Auren Hoffman (00:00.461) Hello fellow data nerds. My guest today is Tanay Kothari. Tanay is the co-founder and CEO of Wispr Flow, a voice first, a voice first AI assistant aiming to make the keyboard optional. By the way, I use it. love the product. Whisper flow has been growing user base by 50 % a month, a month over a month. And they've raised $30 million series a earlier this year today. Welcome to world of death.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (00:22.37) Lauren, thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this.

Auren Hoffman (00:24.011) Yeah. Okay. I'm a, I'm a big user by the way of the product. Like kind of a new user actually. So I'm kind of excited to talk to you. but I'm just kind of interested in like dictation in general. Like Apple's got native dictation. Google's got native dictation. Microsoft has needed native dictation. They don't really work that well. Like why haven't they nailed it?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (00:47.662) 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. Now there's a few things that are wrong with it.

Auren Hoffman (01:12.471) Yep. And while you're saying it too, it doesn't like wait for the context and stuff, right?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (01:18.466) 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, right? If you're...

Auren Hoffman (01:37.837) Yeah, you're like, ooh, you know, you don't want those in there either too, right? Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (01:41.996) 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, right? 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,

Auren Hoffman (01:56.065) Yep. Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (02:10.774) 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. What we aim to do with Whisperflow is, 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

Auren Hoffman (02:18.359) Yep. Yep.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (02:39.586) perfect and ready to go. Whisper flow today is 85%.

Auren Hoffman (02:40.631) Yeah. Yeah. Insane. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. And you want to be, you even need to get into the nineties to make sure it gets used all the time. Right? Like there's probably some sort of number where you need to get to where people use it all the time. yeah. Even the other night I, I, I came from like, 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.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (02:59.022) Yep.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (03:05.772) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (03:10.699) And like, kept messing up. This isn't a whisper flow. This was, this was, Apple kept messing up the Saki. And there was just, did like, I did like four takes and finally I'm like, okay, I just went to whisper flow and, and did it and worked. It worked great. But it's like, it's just like those types of things. Maybe it's not like the most obvious thing that someone's going to talk about. Maybe Saki isn't a common thing people talk about. but it just like, the, the, there's not, most people aren't always having obvious conversations.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (03:16.376) Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (03:39.33) No, almost no one is. And that's why you haven't ever heard anybody say like, Hey, I love Siri or I love Google's voice because it never gave you that aha moment of perfectly getting you. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (03:50.325) It's good if you have like a very specific instruction, right? Like if you have a super like, you know, if you're like, Hey, Alexa play, you know, this song by Taylor Swift, it will generally find it because it kind of knows, okay, you're saying play, which is kind of like the code. And then, okay, you're probably usually talk to me about music and therefore, and then, but if you're, if you, if, if the,

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (04:07.788) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (04:15.914) If the surface area is really big, like it is with like text messages and emails and you know, those types of things that it really starts to break down really fast.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (04:25.867) 100%.

Auren Hoffman (04:28.073) Is it, and, and even when it's not like when they're doing translation on a voicemail. So when you get a translation, you know, a voice to text on Apple or Google, those are also laughably wrong. And those, have plenty of time, right? They're not doing it in real time, right? They can take it. They have plenty of time. They can then do the thing and then they could send it to you. Is it just like, they're not putting compute behind it or why is that so bad?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (04:57.421) 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.

Right? 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. And so if in the voicemail, it understood a bit about who's sending it, who it's sending to, like the voicemails always get my name wrong. And Apple should just be like, no, this dude's name is Tane. That is likely what they're saying and not some other random word. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so being able to take

Auren Hoffman (05:47.905) Right. Right, right, right. Cause right. Good point. If they're calling you, right? They know, right. Now, of course the person calling you might, might, might get your name wrong. Cause it's not a common name, right? People get my name wrong all the time, but yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (05:56.918) at context.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (06:00.789) 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. And super excited to be the company that is driving that change.

Auren Hoffman (06:14.53) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (06:22.593) No, is there a way to get one of the problems is it's just hard to get like natively in to iOS or into, 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 key stroke and you can do it where on your phone, you've got to like go to a new keyboard or something and press. it's like three buttons or something to get there often. Like is that, and obviously like.

It's not an Apple or Google's best interest to get another voice system in there. So how do you kind of like, how do you circumvent that in a way to make it easier for the user long-term?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (06:55.245) Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (07:03.127) So most other kind of voice keyboards are five, six taps. We made Whisper down to, OK, on frequent usage, it's just one tap to get it to work. If you want it to just be that consistently the best experience, then, Aurang, you got to message Tim and tell him to do something about it. Android is going to be a phenomenal experience.

Auren Hoffman (07:15.147) Yep. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (07:23.245) I don't think Tim Cook listens to this podcast, but Sundar might be so we can, we can at least talk to him through there. Yeah. Okay.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (07:31.605) Android is going to be fantastic because iOS is just heavily limited. They don't let you do a lot. Android is going to work like a charm. So we're going to work on, we're going to be shipping that end of this year. And hopefully that gives Apple the impetus to do.

Auren Hoffman (07:36.173) It's just having to be limited. Okay. Okay, Andrew, we work great. Okay, perfect. Oh, awesome. Okay, cool.

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

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (07:51.501) Okay?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (08:04.129) Yeah, Lauren, we're going to have so many people in the comments talking to you about that one.

Auren Hoffman (08:10.18) Totally, totally. I mean, look, I love Apple. use it today, but geez, 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...

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (08:15.931) yeah.

Auren Hoffman (08:35.533) Top 1 % of voice users, I assume, right? So how are you using voice that maybe the average person isn't?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (08:43.053) I'll tell you something shocking. I was looking through our user base and I personally am not even in the top 1 % because of how deep voice penetration has become because of Whisper Flow. So I'll give you one stat. When people start using Whisper, right, the first month about 20 % of the work on their laptop is done with Whisper Flow. 80 % is their keyboard.

Auren Hoffman (08:52.47) Okay, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (09:11.415) How do you know? You just estimate it basically.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (09:13.087) We just see the number of keystrokes. So 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 80 % flow, 20 % keyboard. And that was shocking to me, right? And this is across every single flow user ever. Yeah, you'll get that 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, right? And that leads to the question that you were asking is, what do you use it for?

Auren Hoffman (09:42.253) Yeah, I'm not anywhere close to that today. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (10:01.527) Well, when people first start, right, 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. And then a week later, they...

Auren Hoffman (10:08.919) Yep. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (10:17.747) the way, like the AI, the thing is like when I do an AI prompt and chat GPT or whatever, it actually like does get, it does do the voice transcription pretty well. Like if I, if I talk to chat GPT, I don't have, it doesn't have a problem actually getting my, it usually does it quite well. It's like all the other things don't.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (10:38.987) Yep. You would be surprised. ChatGPT is actually the most popular tool for people who use Whisper Flow. Even though ChatGPT literally has a button, it 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,

Auren Hoffman (10:49.739) Okay, just because they're already in it. Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (10:56.757) Yeah. Yeah. Then the mic. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (11:08.885) 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 they use Whisper in blows up. The median number of applications per person is 69 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.

Auren Hoffman (11:14.155) Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (11:38.047) And so it is genuinely replacing everything that you would do with your keyboard otherwise.

Auren Hoffman (11:43.693) And it's, I mean, it is bitter when I'm by myself, like if in my office by myself or whatever, when I'm, when I'm in an office with other people or when I'm, you know, in a, on a airplane or something like that, or on a train or whatever, I don't feel as comfortable. Maybe, maybe that's just me. I don't feel as comfortable talking, even whispering in the thing. just like seems weird. So I'm more typing where I was on by myself. I'm like talking all the time is are people having similar experiences?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (12:13.889) a lot of people start off like that. And so what we've seen is a lot of our users are in open offices, right? And so about 50 % of them, what they do is they have a room where they go to take Zoom meetings, right? We all do this all day long. So they just have a two hour block in their day where they go to this room and they get all their work done with Whisperflow, right? What I've started to see, and this is...

Auren Hoffman (12:27.947) Yep. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (12:35.725) Okay, yeah, yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (12:41.067) 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, you know, fancy multi hundred dollar mic. People have these $10 mics, these podium 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. It looks a little surreal.

Auren Hoffman (13:04.117) Is this like... Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (13:11.191) but you see the productivity levels shoot up like nothing else. And it starts with one team using it. And initially people are like, what are these people doing? And then the boost is so visible that the rest of the office is like, okay, yeah, we wanna do whatever they're doing. And we've seen this happen across, know, Fortune 500 companies and the DOP startups and beyond. When I was thinking I'll...

Auren Hoffman (13:13.911) up.

Auren Hoffman (13:27.693) Wanna try it? Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (13:38.123) write a blog about how we're seeing this change happen.

Auren Hoffman (13:42.327) It's interesting because for me, and I think for many people, 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. 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, right?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (13:56.439) Yes.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (14:05.26) Mm-hmm.

Auren Hoffman (14:05.479) I can, I can grok it. can read much, much, much faster than, than, you know, maybe even three yucks faster than I can listen. and so it's a, so it's like very interesting. How it's like a one way input, not a two way input.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (14:18.945) Yes, that was very intentional. 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.

Auren Hoffman (14:30.167) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (14:34.305) Yeah. And also it's like, sometimes you realize, like you quickly realize just while you're reading it, you don't need to read all of it. And so you can like, you know, you read the first sentence of the paragraph, I got it. I can move to the next pair. So, you know, whereas if you're listening, you don't have the ability to kind of scan the document and move ahead. And so this is not always that relevant, that, that comes there. like I find like when I'm in the car often, I'm talking to like, let's say chat GPT or Grok or some of these things in the car and.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (14:53.655) Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (15:03.277) It's just like taking so long to have this kind of like learning conversation. Whereas like if I'm not, but I have no choice but to listen when I'm in the car. Whereas when I'm engaged, I can just, I can learn so much, much faster because like half the stuff they're telling me I already know and I can kind of move, I can move around or I don't need to know that or it's just fluff or you whatever it is.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (15:24.685) Mm-hmm. Yeah, now that's bang on point.

Auren Hoffman (15:28.235) Now, what about accents? What I found, okay, and this is my own like very, very small kind of thing is these things work super well with certain accents and terrible with other accents. I found like even with like strong accents from like India, it works pretty well, but strong French accents. It like can't handle at all. I haven't tried to whisper flow with a strong French accent cause I speak

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (15:50.541) Are you talking about Whisper Flow?

Okay.

Auren Hoffman (15:55.937) You know, I don't speak with a strong French accent. Yeah, I could probably be joy, but I don't, you I don't really know how to do it. so, but I just found like, like certain accents, these things generally tend to work better. Like if I use granola or some of these other things, like they tend to work better, depending on the, the, the accents that are, don't know if you've come up with certain, you've come up with some of those things yourself.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (16:19.745) 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, right? And the models just do this for you. And it like translates the whole thing into Russian, and then you're just like, what?

Auren Hoffman (16:26.999) Hehehe

Auren Hoffman (16:34.997) No. Wait, what?

Auren Hoffman (16:40.489) It knows it somehow figures out that you're talking in Russian and like literally puts it out in Cyrillic or something.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (16:47.437) It does that, but you're actually speaking English in a Russian accent. And it writes all of that in Cyrillic and just like translates the whole thing to Russian. Yeah, this happens all the time with voice users that have thick accents. And so that was a key problem that we had to solve. Yeah. It's cool the first time, but then really annoying after that. And so...

Auren Hoffman (16:51.575) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (16:55.225) my gosh, that's crazy. I didn't know that. Okay.

Auren Hoffman (17:05.616) my gosh, I had no idea, that's so cool.

Auren Hoffman (17:12.352) Yeah, I'm really annoying. Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (17:15.277) 60 % of our user base is actually outside of the U S 70 % of our users speak a language other than English. And for that, that was one of the things that we had to solve. And I think actually whisper flow is the first voice AI tool that solves that. You can have a thick accent in any language and it just gets you still.

Auren Hoffman (17:35.093) Yep. Yep. One of my friends, his, his mom lives in the U S but she's originally from India. Her first language is Hindi. She has a pretty thick, she moved here when she was 35 or something. So she's pretty thick accent. and when she now is communicating with like internally in her work, she, she, she now talks in Hindi.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (17:45.421) Mm-hmm.

Auren Hoffman (18:02.497) And then it automatically comes in and then also translates it to English for her because she, she, know, her, writing's 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.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (18:06.603) Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (18:20.553) Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, definitely. I think there is there are so many problems that the ESL or English as a second language group face when they're working and this is not just in the US, right? People are all over the world. is English is the international language. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (18:36.333) Yep. English is the language of work, right? So if you're doing international business, you're using English.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (18:44.651) 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 the majority of the world population.

Auren Hoffman (19:02.253) Yeah, yeah, there's more English speakers who speak English as a second language, or, you know, as not their first language, than people who speak it as their first language.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (19:10.601) Mm-hmm.

Auren Hoffman (19:12.429) It's really like 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?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (19:16.332) Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (19:26.933) Never remove the voice.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (19:34.164) The only one that I have seen there to be still like people preferring other modes is journaling. There's something about journaling that people find therapeutic when they're writing on a piece of paper or for example, like physically writing or some people like me.

Auren Hoffman (19:47.788) Auren Hoffman (19:54.231) they're actually writing.

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

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (20:02.763) It depends, it depends person by person. Like some people don't, if they're just speaking out loud, they just ramble. And so they need something to ground them, which either they're like 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 going to work as well. Cause that's just how their brain works. And that one.

Auren Hoffman (20:04.748) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (20:25.101) Hmm. What about like things that are like super technical, like, um, I don't know when I, when I'm coding it, like, I don't feel like I want to use voice there. I like using the AI assist to help me, or I can imagine like some sort of AI assist for lawyers. think that might be great, but I don't know if I want to do that by voice. I might probably want to use it. Text. And then it kind of gives, you know, pops up and gives me some options as I want to do that. Like it seems like those maybe move a little slower to voice or do you disagree?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (20:52.877) You would be shocked. I was shocked.

Auren Hoffman (20:54.445) Okay. So there's a lot, just developers using it now voice.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (21:00.043) Developers are starting to become one of our biggest biggest segment, right and they're using it in cursor They're using it for every single thing like people aren't Writing code by hand that much at all at this point And so and same for lawyers lawyers is also one of our big big segments They're dictating contracts with whisper because they're like this is just faster. I know exactly what I want to say and whisper just writes in their cell, but

Auren Hoffman (21:03.435) Interesting. Okay.

Auren Hoffman (21:12.459) Yep. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (21:18.551) OK, interesting. All right.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (21:30.135) Those two things I was not expecting. At all.

Auren Hoffman (21:32.781) Hmm. Hmm. Okay. Now you, I know when you guys originally started out, you're building like a wearable device and pivoted, but think of the wearable world. Like where do you think the AI wearable world is going?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (21:46.456) There have been so many different instantiations of it 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 the rabbit R1, this little orange neon thing that you could have in your hand. There are companies that like EO, that was just like an in-ear voice in, voice out kind of system. And then you have the smart glasses, which

are a lot. And so when I think about this space...

Auren Hoffman (22:20.245) Which I love I I use the meta glasses and I love it. I think it's a great. It's a great It doesn't do that much but but what it does it does really well

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (22:26.433) Yeah, I'm excited for when it has displays. so, you know, the point we were getting to earlier, which is voice as an output is, 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, right? First principles thinking.

Auren Hoffman (22:48.073) That's Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (22:54.143) 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. Right? Those two are non-negotiables. 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 bands. That I'm extremely excited about. It's also really hard to be able to get a tiny display

Auren Hoffman (23:05.133) Yep. Correct. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (23:23.383) Super hard. Yeah. Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (23:23.807) replace what your phone does, right? It's possible, but it's hard. The second thing that comes top of mind is

Auren Hoffman (23:30.871) But are you buying the new one? Are you buying that one? Like the one with the display? Are you buying? Okay, yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, to test out, of course, yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (23:35.534) I I buy every single piece of hardware to test out, to play with. And the second thing is, again, like smartwatches and if you remember the movie Her, I 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. The biggest thing that happens

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. And this is something that is gonna be one of the biggest technical revolutions that we'll see is the death 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.

Auren Hoffman (24:27.49) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (24:36.517) Yeah. Yeah. Cause even a car, can, you can imagine while it's just like, just tell me where you want to go. Okay. I want to go to Mary's house. Um, and great. Okay. We're going to send, you know, aunt Mary, we're going to aunt Mary's house. Just sit back. We'll take you there. Um, and give us a sense of the type of music you want to listen to or, know, whatever. And, and then, you know, you don't have to know what's going on. You don't have to know how fast it's going.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (24:39.671) Okay.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (24:50.466) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (25:02.285) All the dials on the car, like you normally need to look at, like you just could imagine, like all those get abstracted away if you want to look at them. Sure. But like, you don't have to look at those. Just like when I, you know, if I ride in the back of a car of Uber, I don't look at any, I don't look at anything today. Right. Um, so the driver might be, but I'm not looking at any of those types of things. Um, 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.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (25:11.595) Mm-hmm.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (25:29.239) Yeah. That is a really good analogy actually. I'm going to use that. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (25:33.531) perfect. All right. Great. Great. It's free. It's free. You know, you don't need to give me any stock or anything for it. now when you, when you guys made the pivot originally from hardware, I, I think you had like 40 employees and you went down to like five overnight. I imagine this was like kind of a very trying time, like walk me through that time.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (25:56.888) So when we started Whisper, right, we had the vision that, in the next few years, everybody's gonna be using voice. When that happens, you wanna use it when you're around people. This is going back to the conversation we were having like 10, 15 minutes ago. And you want to not disturb them, but you also want privacy. You don't wanna feel conscious. And so we wanted to build this wearable device that could understand what you're speaking silently. And so it went from your thoughts to text.

and let 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. And after working on it for three years, from 2021 to 24, we actually had this thing work. It is, think, until still till today, the most magical piece of technology I've ever tried.

Auren Hoffman (26:27.148) Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (26:56.397) And once it worked, we tried connecting it with Siri, Chad GPT, Alexa, and they all sucked. We wanted something that went from your mental rambles to something that was structured and usable. And we call this little project Flow, the Flow OS, and we ran it on this hardware, felt 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. That two friends became five, became 10, became 100, became 1,000 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, but if they're not using it already, like a year ago, no one was using voice.

Auren Hoffman (27:50.773) Yeah, yep. Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (27:54.606) this company is gonna 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 feel just as effortless as talking to a close friend. Technology just gets you. It's with you 24 seven, it...

Auren Hoffman (28:03.991) Yeah. Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (28:24.533) 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. And mid 2024, that answer was we need to build voice as an interface that people can use. And 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. 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, right?

I'm still very close to a lot of them, but we were doing this decision because not because we were out of money, we had more than half the capital we had raised, not because it 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. And if we wanted...

Auren Hoffman (29:52.855) Yep. Yeah, you can't do both. Like you have to focus. You have to put all your eggs in one basket. Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (29:57.41) We can't do both. 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, right? This is, this is still fresh. Looking back, think it was, trust me, I've ripped it off myself a hundreds of times before, but I think it was one of the best decisions we made.

Auren Hoffman (30:12.727) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't wanna, sorry, sorry ripping off the band-aid here, yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (30:26.893) because we are closer now to, I think, where we want the world to be. it was one of the, I mean, that decision was the actual decision that was ripping off the band-aid.

Auren Hoffman (30:43.501) And I'm obviously these are talented people. Like, can I fund some of them? Like, I'm sure, I'm sure they're gonna start interesting things and things like that. Are they out there? Like any of them starting companies?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (30:56.141) couple of them actually have a few of them are leading kind of the AI teams. They're chief scientists at a number of other companies. We're talking like eight sleep and aura and a number of other new neuro tech companies. people are building meta Ray-Ban glasses. Other people are writing Neuralink. And so it's, 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.

Auren Hoffman (30:58.731) Okay.

Auren Hoffman (31:05.25) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (31:09.325) So cool.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (31:26.029) and we helped a lot of people through that because again like this is not their fault

Auren Hoffman (31:26.625) Yep. If you have talent, talented people today, it shouldn't be a problem. You know, 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 like that counterintuitive things you do to optimize productivity?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (31:32.609) Yeah. Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (31:58.957) best.

advice that I have gotten is

you gotta 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 burned out. And so...

Auren Hoffman (32:30.413) else you're context switching a lot,

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (32:33.313) There's so much, there's so much that happens because of that. And so the thing that we, I realized is like, Hey, there's some fires that are important, that are existential to 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, you know, I see the like people around the table are anxious, like something's bothering them.

Just saying that one sentence puts people at ease. I mean, it's a fire. Yeah. I do everything. It's okay. And you just see them relax and sit back in their seats and having the mentality of like when you are 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.

Auren Hoffman (33:05.385) Okay. They're like, all right. Yeah, we understand. We can't do everything. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (33:15.585) Okay.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (33:33.105) is in my opinion way better than literally everything else that I've heard or any amount of you know, Lion's Mane or caffeine that you can take.

Auren Hoffman (33:51.117) All right. A few personal questions. you, you know, on your bio, it says your Forbes 30 under 30, you might be one of the only ones that haven't yet been indicted in that. Um, how do you feel about that? Given all the other kind of like famous people that are there.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (34:03.565) You

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (34:10.411) You know, when it's hasn't.

Auren Hoffman (34:12.237) It's like a badge of honor and also like a worry badge too. Yeah. Cause I've gotten so many wrong.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (34:18.525) It is funny. So when Sajjan 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, to the kind of people we bring on in the company, both as employees and investors. And

doing things like the people who've gotten infected, it doesn't worry me because that is so far away from the things that I actually care about.

Auren Hoffman (35:12.813) All right, two more personal questions. ask all of our guests. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (35:34.497) I think we decided to skip this one because I don't have any conspiracy theory.

Auren Hoffman (35:36.781) Okay, alright, alright, let's skip it. Alright, last question we ask all of our guests. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (35:44.471) Yeah.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (35:50.294) When you're building a new product, give it to your users for free. A lot of people say that they're like, hey, first see if people are actually using it and you can charge them later. can like 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.

Auren Hoffman (36:29.175) But what, like, why was it like, why would that, why would that give you the signal? Like if someone uses whisper flow, if someone bought whisper flow, but only used it once a quarter and someone else was using it, like if you gave it away for free and someone was using it every single, you know, they're using it seven times a day or 20 times a day or something like that. When'd you get more signal from the ladder than the former?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (36:52.557) So I would say...

Auren Hoffman (36:53.429) Like you just, know, by usage, right? Like it's, hard enough just to get someone like product market fit. just, you'll learn like, okay, if whether they pay for it or not, it's like sometimes easier to get someone to pay, then get someone to use it.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (37:07.789) you would be, in some cases, maybe, if these two examples are the only things we're comparing, of course you would be 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.

Auren Hoffman (37:26.187) Yeah, I mean, sometimes when you pay, almost like force yourself to use it.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (37:30.603) You force yourself to use it or you have used it enough where you want to pay. And so even in the product you see 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 like, 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, then the product's like, Hey, now you got to actually pay. And

Auren Hoffman (37:34.987) Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (37:55.093) Enough. Yeah, Dan, you jump in.

Yeah. Okay. So you are doing a free product. You are doing a free product. you're, you're completely free. And then once people use it enough, you ask them to pay your, your, your almost, you're almost not taking, you're almost going back to that thing. Right.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (38:01.186) People.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (38:15.181) you are, but then you also block people's usage when they are hitting that. And so,

Auren Hoffman (38:21.335) But wouldn't all freemium products be that way? exactly what you said? Like, isn't that the whole goal of a free product is to get people to use it enough so that they pay?

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (38:32.011) There's two nuances here that I would say are important. If I was 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%, right? You gotta really go back to the drawing board.

And see like, why do I have millions of users and only like a thousand or a couple thousand people pay me money? If you add it about, you know, three to 4%, it's good. It's decent. That's what you see for a lot of premium products. With Whisper, we actually saw that number be 20%. 20 % of our monthly active users pay us. And that again, we're talking about strength of signal. And so,

I generally think there's no like very standard, do this thing. 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 is if it was 1%, maybe we wouldn't be here talking today.

Auren Hoffman (40:06.093) Yup. Oh, this has been amazing. Thank you to make authority for joining us. The world of DAS. I follow you at tan cots, 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 like an investor or anything. I'm just, I just, I'm just showing your product just purely out of love. wish I was an investor purely out of love of the product. So this has been awesome. Really great chatting with you.

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (40:27.373) you

Tanay (CEO, Wispr Flow) (40:35.528) R and thanks a lot for having me. This is fun.