00:00:01 · Andrew Song
[00:00:01] S0: I think it's really important in anything you do in life to know your truth. Know the truth about what you're working on. There's a truth behind how that's going to change the world somewhere in there, and that will guide so many decisions along the way. You know, my grandfather's experience is not unlike many other people's where he started losing his hearing and so when I tried the first set of hearing aids he got I was shocked at how bad the experience was. That's really what pushed inside of me a problem in the real world to a technology opportunity. Hi, I'm Andrew Song, I'm the co founder and CEO of Whisper. We're a hearing aid startup here in San Francisco, California. Whisper is very unique, we use AI to help people hear better and try to emphasize the person who is speaking to you. And for people who have hearing aids, this is a really big challenge. Their devices are louder than you and I would use, and so you need to be able to really deeply understand what to emphasize and whatnot. We're about 55 people and here to change the world of hearing. I was born in China, I grew up in Canada. Looking at where I am today, everything I get to do today is a version of a dream of that young Andrew. I really knew that technology was really interesting, I got to use a lot of computers. Part of the reason I went to the University of Waterloo and studied computer science, studied mathematics, is I was actually really inspired by Bill Gates when I was very young. He wrote a book called The Road Ahead. He wrote about how the Internet is going to change the world, 10 or 15 predictions about how we're all going to live different lives. I read that book as a young person thinking, woah. Sounds like science fiction. It's like you're reading a space novel. My background is in math and computer science, so I studied that in my undergraduate at the University of Waterloo in Canada. And Waterloo was very unique in that it gave us the opportunity to do six co ops, so six three to four month jobs as students. Know when I did all of those co op terms, what I actually worked on and what I was excited about, it was always product building. Building a new product, putting it in front of people and them liking it or not didn't really matter to me, know I just wanted to work and improve it and build it.
00:01:57 · Andrew Song
And it was actually a friend of mine who worked at Facebook who said, if you're thinking about that then, why don't you just do it now? I interviewed for that product manager role and I think I did terribly. I mean, I'm pretty sure I did terribly because people told me I did terribly after. I think from Facebook's point of view, they looked at me and they said, well, he's an okay engineer so we can hire him as a product manager and if he's a terrible product manager he can just be an engineer. Adapting was so difficult. One of my biggest career memories was from my first week at the job and then I sat down at my desk and I had my laptop open and I had Excel open. I don't know why I had Excel open. It was a blank Excel, so just like empty cells. And I looked to my left and there was a software engineer. They were writing code quietly, know, with headphones on. I looked to my right, there was another software engineer writing code and I asked myself, what am I supposed to be doing right now? And I was a software engineer, so my first instinct was like, oh, maybe I should go write some code. And then I stopped myself and I said, no. I'm supposed to be doing something else. Maybe there's something I can learn about the product analytically. Really memorable example for me when I felt that transition is actually when I first started working on Messenger. My responsibility was to cover consumer product. Everyday people sees and touches and uses, that was my team's responsibility. It's a big responsibility. When I started working, was like, just do everything. You gotta cover everything. This is your responsibility now. It's important, and that's impossible. You can't cover everything. You have to go back to what's this product doing for people. Again, getting back to that sell... That confidence inside of yourself that you understand why this product should exist and how it can be different or how can we improve. I think the biggest thing I learned through that phase was having a really true sense, really objective sense of how your product was working in the real world and you just have to figure that out for yourself and that's how you can be the most valuable in many ways on your team is to have a really clear view of what's going on. To my grandfather, lives in China, my grandfather really helped I think guide me.
00:03:54 · Andrew Song
Know all the things that good parents want, know, a good student, they work hard. Know my grandfather's experiences, unlike many other people's, he started losing his hearing. I think one of the challenges though is that hearing loss is often a very private. When you start realizing you have hearing loss, you may not want to share that with people. In fact you probably want to reject that idea and say you know I don't have hearing loss yet, just people are talking too quiet. He went to a doctor, they gave him hearing aids and then he just chose not to wear them. In fact I found out about it when I opened a drawer in his home and so when I tried the first set of hearing aids he got, I was shocked at how bad the experience was. That's really what pushed inside of me, a problem in the real world to a technology opportunity. My philosophy sort of in life has always been, if there's a window of opportunity that opens in front of you, you should jump through it. The opportunity to build a new product, a new technology, and to have such a profound impact on people like my grandfather, it's not one that I felt like I would be happy closing the window on. That was my version of just seeing what we could do and saying, there's something here, and you just have to leap and go for it.
00:04:59 · S1
Ad[00:04:59] S1: You know that feeling of complete mental and physical exhaustion that you get inside of a noisy environment straining to hear someone who's talking to you? The reason you get this feeling is because it takes a lot of work for your brain to actually separate speech from background noise. This separation of speech and noise becomes increasingly more difficult if you have a hearing loss.
00:05:19 · Andrew Song
[00:05:19] S0: We use artificial intelligence. We use AI and try to emphasize the person who's speaking to you. When we started the business, there's always like 10,000 spreadsheets that you're trying to work through and understand what the business looks like. You do lots of interviews with consumers, but at the end of the day, the question that we had to ask ourselves was at the end of all of these spreadsheets and all of these interviews and all of these surveys, at the end of that was a person, was a patient who needed something and when they had to make that decision was there a reason for them to choose Whisper or not? We felt like the answer was yes. And so I think in that way that's my grandfather's biggest influence on it is just reminding us that that's there. Building a hearing aid is not a series of just building an MVP and then building their product. For us, was probably building 10 or 20 MVPs along the way. Because today, when you look at Whisper, there's a product there. I'm like, oh, hearing aid. Of course, it would look like this. But along the way, we struggled so much. One of the things we learned very early on was it's better to be fast than right because it's very hard to be right. So you might as well be fast and find out if you're wrong. And the first results that we got were, I think, really inspiring. You know, they were on laptops. We didn't have hearing aids yet. We had laptops with headphones and big microphones that we were holding out in the world. So that was what our hearing aid was, but we could record some sound and see that light. Oh, when I listened to this, when I just recorded it, very noisy. It's hard to hear the person. And now that I've built my little model over the past few months, it sounds great. And then why don't we put the mic on the headphones? That's a little closer. Wire up some microphones. We'll just glue them to the hearing aids, That will be our second hearing aid. And then there are all the latency and everything was a little bit weird because we had to use this laptop. It's like, well, if we use some audio equipment and wire this altogether, maybe it'll sound a little bit better. That was our third our third demo. There are so many it's hard to count when you go through and build a hardware product especially.
00:07:09 · Andrew Song
We worked with a partner to build them, to manufacture them, and one of the first things we found out, the microphones don't work, and it became this kinda ongoing problem where we couldn't figure it out, couldn't figure it out. And the more... The longer it takes you to figure out and solve a problem like that, the more you think, if I don't solve this problem, the company's gonna die. You know, after we got the microphones working, it solved many other problems. And people kept saying, if I shower and come back and wear it, it stops working. You know, we thought we were done. Thought we were close to the end. But now we just added all this extra work. Company's gonna die again. We're at, like, the fifteenth hill by this time. This is the fifteenth hill we've had to climb. But it really, I think, shows the commitment of the team to solve it in the time that we did. Building the final product required so many decisions along the way, and it never felt like we were done almost until we were forced to be done. We launched our first product back in 2020 right in the middle of the pandemic and you can imagine working on a hardware product on real patients in a pandemic was not the easiest thing. There was a moment in the company where we brought somebody who used hearing aids, someone who wanted to try our product. They put it on and they said, Wow, that's amazing. They started crying. I got emotional, the whole team got emotional. Was a very powerful moment. What I really learned through that process though was how each step isn't necessarily a step forward. You can have a lot false successes and false failures. And so it's this constant refinement and bringing in people to help us answer that question is that to get us really, really close. I think even today, I look at the product, and there's some deep part of me that's very unsatisfied with. But I think that's just part of life that I accept now, and we're building our next product that looks so much better. I also realized at the end of that process, we're gonna feel the same way too. Making a great product, I think it goes back to that truth. They require an understanding of where is this thing that you want to build? Where is it going to be used in the world?