Cliff Weitzman on building the ‘voice of the internet’ - Episode 1

CW 0:00

The great thing about Speechify is if you read the reviews about 15% of people who said they cried when they started using the product because it was so impactful in their lives. And it goes back to this idea that if your hard of sight you can use glasses, if it's hard to walk, you can use a wheelchair. If you're dyslexic, there's nothing you just suffer.

TS 0:18

Hey there, thanks for joining me on the very first episode of Made for Us. I'm really glad you found this podcast. The idea of the show is to explore the intersection of innovation and inclusion. And it's for anyone who's curious about how to build products that work better for all of us. I'm your host, Tosin Sulaiman, a podcaster and former business journalist. Each week, I'll be speaking to entrepreneurs and leaders from some of the world's most inclusive companies. And they'll be sharing the how, the what and the why of inclusive design.

To kick things off, I'll be speaking to Cliff Weitzman, the founder and CEO of Speechify, an AI text to speech app that he built to help people like himself who have dyslexia. The app has now been downloaded by over twenty million users. In this episode, Cliff tells me how he turned what was once his biggest struggle into a superpower. And how Speechify has helped make the internet more accessible. Now, here's the interview with Cliff.

CW 1:13

So my name is Cliff Weitzman. I'm extremely dyslexic, so first, second, third, fourth grade, I had a really tough time learning how to read. I moved to the US when I was 13. And when I was at university, I found that most of my textbooks did not have audiobooks. So I ended up building this tool for my computer that could read out anything to me, it's a keyboard shortcut. If you highlight text, and you click option A, it reads, If you hit Option S, it slows down, option DDD, it speeds up, then I added the ability to capture your screen. So you can use option X to OCR your screen, and it'll read that out to you. And then I built an iPhone app called Speechify. That lets you scan any physical documents. It can use natural language processing to parse PDFs. It can keep speaking to you even if the phone is closed, which means that you can bike, you can work out, you can eat, you can cook and listen at the same time. The next thing I built was a Chrome extension that will read out your emails and a web app, app.spotify.com, that can keep all those PDFs and other documents for you. And this has become the main tool that folks like me who have dyslexia, ADHD, low vision, autism, concussions, anxiety, second language learners use in order to read.

So now we have tens of millions of people who use it. It's been the number one app in its app store category for about four years on iOS. For about three and a half years on Chrome. That was the first product we built. The second product we built is a audiobooks product called Speechify Books that allows us to resell audiobooks, and ebooks for major publishers. And the third product we built is an AI enabled studio called the Speechify Studio that lets you create voiceovers, but it will also dub videos from one language to another. And the goal of the company is to make sure that reading is never a barrier to learning for anyone, no matter what your background is. So even if you grew up in, you know, Bali, and you had a lot of kids in your first second third grade class, and you couldn't get enough individualized attention from your teacher, reading should never be the reason why you don't realize your potential. So that's kind of the goal that we have with Speechify.

TS 3:10

Okay, great. Thank you for that. Can you talk about growing up in the world that books and reading played in your life.

CW 3:18

So when I was a kid, I wanted to be Prime Minister of Israel, a billionaire and a pop star all the time. And my family really values education in a very Jewish culture. And my dad really, really emphasized how important books were. But I was not reading. And I realized that I would not succeed in being the person that I dreamed of being if I did not figure out how to read. And I think this idea of like, reading is really important got drilled into me, maybe a little bit, or 10x more than most kids just because I kept not doing it. But I really believed like my dad's, he's very wise, very smart, very persuasive. I really bought into this concept that reading is key. And so eventually, I got into reading because my dad would read ebooks to me and then I found audiobooks. But I've listened to two audiobooks a week, every week, for the last eighteen years, more than two thousand books, and it doesn't matter if it's fantasy biography, sci fi, religion, theology, like I'm just so interested to read what people have written down either in terms of stories or wisdom. And I really believe that it is the fastest way to learn and grow. And my biggest passion is getting other people to not only find the same realization, but find the tools that make reading accessible to them.

TS 4:36

Right. And that's an astonishing number of books that you're you get through every year, but I understand that school was quite a struggle. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like getting through school?

CW 4:47

So I found out I had dyslexia when I was in third grade. So before that, you know, my teachers thought I was slow. My parents thought I was lazy. I thought I was awesome. I just needed to find a way to prove to people and when I figured out that I had this like See if it was very relieving, I finally kind of had a place to hang my hat. Because I had proof, you know, I wasn't slow, I wasn't lazy. My brain just worked differently. And that's okay. And that I could find the tools to help myself learn. Then I moved to the US when I was in eighth grade, and we had an eighth grade teacher, Mr. Bloom, that's not American history. And he would assign a chapter a day, you need to write a chapter outline. And I could neither read the chapter, nor write an outline, nor spell any word in English well. And so I found an audio book. Luckily, this random textbook happens to have had an audio book, this is very rare. And I convinced my teachers to let me come in 15 minutes early to school every day and verbally summarize the chapter to him. And obviously started kind of like at the bottom of the class, but with time, I got better. We had a summer reading book for high school called Marley and Me, a great book, but I couldn't finish reading it by myself. And then before University, we had a summer reading book called Sons of Providence, not very good book, I spent maybe the majority of the summer trying to read this book, I did not succeed. Eventually, my mom started reading stuff out to me. But we didn't finish the entire book.

And I did the only thing that I could, which is I built the text to speech system from my computer in my phone that would read out the correct Kindle version into my phone overnight. And that worked. And it was very liberating. And when I started listening, I would listen to like 0.75x speed, and then 1x and then 1.25 and 1.5 and 2x and 3x. And so I learned and taught myself how to listen fast, which is a very valuable skill, which now Speechify, you know, teaches a lot of people how to do. We have an automatic Speed Ramping algorithm that coaches you to listen fast. And once I got to that point, you know, I really felt like I had wings, I was not tethered to my desk, in order to be able to do the reading. I had the ability to listen to whatever I want. You know, sometimes people have a list of books they want to read. And they don't want to add too many books, because they want to make sure that they get to them. But like my list is infinite. I could take any book and yeah, I'll get to it. Yeah, so it just felt very freeing.

TS 7:02

Cliff's experience learning English as a second language was another big motivation for building Speechify. I asked him how he coped when his family moved to the US from Israel.

CW 7:14

We got to the US, and I was excited to be here. Our parents gave us the option. They were like, hey, you know, maybe we go to the US, what do you guys think we're five kids? And we're like, Yeah, let's go on an adventure. And I was very, very, very motivated. And I would ask my teachers for additional assignments that I could do. I enrolled myself in summer school, so I could try to catch up. And I remember over the summer, I read like, many, many books, small books. But I read, and I just, you know, I kept working at it. And eventually I got good at it. But good, I got good enough at it, where I could do school. And I think the other thing is, I was never embarrassed of not being good at reading or never embarrassed of like being a second language speaker of English and ever embarrassed to get accommodations from the school and I would fight for the accommodations that I need to have, often I wouldn't get them. And I'd be like, Cool, alright, let's go, I can I can stand up for myself. I never assumed that it was the responsibility of the school to provide for me, or the responsibility of the teachers to provide for me, it was my responsibility to provide for me. So if I didn't get time and a half accommodations for a test, because the teacher was ignorant of what the law is, or of you know, what dyslexia is, which is very common, I would explain to them that this is dyslexia. This is the law. And the way this works is I get 1.5 accommodations on on English tests, like and he's just like, oh, I don't want anybody to know that you're cheating. So I would stand up and say, Hi, my name is Cliff, I have dyslexia, I get one of the halftime accommodations, just so that everybody knows, I have no problem owning it.

the software called Kurzweil: 3000

TS 9:38

Okay, so you had to find a lot of work arounds. And that was what led to you starting Speechify. But since you've learned more about, you know, the condition about dyslexia, you know, what have you figured out about, you know, how your brain works relative to the rest of the population.

CW 9:56

So, dyslexia there's kind of two conventional ways of explaining it. From a neuroscience perspective. The first one is there's the path between the left side and the right side of the brain for someone who is dyslexic, is more convoluted, while for normal versus more of a straight shot. The other way of thinking about it is there's these things in the brain called mini columns that are responsible for sharing information inside the brain. If you're normal, you have a normal distribution of mini columns. And they are normal length. If you have autism, you have shorter mini columns, and they're closer together. If you have dyslexia, you have longer mini columns, and they're further apart. So someone with autism typically is very, very good at focusing and doing a task that requires a lot of short term memory. For someone with dyslexia, we're good at cross pollinating information between different fields. And dyslexia is characterized by a challenge in phonemic awareness, and short term memory. As so decoding is a part of your brain right here, that's in charge of decoding is challenged. Dyslexia is not actually a reading disability, as much as it is a decoding disability. It just seems most people with dyslexia never read enough to start to be able to sight read. So they're stuck in the decoding stage. With Speechify, Speechify decodes for you. So you get to see the word and listen at the same time. And so once I started using Speechify, maybe beyond the first three months, I actually started to be a very fast reader with my eyes, it's just that I would never elect to read with my eyes now that I can listen, you know, three times faster than I would otherwise.

TS: 11:22

And I did hear you speak once about dyslexia and entrepreneurship. And I thought what you said was really interesting. So in the UK, I think about 10% of the UK population has some degree of dyslexia. Whereas 19% of UK entrepreneurs are dyslexic, and in this could be similar in the US and in other countries as well. But yeah, just curious to get your take on that.

CW: 11:45

So typically, dyslexia anywhere in the world, you know, it's the same distribution, which is 17% of the population typically has it, 5% of kids in public school are diagnosed with it, but most people don't get diagnosed, because there's not the you know, the means to get diagnosed. In the US at least 40% of billionaires have dyslexia. And I think it's 30% of millionaires. And it's the type of thing, where like, if you are nine years old, and you suck at the one thing you're supposed to be good at. There's two options. One is you believe the system is rigged against you. And you go down a dark path, and you're like, I don't like school, I don't like government, I don't like other people. The second option is you develop this crazy resiliency and the self belief that you can do hard things, and you just keep going. And then eventually you overcome it. And you're playing life on hardmode. But when you're nine, when you're eight, when you're seven. And if you go through that you develop this very strong perseverance and the thought process that it's okay to fail. And you can look stupid, it's okay, you're not gonna die. And that actually pattern matches really well to people who end up being successful entrepreneurs.

TS: 12:48

Cliff eventually made it to Brown University in Rhode Island, where he majored in renewable energy engineering, and built over 30 products. But it wasn't until his final year that he figured out what he wanted to spend his time on.

CW: 13:01

The first product that I built in college was a product called board break. It was a 3d printed skateboard brake that you could attach to the back of your board. And then I started doing hackathons. And I realized very quickly that physical products took a lot of time, and a lot of money to create. But software products scale infinitely of the first eight hackathons I did it didn't know how to code, but I want half of them. And that I like really dedicated myself to learn how to make websites learning how to make iphone apps. And total, I built about 36 different products, I built an app called party radar that identifies parties on a college campus. But towards graduation, I knew that I wanted to focus on one thing. So I ended up writing a 30 page paper about my worldviews and distilling it down to twenty eight principles that I believe that most people don't believe, in my conclusion was, I really liked Malthus and utilitarianism. And so I wanted to increase the utility of other people in the world. But I realized that there's diminishing marginal returns to utility if you're helping people who already have resources, like, oh, maybe I'll go help people in, you know, slums in India, or townships in South Africa. But I liked living in the United States that I realized there was a group people here who were underserved, that is other people like me with dyslexia. And I typically think that if you want to build a company, that's going to be very big, you've got to use technology or some shift that occurred, that enables for the building of that product, or that product could not have been created two years ago. Otherwise, it's something that's too easy for larger platforms to compete against gets you in. And then you ideally want to build something that's an Advil, not a vitamin. So with Speechify, we were solving a real problem. It was not a nice to have, it was a must have for the initial cohort, but it's very easily expanded to a lot of people who don't necessarily have learning differences.

TS: 14:41

And why do you think there were so few companies focusing on this? I mean, at the time that you started Speechify, there just weren't any options like it?

CW: 14:49

Yeah, well, text to speech has been around since the nineteen sixties. It predates the internet. So the technology, concatenated text to speech was there. The challenge is that it was seen as an accessibility tool. So it's typically buried about four or five, six levels deep in the menu. So people would not work on it. I viewed text to speech as something that's completely revolutionary. And as a better way for intaking information. In twenty fifteen, I started reading a lot of papers about the narrow applications of deep learning, to speech synthesis, optical character recognition, transcription, translation, natural language processing, recommendation engines, deep learning, which today people refer to often as generative AI. And I was like, huh, this is going to fundamentally revolutionize the world. And then in twenty seventeen, you had the transformer that came about inside of Google twenty nineteen, you had general pre trained transformer algorithms, you had the H 100 GPUs come out recently. And so all those advancements made it possible for us to create technology that you could not have been created before. But my thesis was because of deep learning, I could create text to speech that was significantly better. It's just no one had built really good user facing products, on iOS, on Chrome on Android on web app. And I mean, that's just hard. It's a slog. Stripe has this concept called shaving yaks, you want to do a lot of things that other people are not going to do. And you put a lot of distance between you and any other potential competitor. And so we just did that, right. I'm more than seven years into working on Speechify. There's an amazing team we have to work with. And so the first reason is, yeah, it's hard. The second reason is, I think very few people saw an opportunity there, because they assumed the default status quo of reading was good enough. And my, like, very clear personal experience, reading sucks. If you can make something that's better people will use it.

TS: 16:27

And in terms of finding your first users, like how did you approach customer research in the early days.

CW: 16:34

So the first thing that I did is I found a conference called the International Dyslexia Association conference in Florida. And I flew there, and with a keynote speaker for the speaking, I jumped on the stage, I plugged in my computer, I demoed, security didn't kick me out. And 12 School heads offered to fly me out of their schools to teach the kids how to Speechify. And I flew around the United States, and I would go present in schools and instead of leaving, at the end of my presentation, I'd asked to hang around the classes. And I would go and I would talk to kids. And when they had bugs, I'd fix them. And when they had an issue, I'd fix it. So I just talked to a lot of users. The next thing that I did is I wrote this book publicly about my experience with dyslexia on Facebook, I'd write five hundred words a day, I think it did it for about twenty days in a row. And those things would end up getting, you know, thousands of shares, I gained about like 30,000 followers from that. And those were typically moms of kids with dyslexia who started to use the product. The next thing that I did is the bottom of the app, like the bottom twenty percent, it was a huge button that said, Help slash message us. And it didn't send you the customer support. It sent you to me, like it was an iMessage modal popped up with my phone number. And so I was able to support a lot of users directly to the point that I my iMessage stopped working and I had to find a person at Apple to delete the database for my messages to start working in. And so it both it's find users, but it's more so talk to users and figure out how to make a product that fits like a glove on exactly what they need. And so those were the first things and then I got really good at ads on Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, Google ads, SEO, etc, all the kind of customer acquisition channels.

TS: 18:11

And I'm curious in terms of the reaction from your earliest users, because from reading a lot of the reviews on your website, on the app store, they're people who've been really impacted by this.

CW: 18:22

Yeah, I mean, the great thing about Speechify, if you read the reviews, about fifteen percent of people who said they cried when they started using the product, because it was so impactful in their lives. And it goes back to this idea that if you're hard of sight, you can use glasses, if it's hard to walk, you can use a wheelchair, if you're dyslexic, there's nothing you just suffer. So a lot of the times it'll be people saying things like, oh my gosh, my third grader is doing their homework by herself. Like, I never thought this would happen. Or, Hey, I'm 57 years old, I have stroke. And I love reading. And I haven't been able to read for the last four years, and I found this app, and it's completely changed my life. Or wow, you know, I have anxiety. I'm a law student. It's difficult for me to keep up with my readings, I don't have dyslexia, I don't have ADHD. But the closer it gets to the deadline, the more anxious I get. And with Speechify, I just click play, and it reads and the more it reads, the less anxious I get, you know, often it'll be someone saying, Hey, I'm a single mom, and I'm studying to getting a nursing degree. And I have two kids to take care of. And my hands are always busy. And I can just activate Speechify and I get it done.

Or, Hey, I live in Ghana. I'm working towards my accounting degree. I didn't get a lot of individualized attention when I was in fourth grade. I don't really have dyslexia, but I'm also not the best reader. And this made it super easy for me to get through my assigned reading. Or, Hey, I'm a lawyer, I need to read through so many documents. And this saves me about you know, 14 hours a week because I get into the car, or hey, I work in Wall Street. And, you know, I really wanted to read this annual report about the narrow applications of boron doping and silicon wafers when it comes to renewable energy. And it's such a dry paper, and I would never read it myself. But with Speechify I just listened with Snoop Dogg's voice and it's interesting. So I listen to it like a podcast. Yeah. So you know, millions of responses like that.

TS: 20:06

How does it make you feel like when you when you read these comments?

CW: 20:10

So the first year, it was really impactful on me, extremely motivating. Even today, I get like anywhere from like one hundred to one thousand messages like that. They're on the App Store. But like, I get a lot of emails, I get a lot of direct DMS, there was one recently I read this guy who's 74 years old, who uses speechify, every single day, and I was like, ah, this is so sweet. So I messaged the rest of the group. The messages that hit me the most, and the hardest, are typically people who are similar to me. So kids who are really smart, and whose potential is curtailed by the fact that they are have challenged in reading, and they use the product by Speechify to make their life great. The second group that I really like helping are people who are super users of the product, who listen really fast, like, I care about listening fast. If you're using Speechify, and read at, like 250 words per minute, yeah, like that's 25% faster than normal readers amazing. But like, I want to hear from users who are reading at like seven hundred words. Because those are the people who are going to literally change the world in the next like 10 years. And I want to be friends with them. And it's very, very cool for me to see people just becoming monsters, because they use Speechify to feed their brains so much information. So that to me is extremely energizing,

TS: 21:19

And what's your reading speed?

CW: 21:21

I typically listen to between seven hundred/eight hundred words per minute.

TS: 21:24

Okay, so to put that into context, like you know, is that 3x 4x?

CW: 21:29

The average reading speed is two hundred words per minute. So it's like three and a half 4x. And like, for me that's comfortable. Like, I would never want to listen at two hundred words, I want to jump out the window. Like that sounds like a torture to me.

TS: 21:41

But then doesn't that make everyday conversations quite difficult?

CW: 21:44

Yes. It's extremely difficult for me to sit through a lecture in college, where the professor is talking at 1x speed, like, this is a waste of time. So like, I love school, I would love to go and do my master's in computational neuroscience. But like, I just can't envision myself sitting and listening to someone talk when I speak that this doesn't make any sense. If you're a good professor, just write it down in the textbook, and I will listen to it. And so, you know, being an autodidact is like, a skill that you can learn. And so it's one that I've cultivated in myself. What I do love is at a certain point, books don't have the most current information. Humans are the final frontier when it comes to information. And after when you're doing something like doing research in artificial intelligence, or renewable energy engineering or customer acquisition, like, you want the cutting edge. And so what I do is I reach out to people. So I'm like, huge on sending cold messages to people on Facebook, on Instagram, on email, on YouTube, on Tik Tok, and having conversations with those people and learning from them. You know, those conversations are not boring.

TS: 22:48

And you mentioned that you've since expanded to offer audiobooks, you have the AI voice studio, tell me about how that fits in with the vision of Speechify.

CW: 22:56

So the goal is to make sure that reading is never a barrier to learning for anyone, no matter where your background is, we found that a lot of users were uploading books, or we're like, Okay, well, let's just make it easy for you to buy books. And that was just, you know, working on partnerships that we found with publishers who we really liked. The next thing we did is, we had built so much technology around document parsing, computer vision, speech, synthesis, etc. That it was a no brainer to release that as a studio that allowed people to use those products for a b2b and creator use case as well.

TS: 23:28

And, you know, we talked about the impact that you've had with speechify in general. But you know, how much do you think the world has changed for dyslexic people in terms of having products that were designed with them in mind, accessibility of the internet, compared to when you first started building Speechify?

CW: 23:45

Great question. So I've been working on Speechify for seven years, I would say 10 years ago, nobody listened to podcasts. Seven years ago, podcasts started to become a thing. And then over the last like five years, podcasts have become a huge, I remember getting my first audio book on Audible. And there was no app, there was a website that I burned CDs off of. And then I would upload mp3 files onto my iPod Touch. Sorry, I would shuffle. And then finally there was an app. Still, Audible is now huge, but like that's really a phenomenon of the last five years. And then now you can double speed YouTube videos, you can double speed Netflix, you can double speed WhatsApp messages, the world has gotten a lot more audio and a lot of is actually a function of air pods. If you think about how often people had earphones in their ears 10 years ago, compared to how often they haven't now it's like not even comparable. And then if you have ADHD, well, if you didn't have ADHD, and you started using TikTok, now you have ADHD. And so I think that acceptance of neurodiversity has increased. But also just fundamentally, people use listening as a way for information and take a lot more than I did before.

The internet has just become better as it comes to UI user experience accessibility. neurodiversity in general is more well known now. And so most people Know about dyslexia. Now, that was just not the case 15 years ago, and it's accepted. So it's not something to be ashamed of. It's something to celebrate. And I think there's a lot of instances of, like, very clearly documented, you know, if you're dyslexic 30% of MIT has dyslexia, 30% of NASA has dyslexia, it's the type of thing was like, Yeah, you have a challenge with phonemic awareness, but like, you're really good at like, rendering a 3d object in your mind and seeing it from any angle, you really good at cross pollinating information from different places. And like, that's the definition of creativity. And so, you know, there's strengths, there's weaknesses, like any other condition. But yeah, I'd say the world is a lot more accessible now. And, you know, I can give our team a pat in the back, it's a lot more accessible. And a lot of that is actually due to Speechify. If I, you know, my Mac app for Speechify had a bug in it a month ago, and I couldn't do my work. Like, I had to stop everything, make sure that that was solved. And before that was solved, I couldn't do anything. And so it really is amazing how, how much more accessible the world is now, compared to how it was 10 years ago.

TS: 26:05

And what else needs to be done? What progress would you like to see?

CW: 26:09

So, dyslexia, the two big challenges are reading and spelling. Now, within reading, the biggest challenge is actually skimming, like reading documentation. So speechify lets you do that. If you listen really fast, I like to reduce the friction that it takes for an idea to go from my head onto paper. So reading speed is two hundred words per minute. But like most people type it like 50 words per minute, if they type relatively fast, I type at 70 words per minute, my brother types at 140. So I actually even you know, as an adult practice, touch typing all the time, because I want to be able to type but like 150 words per minute, so there's no space between me thinking a thought and appearing on my screen. I think that there's a lot of stuff that's going to come up in that space. I think that there's some interesting company like Neuralink that work on faster bandwidth connection to the brain. I wish I could put a book in a blender blend it, drink it, and the information is in my brain, like, at a certain point, you'll end up with something like that. So I'm excited for that future.

TS: 27:06

In the next part of the interview, Cliff talks about how he made the leap from being a solo founder to bringing on a co founder. And he reveals his unique approach to building the Speechify team.

CW: 27:15

So my brother Tyler joined me as my co founder about two years ago, he had another company called Black SMS that allows you to password protect and encrypt text messages. Tyler started coding when he was in third grade toddler self assembly and fifth grade, built 47 iPhone apps at the time, he was 17. He skipped three to half years of math in high school, three years of computer science in high school, did math as an undergrad, Stanford, his master's in artificial intelligence at Stanford, focusing on text and speech and large language models. And he wrote this very seminal paper on natural languag processing and text to speech. Tyler and I shared an apartment, I was working at Speechify, he was working on Black SMS. It was like having a co founder without having co founder disagreements, working on different projects, I really enjoy being a solo founder. I think that the number one reason why startups fail is co founder disagreements. And that was just like, not possible. And I knew exactly what I wanted to build, my vision was very clear. I was technical enough to be able to build early versions of the product myself. And I was lucky enough to have other people around me who were exceptional who joined the team. And we have an incredible leadership team.

Tyler is the smartest person I've ever met in terms of his ability to learn stuff. And the way I've run Speechify is, every single department I've led at some point, I lead recruiting a lead designer, lead engineering, lead product, lead, customer acquisition, whatever it might be. And I'll just read 100 books on the topic, I'll talk to 100 of the top people in the field. And then I'll rewrite the blueprint. And then Simon who's our COO will come in and clean up the mess that I make and institutionalize it and then we'll put someone in who you know, that's their career, they're very good at it. And they'll follow the blueprint, the only role that I did not lead is head of AI. That part just takes such deep levels of math, and technical acumen and ability to implement Open Source Repositories. The team is now set up very well where if I needed to, I could go and run that team. I just wouldn't be an incredible individual contributor on the team. But Tyler is just like far and above the most talented person I've ever met when it comes to this skill set. And he's the type of person that like he's not hireable, like Google couldn't hire Tyler, DeepMind couldn't hire Tyler, Open AI couldn't hire Tyler. And you know, he's the kind of person who would start his own company. But we're also best friends. And it just stopped making sense for Tyler not to work on Speechify with me, so he joined. And I get a lot of support from Tyler, when it comes to all the things that we do at Speechify for recruiting, business strategy, whatever it might be. And so, you know, if I got to use him for, you know, 2% of my decisions in the past, now I get to use them for like 10% of my decisions and vice versa. And he also happens to lead a team. Now the other thing is like, you know, I trust him with my life.

TS: 29:55

Sounds like a good co founder to have. But I'm curious, when it comes to disagreements, how do you handle that? Given that he's your brother, but also your business partner?

CW: 30:07

Yeah. So disagreements is not necessarily just with Tyler, right? It's with any person on the leadership team at Speechify. So we have four core principles, extreme product quality -we make sure that we have amazing products and we talk to users a lot. Frugality. We don't waste money. Speed. We shift things really quickly. We have a huge bias towards action and leading with love. We take really good care of each other. I have four younger siblings and they're like the most important thing in the world to me. And when we were kids and we had like arguments, whatever. My dad is an amazing arbitrator and so he would explain to us, let's say I was getting punished for something I did to Tyler. He would explain to me why I'm getting punished. And by the end of that explanation, like, oh yeah, that does, this makes sense. You should definitely get punished. and so my dad's a very good communicator. I think inside of Speechify, all the leadership team communicates exceptionally well. The entire company does. Very flat organization. Everybody has my phone number. You know, uh, leadership at Speechify is not given it's earned. If you're on a team, the person who just contributes the most and takes the most ownership eventually leads that team, and that happens very quickly. Um, and we have a lot of very young people in very senior positions for that reason. The person who has the right to decide what direction would go is the person who's the most in the weeds. if there is a disagreement where Simon or Tyler or whomever disagrees with me three times and it's in their domain, I yield.

Yeah, so I think it just, there's a lot of mutual admiration and respect inside of the company and so there's never disagreements that occur that are challenging in that regard. I'll say one more thing 'cause your question was very good. Tyler and I could not have been co-founders 10 years ago, and it's because I wasn't good enough. Tyler was so good. He was such an amazing startup founder. He was so technical, he had such high business acumen, all these different things. If I ended up working with Tyler, he would not have had the respect needed for me in order to co-founder company with me. There was a period of five years where I grew tremendously. I continued to read books. I continued to learn to code. I continued to talk to users. I continued to recruit people, and Tyler could see the things that I was really good at, that there was no clear evidence of beforehand. You could guess at it, but it was, there was no evidence. Once that was clear, it made it easy for me and Tyler to work together.

And yes, we're very lucky to be brothers, but I have a lot of friends like this who were not my brothers, right? The best example is Simon. Simon and I met off the. Message on Facebook. I had written in Hackathon Hackers Europe. Hey, I'm working on this product. I need some help. Whatever. Simon and I, different religions, different languages, different countries, thousands of miles apart. Not a single person in the history of his family Knew a single person in the history of my family, and I did not know a single person who knew him. He did not know anyone who knew me. We started working together remotely on other sides of the world. And eventually he helped me so much that I got him a flight to the United States, got him a visa, got him an apartment. Eventually he got a green card. He went from an iOS intern to an iOS engineer to head of iOS, to head of recruiting to COO, um, head of engineering in the middle.

And there's countless stories like that of people who have worked in Speechify. And so I think that's the key is, uh, to me the greatest mark of a good leader is seeing the greatness in others before they see it in themselves. And you know, the greatest gift that you can give to yourself is see the greatness in yourself and hold yourself to the standard of the person that you can be. And if you do that, then your life will be wonderful.

TS: 33:24

Thanks to Cliff Weitzman for a fascinating conversation. If you'd like to learn more, you can follow Cliff on Instagram, YouTube, and Medium. You'll find the links in the show notes. I hope you enjoy the episode at whatever speed you listen to it. If so, be sure to subscribe if you haven't already. And please consider leaving a five star review on Apple Podcasts. This is a brand new show and your review will help even more people discover it. I'm Tosin Sulaiman, hope to see you next time on Made For Us.

CW: 33:54

Book recommendation: How to Win Friends by Dale Carnegie. Book recommendation: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson is my favorite book. And then song recommendation. The first song from Hamilton the musical, and actually really the entire the entire track.

TS: 34:07

And you're a musician yourself, so I, I thought you might recommend one of your songs.

CW: 34:11

Oh, that's very kind. Uh, yeah. If you really like the story, uh, go on Spotify and search Speechify, Cliff Weitzman, and you'll find a, a song that I wrote that has done really well in ads.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai