A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:10:55 · Dylan
[00:10:55] S0: I believed at the time and still believe that to create the best product is not just a function of resources. You don't just put a budget and people in a bottle and shake and then out comes this amazing product. You can definitely increase the likelihood of that the more resources and people you have to a point, because at a certain point, more resources and people actually becomes a hindrance. There's that software development book The Mythical Man-Month. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but it's like the more people you add on a project, sometimes the slower it actually goes. I always felt like there was an opportunity here. Going head-to-head with a Google on a core area of their product, like search, that's a much harder task. For something that they're not focused on and they weren't at the time, the YC partner actually I saw recently wrote something about this on Twitter or LinkedIn, which was like, you're really not competing with Google. You're competing with a PM at Google that’s trying to have a successful product under their belt and that's navigating all these internal politics. Of course, if it becomes the main focus of a company, again, like search or now with Gemini trying to compete with GPT, it's a different story, but at the time and still now where we're focusing on creating our product is not within the core focus area of these larger companies. The opportunity space is around working much more closely with developers and with customers in this emerging market to understand what they need and to build the best products for them.
00:12:26 · Pablo Srugo, Dylan
[00:12:26] S1: Let's go back to that. You get into YC, which oftentimes is a huge moment, inflection point, right or wrong, I think, for startups. Is that what happened to you? Did you find there's a before and after YC and things just took off? [00:12:40] S0: It definitely became more real when we got into YC. I remember going down to YC for the first day and I was like, I don't know if I can curse on the show, but I was like, oh, shit, this is real now because I had started the company a month prior and then in YC and YC is basically a sprint to demo day. It's really just 90 days, right? It's three months. You need to have progress made and I had nothing when I started. When I was building, you can't just quickly pull together a web app. You have to train these models. You have to get data. It takes a while. I remember at the time each model iteration took a week to train or something, two weeks to train. If you think about that, if you're just consecutively training models, you have six model runs essentially, because there's two a month and YC’s three months. Startups are all about iteration, especially in the early stage and still now. My ability to iterate was pretty slow back then because I was bounded by the speed at which I could train models and iterate on the models to get them to be good enough so that people would start using them. We didn't make a ton of progress in terms of go-to market traction during YC, but we did make progress and we just got started, were able to raise a seed round after YC, which gave us the runway to hire some people.