Wispr Flow CEO Tanay Kothari - voice AI deep dive

Tanay Kothari is the co-founder and CEO of Wispr Flow, a voice-first AI assistant that recently raised $56 million in Series A funding. In this episode of World of DaaS, Tanay and Auren discuss: Why Apple and Google's dictation tools failWhat AI-first devices will actually look likePivoting from hardware to softwareVoice replacing nearly three-quarters of keyboard usage Looking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to worldofdaas.com for our podcast, newsletter and events, and ...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Auren Hoffman?

  Hello fellow data nerds. Welcome to World of DAS. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Incubate and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news, original content, articles on data and more at worldofdaas.com. That's world of das, D-A-A-S, dot com. Hello fellow data nerds. My guest today is Suneet Kothari. Today is the co-founder and CEO of Whisperflow, a voice-first AI assistant aiming to make the keyboard optional. By the way, I use it. I love the product. Whisperflow has been growing its user base by 50% month over month, and they've raised $30 million Series A earlier this year. Today, welcome to World of DAS.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Orin, thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this.

• 0:45Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, okay. I'm a big user, by the way, of the product. I'm a new user, actually, so I'm excited to talk to you. I'm just interested in dictation in general. Apple's got native dictation, Google's got native dictation, Microsoft has native dictation. They don't really work that well. Why haven't they nailed it?

• 1:05Speaker 01

  I think, at the end of the day, what we saw happen was, I honestly wish they did, but the problem that they were trying to solve is very different than the problem that people wanted solved. So every single dictation tool, until today, what it tries to do is, it takes what you say and it tries to write it down word for word.

• 1:27Auren Hoffman?

  And while you're saying it too, it doesn't like wait for the context and stuff, right?

• 1:31Speaker 01

  While you're saying it. So one, you're distracted, reading the same thing that you said half a second ago. Two, the way you speak is very different than the way you write. You don't actually want your rambles on a piece of paper. What you want is something that is ready to send, that is in your written tone, for the purpose you're in.

• 1:50Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, if you're like, um, uh, you don't want those in there either, too, right?

• 1:54Speaker 01

  No, not at all. If you're sending an iMessage, you want it to sound casual. If you're sending an email, you want it nice, structured, professional sounding. And the way you speak is the same in all of these cases. It's just the writing that is different. So that is the first insight that we had. The second insight that we had is, what people want from these systems is perfection. If you dictate something with Siri, and in every sentence, it's going to make one mistake... The time you spend fixing that mistake just takes away all the productivity boost that voice gave you.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  What we aim to do with Whisperflow is, hey, the metric we want to optimize for is what we call zero edit rate. What percentage of your messages are perfect? Apple, Google, Microsoft, all of these large players added about 10% zero edit rate, which means 10% of their dictations are perfect and ready to go. Whisperflow today is 85%.

• 2:53Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, and you probably even need to get into the 90s to make sure it get used all the time. There's probably some sort of number where you need to get to where people will use it all the time. Even the other night, I came from an event where they had really good sake, the Japanese wine. And so I was sending a text to someone saying, hey, thanks for bringing this amazing sake. And it kept messing up. This isn't Whisperflow, this was Apple, kept messing up the sake. And there was just, I did like four takes. And finally, I'm like, okay, I just went to Whisperflow and did it and it worked great. But just like those types of things, maybe it's not like the most obvious thing that someone's going to talk about. Maybe sake isn't a common thing people talk about. Most people aren't always having obvious conversations.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  No, almost no one is. That's why you haven't ever heard anybody say like, hey, I love Siri or I love Google's voice. Cause it never gave you that aha moment of.

• 3:47Auren Hoffman?

  It's good if you have a very specific instruction. If you're like, hey, Alexa, play this song by Taylor Swift, it will generally find it because it knows, okay, you're saying play, which is the code. And then, okay, usually talk to me about music. And therefore, if the surface area is really big, like it is with text messages and emails and those types of things, it really starts to break down really fast.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Oh, 100%.

• 4:14Auren Hoffman?

  Even when they're doing translation on a voicemail. So when you get a translation, a voice to text on Apple or Google, those are also laughably wrong. And those, they have plenty of time. They're not doing it in real time. They can take it, they have plenty of time, they can then do the thing and then they can send it to you. Is it just they're not putting compute behind it? Or why is that so bad?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  That is the second biggest insight that we have. That is a mistake people are making today, which is when they're using voice, they're just like, hey, here's the voicemail, let me transcribe it. So they just use the audio. At the end of the day, even when you and I are speaking, just like humans understanding audio, right? There are so many different ways you can kind of hear the same thing. But what matters is the context. And there's been so many studies on this that if you have context, then humans understand perfectly what you're trying to do. And the same thing applies to models. So if in the voicemail, it understood a bit about who's sending it, who it's sending to, the voicemails always get my name wrong.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  And Apple should just be like, no, this dude's name is Tanay. That is likely what they're saying and not some other random word.

• 5:30Auren Hoffman?

  Right, because they're calling you. Of course, the person calling you might get your name wrong because it's not a common name. People get my name wrong all the time.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Yep. And so that is the second thing that we added in. And I think going forward in the future, that is just going to be common across all voice platforms that are super excited to be the company that is driving that change.

• 5:54Auren Hoffman?

  Now, is there a way to get? One of the problems is it's just hard to get natively in to iOS or into your Pixel or something like that. So on my laptop, if I want to use a voice service like Whisper, it's pretty easy. You can just hit a keystroke and you can do it. Where on your phone, you've got to go to a new keyboard or something. So it's like three buttons to get there often. And obviously, it's not an Apple or Google's best interest to get another voice system in there. So how do you circumvent that in a way to make it easier for the user long term?

• 6:28Speaker 01

  So most other voice keyboards are five, six taps. We made Whisper down to, okay, on frequent usage, it's just one tap to get it to work. If we want it to just be that consistently, the best experience, then Orin, you got to message Tim and tell him to do something about it. Android is going to be a phenomenal experience.

• 6:51Auren Hoffman?

  I don't think Tim Cook listens to this podcast, but Sundar might be. So we can at least talk to him through here.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Android is going to be fantastic because iOS is just heavily limited. They don't let you do a lot.

• 7:02Auren Hoffman?

  It's just heavily limited. Okay.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Android's going to work like a charm. So we're going to be shipping that end of this year.

• 7:08Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, awesome. Okay, cool.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Hopefully that gives Apple the impetus.

• 7:12Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, but there's all these reasons for me to switch to an Android phone. So it's very possible by next year I might be switching for a lot of reasons. Cause the Apple phone is just getting stupider and stupider compared to the Android phone just because it's not AI enabled.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Oh, and we're gonna have so many people in the comments. Talking to you about that one.

• 7:31Auren Hoffman?

  Totally, totally. I mean, look, I love Apple. I use it today, but jeez, they're falling behind fast. I find myself using voice way more today than even a few months ago. How are you using it? What are you doing in voice? You're probably in the top one percent of voice users, I assume. So how are you using voice that maybe the average person isn't?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  I'll tell you something shocking. I was looking through our user base and I personally am not even in the top one percent.

• 8:03Auren Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Because of how deep voice penetration has become because of Wispr Flow. So I'll give you one stat. When people start using Whisper, the first month, about twenty percent of the work on their laptop is done with Wispr Flow. Eighty percent is their keyboard.

• 8:19Auren Hoffman?

  How do you know? You just estimate it, basically?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  We just see the number of keystrokes, number of key presses that you do. We see that number of times you use Flow, we see that, and so we can put down, hey, what is the Flow versus keyboard look like? Four months in, it is eighty percent Flow, twenty percent keyboard. And that was shocking to me. And this is across every single Flow user ever.

• 8:45Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm not anywhere close to that today.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  You'll get there in a couple of months, but what we see is people slowly build that habit of voice. And this is the first time in human history, people have stopped using the keyboard altogether. And that leads to the question that you were asking is what do you use it for? Well, when people first start, they use it for one thing that they do often. They might use it for all their AI prompts or all their emails, all Slack messages, all documents and journals and notes that they're writing.

• 9:15Auren Hoffman?

  And by the way, the thing is like when I do an AI prompt in ChatGPT or whatever, it actually does do the voice transcription pretty well. If I talk to ChatGPT, that doesn't have a problem, actually. It usually does it quite well. It's like all the other things don't work.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Yep, you would be surprised. Chat G P T is actually the most popular tool where people use Wispr Flow.

• 9:39Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, just because they're already in it.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Even though Chat G P T literally has a mic button embedded in the product, but people love Whisper more than they do OpenAI's own tool. And so they just use Whisper inside of it. But coming back to the thing, what we see happen a week or two later is people hit this realization of, wait, why don't I use this for everything? And then what you see is the number of applications that use Whisper and blows up. The median number of applications per person is sixty nine where they use Whisper. So they're doing it, everything from sending a text to their mom, to the two-word Google search, to writing long messages. Couple of people have written entire books with Whisper.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  And so it is genuinely replacing everything that you would do with your keyboard otherwise.

• 10:29Auren Hoffman?

  It is bitter when I'm by myself, like if in my office by myself or whatever, when I'm in an office with other people or when I'm on a airplane or something like that, or on a train or whatever, I don't feel as comfortable. Maybe that's just me, but I don't feel as comfortable talking, even whispering in the thing. It just seems weird. So I'm more typing where as I'm by myself, I'm like talking all the time. Are people having similar experiences?

• 10:54Speaker 01

  A lot of people start off like that. And so what we've seen is a lot of our users are in open offices. And so about fifty percent of them, what they do is they have a room where they go to take Zoom meetings. We all do this all day long. So

• 11:09Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  They just have a two-hour block in their day where they go to this room and they get all their work done with Wispr Flow.

• 11:15Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  What I've started to see, and this is absolutely incredible, we're seeing actual workplace transformation, is people are in their offices, they're having these mics that come up to their mouth. Now, this is a fancy multi-hundred-dollar mic. People have these ten-dollar mics, these audio mics that come up to their mouth, they're silently whispering to it. And there are some offices where the entire office, everybody has this mic, they're all just whispering to their computers.

• 11:44Auren Hoffman?

  It's just like.

• 11:48Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, okay.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  It looks a little surreal.

• 11:51Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  But you see the productivity levels shoot up like nothing else. And it starts with one team using it. And initially, people are like, oh, what are these people doing? And then the boost is so visible that the rest of the office is like, okay, yeah, we want to do whatever they're doing.

• 12:08Auren Hoffman?

  I'll try, yeah.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  And we've seen this happen across Fortune 500 companies and the top startups and beyond. What I was thinking, I'll write a blog about how we're seeing this change happen.

• 12:20Auren Hoffman?

  It's interesting because for me, and I think for many people, I can input things very quickly with voice quicker than I can with typing often. But I still prefer to read, I can read much faster than listening. And so the text is very helpful. It's not like I want the two-way conversation, I don't need it to read it back to me. I can grok it, I can read much, much, much faster than, maybe even three X faster than I can listen. So it's very interesting how it's like a one-way input, not a two-way input.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yes, that was very intentional. I think a lot of people ask us if we're ever gonna do text to speech. And the usual answer is, people actually don't want that. It's very annoying to listen to something very slowly when you could just read it like that.

• 13:06Auren Hoffman?

  And also, like, sometimes you realize, just while you're reading it, you don't need to read all of it. You read the first sentence of the paragraph, I got it, I can move to the next paragraph. Whereas if you're listening, you don't have the ability to scan the document and move ahead. And this is not always that relevant that comes there. I find when I'm in the car, often I'm talking, let's say, ChatGPT or Grok or some of these things in the car. And it's just taking so long to have this learning conversation, whereas if I'm not, I have no choice but to listen when I'm in the car. Whereas when I'm engaged, I can learn so much faster because half the stuff they're telling me already know and I can move around. Or I don't need to know that, or it's just fluff, or whatever it is.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's bang on point.

• 13:49Auren Hoffman?

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• 14:30Auren Hoffman?

  Now, what about accents? What I found, okay, and this is my very small thing, is these things work super well with certain accents and terrible with other accents. I found even with strong accents from India, it works pretty well, but strong French accents, it can't handle at all.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Are you talking about Whisperflow?

• 14:51Auren Hoffman?

  I haven't tried Whisperflow with a strong French accent because I don't speak with a strong French accent. Yeah, I could probably be jay, but I don't really know how to do it. But I just found certain accents, these things generally tend to work better. Like if I use granola or some of these other things, they tend to work better depending on the accents that are... I don't know if you've come up with some of those things yourself.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  That was actually a really hard problem to solve. So what you'll see, and I guess if you don't have a strong accent, you wouldn't, but what a lot of other people see is if they speak English with a strong Russian accent, it writes it in Russian. And the models just do this for you. And it like translates the whole thing into Russian and then you're just like, what?

• 15:31Auren Hoffman?

  It knows, it somehow figures out that you're talking in Russian and like literally puts it out in Cyrillic or something?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  It does that, but you're actually speaking English in a Russian accent.

• 15:41Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  And it writes all of that in Cyrillic and just like translates the whole thing to Russian.

• 15:46Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, my gosh, that's crazy. I didn't know that.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah, this happens all the time with voice users that have thick accents.

• 15:54Auren Hoffman?

  Oh.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  And so that was a key problem that we had to solve.

• 15:58Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, my gosh, I had no idea. That's so cool.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's cool the first time, but then really annoying after that.

• 16:04Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, really annoying.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Sixty percent of our user base is actually outside of the US. Seventy percent of our users speak a language other than English. That was one of the things that we had to solve. And I think actually Whisperflow is the first voice AI tool that solves that. You can have a thick accent in any language and it just gets you still.

• 16:24Auren Hoffman?

  One of my friends, his mom lives in the US, but she's originally from India. Her first language is Hindi. She has a pretty thick accent. She moved here when she was thirty five or something. So she's a pretty thick accent. And when she now is communicating internally in her work, she now talks in Hindi. And then it automatically comes in and then it also translates it to English for her. Because her writing is good in English, but not amazing. And then she then can like send it on to her colleagues and stuff like that. And she says it's like a game changer for her in the office.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Yeah, no, definitely. I think there is, there are so many problems that ESL or English as a second language group face. When they're working, and this is not just in the US. People are all over the world. English is the international language.

• 17:17Auren Hoffman?

  English is the language of work. So if you're doing international business, you're using English.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's a lot of support that they need to be able to feel confident in their writing, their communication, because it's all important. So there's a lot that we're also going to be building there to make lives better for ESL speakers. Because that's actually majority of the work population.

• 17:38Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's more English speakers who speak English as a second language than people who speak it as their first language.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 17:44Auren Hoffman?

  It's really the only language like that that exists, really. What do you think the use cases are that will never move to voice or maybe not in the next five years?

• 17:54Speaker 01

  The only one. That I have seen there to be still people preferring other modes is journaling.

• 18:05Auren Hoffman?

  Journaling, oh.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  There's something about journaling that people find therapeutic when they're writing on a piece of paper.

• 18:12Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, they're actually writing.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Or for example, physically writing.

• 18:16Auren Hoffman?

  I would have thought journaling would definitely go to voice pretty quickly.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  It depends person by person. Some people, if they're just speaking out loud, they just ramble. And so they need something to ground them, which either they're writing physically in a notebook or they're like opening a document and then writing on their keyboard. That I've seen for some people is just they can use other tools, but it's never gonna work as well. Cause that's just how their brain works.

• 18:40Auren Hoffman?

  What about things that are super technical? When I'm coding, I don't feel like I want to use voice there. I like using the AI assist to help me. Or I can imagine some sort of AI assist for lawyers. I think that might be great, but I don't know if I want to do that by voice. I might probably want to use a text and then it pops up and gives me some options as I want to do that. It seems like those maybe move a little slower to voice or do you disagree?

• 19:03Speaker 01

  He would be shocked.

• 19:04Auren Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  I was shocked.

• 19:06Auren Hoffman?

  Just developers using it now, voice.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Developers are starting to become one of our biggest segment and they're using it in cursor. They're using it for every single thing. People aren't writing code by hand that much at all at this point. And same for lawyers. Lawyers is also one of our big, big segments.

• 19:26Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, interesting. All right.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  They're dictating contracts with Whisper. Cause they're like, this is just faster. I know exactly what I want to say and Whisper just writes in there self. But those two things I was not expecting at all.

• 19:39Auren Hoffman?

  Hmm, okay. I know when you guys originally started out, you're building a wearable device and pivoted. But thinking of the wearable world, where do you think the AI wearable world is going?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  There have been so many different instantiations offered that we've seen in the last couple of years. There was the humane pin, which you could just attach on your jacket or your shirt. There was a rabbit, R1, this little orange neon thing that you could have in your hand. There are companies like E O. That was just like an in-ear voice in, voice out system. And then you have the smart glasses, which are a lot.

• 20:18Auren Hoffman?

  But which I love. I use the Meta glasses and I love it. I think it's great. Doesn't do that much, but what it does, it does really well.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  I'm excited for when it has displays. And so the point we were getting to earlier, which is voice as an output is, I think, one of the most seamless ways for humans to interact with technology. However, displays as an input is the fastest, highest bandwidth way in which we absorb information. And so to me, just like that, first principle is thinking. If you're building a core piece of technology that is going to be with people, that is their primary personal computing device, it needs to have a display and it needs to have really solid voice input. Those two are non-negotiables.

• 20:59Auren Hoffman?

  Correct, yep.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Now, when you look at that, stuff that comes top of mind is number one, AR glasses with a display in them, similar to the new Meta Ray Bans. That I'm extremely excited about. It's also really hard to be able to get a tiny display.

• 21:15Auren Hoffman?

  Super hard.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  To replace what your phone does. It's possible, but it's hard.

• 21:20Auren Hoffman?

  Are you buying that one? The one with the display?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  I buy every single piece of hardware to test out, to play with.

• 21:26Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, to test out, of course, yeah.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  And the second thing is again, smartwatches. If you remember the movie Her.

• 21:34Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Think that showed it perfectly where you had an in-ear device. So it was voice first throughout. And then you had a little display that you could pull out time and again.

• 21:43Auren Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  The biggest change that happens that I think most people are not talking about is displays become secondary. And we have been in a GUI-first world for the last 25 years, ever since MS-DOS. This is something that is going to be one of the biggest technical revolutions that we'll see is the depth of the GUI. And that is going to lead to software being built differently, experiences being built differently, and a new generation of hardware that just adopts that.

• 22:14Auren Hoffman?

  Because even in a car, you can imagine, well, just tell me where you want to go. Okay, I want to go to Mary's house. Great, okay, we're going to Aunt Mary's house. Just sit back, we'll take you there. And give us a sense of the type of music you want to listen to or whatever. And then you don't have to know what's going on. You don't have to know how fast it's going. All the dials on the car you normally need to look at. You just could imagine all those get abstracted away. If you want to look at them, sure, but you don't have to look at those. Just like when I ride in the back of a car of Uber, I don't look at anything today. So the driver might be, but I'm not looking at any of those types of things. I just tell the driver where I want to go and maybe what kind of music I want to listen to and then we're off.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is a really good analogy, actually. I'm going to use that.

• 23:01Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, perfect. All right, great, great. It's free, don't need to give me any stock or anything for it. When you guys made the pivot originally from hardware, I think you had forty employees and you went down to like five overnight. I imagine this was a very trying time. Walk me through that time a little bit.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  When we started Whisper, we had the vision that, okay, in the next few years, everybody's going to be using voice. When that happens, you want to use it when you're around people. This is going back to the conversation we were having ten, fifteen minutes ago. And you want to not disturb them, but you also want privacy. You don't want to feel conscious. And so we wanted to build this wearable device that could understand what you're speaking silently. So it went from your thoughts to text and lets you do everything you wanted. And so we put together this incredible team of some of the best engineers and scientists in the world. PhDs across machine learning, neuroscience, signal processing, electrical, mechanical.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  And after working on it for three years, from twenty twenty one to twenty four, we actually had this thing work. It is, I think, still till today, the most magical piece of technology I've ever tried. And once it worked, we tried connecting it with Siri, ChatGPT, Alexa, and they all suck. We wanted something that went from your mental rambles to something that was structured and usable. And we called this little project Flow, the Flow OS. And we ran it on this hardware for good. Then I packaged it up because I wanted to give it to some friends who didn't have the hardware device. So I packaged it into a desktop app, sent it to them.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  That two friends became five, became ten, became a hundred, became a thousand, very quickly. And what hit us like a brick in the face was the realization that people still today don't have the behavior of voice. We're giving people a device that lets them use voice better. If they're not using it already, a year ago, no one was using voice. This company is going to tank. The first thing we need to do is build a behavior of voice. Now, again, I wish somebody else had built that so you could keep working on the hardware. But the way I think about the world is like, hey, this is the state of the world today. This is what I want it to be. I want it to be in a place where interacting with devices feels just as effortless as talking to a close friend.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Technology just gets you. It's with you 24/7. It lets you be present, doesn't pull you into screens. And when I think about a world like that, the way I think about what we do with the company is whatever is needed in the world to get people one step closer to that. Mid 2024, that answer was, we need to build voice as an interface that people can use. That was the hard decision that made us switch over from building a hardware device to the software device. Now, majority of our team are neuroscientists. We're collecting data for our brain-computer interface. We had a massive hardware team that was building the actual hardware device.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  And with this new product, there was none of that. And so it was insanely hard at that time. Think for two months, it was probably the lowest low for me. And it was really tough for a lot of people. And that was what I was feeling secondarily as well because I loved all these guys. I'm still very close to a lot of them. But we were doing this decision not because we were out of money. We had more than half the capital we'd raised. Not because they wasn't doing well. We were ahead of schedule, which is crazy for a deep tech company. Team was incredible. It was starting to work, but it was not the right thing to build.

• 26:49Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, you can't do both. You have to focus. You have to put all your eggs in one basket.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Getting one thing to product market fit is hard enough. And so decided to make the hard decision to move over here. And looking back a year later, because this is all happening August of last year. This is still fresh.

• 27:08Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. Sorry, ripping off the bandaid here.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Trust me, I've ripped it off myself hundreds of times before. But looking back, I think it was one of the best decisions we made. Because we are closer now to, I think, where we want the world to be. That decision was the actual decision that was ripping off the bandaid.

• 27:28Auren Hoffman?

  I'm obviously, these are talented people. Can I fund some of them? I'm sure they're going to start interesting things and things like that. Are they out there like any of them starting companies?

• 27:37Speaker 01

  A couple of them actually have. A few of them are leading the AI teams. Their chief scientists at a number of other companies. We're talking like Eight Sleep and Aura and a number of other new neurotech companies. People are building Meta Ray-Ban glasses. Other people are at Neuralink. And so it's crazy to see where people have gone. The thing that makes me happy is I think every single one of them found a new home. And we helped a lot of people through that. Because again, this is not their fault.

• 28:08Auren Hoffman?

  A talented people today shouldn't be a problem. That shouldn't be a problem in today's market if you're talented. Now, I know that you're big on overall optimization, health, productivity, et cetera. What are some of the counterintuitive things you do to optimize productivity?

• 28:25Speaker 01

  The best advice that I have gotten is you're gonna let some fires burn. When you're living life, when you're doing anything hard, that is complex, lots of moving pieces. There's a lot of fires that come up all the time. And if you try to go and try to fight all those fires and solve all of those problems, yourself or even as a team, you are all gonna get burnt out.

• 28:49Auren Hoffman?

  And also your context switching a lot.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  There's so much that happens because of that. I realize, hey, there's some fires that are important, the existence of the company. There's some others that if we just let them burn, it'll be fine. And just actively saying that, hey, let some fires burn. The moment, whenever I see the people around the table are anxious, something's bothering them. Just saying that one sentence puts people at ease.

• 29:17Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, they're like, all right, yeah, we understand. We can't do everything.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Can't do everything. It's okay. And you just see them relax and sit back in their seats. And having the mentality of when you're not anxious, when you can think clearly and calmly and you're composed, you're just able to do so much more. Clarity of thought is, I think, one of the most underrated productivity hacks. And anything that gets you there is, in my opinion, way better than literally everything else that I've tried, heard, or any amount of lion's mane or caffeine that you can take.

• 29:56Auren Hoffman?

  All right, a few personal questions. So on your bio, it says you're Forbes 30 under 30. You might be one of the only ones that haven't yet been indicted in that. How do you feel about that, given all the other kind of like famous people that are there? It's like a badge of honor and also a worry badge too. Yeah, because I've gotten so many wrong.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  It is funny. So when Saj and I were starting the company, the first thing that we did, before we even decided to pull the trigger, is we wanted to align on values, things that are the highest priority for us as individuals. And the number one thing is integrity. I think as a person, integrity is all you have. And if you lose it once, it's gone forever. And that has become just core to how me and him operate, core to the kind of people we bring on in the company, both as employees and investors. Doing things like the people who've gotten indicted, it doesn't worry me because that is so far away from the things that I actually care about.

• 30:59Auren Hoffman?

  Last question we ask all our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

• 31:04Speaker 01

  When you're building a new product, give it to your users for free. A lot of people, they're like, hey, first see if people are actually using it and you can charge them later. You can get a lot of people, scale the product and then you can always charge people later. What it does is you never genuinely learn if you're actually adding value. Cause if you're building something that adds value to people's lives and is actually solving a problem, they will transact back. And that is the strongest signal that you as a founder can use for deciding if you're building the right thing or not.

• 31:40Auren Hoffman?

  Why would that give you the signal? If someone bought Whisperflow but only used it once a quarter and you gave it away for free and someone was using it seven times a day or 20 times a day or something like that, wouldn't you get more signal from the latter than the former? You know by usage, it's hard enough just to get someone a product market fit. You just, you'll learn like, okay, whether they pay for it or not, it's like sometimes easier to get someone to pay than get someone to use it.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  In some cases, maybe if these two examples are the only things we're comparing, of course, the person who uses it gives you more signal. But from what I've seen, the person who pays and then doesn't use it, it's a very small minority of the people who would eventually pay.

• 32:18Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, I mean, sometimes when you pay, you almost like force yourself to use it.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  You force yourself to use it or you have used it enough where you want to pay. And so even in the product it's seen right now, when you sign up, no credit card. We actually give you two weeks of the full version for free. And then you get dropped down to the freemium one. And even then, we don't bug you with, hey, pay for this product, pay for this product, nothing. Just keep using it. We're happy, you're happy. But once you exceed the limits, once you're using it a lot.

• 32:47Auren Hoffman?

  Enough. Yeah, then you jump in.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Then the product's like, hey, now you gotta actually pay.

• 32:52Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay. So you are doing a free product. You're completely free. And then, once people use it enough, you ask them to pay. You're almost going back to that thing.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  You are, but then you also block people's usage when they are hitting that.

• 33:07Auren Hoffman?

  But wouldn't all freemium products be that way? Exactly what you said. Isn't that the whole goal of a free product? Is to get people to use it enough so that they pay?

• 33:17Speaker 01

  There's two nuances here that I would say are important. If I was now now going down into the actual tactical details of it, what percentage of your engaged users are actually paying you? That is important. If, for example, that's 1%, you gotta really go back to the drawing board and see like, why do I have millions of users? And only a thousand or a couple thousand people pay me money? If you added about 3% to 4%, it's good. It's decent. That's what you see for a lot of freemium products. With Whisper, we actually saw that number be 20%. 20% of our monthly active users pay us.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  And that, again, we're talking about strength of signal. And so I generally think there's very standard or do this thing. This is, this is perfect. But it all gets into the nuances. So this is the level of signal that you're getting. And that to us was like, okay, wow. This is extremely rare to see this kind of traction. And that is something really special here. Enough to convince us to double down, to leave everything else, to just focus on this and drive a lot more conviction. Worse than if it was 1%, maybe we wouldn't be here talking today.

• 34:41Auren Hoffman?

  This has been amazing. Thank you, Tanay Kothari, for joining us at World of DAS. I follow you at TanKots, T A N K O T S on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been a ton of fun, super interesting. I love your product. Keep building it. This has been great. I'm not even an investor or anything. I'm just showing your product just purely out of love. I wish I was an investor, purely out of love of the product. So this has been awesome. Really great chatting with you.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  All right. And thanks a lot for having me. This is fun.

• 35:13Auren Hoffman?

  Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to World of DAS wherever you consume your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and more. And please help us get discovered by leaving a review. And check out worldofdaas.com. That's worldofdas, D-A-A-S, dot com. And of course, connect with me on Twitter, at Auren, that's A-U-R-E-N. Would absolutely love to hear from you.