# What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World

What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks · How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify

20VC · May 9, 2026 · 107 min · 25,176 words
Speakers: Cliff Weitzman, Harry Stebbings
Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-a80d0cbb/

## Cold open

**Cliff Weitzman** [0:00]:

Don't even bother spending money on any platform that's not Meta until you reach a $100,000 a month in spend on Meta. Companies go through cutting and bulking cycles like bodybuilders do. We test almost a thousand day ad generated ads a day right now. We're getting to the point where soon we're gonna spend more in tokens than we spend on actual salaries. If you don't spend a thousand 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 and I. You could do things.

**Harry Stebbings** [0:26]:

This is 20 VC

## Intro

**Harry Stebbings** [0:27]:

with me, Harry Stebbings. And 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 60,000,000 people and has over a million five star ratings. I've never had a guest who has such batshit crazy stories. So check this out. What I learned from sleeping at MrBeast's house for three weeks. This is the man that got hacked, went and tracked down the hacker, then hired him, and got him to live with him also. He spent eleven days sleeping in a Walmart parking lot in the middle of America. There is the most insane amount of stories from Cliff, and this is one of the most fun and fascinating stories we've ever featured on 20 VC. But before we dive into the show today,

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## Conversation

**Harry Stebbings** [4:23]:

Cliff, I normally ask for great suggestions beforehand. And, honestly, most of the time, they're, like, six out of 10, 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. My pleasure. It's great to be here. 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?

**Cliff Weitzman** [5:02]:

Yeah. So I moved to The US when I was 13. I didn't speak English. 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 one in ten 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 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 because I just couldn't read very well. I just made it my goal, my job. Instead of leaving school, I go back to academic workshop, and I would apply to 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. 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. And so my overall principle in life is volume of work. More reps, more shots a goal, more three throws, and that's how you get on the bell curve unexpected outcomes.

**Harry Stebbings** [6:15]:

One of my favorite statements is actually Alex Wormozi. I don't know if know Alex Wormozi, but he says, you know, volume times leverage equals output. And I really think about that. I used to send, like, hundreds of emails to sponsors for the show, and I had zero leverage. 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 read?

**Cliff Weitzman** [6:39]:

Yes. So I am super dyslexic. First, second, third, fourth grade, could not figure out how to read, and I wanted to read fast. So we built a deep learning based text to speech model in 2015 that now reads more than 10,000,000 books worth of words to people every year. So now if you wanna read fast, but you can't, you can read fast.

**Harry Stebbings** [6:56]:

So you're a great gay. Very great gay. Great gay. This was apparently the start in the yearbooks of 40 of my 14 year old friends and freshmen, that is what you wrote. How did

**Cliff Weitzman** [7:08]:

that lead to Speechify? 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 want to 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 sleep over 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? 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 sent 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.

**Harry Stebbings** [8:19]:

Dude, I I was listening to you and Ali, Abdul. Great show. 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 really enjoyed the show too with the greatest of respects. I was kind of frustrated listening because you said that, and I was like, amazing. What did you learn? Sure. And we didn't go into it in that conversation. So what did you learn from flying around the world and meeting the top a 100 consumer subscription companies?

**Cliff Weitzman** [8:51]:

The first basically, at every point in Speechify's history, I have led every department except for AI. Design, engineering, QA, growth. And my rule is I will read a 100 books about the topic, listen to them with Speechify. I will identify a 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, twenty three and me, of Honey, of Grammarly, Vlad from Robinhood, and all those became Speechify investors very early on. But they would all respond to the emails. 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 And I do 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 chat, and there was one thing that always succeeded, which is I have listened to a 100 books a year every year for the last fifteen years. So I'd ask them what's your favorite books, and they 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? 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 recently. And, like, it's just like, 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. 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, etcetera. 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 a $100,000 a month and spend on Meta. And then I stopped spending in 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 by the ads. And we had a situation where we hired a head of growth. Thirty days in, nothing. Sixty days in, nothing. And I was like, alright, man. What's going on? 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. It

**Harry Stebbings** [12:17]:

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

**Cliff Weitzman** [12:32]:

I do all of it. We look for three things when we hire people. Firing the better for the product, high loyalty to the team, and the ability to learn fast and ship to production. We have a principle even inside of engineering, which is you gotta respond to messages within sixty seconds because 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.

**Harry Stebbings** [13:12]:

Okay. There's many things that I wanna unpack here. You can tell from my incredibly athletic physique that I am a fan of weights and gym work. You said before that growth is about bulking and cutting downstairs. I love this so much. Can you explain how you think about that?

**Cliff Weitzman** [13:27]:

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. 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. 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, and 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'd 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 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 thirty minute increments, so every day I'd have 48 units, and I noticed that 30% of my time, 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. And so the the rule is you just have to go, 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 there 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 could 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, 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 hyper growth 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.

**Harry Stebbings** [15:36]:

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

**Cliff Weitzman** [15:42]:

No. Not at all. So if you think about CAC, 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 a $140, but if you're listening to this show, hit me up, Cliff, at Speechify dot com, I'll give you a discount. 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 in 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. If the test fails, that's fine. The classic adage that you learn from CMOs, I learned this from Kelly at Netflix. They spent $1,700,000,000 on performance marketing in 2017, and you'll hear I Brex also is really good at this. 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.

**Harry Stebbings** [17:15]:

When you look back at the consumer subscription companies and buying ad patterns, you said, I wanna go in. I wanna see how they buy ads. Who had the most atypical slash weird process that stood out?

**Cliff Weitzman** [17:28]:

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.

**Harry Stebbings** [17:40]:

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

**Cliff Weitzman** [17:42]:

day. Every single day. What

**Harry Stebbings** [17:44]:

is the play today

**Cliff Weitzman** [17:44]:

that people don't know? Whitelisting ads on Instagram works really well. So what whitelisting ads is? So let's say you find a creator that is in your niche. For example, for us, maybe it's teachers, 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 could 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.

**Harry Stebbings** [18:18]:

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

**Cliff Weitzman** [18:22]:

Not at all. Because you're marketing for different demographics. So for example, you find this interesting. We test almost a thousand day generated ads a day right now on top of the roughly 8,000 organic creators we make with humans every single month. And one of the things we do is we risk 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 I was gonna say farm, but farm wouldn't convert for our users. Sure. And so you just test all the variations. And so I know that for us, highest converting demographics would be people in their thirties and forties in terms of paid, but we have like crazy usage in the eighteen to twenty eight year old market. But people who are 60 and above need reading glasses, so they use Speechify a ton. And now we're launching voice agents at, symblvoices.ai, and so that's a different demographic. And so all the initial ads for Speechify were me. It was my face. And I would sit in my house, especially 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 contract and find that one. Gotcha. And Speechify can find that for you. You just need to listen 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 convert a lot better than men as, like, audiences. And so right now, I'd say more 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, and you just have to test everything. On the video before

**Harry Stebbings** [20:02]:

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 that said like AI ads? What do you use

**Cliff Weitzman** [20:13]:

for your AI ads? 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 there was a point several months ago where my girlfriend went to Disneyland. So I had four days free. And so in that time, I went to school, Alex or Mosey, shout out, and I did a course for AI generated video ads. And then I hired everybody from inside of the community that was really good. 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. And twenty four seven, 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 n eight n, and then all the n eight n 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 reskin. It automatically posts this 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 for 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? Two was really good, and then Cling was really good, and then Cdance was really good, and now ChatGPT's new image model. And then a Banana, obviously, is you just constantly test and iterate and iterate, and you find flows that work. So we just built our own. 1,300 ads

**Harry Stebbings** [21:36]:

a day. A day. That's wild. What do we look for in the outcomes? The end of the day, I work for Speechify, I go, okay, Cliff, here's 1,300 ads.

**Cliff Weitzman** [21:45]:

Yeah, so what you wanna do is you throw a lot of things in the wall, no matter how smart you are, you're not gonna know ahead of time which thing is going to convert. You really don't. You don't. You have no idea. So you'd First, you test. Once you test, you look for the following. 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. If we see that the cost of acquiring a user and having him 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, then we cut it. And so you just. It's like evolution. You put it into the wild, and you see if it performs. And so every day you'll take the top 10, you'll take the top Every day we upload 1,300 to our testing campaigns. Yep. We'll take of those, the ones that win, might be the nothing won that day, in which case nothing gets launched. Might be the lot one that day, in which case they all get launched. And then you let them it's like March madness brackets. Uh-huh. Like, you just graduated to the next level of competition where you can get more spend. It's almost like duplicating the algorithm that TikTok and Instagram have anyway, where when you post a video, a thousand people see it, And then if it does well, 10,000 people see it. And if it does well, a 100,000 people see it. If it does well, 10,000,000 people will see it. It's the same thing with performance marketing ads except you're paying for every view. I do just

**Harry Stebbings** [23:03]:

wanna go back to the ad spend as well. You have one ad drive $3,000,000 of revenue. Can you just talk to me about that and the lessons learned from that?

**Cliff Weitzman** [23:11]:

Sure. So rule of 100. I had gone and I had talked to all these people who were good at growth, and then I made a list of top 100 creators, and I talked to them, and I lived in their houses. And then I was making those ads in my apartment, and some of them were good, but I was stuck in a local maxima, and I wanted to break out to a global maxima. And my conclusion is the way that I would do that is I made a list of the top 100 best performing ads in history. Every Super Bowl ad that was really funny, every ad that I've made me cry, every ad that won had a won an award. I made a list of maybe 500 ads ads, and then I whittled them down to the top 100. And then I read the script for each one of them, and I rewrote the script to be about Speechify. And then what I would do is I would up the ante on the ad. So the rule in videos typically is you win or lose by the first three seconds. Do you have good retention in the first three seconds? But the rule I developed is actually you win or lose by the first image of the video, like the first ten eighty pixels. And so I wanted the first ten eighty pixels to be as crazy as possible. The way to represent Speechify is headphones, so I got bright red headphones. I put them on my head. I put a suit on, and then I went into a hot tub. And so the first shot is me with red headphones and a suit in hot tub, at the time I had long hair, and I just threw behind me like the most random knickknacks, like weird photos and books and stuff like that. And I developed this character called Cruz Silver. Cruz Silver appears in many of our ads, and he's a version of me, and he's very gullible. He's kind of dull, but he has great confidence. And so the ad starts: Hi, I'm Cliff, founder of Speechify. What is Speechify? Well, you give us stuff you need to read, and we read it to you instantly. Yeah, instantly. Are the voices any good? No. Our voices are great, and then it just goes into all these different scenes, and the video was really long. And so then I edited it, and I made, like my college apps, almost 50 variations of that video, and I tested all of them. And one did pretty good, and another did better, and 20 didn't perform at all, and one did amazing. And that YouTube ad basically launched the company, took a whole new stratosphere, and performed for, like, three years straight. That video got hundreds of millions of impressions on Instagram alone, and then every year I remake that video. Again, I did the nacho commercial from the Super Bowl. I did the Isaiah Old Spice commercial. I literally got a horse for the ad, and just you just take it as far as you can. Did it work? Like, did they work like you thought they would? It's a complete random distribution of what works and what doesn't work. What did you think would that really didn't? I thought that that old Spice commercial would absolutely annihilate and got, like, 300,000 views. The one that I did not expect to work that worked amazing is I wrote a rap song about my experience with dyslexia and ADHD, and that thing made us, like, 3 mil also, like, $3,000,000 on a rap song.

**Harry Stebbings** [25:47]:

Do you believe in the power of repurposing? We did a a video the other day that went super viral on comparing American founders to French founders. Yeah. And, basically, American founders have nothing and say, oh, we're a trillion dollar company right now. French founders have like a 100,000,000 in revenue. They're like, you shit. Super viral. And the team is now like repurposing it into like 10

**Cliff Weitzman** [26:06]:

different Oh, of course. That works amazing. So one, formats are the thing that works. Right? So one of the things that works really well for MrBeast is ladders. $1 hotel, a $100 hotel, a thousand dollar hotel, a million dollar hotel. Competing where you have people age one to 100, like, all competing against each other in the same thing. Like, I got trapped on an island, blah blah blah. He does the same formats but changes the view and how it works. So American founder versus British founder is a perfect format, and then you switch it to French versus Ghanaian, whatever you want. And then, of course, repurposing works. You take the same piece of content, and you put it on TikTok. You put it on Instagram. You put it on YouTube. Change the hook. Especially in performance marketing, it doesn't matter how many times you post because you're not going to damage your brand by posting something that will not perform organically because it's behind the wall anyway. It only gets served, it lives in the shadows. So just test 800 variations, why not? Do you give a shit about

**Harry Stebbings** [26:55]:

conversion? And I know

**Cliff Weitzman** [26:56]:

that's I only care about conversion.

**Harry Stebbings** [26:57]:

So you because we have TikTok, and we get lots of views. Conversion back to core podcast and core product, very little. Would you say then, not worth it. Don't bother. Yes. Fascinating. Correct.

**Cliff Weitzman** [27:09]:

Only do things that result in conversion. So we have more than 50,000,000 people who use Speechify now, the organic B2C product that makes it really easy to read. If you don't download the app, and you don't start a trial, and you don't convert to paid, there's two options. The first one is I don't care. The second one is I actually do genuinely care that we solve dyslexia and ADHD, and so there's two billion people in the world that have either ADHD, low vision, autism, anxiety, concussion, second language learners. Our philosophy is we roll out the red carpet for the user, because we give them the best experience possible. If you can't pay, that's fine. You still have a great experience. And so I think about that as that's our form of charity. Like, we acquire the user, and they can use the product for free. Amazing. But that's not what's gonna cover the ad spend. So the ad spend is covered by the people who pay. If you don't get people who actually convert on your product, there's no point in doing the work that you're doing.

**Harry Stebbings** [27:54]:

Do you have a separate growth team for the ads testing, for the new channel testing, for the iterations? Is that all in marketing or is that a separate growth team?

**Cliff Weitzman** [28:03]:

It's all in one. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's not split. And there it's like there's sub teams inside of growth, but they all report into the same people.

**Harry Stebbings** [28:09]:

When you look at channel composition, what does yours look like today?

**Cliff Weitzman** [28:13]:

It's still word-of-mouth is like the biggest way of us getting people. Right? It's someone telling their friend, hey. I know you like podcasts and audiobooks, and I can see that you're reading at, like, a normal reading speed. Like, don't you wanna read three x faster? Like, use Speechify to make AI generated audiobooks. That's the biggest one. We crush it on Apple. So we were, like, we won the design award last year. We got featured by them, like, 14 times last year. SEO is huge for us, 10% 15% now. 15% of our users come organically from Chantilly PT. Inside of performance marketing, Meta is still the best winner. Google is the most profitable. YouTube is pretty good, especially on desktop. App loving is interesting. TikTok is interesting, but they're not as big, and you have this great halo effect. So the more that you get the message out there in different ways, the more you sow the seeds that results in people talking about it and telling each other about it.

**Harry Stebbings** [29:01]:

You said OpenAI that, and you said about being one of the first 200 on OpenAI ads. Biggest lessons from OpenAI ads? You just gotta test like everything else.

**Cliff Weitzman** [29:09]:

Do you think it will be huge? 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, 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, and the ads convert. Now it's extremely high CPMs, 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. Would you buy Meta today? Absolutely. Yeah. I think Meta is one of the most underrated stocks right now.

**Harry Stebbings** [29:55]:

Why?

**Cliff Weitzman** [29:55]:

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 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 and Zach also has proven that he is the number one acquirer in the world. Like, no one acquires as well as Meta. The leadership team is incredible. Like, Chris Cox is amazing. Alex Schultz is amazing. And 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 but I really do believe that they will. 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?

**Harry Stebbings** [30:51]:

You said 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

**Cliff Weitzman** [31:01]:

that? Is that bullshit? No. No. It's not bullshit. Everything is in taste as well. 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, cloud code terminals. Definitely, like, design when we, like, wanna launch a new product. We do not assign a designer in the beginning. Like, we say just use the default cloth 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 hammer and chisel part of design is not as important, and therefore, the thing that's left is taste. Very few people have taste. 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 comings. And so, no, taste really, really matters. Even if it's just telling you pick that one, not that one. I'm down 40% on my Figma position. Hold or sell? Hold. Dylan Field is a savage. Anything Dylan Field does, you should you should go for. So you think they survive in an Anthropic in design? I do. I also think that Figma is a relatively antifragile company just because it's a really good team. They're excellent at sales. They have really good taste. Figma itself is a great product because Dylan coded the original thing. I think it was a c c plus plus. It was 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. It's 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 40 x revenue, and now they're at six x 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.

**Harry Stebbings** [32:56]:

Claude code or Cursor internally? What does everyone use engineering wise? Claude

**Cliff Weitzman** [33:00]:

code. So we were huge adopters of Cursor about two years ago. I think I got the Anthropic team plan in December, and it actually drives me crazy that not everybody has moved over to Cloud Code. A lot of people will use Cloud Code from inside the terminal in Cursor. I prefer if they use Cloud Code inside of the Cloud Code ID. I think it's more powerful, but it's fine to use it inside a Cursor as well. But just most important is you have to use it to the max. 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. I was like, why did it take you three months to ask me about this? Like, I'm pushing people constantly to hit limits. We're getting to the point where soon we're gonna spend more in tokens than we spend on actual salaries. You're getting to the point where you spend more in tokens than you're doing that? Like, next year, expect we'll spend more in tokens than we'll spend on salaries. Is that atypical? It's atypical right now, but I don't think it'll be atypical in the long term.

**Harry Stebbings** [33:51]:

You don't you think the majority of great high quality companies will get there in three years. Yeah. You

**Cliff Weitzman** [33:54]:

just need to be, like, a really strong early adopter. Across all functions or just engineering? No. Across engineering. Across engineering. 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.

**Harry Stebbings** [34:09]:

Are they AI native? I know that sounds really kind of VC wanky, but, like, I am pushing people to use internally Yeah. Which honestly is kind of frustrating, especially on, like, growth stuff. Like so we do clips here where, basically, they interview me for, an hour and then turn into a 100 clips. Yeah. 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. Yeah. It's very easy for you to change that already. It is, but I'm the one who's pushing them. My point is I'm dragging my team into an AI world. So I I could tell you what we do.

**Cliff Weitzman** [34:41]:

So remember, like, Speechify is a voice agents ecosystem with 50,000,000 users and one point one 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 new hosts. Then we launched teacher agents that will ask you questions about the document and then teach you back the content gap that you were missing. And now we just launched, Jarvis, which is the speech right for work. It, like, lets you do productivity and then the enterprise SIMBA Voices .ai. We're constantly educating our own users on how to use AI, and what we found is it takes about a 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 b to c users as you need to do internally. Internally, I am constantly screaming from the rooftops that people have to use Cloud Code, and I'm 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 a thousand 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 they'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, it's like 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. Send me a Loom video with what you use the AI to make.

**Harry Stebbings** [36:22]:

So there were so many things that we're we're talking about kind of token maxing and spending more on tokens than we are on people. 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. Yeah. What are the leading signals for you of a candidate slash person that is going to be successful at Speechify? Yeah.

**Cliff Weitzman** [36:44]:

So people talk a lot about IQ, intelligent 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 Savannah. 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 thirty minutes. But the things that really move the company 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. 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 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 happen. 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.

**Harry Stebbings** [38:21]:

I think that this is exactly the same when I look for founders that I wanna invest in. As awful as it seems, there are certain things we look for. One of them is like, struggles in parental relationships often signify very successful founders, sadly. If you were an investor today looking for adversity quotient or struggle duration in a founder, what would you advise me to ask question, dig deep on with founders?

**Cliff Weitzman** [38:45]:

There's a great question from YC, which is what is a noncomputer 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 I'm then looking for the rest.

**Harry Stebbings** [39:02]:

Are there any mega red flags on the flip side? For me, I'm like, I hate the people that are like founding GTM advisor, and it's like, no, no, no. You're just a GTM hire that was one of the first you know, like a founding this, like, everything needs to be a founding role.

**Cliff Weitzman** [39:19]:

Fuck off. So no. There's a lot. The first one is any situation where you can discover dishonesty. So what I really don't like is when people give me a stat, and they say, oh, I raised the stat x y z. And the more question you ask, the more you realize they change the definition of what the denominator was. So, like, that's one thing that I really dislike. The second thing is people who talk too much. The 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 with the rest of the people on the Like, we're all about execution here. 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. Then And 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 in another company, and they might leave. What is a bad answer? I wanna earn more money. Is that a bad answer? Terrible answer. Never would have hired that person, not in a million years.

**Harry Stebbings** [40:16]:

Why?

**Cliff Weitzman** [40:17]:

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

**Harry Stebbings** [40:23]:

good answer is?

**Cliff Weitzman** [40:24]:

I have a kid with dyslexia. I have a niece with ADHD. I use the product myself every single day. Those are great answers. 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 his co 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, so I'd love to work with him. That's a great answer. Like, just do a little bit of research about the company. I like I want to see a reason why people are there. Yeah. That's a better answer.

**Harry Stebbings** [40:52]:

I agree. Yeah. The cash one was always flimsy. But you said that about kind of Tyler and ADHD or earlier you said about dyslexia. The best founders on dyslexic will have ADHD. Unpack

**Cliff Weitzman** [41:02]:

that one. 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. Forty percent of people who are incarcerated have dyslexia, even though seventeen percent of the population has it. The second option is you keep trying, and you try again, 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 forty percent of billionaires also have dyslexia.

**Harry Stebbings** [41:38]:

That's insane. Forty percent of billionaires.

**Cliff Weitzman** [41:40]:

Yeah. 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 a q 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 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 to 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 a 100, amazing place to be ADHD, but you got to go from the zero to a 100 where you're doing all the IC work yourself, we 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.

**Harry Stebbings** [42:38]:

I'm being a terrible interview on this because I'm just jumping around so much, but I'm so enjoying the kind of spontaneity of the discussion. You mentioned the multiple different disciplines that you have to adopt in the early stage of a company. What role does not exist today that you think will be incredibly commonplace in five years' time?

**Cliff Weitzman** [42:54]:

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. So we're still hiring people at a crazy rate. Last year, we had a 178,000 people 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. I have a friend Austin Ray at RAMP, and, like, his entire job is teaching the organization how to use AI tools. And we almost had Austin join Speechify AI, and it's one of my biggest mistakes that we didn't make that happen. Why

**Harry Stebbings** [43:40]:

didn't you make it happen?

**Cliff Weitzman** [43:41]:

We hired him as a consultant. We worked for with him for a while. I had super high conviction on him. I couldn't get to the level of conviction I needed from other people, and I made a huge mistake because I didn't get a, like, resounding, we have to hire him for everybody else. I didn't do it. I should've trusted my gut and, like, done everything to give the sexiest offer possible, because he's also, like, obviously a very expensive hire, so there's, like, a cost to it. I we should have just given him that because it was clear. He was such Speechify DNA.

**Harry Stebbings** [44:05]:

Do wanna hear something nuts? I've been investing for ten years. Basically, what I've learned is I can't decide the difference between a seven out of 10 and a 10 out of 10. But I'm very good at guessing between a one out of 10 to a seven out of 10. And so basically, anything that hits a seven out of 10 in terms of founder quality, I should invest. Right? If I'd invest in every founder that I'd met, every founder that I've met, I'd be 17 x more successful. Wow. One seven x more successful. I would have had two and a half percent of deal. I'd have a seed check-in Flexport, seed check-in Vanta. And I knew all these guys were great, but I wasn't sure they were like 10 out of 10, and the honest truth is the market. I saw shipping. I saw SOC two compliance. I saw payroll.

**Cliff Weitzman** [44:48]:

I have the same philosophy about hiring. If you can really trust someone, you can afford to pay them significantly more. And it's actually just hire the person for more money, and if they don't work out, you part ways. Like, it's fine. You should always be trigger happy to hire really good people if you see that they're really good, and just ignore the fact that they're expensive. Make it work.

**Harry Stebbings** [45:07]:

Also, when you get spidey senses in the interview process, listen. Like, it will only get worse post hire. And what I mean by that is when someone you they just get the feeling that they really actually wanna be an investor, not in finance. Trust me. When they get on the finance team of the investment firm, they'll be pushing to be on the investment team, not on the finance team. Like, listen to the early spidey senses. You said before why we never hire from Google.

**Cliff Weitzman** [45:32]:

Why? When we try to hire from large organizations, we do have very similar DNA to Amazon. Typically, we found this is my personal experience. When we hire folks from Google, they come from a place of a ton of abundance. So the hunger is not the same hunger, and you need to coach them out of essentially bad habits. That can infest your culture in a bad way. The other thing is this is true in general of hiring in the Bay Area. The loyalty is a lot less high than you would get from hiring in Europe. Because in Europe, people really value a good company and a good job, and it's just not the same thing in New York or San Francisco. And sometimes you find diamonds in the rough. Don't get me wrong, and you should definitely hire those people. But by and large, you're taking a big risk. Now for us, we really like to invest in people. It's extremely important to us. And so we've only had one real case of attrition in Speechify of someone who, like, worked with us for a long time, that person went to work for Elon Musk directly. Like, okay, makes sense. But generally, I don't want people who we coach and understand the context of the company to leave. And so we just find that people who come from companies like Google are more likely to do that.

**Harry Stebbings** [46:30]:

What do you do to retain people in a way that others don't? A lot.

**Cliff Weitzman** [46:34]:

I'll give you an example from early, early days of Speechify. Had an amazing teammate. I loved him. He took time off school to work for us, and he told me that he wanted to leave because he wanted to have more friends. Like, there were not a lot of friends in the Bay Area for him. He wanted to go back to where he was cool. Okay. No worries. And the way I found that out, he said he was going to leave. And I was like, why? And he didn't really know. So I sat him down. I put my phone in his hand, notes file open. I was like, write the 10 top goals you have in life. And it was became very clear that it was all around friendships. And I like, okay. Can you describe to him what you're looking for in his friends? He described what he looks for in his friends. Cool. My assignment for you for today, don't do any Speechify work. Give me, by the end of the day, a Google Sheet with 50 people in the Bay Area that you wanna be friends with. So he gave me, like, Thiel Fellows and people who won the award for being the best student at Stanford and Berkeley and whatever. And then I DMed all those people on Instagram, and I was like, hey. We have dinners on my patio every Friday. I know some of you. I don't know others of you. You're all invited this Friday and next Friday. So the 50 people of 35 people showed up. He was there, and he made a ton of friends, and then he stayed. And so often, it'll be stuff like that. Early, early Speechify, the person who's now our COO, we couldn't get him a visa. And we went to 15 lawyers. No one would do the visa thing. So in the end, I read the immigration law myself, and I figured out how to get him a green card directly. Took a lot of work, but, like, we got it. And after that, we became really good at immigration. There there was a person who worked at Speechify, really, really amazing engineer, and he was based in Ukraine. He was gonna leave. This is, like, right around when the war was about to start. I flew to Ukraine. I ignored The US restriction of you cannot go to Ukraine. Literally, to board the plane, I had to sign a form saying the airline is not responsible for what happens beyond this point. I worked out with him there for, like, three days. I ran a hackathon with other people there. We sorted out the problem, and he stayed. Typically, this is not the case in Speechify. In most companies, this is true. People don't quit companies. They quit managers. That has not happened at Speechify. Typically, if there's an issue, we'd, 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 because they're, for whatever reason, not satisfied. Figure out what's not satisfying and solve that thing for the pur and sometimes it's money, in which case, just solve it. Are you worried by the number of layoffs that we're seeing? Of course. I'm super worried. I think the one thing that we 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, 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, and I don't have a great answer for it other than more people should be entrepreneurs.

**Harry Stebbings** [49:04]:

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

**Cliff Weitzman** [49:10]:

No. I have a bent towards older hires because they read textbooks about software engineering when they see what's coming out of the LLM, but 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. Now, if I see a cracked young engineer who's great at cloud code, and I can see the project, course, I'm gonna hire that person on the spot. Like, there's no question. Regardless, a prerequisite is that we have like this entrance exam. There'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 you get thirty minutes to fix what you broke. 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's that's key. And if you don't pass that, like, there's no way that we can work together. And the best are dot dot dot? You never know. Like, you just have to try with everybody. Sometimes people tell you that they're great at AI, and then you give them a challenge and they suck. You just gotta test. And sometimes people have never used AI before, and you force them to sit with it for forty eight hours, and by the end of the forty eight hours, they're phenomenal.

**Harry Stebbings** [50:22]:

You said before, literally twenty minutes ago, sixty second response times are the best predictor for any engineer's success. What do you mean by that? Yeah. And what should we know?

**Cliff Weitzman** [50:32]:

Yeah. So Speechify is our most first team. There's 45 AI engineers on our research team. There's about a 150 product facing software engineers, and we have people in 36 country nests now. 200 people in total. Everybody's really good at engineering. The 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. 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 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. 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 4PM, 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. Young people are scared to call. 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 because everybody's like, the skill has atrophied. Just get the answer, move on.

**Harry Stebbings** [52:01]:

We actually had a viral video the other day because 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.

**Cliff Weitzman** [52:22]:

Wrong culture. It's fine. Like, obviously, if you're asleep, don't respond. If you're with the but even if you're with the kids, like, you could tell me I'm not free right now. Just tell me I'm not free right now.

**Harry Stebbings** [52:30]:

Yeah. Dropping kids off in school.

**Cliff Weitzman** [52:31]:

Back later. Yeah. Cool. Just did for me.

**Harry Stebbings** [52:32]:

Fine.

**Cliff Weitzman** [52:33]:

Totally agree. 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 could take vacation, you could do whatever you want, be anywhere in the world. You don't even need to work nine to five. Like, you wanna work at 3PM 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. 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. What

**Harry Stebbings** [53:14]:

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

**Cliff Weitzman** [53:18]:

No. Deadlines are challenging. Goals are also like, you definitely set goals. So 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 3PM on Tuesday, invite Rohan, Simon, Cliff, Pankaj. So everybody knows. And then sometimes we have calendar invites that start with this is not a meeting. It's a deadline. 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 peer. Here's why. I'm gonna do it twenty four 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. I'd love to get a test flight link too, but, like, ideally, just send me a screen recording to begin. That's number one. And then the other thing is just increase speed is show it yourself. Like, when people message you, message back. When you need something, call people. 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.

**Harry Stebbings** [54:16]:

What did you do too fast that you then later subsequently

**Cliff Weitzman** [54:19]:

regretted in a major way? So I think you did a episode of Marc Andreessen who was like, don't introspect Yeah. Because 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 05:30PM. They, like, didn't live and breathe the company, and in the end, 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 thirty days. Right? Like, that was a mistake. But I was young. I didn't know, like, I didn't know what to like, what what good meant. Later, learned also, I was, like, begging and borrowing for people to work for my company at the time. Like, we didn't have any, like, thank you for working for me at the time, at least.

**Harry Stebbings** [55:04]:

I was thinking this going to bed last night, is like, I've never ever not seen a young founder not fall for Big Logos. Every single day. You have to. Yeah. It's just like the canonical path. You will learn the lesson. 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. Would you be long Snap?

**Cliff Weitzman** [55:26]:

No. Why? One, we try to run ads on Snap all the time. We never succeed. If you're a rep in the growth, miss Snap. Send me an email. Teach me how to make Snap work. I haven't succeeded. I've been trying. 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 cash is fastidious today. I think they're overpaying creators' love, drive, and center, and I just think that the lunch is completely eaten by Meta at this point.

**Harry Stebbings** [55:50]:

We were talking about, like, calls versus messages. Slack messages kill your company. Yeah. Any tips for me on Slack etiquette? Oof.

**Cliff Weitzman** [55:59]:

Most long Slack message should have been a phone call. Just call. You'll get the answer immediately, and then the person can ask you follow-up questions. Like, that's so easy. And then all your engineers who are supposed to be coding are spending time reading Slack. I'd rather you put that in the PR commit message. Like, there's just no reason. And so, yes, there's things that you do need to communicate on Slack, but just call. The other thing is, right, we have this internal voice agent. Like, the world is getting eaten by voice agents now. It's just so much faster to communicate by voice than to communicate by text, period. And so text is great for asynchronous, but if you try to move fast, you don't wanna go asynchronous. You wanna move now. You said about the Apple and the Snap.

**Harry Stebbings** [56:35]:

Oh, we they they quit, but I should have got rid of them earlier. Whatever. Whatever. Normally, you do a performance review. Yeah. Put them on a performance improvement plan. Why are

**Cliff Weitzman** [56:43]:

performance reviews a waste of time? Total waste of time. Why? So the problem is that you didn't communicate to them ahead of time what the goal was. So typically, reason why people end up on a PIP is because they didn't ship something to production. And so I have a philosophy that if you made something amazing, but it's not in production, it's a waste of time. Like, you get no credit unless it's in production. The analogy I always give someone is you're a farmer, and you are a milk delivery guy. And you have the best milk in the world, and you put it in a bottle, but you didn't put it on my doorstep. You put it down the street, and now the milk is spoiled. There's literally no point for all this milk that you created. It's like you're a football player, and you didn't put the ball in the goal. You put it right before the line. You didn't cross the end zone. No credit. And so the problem that the leader has in that situation is they should have informed the person ahead of time that they have not shipped the thing to production. And so all you do is you get on a call. You go, hey, Matthew. Harry. Hey, Harry. Listen. We've been working together for thirty days. You still haven't shipped anything to production. We're a startup. And so, like, the only time that I, as a CEO, get recognized is when things go to production. I need you to put your thing in production in the next whatever how big the feature seventy two hours. If you can't, reduce the scope of the feature. If it has eight features, only focus on one, but ship that thing to production. Like, get it through PR, and that doesn't mean you submit the PR. It means whoever needs to approve your pull request, get on the phone with them and get them to review live right Then you go and QA it. And if you're allowed to QA it, call the QAs, get them to approve it right now. And if there's an issue, then you go fix it. Just all the timelines, make them faster. Ride that feature until it is in production. And then I know that you're an actual outcome owner, not just an engineer. And so as long as you communicate that, the seventy two hours end, you still didn't send the features to production, you told you the performance review. The person is just not an outcome owner. And then you need to decide, are you okay with not having an outcome owner in the company? That's up to you then. You

**Harry Stebbings** [58:29]:

said about QA there. QA is now the most valuable skill in the world. Totally. Why is that and why

**Cliff Weitzman** [58:35]:

most people should at it? Alright. So in a world where software engineering is commoditized and design is commoditized, if you try to build stuff with cloud 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. I have a friend who works directly for Elon. Elon's like the best QA. He'll always found 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 because it's in production live. Like, I see it. So And then I call people immediately, or I send them a screen recording, and I'm like, why do we have this bug? And, like, either this is 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, like, a great prompt on Cloud Code, and now it's on your phone. The next forty eight 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 product from a great product, just QA. 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.

**Harry Stebbings** [60:12]:

So much of company interactions assessing talent is done in meetings in some respects. Why did you ban meetings?

**Cliff Weitzman** [60:19]:

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 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 sixty minutes long, thirty minutes before that, you still need to be home. Thirty minutes after that, you still need to be home. You can't think about the projects 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 have just been an email, or that that could have been a a Slack message. Who needs this? Nobody needs this. You're just creating slowness for absolutely no reason. The places where meetings get 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. The other thing I really dislike is performance reviews. We used to have a situation where leaders we don't have managers. We have leaders. 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 keyword, coding, designing, talking to users. We had leaders who were spending eight hours a week in performance management meetings with eight direct reports. They're like, this is stupid. We're gonna cut that to fifteen minutes instead of sixty 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. You don't respond unless the direction is bad, in which case you tell them this is the correct direction to go. Do you like HR? 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 the sidestepping it so far. Thank you.

**Harry Stebbings** [62:05]:

I tweeted it recently, and basically, the only people who shit on me shit on me because they were like recruiting is really important, and I completely agree. But I think it's so important that I take talent out of HR. For me, talent is its own independent function and HR is the management. There's the acquisition and then there's management. Unbluntly, I don't think great people need that much management. Vacation monitoring is not something that great people need.

**Cliff Weitzman** [62:30]:

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. 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'll give them the next one. And if they got it, I 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. You just want to do a situation where your team pushes as hard as you do. That's it. Do

**Harry Stebbings** [63:26]:

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

**Cliff Weitzman** [63:32]:

No. I think everybody can be a doer. I have this concept, which is I like awakening people. Like, I meet people, and and 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, 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. There's a great question that I like. Like, who's the first person who believes in you more than you believe in yourself? And so that's my favorite thing to do is, like, I'll meet someone. I'll be like, this is such a talented person, and I can see how amazing they are. 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 door.

**Harry Stebbings** [64:20]:

You said you were hiring a lot of people quite quickly at one point. You never raised a lot of money and did a big splashy round. Can you just help me understand, what did the fundraising profile look of this business? Because it's such a weird business. And we chatted before, and I in all honesty, was like, it was weird for me going into meeting you because we went for a walk around the park. So I was like, I don't know. My friends are VCs. All of them are, obviously. And like, there's nothing online. Help me understand this.

**Cliff Weitzman** [64:49]:

Yeah. So I started Speechify when I was in college. I was like 21 years old. For four and a half years, it didn't grow really fast. I just iterated on it until it did, and then it started growing really fast. And then I did this blitz of finding all the people who could teach it. And a half years in, how much revenue were you making? By four and a half years in yeah. We were making more than $5,000,000 at that point. And so we started growing really fast from the $5,000,000 upwards, and then a ton of the people who I talked to were the early investors. So Dylan Field from Figma, Mike Krieger from Instagram, Eve from Twitter, Zillow founders, Audible founders, Grammarly founders, Robinhood founders, Honey founders, 23andMe founders, Plaid founders, Medium, Brex, Richard Branson, Gary Cohn, who led all of Goldman. Charlie Songhurst was my very first investor.

**Harry Stebbings** [65:29]:

Charlie Songhurst was your first

**Cliff Weitzman** [65:31]:

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 one point one million five star reviews. We have 94% of the b to c voice agents market. We read more to people than any other AI product in the world. How much money have you raised? We don't share it publicly. You don't you at least you don't say it? No. Does your team know? No. Wow. Our leadership team knows. But yeah. No. We don't. And you don't say

**Harry Stebbings** [66:04]:

your valuation publicly?

**Cliff Weitzman** [66:05]:

No. There's only three reasons people typically share these numbers. Number one, they wanna bring more users in. We get so many users every single week. There's no reason to. Number two, for hiring. A 178,000 people applied to open engineering positions at Speechify last year. We don't need to make splashes about fundraising to hire. And number three is to get more investors in, but there's 10 investors in my inbox every week who are wonderful people who want to invest in the company. That's not what we need either. Like, what I need is if you have grown a product to more than $10,000,000 a month, please send me an email, cliff@speechify.com. I would love to talk to you. Like, teach me how to get more users. We just launched the enterprise business, like, literally, like, in this week. You If know how to get enterprise users, great. I would love to talk to you. That's a new part of my business. Why? Are you building an enterprise sales team? Now we're that is exactly what we're doing now, but, like, front deployed engineers. Yeah.

**Harry Stebbings** [66:53]:

Again, it was so funny. I was researching and on pitch book, which is, you know, you pay $50,000 a seat. Like, you get data on everyone. There's nothing on you. It came out with, like, news articles from, like, three years ago, I was like, fucking hell. This is impossible. We

**Cliff Weitzman** [67:08]:

just avoid doing news as well. Like, we just don't like it. I want users to come to Speechify because they want use voice agents or because they want to read their PDFs, not not because I'm looking for competitors.

**Harry Stebbings** [67:20]:

You know what's interesting? I'm gonna ask about two people now, because I had Jake Paul on the show recently, and was like, just relevance to everything. Relevance to everything. I really like Jake and Logan, but the comments were like, less relevant now. And you were like, Logan actually doing WWE makes sense. Would you buy or sell the stock of Logan Paul?

**Cliff Weitzman** [67:40]:

Oh, a 100%. Super hard. So here's what I think about Logan. I don't have a relationship with Jake. I know Logan super, super well. One of my favorite people. So Logan went super hard on Vine. He's, like, the the biggest person on Vine, and then Instagram, and then Facebook, and then YouTube. And this is the concept we talked about, which is bulking and cutting cycles for companies also applies to creators. So at that point, he was just dialed in. Right? It's like, you're cutting. You're just creating value. You're not learning. You're not doing anything. Milked everything you can milk from YouTube. I said, cool. Alright. What's the next challenge? They both got into boxing. They've done really well in boxing. Really, really well. And then Logan got this seat in the WWE. Now people forget this, but, like, WWE is like a top 20 YouTube channel in addition to having TV and Netflix and everything like that. And so when I was 30, I was really, like, concerned I hadn't achieved the goals I had in life, not even close. So I got this cabin on a river in The UK, and for four days in a row, all I did was made a list of the top 200 people who had accumulated the most power to impact the world by the age of 35. And one of the common themes I saw is people sometimes have this exponential growth between the age of 29 and 35. And one of the things that happens is they're like a virus. They attach themselves to a larger organization. From within, they lice that organization, and they use that organization to help them grow. And so the WWE is what launched The Rock. And so Logan is now accumulating all these amazing fans from the WWE that he could not have accumulated on his own. In addition, obviously, he did a great job with Trey launching Prime, a legit business in a very, very short period of time. And both Logan and Jake now have their fun. Like, Jake was, like, the meme of Sora. Great thing to do. And and so I think that they're now in this bulking mode where they're exploring a bunch of different areas, and they're seeing what takes. So Prime took, WWE took. There's all these different things that they're trying. And like him or hate him, part of the whole philosophy is being not likable but still generating attention. Logan's a really, really smart guy in my personal experience, and I also think that there's very few people who are playing the game like he is. He's, like, a very unique situation. Like, is it a company? Is it a person? Is it a social media company? Like, what what's happening here? And so I think he's created a lot of leverage for himself, which is really interesting.

**Harry Stebbings** [69:49]:

Do you apply that same philosophy to me then? Yes. Being virus attack. But if if I were to do that, that would mean joining Andreessen Horowitz or joining Sequoia.

**Cliff Weitzman** [69:58]:

But you can't lie, Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia. You cannot redirect the snake's head to be going in the direction that you want. Maybe you could. What I would do is I would join Union Square Ventures. I would join an institution that has a really storied name but doesn't have particularly strong leadership, and I would become the leadership for that organization. Over just building it yourself and being a Thrive. You can also just build it yourself. The other thing that you could do is find another way of doing it. So what's the besties called? The podcast All In. Yeah. Great example. You can have a side chapter to your life. Like, let's say you'd now became a fourth or fifth host in All In podcast. That would be pretty good for your career. It wouldn't take that much time from you, but it would help grow you really fast. It would help grow them really fast too. And so let's say you went on Shark Tank or Dragon's Den. Would be amazing for you. Huge existing institution takes very little of your time, but you'd be the loudest voice in the room with the most interesting things to say, and you'd get a ton more views. By the way, a great example would be, maybe you write a book, how I became a VC by the age of 28. And then that book is available in all the airports and newsstands, and you're using Penguin Random House as your launching pad. Figure out what is a launching pad. And for you, what's interesting is you started, what, ten years ago, fifteen years ago? Podcasting was not a thing at the time. Like, you were so early, so you rode a wave that came up with you. The question is, can you go now to a different wave that is already big, and then because of the strategic position you are in, grow with it. So TV is a great option. YouTube is an interesting one.

**Harry Stebbings** [71:24]:

MrBeast is another of these characters. You slept at MrBeast's house for three weeks.

**Cliff Weitzman** [71:30]:

What did you learn? So I first met Jimmy at a party of one of my friends' houses, and I had eight people working on the leadership team at Speechify at the time. I had a 100 people. He had a 100 people. He had eight leaders, and we just ended up talking for, like, three hours, and I was supposed to fly to New York. 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. I was like, alright. 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, a 100 people on set just to, like, essentially repaint the door pink. Like, I say that 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 is 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? 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 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. 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. Insane level of ambition as an operator, as a business person, as a creator. And I I'll give him his flowers. Like, he's done a really good job.

**Harry Stebbings** [73:21]:

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

**Cliff Weitzman** [73:26]:

Not for several years. Last year, they had the highest views, but this year, they're having a little bit of challenge. Mhmm. 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 to be a streamer, partly because streams get clipped, and then those clips can get watched 7,000,000,000 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 Beast Games. He 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, twenty four months, even more, has been operating as entrepreneur, building the company, building the products even more than building the content, while 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 make it grow even bigger. I have

**Harry Stebbings** [74:28]:

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 three x levered option on Nvidia in 2022 before the market caught on? And I was right in this. It's like, what? Can you talk to me about that?

**Cliff Weitzman** [74:45]:

Yeah. So it was not me. It was my brother, Tyler. It was the case that we were very excited about a 100 GPUs back in the day. H 100 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 h 100 GPUs, no one will let us buy them. What the hell is going on here? And there was a presentation that Jensen made 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 three x levered option. It's now, like, 36 x 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. And so I think at the end of the day, 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.

**Harry Stebbings** [75:55]:

The biggest lesson I have in ten years of investing is you have diversify to concentrate. And it actually, what I mean by I should have invested in everything, and I should have done to find the Alan Changs, the Adam Feroggis, the Cliff Weitzman's. You have to be broad to have

**Cliff Weitzman** [76:12]:

the luxury luxury to really know. 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.

**Harry Stebbings** [76:23]:

Would you still say

**Cliff Weitzman** [76:24]:

Nvidia

**Harry Stebbings** [76:24]:

is a buy today?

**Cliff Weitzman** [76:25]:

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.

**Harry Stebbings** [76:30]:

Do you think it'll be a $10,000,000,000,000 company?

**Cliff Weitzman** [76:33]:

You just need to look at the multiple of the revenue and profits. What is it trading at now? 3,000,000,000,000? Yeah. What's the Four four two. Four two. What's the multiple in revenue? I think 35. 35 is reasonable given how much they're growing. So, yeah, I think they have a lot more juice.

**Harry Stebbings** [76:48]:

One thing that I'm spending more and more time on is energy, naturally. Yes. How do you think about kind of energy requirements from AI given we're now 1% of energy utilization goes towards AI? Yeah. That will likely 10 to 12 times in those few years. Yep. How do you think about energy requirements where you would be investing? How you would advise me?

**Cliff Weitzman** [77:08]:

So one thing that I was surprised by is hydro. So all the dams that can be dammed have been dammed. Hydro power 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. One of my biggest side projects that I really wanna 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. Not one that creates energy just once 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 maximalist. I'm all in on solar. 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 born 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. It's just such 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, 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 Solar City. And I was like, who is this guy walking with Obama with rockets in the background? It was Wikipedia. So I read the Wikipedia, and then I found more information. Solar City was not a technology company. They were a finance company that had convinced, I think it was JPMorgan, to amortize the value of a solar panel over thirty 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 hounding pots. What

**Harry Stebbings** [79:20]:

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

**Cliff Weitzman** [79:25]:

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 rock 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. 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 slash 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 3AM and you messaged me, I'd respond back, and you didn't need to enable notifications because I was not iMessaging you. And if it was not 3AM, but the middle of the day, I would call you, and I'd solve that problem on the spot. And then every day, I would export the people who had churned given that it was thirty 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 because 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 y c model. I'll just talk to users. 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 black, or would have given people a faster horse, 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.

**Harry Stebbings** [81:44]:

It's so funny. We actually have a very strong product perspective on YouTube versus Spotify. Spotify, we do not offer video. You you cannot watch this on Spotify. You can watch it on YouTube, and we have Shorts across IG and TikTok and Instagram. 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, about ten minutes shorter, that's a lot shorter, than you listen on audio versus on YouTube where you have the full video. Wow. I like that. That's very opinionated. It's very taste based. By the way, the CEO of Spotify is

**Cliff Weitzman** [82:21]:

actively annoyed at that. 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? Why don't you take the audio AI

**Harry Stebbings** [82:32]:

is not there to make the frame transitions work.

**Cliff Weitzman** [82:35]:

I like the taste. So hey, the CEO is not Daniel like anymore. Who is it? Gustav. Harry is asking for a solution, please give it to him. Oh, I would love it if One should be able to upload the video

**Harry Stebbings** [82:45]:

file Yeah. And then it should sync to the audio file. Because one thing that it does do is it automatically plays video, and then you switch to audio. And that means when you switch between different apps, you don't get the annoying video thing in the corner. That's solving a different style of But the it'd be great if you could have two separate files attached and you could choose one, Kurt or not Kurt. Absolutely. Super interesting one there. Another one that I just have to ask is you got hacked, you found the hacker, and then you hired him. Yes. And he ended up living with you for a year.

**Cliff Weitzman** [83:15]:

Yes. We had a security vulnerability that did not expose user data, but cost us a lot of money. Essentially, someone could use our models for free. I was aware of this. And it was basically a trade off between that or launching new features on the AI model. And I was like, no. No. Launch the new feature. And then it came back to me. I was like, no. No. Launch the new feature. The worst that can happen is, like, they can abuse us. And then it happened again, and then we got hacked. Like, I deserved it. But it's okay because, like, the amount that we lost was, like, a couple $100,000, but it was, like, not crazy. Anyway, this happened, and I was like, goddamn it. And I just went on this, like, search of figuring out who hacked us, found the person. The attack came from, like, a school domain, and so I ended up messaging the provost of the school. Like, all the I found the person. We got on a Zoom call. I was like, do you wanna tell me what happened here? And they fessed up to it, and they're just like, they're a kid. They're young. They didn't know that I mean, I don't know how they did it, but they didn't know this was not okay. And then, like, I asked them to stop. They stopped. They took down the thing that they did. I was like, to be honest with you, this is pretty impressive. This is exactly what I would have loved to have done at your age if I didn't know that it was not okay. But I was not ready for hiring them for Speechify, was like, this person's got it. So I hired him to do personal projects for me. Like little side projects, like optimization of my email drive, like all these small that I wanted to improve my life that didn't exist. He was my personal engineer for a long time. So all the early voice projects at Speechify, like the very first version of Jarvis that I could call on the phone and talk to, he built it for me. And like, well, I like, I had the core team, and then I would text them, hey, can you do this? Like, here's a cool repo I found, and he would just do it. Like, we built a translation to all these things, and then eventually he came and lived in the first in LA and then in Miami, and then at that point, we built enough trust that he joined the core team and, like, worked on real products. But my philosophy is if you find someone that is talented, better work with them. And, like, most people, like, if they get hacked, like, that person is my enemy. They are evil. I do not wanna interface with them ever again. And, like, you'll see in world history, the most successful leaders are the people who end up having some confrontation with someone, but recognize that that person is amazing and find a way to still work together. So that's my philosophy in general. I I do

**Harry Stebbings** [85:11]:

have to ask just a couple more is, one, we are seeing insane revenue ramps from consumer AI companies, and it's distorting our minds in a lot of ways. When we are looking at insane revenue ramps on consumer AI companies, you mentioned churn earlier, what do we not know, think, analyze when it comes to churn, usage, retention? Advise me. The main thing

**Cliff Weitzman** [85:34]:

to look for is inference costs burning those companies alive. Like early days of KSI GPT, they're just burning billions of dollars in inference costs. And so we had exactly that revenue ramp in 2022, because we were just early. We started doing this in 2025. Sorry, 2015 dyslexia. And we had built models and like, they were great, but like, once users probably started to use Speechify, it stopped being a business and started to be a charity. So the whole focus of the 40 person at the time, AI engineering team at Speechify, and all the GPUs that we had bought in the data center that we set up was to reduce inference costs. And we got it to the point of single digit dollars for a million characters. If you go to any other model, it'll be anywhere from 30 to a $100 per million characters. So there's like two order deviation, standard deviation's cheaper. What is Leven Labs? For the, like, standard model, it's anywhere from 70 to a $100. And for the v three fast model, it's like $30. So, like, literally, more than 10 x cheaper. And that was just our whole focus for two and a half years. And we solved it. And that's why the company has been profitable for so And so when you look at a company that is hyper growing like that, you just gotta ask yourself, are they just giving away free money? So let's take Cursor for example, which is a really great example. Like, Cursor is one of my favorite examples ever because the market demanded that tool. Every software engineer who was coding inside of of with ChatGPT wanted an integration into their IDE. So all they did was take two separate tools, fork the open source repository for Versus Code and add Claude Sonnet at the time. And all the electrons on the right side were dying to go to the left side. And the second you put a bar of metal on top of it, of course, you had the flow of money. And so that flow of money, as we all know, went straight through Cursor and to Anthropic. That is actually great because they didn't lose real money in the process. They just upped revenue that did not become profit. But very often, you'll have a company that raises $50,000,000, and they're just burning the $50,000,000 alive. So make sure that there's a plan of how to reduce costs with time. However, here's the most important thing. Any Harvard MBA can figure out how to cut costs. Just requires being smart. Takes a genius to increase revenue. So still, if that company has an amazing growth lever, as long as there's some differentiator, they have better design, they have community community is, like, so important. If they have community around it, then that's probably a pretty good bet. Are we about to see churn rates hit companies in a way that we haven't expected? None if it's a product that you really need. If you have a disability, if you are blind and you need glasses, you will never churn from glasses. If you need a wheelchair, you're not gonna churn from your wheelchair, in the same way that people don't churn from Speechify. But if it's a frivolous use case that's not important, then yes. Like a meme maker, sure. But if it's something that's a tool that you need to survive, then no. Does Apple buy WhisperFlow? Oh, Apple launched as a competitor. Really? Why are they so incapable? Okay. So Apple bought the Siri team way back in the day. Apple has this philosophy of on device security, and therefore they're not using models that run on the cloud by and large. The keyboard does did not give you access to the full RAM. So therefore, it's very difficult to run either a Wi Fi call that does text to speech speech to text or something that connects to the app. WhisperFlow has done an amazing job. I'm super proud of that team. Like, such great marketing, like, everything. Obviously, you could do the same things with Speechify, but, like, they just did such a good job with the marketing, organic, like, incredible. Great growth story. Here's the thing. Right? It's very difficult, like you said, to be AI first, like AI native, like audio first, AI first, mobile first. Apple has built such an amazing ecosystem that by and large kinda become lazy. Right? Like, this is the cycle the circle of life for startups. Like, you need the hungry small startups to go after look. Look. Even like, Apple makes so much money off the App Store. Like, I can't even get an API to get receipt for a user that makes a purchase. Like, it's so difficult to work with the App Store at this point. And we love Apple. Like, you know, it's made our business so much money, but it's just hard. I'm very excited about the transition of the new CEO at Apple. Let's see what comes out of that.

**Harry Stebbings** [89:16]:

Why are you excited?

**Cliff Weitzman** [89:17]:

I think that the new CEO is more of an engineer, and so I'm excited to hypothetically have more support of good engineering tools for people to build excellent things for the platform. Tim Cook is like a god when it comes to supply chain. Like, no one comes even close. I And think that Apple just won that race. Right? AirPods were absolutely a huge win. Apple Watch was a huge win. Costs for producing iPhones, amazing. Like, have you ever heard of Apple having a supply shortage? The first time I ever heard one is, like, Mac minis were out of stock, But, like, they always had the product to sell. Amazing, amazing company. And by the way, AirPods made more money than Spotify and almost every other audio company put together every single year for the last seven years. Like, the amount of listening is absolutely unhinged since podcasts and audiobooks have 40% penetration in most markets today. In markets that they don't, like Mexico, they're growing exponentially, so you have picked the correct career. Speechify is just AI generated podcasts, AI generated audiobooks, so the TAM is really big, but Apple drove that with AirPods. So they won. They locked in the supply chain supply chain side and, obviously, the brand side, and everybody trusts them. Okay. Time to go back from cutting mode into bulking mode. That's it.

**Harry Stebbings** [90:21]:

Dude, we're gonna do a quick fire because otherwise, I could talk to you all day. I'm gonna mix it up a little bit. You can buy OpenAI at $8.50, or you can buy Anthropic at $8.50.

**Cliff Weitzman** [90:30]:

Oh, damn. I like to be contrarian when it comes to these. So most people in my seat would say Anthropic right now, because I love Cloud Code. Oh my god. I would marry Cloud Code. Very hard decision. I would to be contrarian, would say OpenAI. Why? I often will look at the founders, and though I get that Sam Altman rubs a lot of people the wrong way and comes off slimy, I think he's really good as a company operator. Really good. Sorry. But

**Harry Stebbings** [90:55]:

batting that up with data for me.

**Cliff Weitzman** [90:57]:

Sure. No one has raised as much money as Sam Altman in the history of Silicon Valley like that. Completely ridiculous. True. The recruiting for OpenAI was absolutely insane. You get Greg Brockman, you get Ilya Siskiver. Taro.

**Harry Stebbings** [91:10]:

Taro. Greg Brockman? This was years and years ago. This was ten years ago. Latest recruiters in the last five years, mega bar, Mega bar on top the match.

**Cliff Weitzman** [91:19]:

The

**Harry Stebbings** [91:19]:

You

**Cliff Weitzman** [91:20]:

whole coup, and the internal team did support Sam. So also, when it comes to like enterprise deals, he's so good at it that it looks like black magic and looks like fraud. Mhmm. Right? Here's the analogy I give people, and again, I wanna give them credit for they did it first. There's a lot of AQ in that company, because OpenAI actually started in 2015. Chesapeake didn't come out until 2022. The way I liken it is you had Columbus going to the richest man in the world at the time, the king of Spain, and saying, hey. I wanna get to India, AGI. And on the way, he found The United States. Right? America, Chatuchipiti. That's exactly what happened. Sam and Ilya and Greg and Elon went and got a ton of money from essentially Bill Gates, right, Microsoft, tried their best to get to AGI, found Chechiuti along the way, and then they made it into a really great, really great experience and product. Anthropic is running circles around them right now, like, especially in the coding arena. Let's see what happens. I right now use Anthropic for everything, and I do not use for almost anything. And one of my least favorite things in the world is clickbaiting me at the end of its responses. I've literally written a prompt, like a shortcut on my computer to, like, tell it off every time it does it to get it to stop. But I think that they're in a very good, not in the tech community, but outside the tech community. Their brand is pretty good outside the tech community. I think that they have a ton of cash. I think they have a pretty strong team, and I prefer to be contrarian than say the obvious answer. But Anthropic is so good. So either give me more options or let me give me an opportunity to contrarian here.

**Harry Stebbings** [92:43]:

Is is is Grok gonna be a meaningful competitor?

**Cliff Weitzman** [92:46]:

Good question. Yes. Yes. It will. Same thing. Elon is a savage. Like, there's a rule that everybody should know, which is never bet against Elon. You just shouldn't do it. What have you changed your mind on in the last twelve months? I have a good one. Last year, MrBeast, Jimmy, was like, hey. I wanna do this video where someone starts off no money, no phone, no computer in the middle of America, and they need to start a business. And I think that you would be a hilarious person to do it. And I was like, Jimmy, I don't got time for this. And he's like, I'll do this many Speechify integrations. Like, okay, that's not really a good deal. Let's do it. So I spent eleven days sleeping in a Walmart parking lot in the middle of America. It took me three days to get an iPhone, make enough money to get an iPhone, five days to make enough money to have a laptop. I started working at a company, worked at a pizza restaurant, worked at a gym, and the video essentially fell apart. Like, were a lot of challenges, it didn't work. So I was really upset about it. And typically, I take a 100% responsibility, 200% responsibility for everything I do, and I couldn't figure out what I could have done more to make the video work, and it took me a couple months to figure it out, but eventually I figured it out. I became resentful. I thought that part of, like, the production team, like, they they said they do this, and then they didn't, and they said they did this, and then they didn't, and I forgot to be grateful for the fact that I was doing something so cool that could inspire hundreds of millions of people. And what I realized is I often tell myself that my greatest advantage is that I have this AQ thing. I'm really good at keep I keep going when other people stop. I put more reps in than everybody else, but that's actually not my biggest advantage. My biggest advantage is I'm typically very grateful, and I'm really optimistic. And in that moment when things got really tough, it's around day nine where I was very hungry. I forgot to be grateful, and I forgot to be optimistic. And I think that one of the core inputs for allowing someone to have super strong AQ is they can find the goodness in every situation. They can find a way to be grateful about things. When I got into coding, I would misspell everything. An assignment that would take a normal person four hours would take me seventeen hours. So I had a notebook, and every day I would write before I go to sleep and before or, like, right as I woke up, I'm good at computer science. I'm good at computer science. I'm good at computer science. And I found it really challenging, but I really appreciated that I got to learn because I wanted to. And so the thing I changed my mind on is that the most important thing is even when things are shitty, you gotta find something to be grateful for. Do you worry about wealth and equality in a world of AI? All the time. Constantly. Constantly. And especially after that experience, like, I was generous with people who were living on the street before. Now I'm way more. Like, I just buy people phones because because that's the thing that I wanted. It's like, I'll go into the convenience store and just buy any Android that's there and give it to them.

**Harry Stebbings** [95:09]:

Because you just saw how difficult it was starting from zero.

**Cliff Weitzman** [95:11]:

Not having a phone is insane. It's literally madness. And, like, I came into the project, like I had a full meal beforehand, and I have a lot of random skills, and like eventually I did succeed in getting an iPhone, but it was really hard. And if you don't have a phone, you don't have Google Maps. Like, you you you literally can't navigate. You don't have Wi Fi. You can't put a phone down to get a job. You can't even drive for Grubhub or Uber Eats or do Deliveroo because you don't have a phone, and phones get stolen in those situations too. So, like, first of all, my personal opinion, the government should give a free Android to everybody who wants one. Like, you should be able to go to the Social Security office and just get a phone. Like, it's a basic human right at this point, in my opinion. The second thing is the Gini index now is getting really messed up. All the value is accruing to essentially buffoons like me who built a consumer subscription product or a AI product that gets a ton of people to pay for it, and it becomes like a standard in their life. And as long as you figure out the inference costs, you just print profit, and that doesn't make any sense. It's too few people getting too much leverage, not to mention, like, the hyperscalers. So what happens to everybody else? And so the solution is don't be a Luddite about it. Embrace using these tools, because number one, you're gonna get more entrepreneurs, which is an amazing thing. It's easier than ever to be an entrepreneur, which is, by the way, why I'm really long meta. A world where it's easy to do engineering and easy to do design, more things launch, and go to market, it becomes the most important thing. And the second thing is how do you reskill people? So I do believe that you can get people who are old and grizzled and have are veterans to learn how to use AI, but most people don't naturally do That's an unnatural behavior, but go back to the principle of a little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y intercept. People just need to be awakened and need to convince them that it's fun to learn and you need to learn, but not everybody will do that. And that's the whole point of having a government system is there should be a way to reeducate. And especially now, as you see k to 12 kind of falling apart and universities falling apart, I think there will come a wave of people going back to school after the age of 40, but school will be different. I don't know what that looks like, but I think that this is, like, the most important topic that we're not thinking about. Would you suggest your children to go to university? I had the best time in university of anyone I've ever met. My cheeks started to hurt from smiling so much three months in. I found my people, and I was so lucky to go to a place where I had an open curriculum. Half my classes, didn't have the prerequisites for. I got to make my own major, and and I met so many people who have stayed my friends for life, and I would just have two dinners every single night, and I'd sit with a table of six people I didn't know, and I'd do that again. Actually, I didn't do that again. So three dinners a night. So yes, I would because it was the best experience of my life, but I would not tell them that the university is the thing that's responsible for their education. You are the quarterback of your own education. You need to be constantly reading like, I the reason I am the person that I am today is because from the age of 13 till today, I have listened to a 100 audiobooks every single year. I will say that in the last twenty four months, half of the content that I've consumed is deep research outputs from Speechify where I go, hey. Give me a comparative analysis of Catholicism versus Protestantism versus Mormonism versus Islam. And then I listen to that 200 page document. And I'll be like, hey. Saw I this cool company called Etch. Explain what this company does. Hey. Explain to me how to build a fusion nuclear reactor. And then I'll listen to like, I'm just constantly listening to these things. And, like, my workflow is I'll ask a question. I'll get back a 100 pages, and I'll listen to it on Speechify while I'm walking around. Everybody should constantly be doing this, and my thought is, like, when I have kids, which I'm excited to one they have, I want the teacher agent inside of Speechify to be amazing, so they could skip all the classes in school. Like, my brother and I skipped basically most of the math classes when we were in high school because we got bored of the normal math, but math is the only class that's easy to skip because you just take the test, if you pass it, you're good. Everything else is subjective. But if you have an agent that asks you all the questions about the American Revolution and all the questions about Greek history and it shows that you're very accurate, it's a signal that you can move on. What purchase under a thousand dollars has been the most impactful? Oh, there is a protein powder on Amazon called Earth Chimp, which is pea based protein powder. And you take that and a 32 ounce bottle of, like, shaker instead of the 16 ounce, and I have that three scoops every morning and every evening, and I don't need to worry about food because I get the amount of protein I eat every single day automatically. And I'd say, like, half my body at this point is pea based protein.

**Harry Stebbings** [99:21]:

And you

**Cliff Weitzman** [99:21]:

so you don't eat food in the day? I do eat food in the day, but like I travel a lot. And so I have that like 80 grams of protein in the morning, 80 grams of protein before I go to sleep, and like, know I'm good for

**Harry Stebbings** [99:30]:

food. 80 each? Yeah. Isn't the ingestion rate something like 20 per?

**Cliff Weitzman** [99:36]:

Per hour? Yeah. No. Like you see that in some studies and by and large, that's not true. Like if you talk to people who are bodybuilders, it's just not reflected. Like it's like a very small optimization. You can ingest 80 and it's not futile.

**Harry Stebbings** [99:48]:

You'll fart

**Cliff Weitzman** [99:48]:

more.

**Harry Stebbings** [99:49]:

You fart like a trooper. You would if you ate. Yeah. With eighty and eighty, dude? Dude, I don't wanna be next to you on a flight. Yeah. What's the workout routine? And any tips for doing it while traveling? Because when I travel, I'm

**Cliff Weitzman** [100:01]:

Okay. So great new hack that I have. Take photos of yourself and upload it to Chatty GBT, ask it what body fat percentage am I and what do I need to improve, and it's so good at giving you information now, and then ask it for the workout routine to take the parts of your body that you think you wanna improve, and it'll just give you the workout routine. It's really good. So most of my sport is tricking parkour and gymnastics, so and I'll go to a gym wherever I'm going. There's a great one here in East London called Over Gravity, and I'll go train, and I'll find the best athlete in the gym. And I'll go up to and say, hey, what's name? John. I'm Cliff. Nice to meet you. Hey. You seem amazing. Can I hire you to coach me one on one? How much would that cost? I'm like, I don't know. £75. Whatever. So from that point on, I will go train. I'll train with them. And like gymnastics, I just love to do, so I'll do it like for three hours in a row. And I love to have somebody else who's better than me watching me and giving me tips. And so it doesn't matter whether it's like a sport I'm trying learn or guitar or whatever, like, I'll hire someone to watch me do the thing and coach me to be better. When it comes to lifting, I mean, obviously compound movement movements or whatever are great. DEXA scans are incredible, so you can find the breakdown between fat, muscle, and bone density in your body, and you can figure out exactly what your body fat percentage is, and it's just all macros. So if you're my size or your size, you wanna have about one pound of one gram of protein per pound of body weight. You wanna have about 50 to 80 grams of fat every single day, and then you cut or you bulk. So if I cut, I eat a 130 grams of carbs a day. If I'm bulking, I'm eating, like, 260, 70 grams of carbs a day. And then, like, your body's just a science equation. You can change it. Have you ever done fasting? I have done fasting for, like, Yom Kippur, but I haven't done it for health reasons. I've tried. It's just very hard. Bit depressing, I have to say. Yeah. And one

**Harry Stebbings** [101:37]:

do get bar a day? Oh, I I well, that that is fucking depressing. Is one of the worst things ever. Okay. Final one. What excites you most about the next ten years? When you look forward, what are you like? I'm pumped about this.

**Cliff Weitzman** [101:50]:

I think humanity is essentially going through a new form of evolution. I mean, if you look at evolution, right, to begin with, like, humans are, what, the last minute on the clock. We're getting to a point where evolution is not a matter of your physiology, but of your brain's ability to intake information faster and understand that information and use it in a different way. And I love fantasy audiobooks, and sometimes there's this thing called a familiar in fantasy audiobooks. It's like this, you know, this animal, like a dire wolf that can connect with you mentally and, like, do basically, I feel the same way about my computer and my phone and all the tools that I get to use. And my team, by way, like Speechify is one live organism around the world. You can just achieve more. Like, even if I just look at what happened to my dad with his experience with cancer and my brother who's still ill, but we're gonna figure it out, I just have this permission Promethean view that we can solve everything. And when you talk to a doctor, you can very easily educate yourself to be as sophisticated. When you don't know how to solve your AC, you just take a video with Etchety B. It tells you how to set the AC and how to work your stove and how to set a fusion reactor in your backyard. You can learn everything. You can do stuff. You can build stuff more easily than ever before, and our kids are gonna grow up with this mentality ingrained. So my dream for the world is everybody believes they have a higher level of agency than we do today, and hopefully that will be the case. The negative side of that is people think they have less agency because they abdicate all the decision making to AI. And so you need to be peep to have people be in the driver's seat and use the tools instead of having the tools use them.

**Harry Stebbings** [103:14]:

I think Sam Morton said it very well when he said older people use it as a replacement to Google and younger people use it as their operating system for life. As he said there, how do I make air con work? How do I get a better shoulder density or whatever that is? Cliff, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for putting up with my wandering questions, but you've been amazing. Thanks for having me. But before we leave you today,

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