A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:05:19 · Pablo Srugo, Dylan
[00:05:19] S1: Did you, back then, was it always your idea to be this layer that others would build on top of or did you think through, because let's say, arguably if you have the best speech to text, maybe you need to just build an app to do transcription and you offer transcription. Did you think through that? [00:05:34] S0: As a developer, I was always so inspired by the iconic developer companies like Twilio, like Stripe. There was a company at the time in 2015, ‘16, when all this was formulating called wit.ai, I don’t know if you've heard of them. They were acquired by Facebook. They're a small company, but they built this developer platform for building these text-based natural language interfaces. You could train it to understand, hey, I want to set an alarm. AI would take that prompt and would turn it into this structured JSON that your app could operate on. If someone said, “Hey, I want to set my alarm for 7 p.m.” they would spit out a JSON it was like action. [00:06:16] S1: Right, so it’s text to code, yeah.
00:06:16 · Pablo Srugo, Dylan
[00:06:16] S1: Right, so it’s text to code, yeah. [00:06:18] S0: Exactly, and the community around it was so cool and people were building so many cool things with it. I say that because for me, building a developer platform was always something, as a developer, I was really passionate about. The goal really when we started the company was let's build really advanced new models for speech tasks, speech to text, speaker diarization, speech understanding, and let's make them available through a developer platform that is super easy to use, that has great docs, that you can get started on for free, and that can scale with you if you deploy it at really large scale, even if you're a big enterprise organization, but let's build that platform that anyone can just pick up and use, whether you're a college student or a developer at a Fortune 500. Democratizing a really powerful and cool tech, whether it's the ability to process a credit card or send a text message or do something with an AI model, as a developer, I feel like unleashes the potential of this tech to so many people. There's entire businesses that have been built on Twilio as a result, but it just shows when you make this technology just really accessible and easy, people will unleash their creativity. I wanted to work in that space.
00:06:18 · Dylan, Pablo Srugo
[00:06:18] S0: Exactly, and the community around it was so cool and people were building so many cool things with it. I say that because for me, building a developer platform was always something, as a developer, I was really passionate about. The goal really when we started the company was let's build really advanced new models for speech tasks, speech to text, speaker diarization, speech understanding, and let's make them available through a developer platform that is super easy to use, that has great docs, that you can get started on for free, and that can scale with you if you deploy it at really large scale, even if you're a big enterprise organization, but let's build that platform that anyone can just pick up and use, whether you're a college student or a developer at a Fortune 500. Democratizing a really powerful and cool tech, whether it's the ability to process a credit card or send a text message or do something with an AI model, as a developer, I feel like unleashes the potential of this tech to so many people. There's entire businesses that have been built on Twilio as a result, but it just shows when you make this technology just really accessible and easy, people will unleash their creativity. I wanted to work in that space. [00:07:32] S1: At this time, you're in California, you're working at Cisco as a brand name company, you're a machine learning developer. You're, I'm assuming, making a pretty good salary. When do you decide to take that leap of faith? How far along do you get on Assembly AI before you quit that full-time job and just go all in?
00:07:32 · Pablo Srugo, Dylan
[00:07:32] S1: At this time, you're in California, you're working at Cisco as a brand name company, you're a machine learning developer. You're, I'm assuming, making a pretty good salary. When do you decide to take that leap of faith? How far along do you get on Assembly AI before you quit that full-time job and just go all in? [00:07:49] S0: It is funny because I worked on a startup in college and then I just did software development as a contractor for two years. Then I took this job at Cisco and then I started Assembly. I feel like the time at Cisco was almost this paid vacation, so to speak. It was active, maybe, no, that's not the right word. It's active rest mode. You know when you're working out you don't want to sprint but… [00:08:11] S1: Yeah, you do stuff, not too much struggling, just enough that it gives you a little bit of… [00:08:16] S0: I went to the gym every day at 5 p.m. I was in amazing shape. I was reading. I was learning things in my spare time. I just felt bored because nothing I was working on just felt like it had impact. I wanted to feel like what I was doing was having impact. [00:08:37] S1: Was that your mindset? Through it, through that time at Cisco, you were like, this is my in-between. I'm going to find a startup. I'm going to find a problem I really care about and work on it. Was that set in your mind that you found something again or not really?
00:08:37 · Pablo Srugo, Dylan
[00:08:37] S1: Was that your mindset? Through it, through that time at Cisco, you were like, this is my in-between. I'm going to find a startup. I'm going to find a problem I really care about and work on it. Was that set in your mind that you found something again or not really? [00:08:49] S0: It just happened. I mean, I think it's always hard to predict out what your personal future will look like. I knew I wanted to go to San Francisco. I knew I wanted to get closer to the startup ecosystem. I knew that I would eventually want to start another company. [00:09:04] S1: Where is Assembly AI when you take that… quitting is a big decision, going in, actually giving your two weeks. [00:09:09] S0: There is nothing. It was just me and I was like, okay, I just want to work on this, and so I quit. I didn't want to work on it while I was at Cisco. I quit and I started working on it, forget this specific time, but it was near the YC summer batch application deadline. I wanted to try to get my thoughts out for what I was working on. I submitted an application to YC for their summer batch. This is summer of 2017 and it was 30 days past the deadline. I was single founder, past the deadline, there's no way I'm going to get in. I was planning to just work on it, recruit a co-founder, apply to YC later once there was more traction and we had more built and I had a team, but long story short, ended up getting into YC. Was in Europe at the time I found out I got… [00:09:57] S1: What did they see? What did YC see back then?
00:09:57 · Pablo Srugo, Dylan
[00:09:57] S1: What did they see? What did YC see back then? [00:09:59] S0: Our group partner is this really brilliant guy. His name's Daniel Gross. He does a ton of AI investing. He had worked at Apple and just saw that there was an opportunity here because he had interfaced with companies building this type of tech. He saw that it wasn't that good. He saw that there was no real easy way for developers or companies to get access to this tech at the time. He was a believer and he was on the interview panel and then he became my group partner and he's now a major investor in the company too. He really believed in the idea, in large part I think is probably why we got accepted to YC. It was the fact that he had, I think, firsthand experience to see that this was possible because a lot of people at the time were like, oh, aren't the big tech companies just going to make this stuff and it's going to be the best? [00:10:45] S1: What was your answer to that? Because yeah, that's the obvious maybe first-level question is like, oh, speech to text API, Google will do this or whatever.