, like, bury it a little bit. Or, like, it's actually relatively simple to fix, like, let's fix it. And so let's say you built a feature with one shot of, uh, like, a great prompt on Claude Code, and now it's on your phone. The next 48 hours is just you finding the bugs and making just indelible piece of software that does not break, and then you ship that thing to production. That's what separates a good product... Sorry. That's what separates a product from a great product, just QA. And so, so this is the other thing that we do. Let's say you have a person who's not an amazing outcome owner. They just, they can't ride people like that. Hey, that's okay. That's a personality trait. But if they're still a good software engineer, they will be good at QA. So before letting them go, I'd actually rather put them in QA for a little bit, see how well they do in QA, and if they do well there, that tells me something, and we should not get rid of that person. Like, we should just coach them properly. But if they're also bad at QA, then you should let them go.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings1:09:33

       So much of company interactions assessing talent is done in meetings in some respects.

    4. CWCliff Weitzman1:09:38

       Mm.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings1:09:39

       Why did you ban meetings?

    6. CWCliff Weitzman1:09:40

       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've just been an email or that c- that could've been a, 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, I don't like the fat general sitting in the back saying, "Take that hill." I want the guy who's running up the hill first, engaging the enemy first. Like, you should be the strongest individual contributor in your team if you're leading that team. If you need a people manager, we'll give you a people manager to manage the communication. But I want you mainly hands on keyboard, coding, designing, talking to users. We had leaders who were spending eight hours a week in performance management meetings with their eight direct reports. So I was like, "This is stupid. We're gonna cut that to 15 minutes instead of 60 minutes, and we're gonna do it every other week," because there literally is no reason for doing that. Just have a habit of your team sends you their top three priorities every single morning. If you don't respond, unless the direction is bad, in which case you tell them this is the correct direction to go.

    7. HSHarry Stebbings1:11:22

       Do you like HR?

    8. CWCliff Weitzman1:11:24

       If by HR you mean recruiting, I love recruiting. If by HR you mean, like, dealing with internal politics and issues, we, for the most part, have succeeded in stay stepping it so far. Amen. Thank God. [laughs]

    9. HSHarry Stebbings1:11:35

       [laughs] I tweeted it recently, and, uh, I, basically, uh, the only people who shit on me shit on me 'cause they were like, "Recruiting's really important." And I completely agree, but I think it's so important that I take talent out of HR. Like, for me, talent is its own independent function, and HR is the management. There's the acquisition and then there's management.

    10. CWCliff Weitzman1:11:53

        Mm.

    11. HSHarry Stebbings1:11:53

        And bluntly, I don't think great people need that much management.

    12. CWCliff Weitzman1:11:56

        Correct.

    13. HSHarry Stebbings1:11:56

        Like, vacation monitoring is not something that great people need.

    14. CWCliff Weitzman1:12:00

        The way I think about it is I, like, if we hire you, I'm not gonna be your manager. You need to manage me. I need you to tell me where I need to unblock you, and if I know that, I will go and unblock you. Um, and we had this a lot in the beginning of the company. I would just hire a ton of people, and then I'd give them the goal, and then if they got it, I would give them the next one. And if they got it, I'd give them the next one. But some people would just stop communicating, and, like, they naturally just stopped working at Speechify because they didn't keep communicating. Like, you just need to be interested in the problem and think about it all the time and work towards it and send demos, and then you make progress. And that energy is the thing that I'm hiring for. Like, our leadership team is stacked because everybody is a savage. They think about the product constantly. They're constantly... Like, Rohan just launched this great thing. If you go to speechifyvoice.ai and if you email me, cliff@speechify.com, we'll give you a million minutes for free to use Speechify. He just, like, thought about it in the shower, launched it. Like, you just want to do a situation where your team pushes as hard as you do.That's it.

    15. HSHarry Stebbings1:13:01

        Do you think everyone can be a doer, or do you think... So you do. You don't think it's, like, inbuilt in you?

    16. CWCliff Weitzman1:13:07

        No, I think everybody can be a doer. Uh, I have this concept, which is I like awakening people. Like, I meet people and, and, uh, like Steve Jobs has this great quote, it's like, you know, "The world around us was built by people no smarter than you or I," right? You live your life. You wanna try to not bump into the world too much, but, like, you could do things. And, like, someone just needs to tell you that you can do things sometimes. And the second you see it, especially if you're next to someone who's, like, a really high-quality operator, you're like, "Oh, yeah, I, I, I can do those things." Um, there's a great question that I like is, like, "Who's the first person who believed in you more than you believed in yourself?" And so that's my favorite thing to do is, like, I'll meet someone. I'll be, "This is such a talented person," and I can see how amazing they are, and I just... I... A- a- and it gets to the point that I believe in their ability more than they believe in their ability, and so I just give them more responsibility and more opportunity, and they almost always rise to the occasion. Sometimes they don't, in which case we figure out how to help them get to that place. But yes, everybody can become a doer.

    17. HSHarry Stebbings1:14:05

        You said you were hiring a lot of people quite quickly-

    18. CWCliff Weitzman1:14:08

        Yeah

    19. HSHarry Stebbings1:14:08

        ... at one point. You never, like, raised a lot of money and did a big splashy round.

    20. CWCliff Weitzman1:14:13

        Right.

    21. HSHarry Stebbings1:14:13

        Can you just help me understand, what did the, like, fundraising profile-

    22. CWCliff Weitzman1:14:17

        Yeah

    23. HSHarry Stebbings1:14:17

        ... look of this business? 'Cause it's such a weird business. And we chatted before, and I, i- in all honesty, I was like, I- it was weird for me going into meeting you because we went for a walk around the park 'cause I was like, "I don't know, I don't know my friends of VCs." All of them are obviously. And, like, there's nothing online. Help me understand this.

    24. CWCliff Weitzman1:14:36

        Yeah. So I started Speechify when I was in college. Um, I was, like, 21 years old. For four and a half years, it didn't grow really fast. I just, like, iterated on it until it did, and then it started growing really fast. And then I did this blitz of, like, finding all the people who would be teaching-

    25. HSHarry Stebbings1:14:48

        Four and a half years in, how much revenue were you making?

    26. CWCliff Weitzman1:14:51

        By four and a half years in, yeah, we were making more than $5 million at that point. Um, and so we started growing really fast from the $5 million upwards. Um, and then a ton of the people who I talked to were the early investors. So Dylan Field from Figma, uh, Mike Krieger from Instagram, Ev from Twitter, uh, Zillow founders, Audible founders, Grammarly founders, Robinhood founders, Honey founders, 23andMe founders, Plaid founders, Medium, Brix, Richard Branson, Gary Cohn, who led all of, um, Goldman. Charlie Songhurst was my very first investor.

    27. HSHarry Stebbings1:15:22

        Charlie Songhurst was your first investor?

    28. CWCliff Weitzman1:15:23

        My first investor, yeah. And so we started scaling the business like that. And then we, like, we just found product market fit, and the business started to grow like crazy. And what I realized is if you find lightning in a bottle, you don't wanna tell other people about it. Like, Speechify has 1.1 million five-star reviews. We have 94% of the B2C voice agents market. Um, like, we read more to people than any other AI product in the world. Um-

    29. HSHarry Stebbings1:15:49

        How much money have you raised?

    30. CWCliff Weitzman1:15:51

        We don't share it publicly.
15. 1:22:19 – 1:25:36

    What Cliff Learned Spending Time With Mr Beast

    1. CWCliff Weitzman1:22:19

       and he's like, "Don't fly to New York. Come back with me to North Carolina. I want you to meet the rest of my team." And I was like, "All right. Sounds pretty cool." So I flew there, and I just ended up staying. Like we worked out. I would see how he filmed videos. I learned a ton. So the first thing, I like once basically saw him stop a shoot with like 100 people on set just to like essentially repaint the door pink. Like I say that it, like no genius can figure out what's going to convert in ads. Jimmy knows what's gonna convert in organic content. He just like, he has the algorithm in his head, and it's just data. Like he has spent between the age of 13 and today just studying what converts, and he just like, he's dialed in on human psychology. He's insane. The second thing is the formats. So their videos are so data-driven, and they just figure out, "Okay, here's a format that works. How do we up the ante on this video, and how do we make it even more amazing?" Um, the next one is the content that converts the best is content that doesn't even require language because that works in every single continent in the world. And you want the most simple concepts to be in the video to the point where like a great ad would be, for example, there's this ad for a storm, uh, proofing company, which is a very complicated concept. So their best ad is a bucket. You make a hole in the bucket. The water's coming out of the bucket. You put their material on duct tape. You put the duct tape on the bucket, and it stops coming out. So what are the concepts? Bucket, hole, duct tape, water. Everybody understands these concepts, so make things simple. So for example, for us, PDF is a complicated concept. Book is not a complicated concept, so our best performing ads include books, not PDFs. Um, he's great at hiring. He hires a ton. He tests people, and then if they don't work, they don't work. But like he'll always try and try and try and try. Maybe the most ambitious person that I know, like insane level of ambition as an operator, as a businessperson, as a creator. Um, and I, I'll give him his flowers, like he's done a really good job.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings1:24:07

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

    3. CWCliff Weitzman1:24:12

       Not for several years. Last year they had the highest views, but this year they're having a little bit of challenge.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings1:24:16

       Mm-hmm.

    5. CWCliff Weitzman1:24:17

       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 b- 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, uh, 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 while, like, making the largest unscripted show in the 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 they could grow even bigger.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings1:25:18

       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 3x levered option on Nvidia in 2022 before the market caught on? And I was writing this, like, "What? Can you talk to me about

16. 1:25:36 – 1:28:13

    Buying a 3x Leveraged Nvidia Option in 2022 Before the Market Caught On

    1. HSHarry Stebbings1:25:36

       that?"

    2. CWCliff Weitzman1:25:36

       Yeah. So it was not me, it was my brother Tyler. Um, it was the case that we were very excited about A100 GPUs back in the day. H100 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 H100 GPUs, and no one would 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 3x levered option that's now like 36x 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 2025-- 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 have this philosophy of the 20 punch card investment idea. Like, just everybody would be a much better investor if they only had 20 opportunities. But when you find the opportunity, lever as hard as you can into it in a responsible way.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings1:26:55

       Do you want-- The, the biggest lesson I have in 10 years of investing is you have to diversify to concentrate, and it-- actually, what I mean by it, I should have invested in everything, and I should have done to find the Alan Changs, the Adam Ferugis, the Cliff Weitzmans. You have to be broad to have the luxury to really know who is right.

    4. CWCliff Weitzman1:27:15

       Yeah. And then triple down when that person is in your corner. But the other thing is, can you go deep into an area that other people are missing? And if you can do that well, you will find the honeypots.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings1:27:26

       Would you still say Nvidia is a buy today?

    6. CWCliff Weitzman1:27:28

       I was-- I mean, look, I don't know of a company in the history of the world that has made as much profit as Nvidia today.

    7. HSHarry Stebbings1:27:33

       Do you think it'll be a $10 trillion company?

    8. CWCliff Weitzman1:27:35

       You just need to look at the multiple of the revenue and profits. Um, what is it trading at now? Three trillion?

    9. HSHarry Stebbings1:27:42

       Yeah.

    10. CWCliff Weitzman1:27:43

        What's the-

    11. HSHarry Stebbings1:27:43

        More. More. Four, four two

    12. CWCliff Weitzman1:27:45

        Four, four two. What's the multiple on revenue?

    13. HSHarry Stebbings1:27:48

        Uh, I think 35.

    14. CWCliff Weitzman1:27:50

        35 is reasonable given how much they're growing. So yeah, I think they have a lot more juice.

    15. HSHarry Stebbings1:27:54

        One thing that I'm spending more and more time on is energy, naturally.

    16. CWCliff Weitzman1:27:57

        Yes.

    17. HSHarry Stebbings1:27:57

        Um, how do you think about kind of the energy requirements from AI given we're now 1% of energy utilization goes towards AI?

    18. CWCliff Weitzman1:28:05

        Yeah.

    19. HSHarry Stebbings1:28:06

        That will likely 10 to 12 times in the next few years.

    20. CWCliff Weitzman1:28:08

        Yep.

    21. HSHarry Stebbings1:28:09

        How do you think about energy requirements, where you would be investing,

17. 1:28:13 – 1:57:43

    Where to Invest in Energy for the AI Era

    1. HSHarry Stebbings1:28:13

       how you would advise me?

    2. CWCliff Weitzman1:28:14

       So one thing that I was surprised by, uh, is hydro. So all the dams that can be dammed have been dammed. Hy-hydropower is like the most efficient and easiest way to create. We just don't have ability to invest in hydro more. So then it leaves you with fossil fuels or solar or nuclear. I do think that we are going to figure out fusion nuclear. I think that fission nuclear is also pretty great, but fusion nuclear is coming. We just don't know where it is, when it's coming. Uh, one of my biggest side projects that I really wanna do is build a mini fusion reactor in my garage. I just haven't had a garage for a long time. But when I have one, like, that's one of the first things I wanna do. Um, not one that creates energy, just one that is contained, but I think that we will figure it out, so that's very exciting. But in the meantime, while we haven't figured it out, I'm very much a solar maximal, maximus, maximalist. I'm all in on solar. Um, the kind of theoretical limit for solar, at least when I was in school, was something like 47 or 49% efficiency, and we're getting very close to it. The cost of solar typically is mostly borne in the installation and the manufacturing, not of the cells, and China has done an amazing job in bringing the cost of solar down a lot. Um, it's just such a great investment amortized over time. We just have not installed enough solar in the United States to the degree that we should. Like, China is outdoing us tremendously, and there's so much essentially public land that nobody wants that could have solar installations. There's just a lot of regulation and zoning that stops it. This is like the easiest way for us to solve the energy problem right now. And so if I were you, I would look for either, A, those types of amazing founders that you discussed who are working in the fusion space, or those type of amazing founders that you discussed who are working in the solar space and have some go-to-market that is amazing. Let's talk for a second about SolarCity. The reason why I invested in Tesla way back in the day was because I found Elon Musk from a Wikipedia article from the co-CEOs of SolarCity, and I was like, "Who is this guy walking with Obama with rockets in the background on his Wikipedia?" So I read the Wikipedia, and then I found more information. SolarCity was not a technology company. They were a finance company that had convinced, I think it was JP Morgan, to amortize the value of a solar panel over 30 years, and they got them to underwrite the value of that. And therefore, they could loan money to consumers to install solar panels on their house, and they became the larger installer of solar panel consumer in the United States by far. And so the innovation doesn't always have to be technological. It could be a go-to-market innovation around finance or customer acquisition or something else. So I would look for those honeypots.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings1:30:41

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

    4. CWCliff Weitzman1:30:46

       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 solo 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 walk 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/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 3:00 a.m. and you messaged me, I'd respond back, and you didn't need to enable notifications because I was iMessaging you. And if it was not 3:00 a.m., about the middle of the day, I would call youAnd I'd solve that problem on the spot. And then every 30 days, uh, uh, sorry, every day, I would export the people who had churned, given that it was 30 days since they downloaded, and I would call them because I had their email, so that gave me the ability to call them via FaceTime audio call, and I'd figure out why they churned. And that took a ton of energy, 'cause it's like getting kicked in the teeth every single time someone tells you your baby is ugly. But it allowed me to solve the problems. And so if I was starting a solar company, I would do the same thing. Every single time I'd have an installation, I would personally call the person and say, "How did it go?" And I would follow up, or at this point I'd have a voice agent do it. Just follow up with users constantly. It's like the normal YC model of just talk to users. Um, and then the other thing is just because users don't use the thing that you made doesn't mean that you have the wrong direction. It means the implementation's wrong, but the idea could still be correct. And so the old, like Henry Ford, "You can have any color that you want as long as it's black," or, uh, you know, uh, would have given people a faster horse, um, and like the Steve Jobs idea of... This is one thing that Brian Chesky and Dylan Field are very right about. AB tests are abdicating decision-making to the user. Sometimes you wanna just have a very clear vision, go for a very big goal, and just work towards that goal until it's in the market. And then when it lands, sometimes people think if you build it, they will come. They will not come. You have to build it, and then you have to convince them to join you. And then you have to iterate on the product, sometimes for years, until the fit is correct. And so it goes back to AQ. The most important thing for product market fit is not repositioning your product or do- it just stay in the game. Keep making iterations until it fits like a glove, and then you'll find success.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings1:33:19

       It's so funny. We actually have a very strong product perspective on YouTube versus Spotify. Spotify, we do not offer video.

    6. CWCliff Weitzman1:33:25

       Mm.

    7. HSHarry Stebbings1:33:26

       You, you cannot watch this on Spotify.

    8. CWCliff Weitzman1:33:27

       Why is that?

    9. HSHarry Stebbings1:33:28

       You can watch it on YouTube, and we have shorts across IG and TikTok and Instagram. Um, but, uh, we, you can- why? Because the quality of edit you can make on an audio-only file versus a video file is infinitely better. So if you want a very curt, precise edit, which is significantly shorter-

    10. CWCliff Weitzman1:33:45

        Mm

    11. HSHarry Stebbings1:33:45

        ... about 10 minutes shorter, that's a lot shorter, then you listen on audio versus on YouTube, where you have the full video.

    12. CWCliff Weitzman1:33:53

        Wow.

    13. HSHarry Stebbings1:33:54

        Yeah.

    14. CWCliff Weitzman1:33:54

        I like that. That's very opinionated.

    15. HSHarry Stebbings1:33:56

        It's very-

    16. CWCliff Weitzman1:33:56

        It's very taste based

    17. HSHarry Stebbings1:33:57

        By the way, the CEO of Spotify is actively annoyed at that. And that, now that, that, that's the challenge.

    18. CWCliff Weitzman1:34:04

        So why don't you use, why don't you use AI to make the frame transitions work and then the edit can be the same? Like, why don't you take the audio clip-

    19. HSHarry Stebbings1:34:10

        I would love to. AI's not there to make the fran- frame transitions work.

    20. CWCliff Weitzman1:34:15

        I like the taste. So, hey, uh, the CEO is not Daniel Ek anymore. Who is it? Uh, Gustav?

    21. HSHarry Stebbings1:34:19

        Gustav.

    22. CWCliff Weitzman1:34:19

        So Gustav, uh, Harry is asking for a solution. Please give it to him.

    23. HSHarry Stebbings1:34:23

        Oh, I, I would love an engineer.

    24. CWCliff Weitzman1:34:24

        One should be able to upload the video file-

    25. HSHarry Stebbings1:34:26

        Yeah

    26. CWCliff Weitzman1:34:26

        ... and then it should sync to the audio file.

    27. HSHarry Stebbings1:34:28

        'Cause one thing that it does do is it automatically plays video and then you can hit switch to audio, and that means when you switch between different apps, you don't get the annoying video thing in the corner.

    28. CWCliff Weitzman1:34:37

        Mm.

    29. HSHarry Stebbings1:34:37

        That's kind of solving a different style of problem.

    30. CWCliff Weitzman1:34:39

        Different problem, correct.

Episode duration: 1:57:54