He went viral at 11 y/o—built the world's best dictation app, then raised a $30M Series A. | Tanay Kothari, Founder of Wispr Flow

Tanay Kothari (00:00:00):
Back in 2008, when the first Iron Man movie came out. I wanted to build Jarvis. So me and a friend of mine, built what was then one of the world's first voice assistants. This is before Siri, before Alexa, and to people it just felt like magic. It grew to about two and a half million users organically back then, and then Google shut us down.

Pablo Srugo (00:00:18):
How old were you at the time, by the way?

Tanay Kothari (00:00:19):
I was 11. It had sensors stuck all over your face. You're still non-invasive., and it could decode up to 10 words that you're thinking about. And so, for us when we were talking, somebody's like, "Hey, here's what we think this could become, here's what we know, and here are all the risks why this company would fail." You could tell me five risks that you see. I will tell you 100, because I know 100, and I'm very upfront about it. At the end of the day, the most important thing that nobody talks about with regards to startups is the people, and the team that you build. That comes before your product. That comes before your marketing. Because as you are your market. This went from being a side project in the company to now, I think, one of the most loved AI products of 2025. I think user growth and ARR growth are the two top of mind things for me. Both of them this year have been growing about 50% month over month. And so, right now also I would say this is maybe one of the fastest growing AI products out there or companies period.

Previous Guests (00:01:20):
That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean the name of the show is product market fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:33):
Do you think the product market fit show, has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests. Thank you. Tanay, welcome to the show, man.

Tanay Kothari (00:01:48):
Pablo, thanks for having me here.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:49):
Dude, I was. So this morning, I'm like outside and backyard answering emails. And I decided, we were talking earlier and I was obviously using Wispr Flow, but it's kind of like getting into the habit, right? So this morning I was like, no, you know what? I'm not typing anything. So I just, like, I laid there, dude, and I just crushed through emails. I'm just talking to every single email, not typing a single word, and I sort of felt like. You know those movies where you see like the execs, and they have an actual human assistant, and they're just like reading them the last mail or whatever. And they're saying say this, to this person and say that, like. It was like that man, it was freaking awesome.

Tanay Kothari (00:02:20):
It seems like you have a lot of email to get back to.

Pablo Srugo (00:02:23):
Man I crushed it. No longer dude.

Tanay Kothari (00:02:24):
That's awesome. I'm super happy to hear that. That's honestly my flow as well. Like, in the morning, I'm just on my way to the coffee shop and it's a 10 minute walk. And I think I get through about maybe, like, 40 emails in that time. Just phone to my mouth. Just responding to it, and when I get to work. I'm at inbox zero already.

Pablo Srugo (00:02:45):
That's awesome, man. So whoever hasn't heard of or used Wispr Flow, like it's, you know, this app you just got to download and try. At the end of the day, you just. You click a button on your Mac, for example, and anything that's open that has a cursor, it just types for you. But it doesn't like, and I'm not getting paid to do this. It's just that impressive. It just does it so fast, and with proper formatting. I'm correcting like maybe five percent of the time, you know, what I mean? Very, very not often. So it's pretty epic.

Tanay Kothari (00:03:09):
Yeah. Always happy to do these with happy users.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:12):
Cool, man. Well, listen, let's start at the beginning. You kind of stumbled onto this problem. You're doing something else before. But before we even jump into that. We'd love to hear your background more broadly, because I know you've done a lot of things that kind of led to this moment.

Tanay Kothari (00:03:27):
Yeah, of course. So, grew up in Delhi for most of my life, and Wispr Flow, we started about a year ago, but this is something I've been working on for the last 16 years. And so, back in 2008, when the first Iron Man movie came out. I wanted to build Jarvis. So me and a friend of mine, built what was then one of the world's first voice assistants. This is before Siri, before Alexa, and to people it just felt like magic. It grew to about two and a half million users organically back then, and then Google shut us down.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:57):
How old were you at the time, by the way?

Tanay Kothari (00:03:58):
I was 11. I know, yeah, my parents had a screen time of one hour for me, and so I would wait until they would go to bed. Then I'd call my buddy up. She'd be like, hey, their asleep, and then for four years, we both slept alternate nights. And every alternate day, we would just wake up the entire night, build, and then pretend to be asleep when my mom came to wake me up.

Pablo Srugo (00:04:25):
When did you learn to code? During, through that or were you already doing it before?

Tanay Kothari (00:04:30):
That was the inspiration that got me started, and so that was when I saw that I was, like, I want to teach myself how to code. I went to my school, I asked a couple of my seniors, like, Hey, how do I do that? How do you build apps? And they said, Oh, you're too young, you wouldn't get it. I mean, yes, okay. You see a 10-year-old scrawny kid asking you hard questions, you're gonna be like, nah, man. But nobody says that to me, and so that's when I pulled actually my first all night, right? I remember vividly, I was 10 years old. I was like, I'm gonna teach myself this thing, and so that was when YouTube had started to become a thing. So I went there, I started watching tutorials, started building things, and that was just the start of everything else.

Pablo Srugo (00:05:16):
What happened with this app, like, two and a half million downloads is crazy in any world but like when your 11 years old. Its just like insane. What happens, like, are you monetizing this thing? Is it free? What are your parents saying?

Tanay Kothari (00:05:16):
So I used to be a big philanthropist when I was 11. Because I was, like, I hate paying for apps. My parents never pay for any apps for me, and so I'm going to make it free for everybody. And so that's what I did. So it was free to download for anybody in the world. We built it on Android back then. And the thing is, I was afraid that my parents would scold me. So I never told them. I never told them until Google sent me a letter where they were pissed at me. And then I showed it to my dad and I was like, I don't know what this thing is, and then he's like, what on earth are you doing?

Pablo Srugo (00:06:02):
That's wild. What was Google pissed about? You had an app that was working.

Tanay Kothari (00:06:05):
So, do you remember LimeWire?

Pablo Srugo (00:06:07):
Yes, yes, yes. Cause all that stuff. Yeah, like Napster. Yeah, Word.

Tanay Kothari (00:06:11):
Exactly, right? And so, we're talking like 2008, 2009. You still had to pay 99 cents to download a song on iTunes, and I didn't want to do that. Most people didn't want to do that. So you'd go to mp3 skull and whatnot, to download these songs for you or LimeWire. LimeWire was shutting down so it was painful, and so we added this feature in our app where you could save things like play me the latest song by Metallica, and it would go find that on one of these websites but if it didn't then it would go to YouTube. It would find the song, it would convert it to an mp3, download that, and so Google was like, Why are we getting millions of requests from the scrub server that is scraping YouTube? And they were not happy.

Pablo Srugo (00:06:55):
That's wild. So ultimately, what, you just shut this app down?

Tanay Kothari (00:06:58):
Yeah. Yeah, my dad was like, you got to stop whatever you're doing. And I was like, yeah, I got to stop whatever I'm doing, and so we shut it down. I was a terrified kid, when I got that note. But it just stopped that, and I'm glad it didn't stop the rest of the things that I built over the years.

Pablo Srugo (00:07:15):
So then what happens after? Do you just keep, like, built? Are you hooked on, like, building apps and just kind of keep doing that? Or do you kind of stop for a while?

Tanay Kothari (00:07:22):
No, I just keep going. I still don't tell my parents what I'm doing, and it was funny. I didn't have my own laptop. So I used to take my mom's laptop. I used to remember what percent charge it had, when I picked it up and I'd charge it back to the exact same percent. Before putting it in the exact same spot on her table that I pick it up from every night. And I just did that for the next four years until I could convince my parents to buy me a laptop. And then I just moved it all to my thing. It's way easier after that. But over the next.

Pablo Srugo (00:07:56):
Did you have any other apps that went crazy viral like that or was that the biggest one? That first one?

Tanay Kothari (00:08:01):
There were a few actually. So, I built about 60-70 different products over the years.

Pablo Srugo (00:08:06):
Wow.

Tanay Kothari (00:08:07):
And there are a few that did really well. There were some that were, like, high school companions. There were some that were based on just security and more seamless ways to listen to music. Some were productivity-based. There were some games that I built over the years. We built for Windows Phone, Android, iOS. And over the years, taught myself all the different languages needed to code across all the different platforms. And so, yeah, it's been crazy to see all of that come up over the years.

Pablo Srugo (00:08:40):
Do you get any offers from, you know, sometimes, you hear these big companies finding some, like, 15-year-old kids that have just been coding for a long time. They just try to hire. Do you get any offers like that?

Tanay Kothari (00:08:48):
I got something different. So I was at this incubator in India. This is India's first incubator. It was called Investopad. Now they have, like, hundreds of millions of dollars. Maybe even a billion dollar fund that they invest out of, and so back then I was there for a hackathon, and everybody there was a college grad. I was in ninth grade and I was working on something and I was in the elevator with the managing partner. And so he was asking me about what I was building. I explained the whole thing to him, and then he was like, Oh, what university do you go to? And I was like, Nah, dude. I'm like, I just got into high school, and so he was like, shit, okay. I want you to come talk to me tomorrow, and I was like, cool, I'll come by. So I came by and he wanted to start a company with me. And so he and I started a company. I was the CTO, he was the CEO. It was called Proximity. Which was a product where there's a lot of people, they travel a lot. Oftentimes they might cross paths with friends who are traveling to the same place, but you have no idea about it, and so how do you let people make those missed connections? And so that was the problem that we were solving for, and so we build this product together. And so I spent my summer vacation in ninth grade going to that office every single day, spending like 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. there. I had to come back home because I was young. I couldn't spend, like, sleep there or whatever.

Pablo Srugo (00:10:12):
And this was back in New Delhi as well?

Tanay Kothari (00:10:13):
This is all in Delhi, and that was my first experience into just building a product. And I learned a lot more from him. Because at that time, right? I've been this guy who spent most of his life behind a computer screen. I had written more code than I had spoken words in my life.

Pablo Srugo (00:10:31):
Words, yeah that's crazy.

Tanay Kothari (00:10:33):
And so, what I got from there was he would be having calls with his LPs. And he'd just be like, Tanay, just sit here in the background. Shadow me, I want you to learn how to do these things. And so at that time, he's raising money from like Matrix Capital, Sequoia Capital. 

Pablo Srugo (00:10:50):
Wow.

Tanay Kothari (00:10:51):
Like, the top VC funds in the world. And I, as a 15 year old, had the opportunity to just sit and listen to him.

Pablo Srugo (00:10:58):
And this is when, by the way? This is, like, 2012, 2013?

Tanay Kothari (00:11:01):
This is, now we're talking like 2013. Is 2013, 2014 is when this was happening. We, so I had the chance to see him do that. How do you have small talk. How do you build rapport with people. How do you talk in that professional way, bond. These people used to come to the office and he just let me in on every single meeting that they used to have. That kind of made me open up a lot as a person. And there were just other interesting things that happened at that time as well. A lot of startups used to apply to this incubator to join. And he was just like, yeah, then I just sit with me. See how I do these interviews with startups. Kind of Shark Tank like, but they would come, they would pitch, and then we would decide if we wanted to have them in or not. And then halfway through, he was like, Okay, Tanay, you got it. I'm going to bounce, and then I was the only person sitting there interviewing hundreds of startups every single day.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:54):
Oh my God! As a 15-year-old?

Tanay Kothari (00:11:55):
As a 15-year-old, and so I could see the other side as well. I started to get a sense of, this is what makes pitches feel good versus not. This is what I start to look for in founders. And so that I think I still attribute as like one of the most foundational parts of my life. He's somebody I'm still very close with. Because I think he's a big part of the person I became today.

Pablo Srugo (00:12:15):
And dude how do you? Like, I remember when I started my first startup. I could never be doing that and then go back to school. Because the just, the continuity be like, doing these crazy things, you know, whatever all in and then you're like sitting in class. How do you go back to school after that? 

Tanay Kothari (00:12:28):
So, this I think, I attribute a lot to my parents. I think, I had maybe, like, seven percent attendance in school. I would go to school like, one to two days a month. Because I wanted to hang out with my friends. And the rest of the time I would just be home. And I'd just be like building apps and whatnot. And my parents were like, till the time you get good grades, that's fine. Academics was something that always came naturally to me. So that was easy. I would like study the morning before the test and go do that. Super fine, teachers were supportive. Because I was getting good grades, and then they're like, Yeah, do whatever you want in your free time. So that was that was a good level of flexibility that came. But yeah, if I didn't have that I would have gone crazy. 

Pablo Srugo (00:13:09):
Yeah, there's no way you can go from interviewing founders.

Tanay Kothari (00:13:12):
Nope.

Pablo Srugo (00:13:13):
Like YC level stuff. And then you're like, getting taught, you know, history.

Tanay Kothari (00:13:16):
Like, studying geography. 

Pablo Srugo (00:13:18):
Exactly, that's just wild man. Dude and so, then okay. So fast forward then do you still like go traditional route. Do you go to university? What's that part of your life, like?

Tanay Kothari (00:13:27):
I decide I want to be in the Silicon Valley. I want to be surrounded by my kind of people. And so, applied to US universities primarily. Otherwise the track that was set out for me was go to an Indian college, you know, go to the IITs. Do that whole thing but I told my parents I didn't want to do that, and they had both studied in India, right? So sending their, like, first kid abroad. Halfway around the world by himself. Whole new thing I had to convince them off of, and then I came to Stanford. When I was here, I wanted to finish college. I wanted to spend time there. Mostly, because I think, it builds your social skills. It builds maturity when you are in that environment. Cause I'd seen some people who are homeschooled. I'd seen some folks who had not gone to college and, you just lack certain skills that lets you succeed in the world. Which I didn't want to have happen. But even then, like, I met Sahaj. Sahaj is now my co-founder. We met first year of undergrad. We became best friends throughout and then roomed together for the next three years.

Pablo Srugo (00:14:34):
What year is this by the way? When do you start college?

Tanay Kothari (00:14:36):
I started undergrad in 2016, finished in 2020. And so, Sahaj and I, every single night. 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., we just built shit. In the morning, it was like classes, homework, whatever. 10 p.m. hits, it's like, okay, let's build something. And we built crypto projects together. We did quantum computing. Both of us were doing AI research. And so, I just found my people who wanted to stay up with me all night and just keep building things. And that just was, I think, what again made Call It Super worth it. And that was also a time when you're in the valley, right? And so I was running this stealth VC club at Stanford. It was 10 elite people that we got in the club. potential to be future founders, future VCs. And then we would just, every single week, bring on an incredible personality onto campus. Sometimes it was CEOs of companies, sometimes it was the best VCs from Sequoia and Menlo. And we would just have a few hours with them. Just one on like, five of us students, one of them, you get to know them on a first name basis. And that, again, was a was a part of what I started doing back in college to kind of build those relationships in the Valley. Now that I was like.

Pablo Srugo (00:16:01):
Were you, like, you were sure you wanted to be a founder? You're basically like teaching yourself how to do that. I mean, you built a lot of products. Or did you think maybe you wanted to work somewhere? Was that ever a thought?

Tanay Kothari (00:16:12):
I don't think I can work for another person. That just does not fit with my personality. If I did, I would be a terrible employee. I do not listen to other people really well.

Pablo Srugo (00:16:22):
Did any of the things that you worked on in college get to the point. Where you thought maybe this would be a business or were you just always like building things kind of, you know, next week trying something new?

Tanay Kothari (00:16:32):
There were a few. I got into YC a couple of times with some ideas. For one, we got offered a few million dollars of funding. It was a crypto idea. Taking that money would genuinely have felt like scamming people. So I was like, No, I'm just going to shut this thing down. Crypto was a huge fad at that point.

Pablo Srugo (00:16:51):
So when you got into YC. So you got some YC investment, worked on it for a bit, and then just.

Tanay Kothari (00:16:54):
We said no to them.

Pablo Srugo (00:16:56):
Okay.

Tanay Kothari (00:16:57):
Because I realized, I did not want to go down that route. At that time, the YC deal was they would give you 150k for seven percent of your company. Which feels extortive, and I did not want to have that happen at all. I thought we could do much better of a job by reaching out to VCs. And so the one company, so towards the end of callers, there was one product that I was working on called Feather X. Which I ended up continuing to work on after college. And that was the first company in the US that I officially started, worked on, and a year after that. I actually ended up selling it.

Pablo Srugo (00:17:33):
What did that company do?

Tanay Kothari (00:17:34):
So Feather X, super interesting. So this is now we're in 2019. D2C is blowing up. There's brands like Casper dropping every single day on the internet. And they have a big problem, which is most of their users, 90% of them are first time customers. You know nothing about them in a way that Amazon does. You can't personalize for them. And so what I did was we built this technology that would understand what you're interested in, from the first few seconds of your interaction on our website. What are you looking at? What are you clicking on? What are you hovering your mouse over? It would take all of that and then before you could scroll down. It would hot swap the rest of the website. And so if you're on casper.com and I figure out that you care about back pain. Then the rest of the website's like how it helps solve your back pain.

Pablo Srugo (00:18:18):
Is this kind of what you're doing, like, any news feed is kind of doing this. But you're doing this for like a more normal D2C website?

Tanay Kothari (00:18:25):
I love that analogy. That's exactly how I thought about it. It's Facebook's newsfeed algorithm running on your website. Is what I sold to those companies, and it was part because of just a lot of things that I built over the years had to do with personalization. Part also this was unoptimized. For most brands that were doing, like, one to $10 million revenue, it lifted up their conversion rates by 25%. That's 25% more coming to their top line, and so this product was doing incredibly well. And so there was this company called Cerebra that was building AI intelligence for larger brands. They were working with Uniqlo, Forever 21, brands like that. And so, they ended up acquiring us to be a part of the stack that they sold to these larger companies. And so even today, if you go to UNIQLO or Forever 21, I think a decent part of their personalization is still powered by Feather X and the technology that we built back in the day.

Pablo Srugo (00:19:18):
And what made you decide to sell that business versus go long? Was it just a really good cash opportunity or did you just see like the upside was capped? Or was just going to be better in that home? How did you think about it?

Tanay Kothari (00:19:28):
The thing I realized, there was actually two things that was very humbling as a founder. One, for me, I realized that even though this was cool technology. It did not align with the high-level business problems that those companies were thinking about. Personalization was not one of the top five things. If you ask the CEOs of those companies, what are problems you want to solve? And that to me was a big learning that I had. And I was like, I was 20 at this point, right? Or 19 when I started working on it. The big learnings was like, Yes, if you're selling to B2B. If you really want to get large ACVs and large contract values signed from them. You have to be solving the problems that keeps them up at night. This was not one of them. So that was the first realization, and so instead of what I wanted to charge. Which was like in five, six digit sums, we were able to get four digit sums of capital from each of these customers. I thought this could be a business that I could build into a $50-60 million business, but it would be capped there. Marketing tech is its own whole graveyard of companies that land in there. And the second thing was, this was a founder that I was already partnering with. We vibed really well and he was somebody who I thought I could learn from. And so at that time decided to, we had the option to either raise capital and build more of this or sell the company. I decided to go to that route, and then I joined this company. Leading head of product. And then I ended up leading the AI and engineering organizations as well over the next few years. Oh no, not few years. I was there for a year.

Pablo Srugo (00:21:09):
A few months.

Tanay Kothari (00:21:09):
So over the next, over the next year.

Pablo Srugo (00:21:10):
Time flies. And then how do you, like, Wispr Flow originally was. I mean, was a pretty radical idea. How do you land on that?

Tanay Kothari (00:21:21):
So I worked at Cerebra for a year and during that. Sahaj, I told you, my co-founder, he messaged me. He was like, Tanay, I'm about to leave my job. I'm ready to start a company. He was working at this company called Luminous. Which was building photonic chips. So using light instead of electricity to accelerate data movement. And so imagine if your NVIDIA GPUs use that instead. They would use a thousand times lower electricity, be a lot more efficient. And so this was like a pie-in-the-sky kind of opportunity, but if you cracked it, it would be incredible. And he was head of AI there. And before that, his whole background was doing a lot of AI research. So he's actually one of the people who invented diffusion models. Which is now like, mid-journey, open AIs, Dolly, and everything else. Back then, this was a problem that was impossible to solve, and so I saw him kind of work through that in college. Incredible work ethic, this man, and so he reached out to me. He was like, Tanay, I'm ready to start a company, and I was like, this is one thing I cannot say no to. I was on track to be CTO at Cerebra, and I was like, I could do that. Or I could start a company with Sahaj. And when Sahaj and I were talking about, there were a few things that we aligned on. First, I go over the first few months. It's like, one, how do we work as co-founders and still maintain the close friendship that we have? That was really important to me. And second is, what is the company that both of us want to build? The thing that we aligned on pretty quickly is, we don't want an exit that's a few hundred million dollars. It's like, yes, we know what we need to do to get there, but that wouldn't be satisfying because life is short. There's only so much you do before you die. And we want to be able to just shoot for the moon. If we're working on something hard anyway. And so for me, we were talking about, what drives both of us? And the thing that always was top of mind for me is. I wanna change how interaction with devices feels like. I think phones and laptops in their current form, they're good. They've gotten us closer, but we're not there yet. I want something that feels even more natural. That almost feels like an extension of your mind. This is when GPT-3 had just come out. We're now in 2021. GPT-3 has just come out. ChatGPT doesn't exist yet. Most people don't even know what GPT-3 is. The thing that became clear to me once I saw that was, in the next few years, everybody's going to be talking to their devices. Because computers can understand natural language. In a world like that, maybe everybody doesn't want to speak out loud all the time. Because you're around people. You want to maintain privacy. You don't want to disturb others. You want a way for it to just work, not just with your voice, but with your thoughts. And if this worked, this would be maybe the biggest technological breakthrough of this century.

Pablo Srugo (00:24:11):
I'm really worried because listen, you've been listening for like what, 10, 20, 30 minutes now. Clearly you like it. And the thing is, the next episode is way better and you're gonna miss it. You're gonna miss it because you're not following the show. So take your phone out and hit that follow button. But that's basically like Neuralink, no? Like, that's what Elon is doing. That's one of his moonshots. Or is it different?

Tanay Kothari (00:24:33):
I didn't want it to be invasive. Like, no one wants brain surgery. That is drilling a hole in your skull is terrifying. I wanted it to just feel like putting on your AirPods. If that is what the experience felt like, that is something that is truly built for billions of people around the world. We actually spent the first six months reading through 50 to 100 research papers. Spending time with neuroscience professors and researchers at every single one of the top universities to understand what are the limits of what technology can do today. And we built the first prototypes in-house. And after six months of working on it, we actually had the first thing. It was janky, it had sensors stuck all over your face. It was still non-invasive, and it could decode up to 10 words that you're thinking about. Which is insane if you think about it. So it was like, okay, first demo, you can do math. Like, you have a perfect calculator in your head. Because you could think about the math you wanted to do, and you could just hook it up to a calculator and it would solve it for you and just show the answer on the screen. Which is insane, right? That's a superpower in itself. And you're like, okay, what I wanted to do is I wanted to work with every single person. I don't want to have stickies on your face. I want it to be a very sleek device, like the AirPods you're wearing right now. I want it to be something that works easily with every single person with very minimal calibration required. The same way you do, like, setting up Siri on your phone when you're using that for the first time. And if we can build that delightful experience. That is what I want the future to look like. So then, we had something. We had an understanding of what we need to do to get there. We had an understanding of what the final version looks like. And we're just like, let's go build this. And so, August 2nd of 2021. We incorporated Wispr AI. For us, when we're getting into it. It's like, this might just be our life's work. Started working on it, raised about $4.5 million a couple of weeks later. From incredible VCs like NEA and 8VC. We got some incredible founders on board, like the CEOs of Warby Parker, CEO of Whoop. We got the CTO of Dropbox, and a whole slew of other folks on board, all of whom Sahaj and I thought, like, these are people we can learn from. They have solved hard problems before they have built technology across hardware, and software, and AI, and breakthrough deep tech. And we want to work with these people.

Pablo Srugo (00:27:07):
How did you get them? Like, that's a pretty elite. I mean, you had sold a business before. Obviously you had a pretty incredible background as somebody who was young, but still that's a pretty. That's a big round for where the company was at. It was really big play given what you've done so far. How did you make that happen?

Tanay Kothari (00:27:21):
I think, what was very clear to Sahaj and me is like, we were both high integrity people. And just absolutely with no BS. And so for us, when we were talking to somebody who's like, hey, here's what we think this could become, here's what we know and here are all the risks why this company would fail. You could tell me five risks that you see I will tell you a hundred. Because I know a hundred and these I'm like very upfront about it. And so, like, our openness to that I think is one of the things that. For some of the people who we got introduced to earlier, excited them, made it feel like we were some people that they wanted to work with. And then they were like, hey, you should talk to this person who I really respect. And they would be like, you should talk to this person who I really respect. That was through and through. So I think the openness and the trust and the integrity that we like to build. Throughout has been one of the big things that has gotten us to have. Just incredible people year over year, wanting to be a part of Wispr and just honestly like help build magic with us.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:27):
So you have some money. You have this, you have the type of no-brainer idea that's very much like, if you build it, they will come right? It's kind of like AR glasses for example, everybody wants it, you know, if it's sleek enough and it looks like normal. And you get the audio-visual, like, everybody's gonna want that right? Obviously if you could have AirPods that just type for you and you just think like it's just a no-brainer. Now the question is, can you build it? So, what happens over that next year or so, as you start trying to get this to kind of commercial ready?

Tanay Kothari (00:28:55):
So we find this guy, Anthony Leonardo. Who joins us pretty much as our first employee. He is 45 years old. He is the best neuroscientist in the country, period. He's published on the covers of Nature and the top journals. He has managed Nobel Prize winners who used to do research for him, and his incredible background. He's been doing this for the last 30 years, and he was like, now I want to come build something for people. So we get him as our chief scientist. We build a team of incredible PhDs across neuroscience, hardware, signal processing. We build an incredible team across thinking through the user experience and the design, Some of which you still see in the product. All the roots of it came from building this new interface, and we set up goals for ourselves. The hard thing is like, we're here. Things sticky on your face, 10 words. We want sleek, sexy device that does full speech, any language, any accent, any person. And the first hard thing was drawing the steps for ourselves. That we have to climb at each step of the way. To just be like, we are making progress, and so that's the first step of action. We're a deep tech, R&D company, shooting for the moon, and those milestones helped. Even in an ambiguous environment like that, helped us set quarterly milestones to hit. Helped us figure out these are the people we need to hire to hit the next goal and the next goal after that. Over the next three years, we actually built it. We actually built a device. It looked very similar, the first version, to the headphones that I'm wearing right now. And it worked. If I was using that to talk to you right now, I could be sitting in my open office. Nobody around me would hear a word of what I'm saying. You wouldn't hear me crystal clear, but you could make out everything that I'm saying, and it would sound like me. And it would hide my intonation, my pauses, and every single aspect of my tone that I want to be there. And so when we built this, it was maybe the most like incredible technical feat, and I think still the most magical experience every time I've used that device. Because you think of something and it just shows up, which is wild.

Pablo Srugo (00:31:15):
And so what? Like, how am I not, how do I not have this? You know what I mean? Like, what happened?

Tanay Kothari (00:31:19):
So now we're, 2024. We're, June of 2024. This device starts to work. So we're like, what do we do with this, right? Because, remember we started it off with, if we build this, people will come. And the thing we realized is we hooked it up with ChatGPT, we hooked it up with Siri, and Alexa. And they all sucked, because all dictation tools today, all voice tools today are built to take words that you say and put it down word for word. But your mind is rambly, nothing is structured there. What you want to produce is all structured. So we were like, we want to have an interface, essentially, that takes your rambly thoughts. Puts it in a structured output that is useful.

Pablo Srugo (00:31:59):
Because, just to be clear. You were going from brain waves, let's say, to what exactly? And then Siri and Alexa did which piece?

Tanay Kothari (00:32:06):
Brain waves to voice.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:07):
To voice, and then they were doing voice to text. And the voice to text was pretty shitty.

Tanay Kothari (00:32:10):
And then it's like, okay, so we have brain waves to voice. And now, what do you do with the voice? And so, okay, you could control your computer, you could take actions, you could write things, but there was nothing there that was good enough to do these things for you. Like, everybody's here, probably listening to this podcast as you, Siri and Alexa. And you know how much, how reliable they are. And so we were like, we need to solve this problem because this is unsolved. So we built a new operating system for it. That we called Flow, and that is where the name Wispr Flow originates from. And this was something that could take the rambles in your head and then output it in a structured way. And we're like, hey, I want this to figure out who you're talking to. So if I'm talking to Pablo, it knows how Pablo's name is spelled properly. If I'm writing an email to Pablo, it knows that I'm writing an email and structures it like an email. And it's like all of these nuances were things that we started to solve. And the more we worked on it. The more we realized this problem is insanely hard. Nobody solved it yet.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:10):
So is it a better voice to text than anybody else had sort of thing?

Tanay Kothari (00:33:13):
Better voice interface to anything, right? And like voice to text is. I don't call it that because there's the whole. I would say, like, bad rep that whole space has overall. I like to think of it as a voice interface. You wanna speak. You want things to happen. You want it to be reliable. You want it to understand you. How do you do that? And that's what we built with Wispr Flow. And the thing we started to realize is our hypothesis for the company was we wanted, in a world where everybody's using voice, we wanted to build a device that lets you use it everywhere. But in 2024, this was not a world that we were living in. Our assumption about where the world is going to be was wrong. And so the first problem that we needed to solve was actually get people to start using voice, actually get people to step away from keyboards that we have genuinely, as a society, been using for the last 150 years. The keyboards are older than telephones. And move them over to a better interface. Because once you have people using voice, then you can give them the next hardware device. But you can't do it the other way.

Pablo Srugo (00:34:15):
Why not? I mean, I'm curious on that because on the one hand. I get where you're going. But the flip side is voice is the original problem, right? Which is you have to go from private to non-private, which is a big leap. Whereas with hardware, you theory you could just leapfrog that and just go from private to private. But you're just thinking. Which is a no brainer. Was it also, was part of it getting them or part of it just you don't want to be like, a hardware company. Did that kind of factor? I mean, you have to produce headsets, sell headsets. I mean, that's the whole thing.

Tanay Kothari (00:34:42):
My mentality is if I know that we're building the right problem. I will do whatever. I will move mountains if that is what it takes. If you need me to hire 500 scientists and push the frontiers of science. I will do that if I know that this is the right thing to do. I'll tell you why it wasn't the right thing to do. Is because I think consumer hardware is one of the hardest things to build for. Because people have a novelty threshold. You can change a little bit of what they do. You can't completely transform what they do. Otherwise, people don't like changing their habits. They like doing what they're doing. The older you get, the more you see that happen, right? So if I told you like, hey, Pablo. You are currently sending messages to your friends on your laptop, you use your keyboard to type it you use iMessage to send it. I want you to check that. I want you to use my app to talk to your friends. You're not gonna have a screen. You're gonna think all these messages and do that. We're like, ah, I don't know about it. And the interesting thing is you would say, I don't know about it, even though it is the most magical thing I could have built for you. Because you're like, but I know how to use this right now. I'm just gonna do that.

Pablo Srugo (00:35:57):
I'm probably, for what it's worth. I'm probably the wrong person using that example, because I've been, for so long. Dude, because I'm walking around, I'm freaking texting and shit. I'm like, man, can you just read my mind? For so long, do you know what I mean? I've just been like, people talk about Neuralink and they're scared. And the brain surgery is definitely scary. But people are like, scared that the thing would read their thoughts. And I'm like, dude, just give in to the machine. What are you talking, let's go. So I'm, but 99% of people.

Tanay Kothari (00:36:19):
You're a bad example.

Pablo Srugo (00:36:20):
Are, I get what you're saying. Yes, they'd be like, ah, I don't know. It's read my thoughts, I don't really want to do that, you know, what I mean? I'd rather just type.

Tanay Kothari (00:36:27):
Yep. Yep. So, okay.

Pablo Srugo (00:36:28):
Just as an anecdote.

Tanay Kothari (00:36:29):
So this is not, you're not an example. Other people, that's the thing, and so the novelty factor is actually really important when you're thinking about consumer. And so when we think about Wispr Flow, right? If you've used the product, you know, that it's just something that is in the background, works across every single application and device that you use today. So I'll be like, hey man, still use your iMessage, still be on your computer, like do the thing you wanna. I'm just taking away one thing. Which is your keyboard and giving you voice. That is still a big leap for people to make. You'd be surprised, but a lot of people make that leap compared to like the whole transformation that we were talking about. You also see companies on the other side of it that did it wrong. Like look at Humane. Humane was like, you can use your AI everywhere to ask it anything you want. At a time where people didn't know what to do with it. And that company died. Like imagine if Humane started off by building a software product, got people to use it every single day, and then they were like, hey, you know this thing you love using on your phone? We made a device so you don't need to carry your phone in your pocket. That company would still be alive because they solved these problems one by one. They built the behavior one by one. And if you're building for a consumer as a founder or enterprise, honestly. No one wants their workflow ripped out as much as you think they want their workflow ripped out. And, that is a big realization you need to build new technology when you think about disruption. That was the moment when we realized like, hey, number one, the sequencing of this is going to be Wispr Flow first, hardware later. Building Wispr Flow as a product is extremely hard and requires a lot of innovation. It is just impossible for a company, our stage, to try to build two hard products at the same time. We would be setting ourselves up for not building any, and so then we made the hard decision to focus fully on Wispr Flow. That was August of last year. Given how the product is going. How the company is growing. How much people love and use the product. In hindsight, one of the best decisions we've made as a company.

Pablo Srugo (00:38:32):
That's great. I think you said something really intelligent there. Which is kind of this idea that status quo is status quo for a reason. It's there and people are used to it, and there's many reasons for that. And so actually getting people out of status quo, is always much harder than you expect. So this idea of just like layering things on top, getting them to take that just that next step versus that leap forward. Always makes a lot more sense just, because it's by definition closer to status quo. So your goal is still ultimately though to end up with the original vision.

Tanay Kothari (00:39:00):
I want to build Jarvis. I want to build a system that understands you better than you understand yourself. I want to build a system that's with you 24-7. It feels like an extension of your mind. The more I've built both the hardware side and the software side. It's evolved my view of what that should look and feel like over the years. And so, I think like, right now. There are some great hardware companies that are building some new devices that are coming out. And we're starting to work with some of them, to bring Wispr Flow as the operating system to all of their users. It's a voice interface that people trust, that just works, that just doesn't make any mistakes. That I think is the best next step for us right now. And if we see some company do an incredible job at that, we'll partner with them. If we see there's a missing space in the market, that I think is how the world should interact with technology and nobody else is building it, we'll go and build it.

Pablo Srugo (00:39:56):
So one of the kind of maybe the billion dollar question here is like, you know, I had Dylan from like Assembly AI here before. You've got ChatGPT that's got like transcription baked in. Are you guys doing the full thing and regardless of that. What did you guys get right that makes this product. Like, so many people are trying to get this right and you guys got it like incredibly right. Like, you know, you can't tell me everything but tell me as much as you can. So that it maybe makes sense to me, why it's so far ahead.

Tanay Kothari (00:40:23):
You know, on the surface it looks like a lot of people have tried to get this to work but, I think they've all solved the wrong problem. Every single dictation plot product today, it takes everything you say and writes it on word for word, right? It is fantastic. It's what you want for movie subtitles. It's what you want for like, YouTube transcriptions. It is not what you want when you as a person are using it to communicate. The way I speak is very different than the way I write. That is the biggest insight that we had, and we were like, yeah, no problem cares about this. No problem cares about the human aspect of it. That you like to be perceived different ways, in different conversations even though you have the same voice. And that is the hard thing that we solved. That's why we had to build the model in-house. Which just ticks what you say it's natural, it's rambly, it's dream of consciousness, and it puts it out in a way how you would have written it. And that's the only metric we optimize over and so everything about how we look at the problem is different than any other company has attempted it so far. Which is why Wispr Flow feels so much more magical and it is the first tool in the history of computing that has actually replaced the keyboard for a large number of people.

Pablo Srugo (00:41:35):
Do you worry that ChatGPT specifically, as it improves itself. Could put this out as like a cross outside of ChatGPT? Or you think that's a stretch for them? Or you just don't think about those sort of things?

Tanay Kothari (00:41:46):
It's like an always unreasonable question to ask. Why does this other big company not do this? Which is true for like 99% of the startups out there. The way I think about it is mostly, for these companies. What do they care about? And you'll see by where do they put their focus on. ChatGPT as a company, since you brought that up. They want to build AGI. They want to build the best models out there. They have thousands of people working on that. They have a handful of people working on the desktop app, for example. And so that tells you roughly what the priorities of that organization is, and where they're going to land with that. In the next couple of years, are they gonna have something similar to Wispr Flow? Likely, I'd be surprised if they don't. That's just, I personally, as a founder, don't mull over that question too much. Apart from thinking about like, okay, are there any existential risks that this poses to us? And what can we do as a company to take care of this existential risk? How do we think about like our longer term roadmap? Where does that fit in?

Pablo Srugo (00:42:52):
That makes sense. And remind me, so you moved over to Wispr Flow last August? Like, a year ago? How have things gone since?

Tanay Kothari (00:43:00):
Beyond my wildest expectations. This went from being a side project in the company to now I think one of the most loved AI products of 2025. Has had tremendous amount of user love like every day. There are dozens and dozens of people who've never talked about a product before. Just like this product has completely transformed my life. and they talk about it to anybody who would listen to the point, where people just think we're paying them. And it's like, I don't even know that's, I don't personally know this person even. They just love it a lot. We are starting to see meaningful changes in people's lives that they come and tell us. It's people say a lot of founders and sometimes like their spouses, does like you have made life so much better. Because this person's like they're not stressed anymore. They have a lot of work in their life that feels like grunt work, right? As a founder like, a lot of your time is responding to your team, a lot of your time is talking to your customers and fending off 200 emails every single day. And that is work that you would rather not do. And so if Wispr Flow comes in and makes that part of your day effortless. It goes from you spending five hours a day on it, to two hours a day. That three hours a day that people get back, the amount of energy that they get back, it's huge. That is that is something that you can't even put into value.

Pablo Srugo (00:44:32):
And you don't realize, this is something you don't. It's one of those things you're so used to type. I'm so used to typing. I was my whole life and like I'm pretty good at typing. I mean, I type pretty fast. I can look whatever all those things. You know, I wouldn't think that. I'm that slow. But then when you start talking instead of typing, you realize you're so much slower at typing than you are at talking and certainly at thinking. And also there's like an effort to it that, you've just. I've forgotten, because I'm so used to typing. I don't think about it, but it actually typing, and erasing, and reformatting is actually a lot of friction. And it's really annoying. And only when you get rid of that, it's almost like this weight drops off. You're like, oh, okay. This is a different vibe, do you know what I mean? Anyways, yeah, you should be paying me for this, dude. I'm sure I'm not getting paid. I like this product a lot. Question, what about numbers? How fast does it grow user-wise or ARR-wise? What are you paying most attention to in terms of that North Star metric?

Tanay Kothari (00:45:32):
I think user growth and ARR growth are the two top of mind things for me. They're both grabbing mindshare and scaling revenue for us as a business. Both of them this year have been growing about 50% month over month. And so, right now, I would say this is maybe one of the fastest growing AI products out there, or companies, period.

Pablo Srugo (00:45:52):
You're probably in the single millions ARR, like high level?

Tanay Kothari (00:45:55):
Around there.

Pablo Srugo (00:45:56):
And then, well, just one more question before I close it off. You pivoted to this. What did you do from a marketing, go-to-market standpoint? At some point, I assume word of mouth took over, but how did you initially kind of get it out there?

Tanay Kothari (00:46:08):
It was a lot of build-in public, founder-led. It was me on, you'd find me on Reddit, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, sharing my story. Sharing the story of our users. Sharing how we're thinking about this, and that brought a lot of people on board who resonated with it. And because it is something that is a big point in everybody's life. Can you get rid of the grunt work? Where a lot of my brain cycles go towards, that I would rather not have it go there. So I have time to do things that are actually more meaningful. That messaging resonated with people. So it started off as a lot of that. Now, of course, it's a it's a whole movement that we see all around.

Pablo Srugo (00:46:48):
Are you spending a lot, though? On marketing or is it mainly just organic?

Tanay Kothari (00:46:51):
Our growth is actually 90 percent organic. Yeah, it's incredible and it's genuinely a lot of people like you who love the product, and they're on YouTube, and Twitter, and LinkedIn, and they're just telling the world about it. Which is how the product has grown a lot over the last few months.

Pablo Srugo (00:47:08):
Perfect. Well, let me stop it there and let's ask the last three questions I always end on. The first one is, for this specific product. When did you know that you'd found true product market fit?

Tanay Kothari (00:47:17):
January of this year. We had one, a lot of people who said that this product had meaningfully changed their life, and they said it in a public forum. And you look at their posts and they've never said anything like that before. Two, our conversion to paid numbers, insanely high. We are a freemium product. For most freemium products, 3% is good, 4% conversion to paid is great. We were seeing 20% of our user base convert to paid.

Pablo Srugo (00:47:44):
What's the threshold? Like what makes you convert? What do you pay for?

Tanay Kothari (00:47:47):
Once you hit 2,000 words a week, or like six pages of Word docs that you would write. That's when we ask you to pay, and so we don't even take people's credit card up front.

Pablo Srugo (00:47:57):
You'll see me on that ledger soon enough, I think.

Tanay Kothari (00:48:00):
I'm surprised you're not there already, given how much you're using it.

Pablo Srugo (00:48:04):
I was just, dude, because I've just. Like, I told you last week, I just kind of started trying it here and there. This morning was the first time I just kind of went all out on it. So, yeah.

Tanay Kothari (00:48:12):
Okay. I think we will see you there for sure then. And so, yeah, our numbers were like 5X what is the 90th percentile in the industry. And finally, it was, there were people. So at this time, we were just on Mac. We didn't even have Windows. People genuinely bought MacBooks and switched over from Windows just so they could use Flow. If that is not product market fit, I don't know what is.

Pablo Srugo (00:48:39):
Second question, did you ever in the history of this company, like since 2021. Was there any moment where you actually thought. Maybe this won't work, maybe it would just fail?

Tanay Kothari (00:48:48):
Every other day. I don't know, I don't get that thought. I'm generally optimistic on the outside, always skeptical on the inside, and it keeps me on my toes.

Pablo Srugo (00:49:01):
And then last question, what's one piece of advice you wish you would have maybe told yourself five years ago?

Tanay Kothari (00:49:07):
I think the biggest thing that I would tell myself is, at the end of the day. The most important thing that nobody talks about with regards to startups is the people and the team that you build. That comes before your product, that comes before your marketing, or your market. As you build the company, the product evolves, the market you're targeting evolves. You need to hit product market fit again and again, but the team you put together stays with you. And this is the team you spend 10 hours of every single waking day with. This is the people who define how you feel at the end of the day. And you are also responsible for them. If you make a stressful environment. They're not going to feel happy when they go back home. Imagine what that would mean for the interaction that they have with their spouses and their kids. On the other hand, if you make them feel like they're growing, if they make them feel valued, imagine the smile on the face and the happiness they show back to their doorstep. How that changes their interactions with their family. That's what I think about a lot, with every single person who is on our team. Because, yeah, I am genuinely responsible for both their life in the company and what the life outside of the company looks like. And I think once you realize that, is when I think you are ready to have that responsibility of managing people.

Pablo Srugo (00:50:36):
Perfect, man. Well, dude, thanks so much for jumping on the show, dude. It's been great.

Tanay Kothari (00:50:39):
This was fantastic. Thanks, Pablo.

Pablo Srugo (00:50:41):
So picture this, it's months from now, years from now, and one of your founder friends. A really close founder friends of yours, guess what? Their startup went bankrupt. And it turns out if you had just shared the product market fit show with them. They would have learned everything they needed to, to find product market fit and to create a huge success. But instead, their startup has completely failed. You have blood on your hands. Don't let that happen. You don't want to live like that. It is terrible. So do what you need to do. Tell them about the show. Send it to them. Put it on WhatsApp. Put it on Slack. Put it where you need to put it. Just make sure they know about it and they check it out.