REPLAY: Cliff Weitzman on building 'the voice of the internet'

CW: 00:00

The great thing about Speechify is if you read the reviews, about 15% of people who say they cried when they started using the product 'cause 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.

TS: 00:15

Hey everyone, it's Tosin here. This week we wanted to share one of our most popular episodes of season one. It's with Cliff Weitzman, the founder and CEO of Speechify, a text to speech app built for people who have dyslexia, like Cliff himself. Speechify now has 50 million users, and in the interview Cliff talks about how it's helped make the internet more accessible and turned him into a scarily fast reader.

pisode of Made For Us back in: 2023

TS: 01:00

Before we begin, I'd also like to say a huge thank you to everyone who's tuned into Made For Us since the launch of season two.

You've helped this show become one of the top 10 design podcasts on the Apple Podcast charts in the US on Monday. We even got as high as number three, a pretty big deal for an 18 month old indie show. So thanks for your support and please do keep listening and sharing your favorite episodes. And if you like cheering for the underdog, why not leave a five star rating as well? It really does make a difference.

Now here's my conversation with Cliff Weitzman.

CW: 01:34

So my name is Cliff Weitzman. I am 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 in 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 X and you click option A, it reads, if you hit Option S, it slows down option D, D, d, 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.

CW: 02:03

And then I built an iPhone app called Speechify that lets you scan any physical documents. It can use natural language processing, parse PDFs. it can keep speaking to you even if the phone is closed, uh, 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, at a web app, uh, app.speechify.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. Uh, tens of millions of people who use it. It's been the number one app at its app store category for about four years in iOS, for about three and a half years on Chrome. Uh, 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 from major publishers.

CW: 02:57

And the third product we built, uh, is a 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 learning for anyone, no matter what your background is.

So even if you grew up in, you know, Bali and you had, uh, 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: 03:31

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

CW: 00:03:39

Yeah. So when I was a kid, I wanted to be Prime Minister of Israel, billionaire and a pop star all at the same time. And, uh, my family really values education in a very Jewish culture. And my dad, uh, 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 10 x more than most kids, just because I kept not doing it.

But I really believed, like my dad's a, he's very wise, very smart, very persuasive. So I really bought into this concept that reading is key. Um. Eventually I got into reading 'cause my dad would read out books to me and then I found audio books. But I've listened to two audio books a week, every week for the last 18 years.

CW: 04:28

I’m more than 2000 books in. and it doesn't matter if it's fantasy, biography, sci-fi, religion, theology, like, I'm just, I'm 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: 04:57

Right. And that's an, an astonishing number of books that you, 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: 05:09

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 it to people. And when I figured out that I had dyslexia, 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 a eighth grade teacher, Mr. Bloom, that taught 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 audiobook.

CW: 05:54

Luckily this random textbook happened to have had an audiobook. 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 I started kind of like in the bottom of the class, but with time I got better.

We had a summer reading book for high school called Marley and Me. 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. Uh, I spent maybe the majority of the summer trying to read this book. I did not succeed.

CW: 06:23

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 a Texas speech system for my computer and my phone that would read out the crack Kindle version into my phone overnight. And that worked. and it was very liberating.

And when I started listening, I would listen to like 0.75 x speed and then one X and then 1.25 and 1.5 and two x and three x. and so I learned and I taught myself how to listen fast, which is a very valuable scale. It was now speechify, you know, it teaches a lot of people how to do, we have an automatic speed ramping algorithm that coaches you into listening fast.

CW: 07:00

And once I got to that point, you know, I really felt like I had wings. I was not tied up 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. They don't wanna add too many books 'cause they wanna make sure that they get to them. But like my list is infinite. I could take any book and you know, I'll get to it. yeah, so just felt very freeing.

TS: 07:24

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: 07:33

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 adventure. And uh, 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.

CW: 07:56

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. Like good at it. 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, never embarrassed to get accommodations, uh, from the school.

And I would fight for the accommodations that I needed to have. Often I wouldn't get them, and I'd be like, cool, all right, let's go. I can, I can stand up for myself. and 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.

CW: 08:38

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.

got software called Kurzweil: 3000

And, uh, as I switched schools, they didn't necessarily continue having access to the same software. And so I started building my own because I wanted something that was faster. I wanted something that had keyboard shortcuts. I wanted something that had better voices. I wanted something that let me scan physical books.

CW: 09:31

And when I finished building Speechify, I built it as a direct to consumer company B2C as opposed to a company that sells into education because I wanted a kid. Who you know, is sitting in the back of his mom's minivan to be able to search, read to me on the app store. And like you could download it and it would just like work.

There'd be no limitations. And that's exactly what happened. And that's why we've become the largest text to speech product in the world and why so many people use it. And yeah, so it comes from that experience.

TS: 10:00

So you had to find a lot of workarounds, and it, 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: 10:17

So, dyslexia, there's kinda like 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 a normal person, it's 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. Uh, if you're normal, you have a normal distribution of mini columns and there are normal length.

CW: 10:44

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.

Dyslexia is characterized by a challenge in phonemic awareness and short term memory. 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's just 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.

CW: 11:29

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.

TS: 11:44

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, you know, in the US and in other countries as well. But yeah, just curious to get your take on that.

CW: 12:06

So, typically dyslexia anywhere in the world, you know, it's, 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 'cause 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 right against you and you go down a dark path and you know, like I, 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 could do hard things and you just keep going, and then eventually you overcome it and you're playing life on hard mode. 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 in the thought process that it's okay to fail and you can look stupid.

CW: 13:03

It's okay. You're not gonna die. and that actually pattern matches really well to people who end up being successful entrepreneurs.

TS: 13:10

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: 13:22

The first product that I built in college was a product called Board Break. It was a 3D printed skateboard breaks break that you could attach to the back of your board. And then I started doing hackathons. And I realized very quickly that, uh, 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, I didn't know how to code, but I won half of them.

CW: 13:44

And then I like really dedicated myself to learning 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. I ended up writing a 30 page paper about my worldviews and distilling it down to the 28 principles that I believe that most other people don't believe.

And my conclusion was I really like Malthus and utilitarianism, and so I wanted to increase the utility of other people in the world. Uh, but I realized that there's deep diminishing marginal returns to utility if you're helping people who already have resources. I was 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. I realized there was a group of people here who were underserved, which there's other people like me with dyslexia, and I typically think that if you want to build a company that's gonna be very big, you've gotta use a technology or some shift that occurred that enables for the building of that product where that product could not have been created two years ago. Otherwise, it's something that's too easy for larger platforms to compete against you in. and then you ideally want to build something that's a Advil, not a vitamin. so with Speechify, uh, we were solving a real problem.

CW: 14:55

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 difficulties.

TS: 15:03

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: 15:10

CW: 15:33

In 2015, I started reading a lot of papers about the narrow applications, deep learning, two speech synthesis, optical character recognition, transcription translation, processing, recommendation engines, you know, deep learning, which today people refer to often as generative ai. and I was like, ha, this is going to fundamentally re revolutionize the world.

And then in: 2017

CW: 16:11

It's just no one had built really good user facing products on iOS and Chrome, on Android, on, web app. I mean that's just hard. It's a slog. stripe has this concept called shaving yaks. You wanna 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.

CW: 16:27

And so we just did that, right? more than seven years into working on Speechify, there's an amazing team boy you have to work with. And so the first readings then, yeah, it's hard. The second reason is I think very few people saw an opportunity there 'cause they assumed the default status quo of reading was good enough. And my, like, very clear personal experience, which reading sucks. If you could make something that's better, people will use it.

TS: 16:49

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

CW: 16:55

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 the keynote speaker, finished speaking, I jumped on the stage, I plugged in my computer, I demoed, security didn’t kicked me out.

And 12 school heads offered to fly me out to their schools to teach the kids how to use. 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 ask to hang around in the classes, and I would go and I would talk to kids, and when they had bugs, I'd fix them.

CW: 17:22

And then 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, uh, book publicly about my experience with dyslexia on Facebook. I'd write 500 words a day. I think I did it for about 20 days in a row. and those things would end up getting, you know, thousands of shares.

I’d get 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 20%, 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 a, 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 my iMessage stopped working and I had to find a person at Apple to delete the database from my iMessages to start working again.

CW: 18:12

And so 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, uh, ads on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Google Ads, SEO, et cetera, all the kind of customer acquisition channels.

TS: 18:32

And I'm curious in terms of the reaction from your earliest users. 'cause 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: 18:43

Yeah, I mean the great thing about Speechify is if you read the reviews, about 15% of people who say they cried when they started using the product 'cause it was so impactful in their lives.

And it goes back to this idea that if you're heart 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 her homework by herself.Like, I never thought this would happen.

Or Hey, I'm 57 years old, I have a stroke. I love reading and I haven't been able to read for the last four years, and I found this app that'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, my, my readings.

CW: 19:18

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 nurse nursing degree, and I have two kids to take care of.

CW: 19:37

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 think I have dyslexia, but I'm also not the best reader. and this made it super easy for me to get through my, uh, 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 to do them in my car.

CW: 20:02

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 on Silicon Wayfairs 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 listened to it like a podcast. yeah. So that's great. You know, millions of responses like that.

TS: 20:27

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

CW: 20:32

So I'd say the first year it was really impactful on me, extremely motivating. Even today I get like anywhere from like a hundred to a thousand messages like that they're on the app store.

But like I get a lot of emails, I get a lot of, you know, direct dms. There was one recently I read of this guy who's 74 years old who uses Speechify every single day. And I was like, ah, this is so sweet. So like 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.

CW: 20:57

So kids who are really smart and whose potential is curtailed by the fact that they have challenge in reading and they use the product like 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 it like 250 words per minute. Yeah, like that's 25% faster than normal readers amazing. But like I wanna hear from users who are reading it like 700 words per minute. Those are the people who are going to literally change the world in the next like 10 years. And I wanna be friends with 'em.

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: 21:40

And what's your reading speed?

CW: 21:42

I typically listen to between 700 and 800 words per minute.

TS: 21:45

Okay. So to put that into context, like you know, is that three x four x?

CW: 21:50

The average reading speed is 200 words per minute. So it's like three and a half, four x. And like for me that's comfortable. Like I would never wanna listen at 200 words per minute. I wanna jump up out the window. Like that sounds like it's torture to me.

TS: 22:02

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

CW: 22:05

Yes. It's extremely difficult for me to sit through a lecture in college when the professor is talking at one X 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. I just can't envision myself sitting and listening to someone talk at one X speed. That doesn't make any sense. if you're a good professor, just write it down in a textbook and I will listen to it.

CW: 22:29

And so, you know, being an autodoc 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 often when you're doing something like doing research in artificial intelligence or renewable literacy, 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 and Instagram, on email, on YouTube, on TikTok, and having conversations with those people and learning from them. Uh, you know, those conversations are not boring.

TS: 23:09

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: 23:17

So the goal is to make sure the reading has never varied learning for anyone no matter where your back is. We found that a lot of users were uploading books and 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, et cetera, that it was a no brainer to release that as a studio that allowed people to use those products, uh, for a B2B and creator use case as well.

TS: 23:50

And you know, we've 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: 24:07

Yeah, 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 huge. I remember getting my first audiobook on Audible, and there was no app.

There was a website that I burned CDs off of, and then I would upload MP three files onto my iPod Touch, sorry, iPod Shuffle. And then finally there was an app. Still audible is, 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 could double speed Netflix, you could double speed WhatsApp messages.

CW: 24:43

The world has gotten a lot more audio and a lot of it's actually a function of AirPods. If you think about how often people had, uh, earphone in their ears 10 years ago compared to how often they have it 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.

I think that acceptance of neurodiversity has increased, but also just fundamentally people use listening as a way for information intake a lot more than they 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.

CW: 25:22

That was just not the case 15 years ago. Uh, and it's accepted, so it's not something to be ashamed of. It's something to celebrate. 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 where like, yeah, you have a challenge with phonemic awareness, but like you're really good at like rendering a 3D in your mind and seeing it from any angle.

You're really good at cross polling 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, uh, condition. Uh, 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.

CW: 26:02

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, uh, 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, it really is amazing how much more accessible the world is now compared to how it was 10 years ago.

TS: 26:26

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

CW: 26:30

For dyslexia? 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 200 words per minute. But like most people type at 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. 'cause I wanna be able to type at 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 gonna come up in that space.

CW: 27:12

I think that there's some interesting company like Neuralink that work on, uh, faster bandwidth connection to the brain. I wish I could put a book in a blender or blend to drink it. The information's in my brain and like at a certain point you'll end up with something like that. So I'm excited for that future.

TS: 27:27

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: 27:37

So my brother Tyler joined me as my co-founder about two years ago. He had another company called Black SMS, that allowed you to password protect and encrypt text messages. Tyler started coding when he was in third grade, Tyler's civil assembly in fifth grade. Built 47 iPhones. At the time he was 17, he skipped three and a half years of math in high school and three years of computer science in high school. Did math as an undergrad at Stanford, his master's in artificial intelligence at Stanford, focusing on Texas speech on large language models.

CW: 28:04

And he wrote this very seminal paper on national life 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 an incredible leadership team.

CW: 28:41

Tyler is the smartest person I've ever met in terms of his ability to learn stuff. and the, the way I run Speechify is every single department I've led. At some point I led recruiting, I led design, I led engineering, I led product, I led, customer acquisition, whatever it might be, and I'll just read a hundred books on the topic.

I'll talk to a hundred of the top people in the field, and then I'll rewrite the blueprints. 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 and they're very good at it, and they'll follow the brutal blueprint.

CW: 29:11

The only role that I did not lead is set up 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 skillset. And he is the type of person that, like, he is not hireable. Like Google couldn't hire Tyler DeepMind couldn't hire Tyler OpenAI couldn't hire Tyler. and you know, he is the type of person who would start his own company, but we're also best friends.

CW: 29:47

And it just stopped making sense for telling not to work on speech with me. So he joined, um. I get a lot of support from Tyler when it comes to all the things that we do at Speechify, 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 him for like 10% of my decisions, and vice versa.

And he also happens to lead the AI team. Uh, the other thing is like, you know, I trust him with my life, so That's amazing.

TS: 30:17

That sounds like a, a good co-founder to have. Curious when it comes to sort of disagreements, how do you handle that given that he's your brother, but also your business partner?

CW: 30:28

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. Uh, we make sure that we have amazing products and we talk to use a lot frugality. We don't waste money, uh, speed. we ship things really quickly.

We have a huge bias towards action and leading with love. We take really good care of each other. Uh, 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, uh, 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.

CW: 31:03

He would explain to me why I'm getting punished. And by the end of day explain it. He's like, oh yeah, that 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 speech fight 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. And we have a lot of very young people in very senior positions.

CW: 31:31

For that reason. The person who has the right to decide what the 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 'cause 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.

CW: 32:14

In order to co-founder a company with me, uh, 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.

CW: 32:30

You could guess at it, but it was, there was no evidence. Once that was clear, it made it easy for me entitled 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 of a cold 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.

CW: 33:03

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. 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 the COO, head of engineering in the middle.

CW: 33:22

And there's countless stories like that of people who have worked 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 in. If you do that, then your life will be wonderful.

TS: 33:44

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 episode. 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: 34:13

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 track.

TS: 34:27

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

CW: 34:31

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.