YouSaid · the spoken record

Cliff Weitzman

lines on the record: 130
first: 2026-05-09
most recent: 2026-05-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Set of Fusion reactor in your backyard, you can learn everything. You can do stuff. You can build stuff more easily than ever before. And our kids are going to grow up with this mentality ingrained. So my dream for the world is everybody believes they have a higher level of agency than we do today. And hopefully that will be the case. The negative side of that is people think they have less agency because they abdicate all the decision making to AI. And so you need to have people be in the driver's seat and use the tools instead of having the tools use them.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think humanity is essentially going through a new form of evolution. I mean, if you look at evolution, right, to begin with, like humans are what, the last minute on the clock, or getting to a point where evolution is not a matter of your physiology, but of your brain's ability to intake information faster and understand that information and use it in a different way. And I love fantasy audiobooks. And sometimes there's this thing called a familiar in fantasy audiobooks. It's like this animal, like a dire wolf, like can connect with you mentally. Basically, I feel the same way about my computer and my phone and all the tools that I get to use. And my team, by the way, it's like Speechify is one live organism around the world. You can just achieve more. Like even if I just look at what happened to my dad with this experience with cancer and my brother who's still ill, but we're going to figure it out. I just have this promethean view that we can solve everything. And when you talk to a doctor, you can very easily educate yourself to be as sophisticated. When you don't know how to solve your AC, you just take a video with it. It tells you how to set the AC and how to work your stove.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great. Dexa scans are incredible, so you can find the breakdown between fat, muscle, and bone density in your body, and you can figure out exactly what your body fat percentage is. And it's just all macros. So if my size or your size, you want to have about one pound of one gram of protein per pound of body weight. You want to have about 50 to 80 grams of fat every single day. And then you cut or you bulk. So if I cut, I ate 130 grams of carbs a day. If I'm bulking, I'm eating like 260, 70 grams of carbs a day. And then like your body is just a sign's equation. You can change it.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so great new hack that I have. Take photos of yourself and upload them to ChatGPT, ask it what body 5%age am I and what do I need to improve. And it's so good at giving you information now and then ask it for the workout routine to take the parts of your body that you think you want to improve and it'll just give you the workout routine. It's really good. So most of my support is tricking parkour and gymnastics. And so I'll go to a gym wherever I'm going. Those are great one here in East London called Overgravity. And I'll go train and I'll find the best athlete in the gym. And they'll go up to him and I'm like, hey, what's your name, John? I'm Cliff. Nice to meet you. Hey, you seem amazing. Can I hire you to coach me one-on-one? How much would that cost? I don't know, 75 pounds, whatever. So from that point on, I will go train and I'll train with them. And like gymnastics, I just love to do so. I'll do it like for three hours in a row. And I love to have somebody else who's better than me watching me and giving me tips. And so it doesn't matter whether it's like a sport I'm trying to learn or guitar or whatever, like I'll hire someone to watch me do the thing and coach me to be better when it comes to lifting. I mean, obviously compound movements or whatever.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hour. No, like you see that in some studies, and by and large, that's not true. Like, if you talk to people who are bodybuilders, it's just like not reflected. Like, it's like a very small optimization.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do eat food in the day, but like I travel a lot. And so I have that 80 grams of protein in the morning, 80 grams of protein before I go to sleep. And like, I know I'm good for food.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a protein powder on Amazon called EarthCimp, which is P-based protein powder. And you take that and a 32-ounce bottle of like shaker instead of the 16 ounce. And I have that three scoops every morning and every evening. And I don't need to worry about food because I get the amount of protein I need every single day automatically. And I'd say like half my body at this point is P-based”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had the best time in university of anyone I've ever met. My cheeks started to hurt from smiling so much three months in. I found my people and I was so lucky to go to a place where I had an open curriculum. Half my classes I didn't have the prerequisites for. I got to make my own nature. And I met so many people who have stayed my friends for life. And I would just have two dinners every single night and I'd sit with a table of six people I didn't know and I'd do that again. Actually, I'd do that again. So three dinners a night. So yes, I would because it was the best experience of my life. But I would not tell them that the university is the thing that's responsible for their education. You are the quarterback of your own education. You need to be constantly reading. Like I, the reason I'm the person that I am today is because from the age of 13 till today, I have listened to 100 audiobooks every single year. I will say that in the last 24 months, half of the content that I've consumed is deep.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there will come a wave of people going back to school after the age of 40, but school will be different. I don't know what that looks like, but I think that this is like the most important topic that we're not thinking about.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Figure out the inference costs, you just print profit, and that doesn't make any sense. It's too few people getting too much leverage, not to mention the hyperscalers. What happens to everybody else? And so the solution is don't be a lead about it. Embrace using these tools. Because number one, you're going to get more entrepreneurs, which is an amazing thing. It's easier than ever to be an entrepreneur, which is, by the way, why I'm really long meta in a world where it's easy to do engineering and easy to do design, more things launched, and go to market becomes the most important thing. And the second thing is how do you reskill people? So I do believe that you can get people who are old and grizzled and are veterans to learn how to use AI, but most people don't naturally do that. That's an unnatural behavior. But go back to the principle of a little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept. People just need to be awakened and you need to convince them that it's fun to learn and you need to learn, but not everybody will do that. And that's the whole point of having a government system is there should be a way to re-educate. And especially now, as you see K-12 kind of falling apart and universities falling apart.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not having a phone is insane. It's literally madness. And I came into the project, like I had a full meal beforehand, and I have a lot of random skills. And like eventually I did succeed in getting an iPhone. But it was really hard. And if you don't have a phone, you don't have Google Maps. You literally can't navigate. You don't have Wi-Fi. You can't put a phone down to get a job. You can't even drive for Grubhub or Uber Eats or do Deliver U because you don't have a phone and phones get stolen in those situations too. So like, first of all, my personal opinion, the government should give a free Android to everybody who wants one. Like you should be able to go to the Social Security Office and just get a phone. Like it's a basic human right at this point, in my opinion. The second thing is the Ginny Index is now getting really messed up. All the value is accruing to essentially buffoons like me who build a consumer subscription product or an AI product that gets a ton of people to pay for it and it becomes like a standard in their life. And as long as you...”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the time, constantly, constantly, and especially after that experience, like I was generous with people who were living on the street before. Now I'm way more. Like I just buy people phones because that's the thing that I wanted. It's like, I'll go into the inconvenience store and just buy any Android that's there and give it to them.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mind on is that the most important thing is even when things are shitty, you got to find something to be grateful for.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So cool, it could inspire hundreds of millions of people. And what I realized is I often tell myself that my greatest advantage is that I have this AQ thing. I'm really good at keep going when other people stop. I put more reps in than everybody else. But that's actually not my biggest advantage. My biggest advantage is I'm typically very grateful and I'm really optimistic. And in that moment when things got really tough, it was around day nine where I was very hungry and forgot to be grateful and I forgot to be optimistic. And I think that one of the core inputs for allowing someone to have super strong AQ is they can find the goodness in every situation. They can find a way to be grateful about things. When I got into coding, I would misspell everything, an assignment that would take a normal person four hours would take me 17 hours. So I had a notebook and every day I would write before I go to sleep and before like right as I woke up, I'm good at computer science, I'm good at computer science. I'm good at computer science. And I found it really challenging, but I really appreciated that I got to learn because I wanted to. And so the thing I changed.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good one. Last year, Mr. Beast Jimmy was like, hey, I want to do this video where someone starts off, no money, no phone, no computer in the middle of America, and they need to start a business. And I think that you would be a hilarious person to do it. And I was like, Jimmy, I don't got time for this. And he's like, I'll do this many speech-fried integration. It's like, okay, that's a really good deal. Let's do it. So I spent 11 days sleeping in a Walmart parking lot in the middle of America. I took me three days to get an iPhone, make enough money to get an iPhone, five days to make enough money to have a laptop. I started working on a company, worked on a pizza restaurant, worked at a gym, and the video essentially fell apart. Like there were a lot of challenges. It didn't work. I was really upset about it. And typically I take 100% responsibility, 200% responsibility for everything I do. And I couldn't figure out what I could have done more to make the video work. And it took me a couple months to figure it out. But eventually I figured it out. I became resentful. I thought that part of like the production team, like they said they do this and then they didn't. And they said they did this and then they didn't. And I forgot to be grateful for the fact that I was doing something.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. Yes, yes, it will. Same thing Elon is the savage. Like there's a rule that everybody should know, which is never bet against Elon. You just shouldn't do it.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chat GPT for almost anything. And one of my least favorite things in the world is ChatGPT clickbaiting me at the end of its responses. I've literally written a prompt, like a shortcut on my computer to like tell it off every time it does it to get it to stop. But I think that they're in a very good, not in the second community, but outside the tech community. Their brand is pretty good outside the tech community. I think that they have a ton of cash. I think they have a pretty strong team. And I prefer to be contrary and then say the obvious answer. But anthropic is so good. So either give me more options or give me an opportunity to be contrary in here.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Megabot on top. You had the whole coup, and the internal team did support Sam. So also, when it comes to enterprise deals, he's so good at it that it looks like black magic and looks like fraud, right? Here's the analogy I give people. And again, I want to give them credit for they did it first. There's a lot of AQ in that company because OpenA actually started in 2015. ChatGPT didn't come out until 2022. The way I liken it is you had Columbus going to the richest man in the world at the time, the King of Spain, and saying, hey, I want to get to India, AGI. And on the way, he found the United States, right? America, ChatGPT. That's exactly what happened. Sam and Ilya and Greg and Elon went and got a ton of money from essentially Bill Gates, right? Microsoft, tried their best to get to AGI, found ChatGPT along the way. And then they made it into a really great, really great experience and product. Anthropic is running circles around them right now, like especially in the Coding Arena. Let's see what happens. I right now use Anthropic for everything, and I do not use...”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one has raised as much money as Sam Altman in the history of Silicon Valley like that. Completely ridiculous. The recruiting for OpenAI was absolutely insane. You get Greg Brockman, you get Ilias' Giver.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Damn. I like to be contrarian when it comes to these. So most people in my seat would say anthropic right now because I love cloth code. Oh my God, I would marry cloud code. Very hard decision. To be contrary, and I would say open AI. I often will look at the founders, and though I get the Sam Altman robs a lot of people the wrong way and comes off slimy, I think he's really good as a company operator. Really good.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The supply chain side and obviously the brand side, and everybody trusts them. Okay, time to go back from cutting mode into bulking mode. That's it.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the new CEO is more of an engineer. And so I'm excited to hypothetically have more support of good engineering tools for people to build excellent things for the platform. Tim Cook is like a god when it comes to supply chain. Like no one comes even close. And I think that Apple just won that race, right? AirPods were absolutely a huge win. Apple Wash was a huge win. Costs for producing iPhones. Amazing. Like, have you ever heard of Apple having a supply shorter? The first time I ever heard one is like Mac Minis were out of stock. But they always had the product to sell. Amazing, amazing company. And by the way, AirPods made more money than Spotify and almost every other audio company put together every single year for the last seven years. Like the amount of listening is absolutely unhinged since podcasts and audiobooks have 40% penetration in most markets today and markets that they don't like Mexico, they're growing exponentially. So you have picked the correct career. Speechify is just AI generated podcast AI generated audiobooks. So the TAM is really big. But Apple drove that with AirPods. So they won. They locked in.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Purchase. Like, it's so difficult to work with the App Store at this point. And we love Apple. Like, you know, it's made our business so much money, but it's just hard. I'm very excited about the transition of the new CEO at Apple. Let's see what comes out of that.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so Apple bought the Siri team way back in the day. Apple has this philosophy of on-device security, and therefore they're not using models that run on the cloud by and large. The keyboard does not give you access to the full RAM. So therefore, it's very difficult to run either a Wi-Fi call that does text-to-speech, speech to text, or something that connects to the app. WhisperFlow is done an amazing job. I'm super proud of that team. Like such great marketing, like everything. Obviously, you could do the same things with SpeecherFi, but like they just did such a good job with the marketing organic incredible. Great growth story. Here's the thing, right? It's very difficult, like you said, to be AI first, like AI native, like audio first, AI first, mobile first. Apple has built such an amazing ecosystem that by and large kind of become lazy, right? Like this is the cycle, the circle of life for startups. Like you need the hungry small startups to go after, like, look, even like Apple makes so much money off the App Store. Like, I can't even get an API to get a receipt for a user that makes it.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not if it's a product that you really need. If you have a disability, if you are blind and you need glasses, you will never churn from glasses. If you need a wheelchair, you're not going to churn from your wheelchair. And the same way that people don't churn from Speechify. But if it's a frivolous use case, that's not important, then yes, like a meme maker, sure. But if it's something that is a tool that you need to survive, then no”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up to revenue that did not become profit. But very often you'll have a company that raises $50 million. And there's just burning the $50 million alive. So make sure that there's a plan of how to reduce costs with time. However, here's the most important thing. Any Harvard MBA can figure out how to cut costs. Just requires being smart. Takes a genius to increase revenue. So still, if that company has an amazing growth lever, as long as there's some differentiator, they have better design. They have community is so important. They have community around it, then that's probably a pretty good bet.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is 11 labs for the standard model that's anywhere from 70 to 100 bucks, and for the V3 fast model, it's like 30 bucks. So like literally more than 10x cheaper. And that was just our whole focus for two and a half years. And we solved it. And that's why the company has been profitable for so long. And so when you look at a company that is hyper-growing like that, you just got to ask yourself, are they just giving away free money? So let's say cursor, for example, which is a really great example. Like cursor is one of my favorite examples ever because the market demanded that tool. Every software engineer who was coding inside of conversations with ChatGPT wanted an integration into their IDE. So all they did was take two separate tools, fork the open source repository for VS Code and add claude sonnet at a time and all the electrons on the right side were dying to go to the left side. And the second you put a bar of metal on top of it, of course you had the flow of money. And so that flow of money, as we all know, went straight through cursor and too anthropic. That is actually great because they didn't lose real money in the process.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The main thing to look for is inference costs bringing those companies alive. Like early days of ChatGPT, they're just burning billions of dollars in inference costs. And so we had exactly that revenue ramp in 2022 because we were just early. We started doing this in 2025. Sorry, 2015 dyslexia. And we had built models and like they were great, but once users probably started to use featurefy, it stopped being a business and started to be a charity. So the whole focus of the 40 person at the time, AI engineering team at Speechify, and all the GPUs that we had bought and the data center that we set up was to reduce infrastructure costs. And we got it to the point of single digit dollars for a million characters. If you go to any other model, it'll be anywhere from 30 to $100 per million characters. There's like two order deviation standard deviations cheaper.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With someone, but recognize that that person is amazing and find a way to still work together. So that's my philosophy in general.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, this is exactly what I would love to have done at your age if I didn't know that it was not. Okay, but I was not ready for hire them for speechified. I was like, this person's got it. So I hired him to do personal projects for me. Like little side projects, like optimization of like my email drive, like all these small apps that I wanted to improve my life that didn't exist. He was my personal engineer for a long time. So all the early voice projects, like the very first version of Jarvis that I could call on the phone and talk to, he built it for me. And like, well, I like, I had the core team and then I would text him, hey, can you do this? Like, here's a cool repo I found. And he would just do it. Like we built a translation to all these things. And then eventually he came and lived with me first in LA and then in Miami. And then at that point, we built enough trust that he joined the core team and worked in real products. But my philosophy is if you find someone that's talented, you better work with them. And like most people, like if they get hacked, like that person is my enemy. They are evil. I do not want to interface with them ever again. And like you'll see in world history, the most successful leaders are the people who end up having some confrontation.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a security vulnerability that did not expose user data, but cost us a lot of money. Essentially, someone could use our models for free. I was aware of this. And it was basically a trade-off between that or launching new features on the AI model. And I was like, no, no, launch the new feature. And then it came back to me. And I was like, no, no, launch the new feature. The worst that can happen is like they can abuse us. And then it happened again. And then we got hacked. Like, I deserved it. But it's okay because the amount that we lost was a couple hundred thousand dollars, but it was not crazy. Anyway, this happened. And I was like, God damn it. And I just went on this like search of figuring out who hacked us, found the person. The attack came from like a school domain. And so I ended up messaging the provost of the school. I found the person. We got on a Zoom call. I was like, do you want to tell me what happened here? And they fessed up to it. And there was like, they're a kid. They were young. They didn't know that, I mean, I don't know how they did it, but they didn't know this was not okay. And then like I asked them to stop. They stopped. They took down the thing that they did. I was like, to be honest with you, this is pretty impressive.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like the taste. So, hey, the CEO is not Daniel Kack anymore. Who is it? Gustav Harry is asking for a solution. Please give it to him.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, why don't you use AI to make the frame transitions work and then the edit can be the same? Why don't you take the audio? I would love to.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decision making to the user. Sometimes you want to just have a very clear vision, go for a very big goal, and just work towards that goal until it's in the market. And then when it lands, sometimes people think if you build it, they will come. They will not come. You have to build it, and then you have to convince them to join you. And then you have to iterate on the product. Sometimes for years until the fit is correct. And so it goes back to AQ. The most important thing for product market fit is not repositioning your product. It just stay in the game. Keep making iterations until it fits like a glove, and then you'll find success.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it'd solve that problem on the spot. And then every day, I would export the people who had churned, given that it was 30 days since they downloaded, and I would call them because I had their email. So that gave me the ability to call them via FaceTime audio call. And I'd figure out why they turned. And that took a ton of energy because it's like getting kicked in the teeth every single time someone tells you your baby is ugly, but it allowed me to solve the problems. And so if I was starting a solar company, I would do the same thing every single time I'd have an installation. I would personally call the person and say, how did it go? And I would follow up, or at this point, I'd have a voice agent do it. Just follow up with users constantly. It's like the normal YC model, just talk to users. And then the other thing is just because users don't use the thing that you made doesn't mean that you have the wrong direction. It means the implementation is wrong, but the idea could still be correct. And so the old like Henry Ford, you can have any color that you want as long as it's black or would have given people a faster horse and like the Steve Jobs idea of this is one thing that Brian Chesky and Dylan Field are very right about. A-B tests are abdicating.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do I know about product market fit that most founders don't know or think about? The first one is the importance of iterations. When we started Speechify, I was living in Palo Alto. I was a solo founder at the time and I just had a bunch of interns. And I tried so hard to hire and I found it really difficult. And the main problem was people were not using the product. So I would rock onto Stanford's campus every single day with a roll of duct tape and I'd put it over my mouth and I'd give my phone to users and I'd see where they'd click. And they'd always click on the wrong buttons and I'd go back and I'd fix it and I'd try it again and I was just like constantly embarrassed by the fact that my user experience was not good enough until we got it to be really good. Like it took a long time. And then what we did is I added in the bottom right corner of the app a big red button that said help slash message us. And if you opened it, it didn't go to intercom. It didn't go to email. It went to my personal text message, like my iMessage. The nice thing about that is if it was 3 a.m. and you messaged me, I'd respond back and you didn't need to enable notifications because I messaging you. And if it was not 3 a.m. by the middle of the day, I would call you.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To amortize the value of a solar panel over 30 years, and they got them to underwrite the value of that. And therefore, they could loan money to consumers to install solar panels on their house. And they became the larger installer of solar panel consumer in the United States, by far. And so the innovation doesn't always have to be technological. It could be a go-to-market innovation around finance or customer acquisition or something else. So I would look for those hounding pot”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An amazing job in bringing the cost of solar down a lot. It's just such a great investment amortized over time. We just have not installed enough solar in the United States to the degree that we should, like China is out doing us tremendously. And there's so much essentially public land that nobody wants that could have solar installations. There's just a lot of regulation and zoning that stops it. This is like the easiest way for us to solve the energy problem right now. And so if I were you, I would look for either A, those types of amazing founders that you discussed who are working in the fusion space or those type of amazing founders that you discussed who are working in the solar space and have some good-to-market that is amazing. Let's talk for a second about SolarCity. The reason why I invested in Tesla way back in the day was because I found Elon Musk from a Wikipedia article from the co-CEOs of Solar City. And I was like, who is this guy walking with Obama with rockets in the background as Wikipedia? So I read the Wikipedia and then I found more information. Solar City was not a technology company. They were a finance company that had convinced that it was just”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one thing that I was surprised by is hydro. So, all the dams that can be dammed have been dammed. Hydro power is like the most efficient and easiest way to create. We just don't have the ability to invest in hydro more. So then it leaves you with fossil fuels or solar or nuclear. I do think that we are going to figure out fusion nuclear. I think that fission nuclear is also pretty great. But fusion nuclear is coming. We just don't know where it is. One of my biggest side projects that I really want to do is build a mini fusion reactor in my garage. I just haven't had a garage for a long time. But when I have one, that's one of the first things I want to do. Not one that creates energy, just once that is contained, but I think that we will figure it out. So that's very exciting. But in the meantime, while we haven't figured it out, I'm very much a solar maximalist. I'm all in on solar. The kind of theoretical limit for solar, at least when I was in school, was something like 47 or 49% efficiency. And we're getting very close to it. The cost of solar typically is mostly born in the installation and the manufacturing not of the cells.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just need to look at the multiple of the revenue and profits. What is it trading at now? $3 trill What's the multiple in revenue?”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and then triple down when that person is in your corner. But the other thing is can you go deep into an area that other people are missing? And if you could do that well, you will find the honeypots.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So it was not me, it was my brother Tyler. It was the case that we were very excited about A100 GPUs back in the day. H100 GPUs were coming out and there were like three times faster than anything before. And we spent so much time trying to spend millions of dollars buying H100 GPUs no one would let us buy them. What the hell is going on here? And there was a presentation that Jensen made as part of the earnings call. And it was just like this amazing example of how they could render a world. And we were like, this is a completely different level of technology. And so the benefit was like, we just had context. And it became very clear that the market was mispricing in video. And so Tyler had even higher conviction than me. I just bought a bunch of NVIDIA stock directly. Tyler bought a 3x lever adoption. It's now like 36x up. And Tyler leads our AI engineering team. He just had the concept.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A period of cutting and figuring out okay, like here is the next phase of the business. Let's figure it out and make it grow even bigger.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not for several years. Last year, they had the highest views, but this year they're having a little bit of challenge. One, the reason why is because, like we talked about platforms, YouTube was the number one place for a long time. Now the best place to be a creator is to be a streamer. Partly because streams get clipped. And then those clipped can get watched 7 billion times in a week on TikTok and Instagram reels and all these other places. So he's already started big time on streaming. Last year, he also took on a huge project, which was BeastCase. He did really well on BeastGames. And then they also spent a ton of time with feastables. And then they have like two other big projects that they're running right now. And so I would say the Jimmy for the last, I don't know, 24 months, even more, has been operating as an entrepreneur, building the company, building the products even more than building the content while making the largest unscripted show in the history of the world in terms of number of people participating. So taking much bigger swings. And I would say that similar to Logan went through a period of bulking and now they're”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next one is the content that converts the best is content that doesn't even require language because that works at every single content in the world. And you want the most simple concepts to be in the video to the point where like a great ad would be, for example, there's this ad for a storm proofing company, which is a very complicated concept. So the best ad is a bucket. You make a hole in the bucket. The water's coming out of the bucket. You put their material on duct tape. You put the duct tape on the bucket and it stops coming out. So what are the concepts? Bucket, whole, duct tape, water. Everybody understands these concepts. So make things simple. So for example, for us, PDF is a complicated concept. Book is not a complicated concept. So our best performing ads include books, not PDFs. He's great at hiring. He hires a ton. He tests people. And then if they don't work, they don't work. But like, he'll always try and try and try and try. Maybe the most ambitious person that I know. Insane level of ambition as an operator, as a business person, as a creator. And I'll give him his flowers. Like, he's done a really good job.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I first met Jimmy at a party of one of my friends' houses, and I had eight people working on the leadership team at Speechify at the time. I had 100 people. He had 100 people. He had eight leaders. And we just ended up talking for like three hours and I was supposed to fly to New York. And he's like, don't fly to New York. Come back with me to North Carolina. I want you to meet the rest of my team. And I was like, all right, sounds pretty cool. So I flew there. And I just ended up staying. Like we worked out. I would see how he filmed videos. I learned a ton. So the first thing I like once basically saw him stop a shoot with like 100 people on set just to like essentially repaint the door pink. I say that no genius can figure out what's going to convert in ads. Jamie knows what's going to convert in organic content. He just like he has the algorithm in his head and it's just data. Like he has spent between the age of 13 and today just studying what converts and he just like has dialed in on human psychology is insane. The second thing is the formats. So their videos are so data driven and they just figure out, okay, here's a format that works. How do we up the ante on this video? And how do we make it even more amazing?”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can also just build it yourself. The other thing that you could do is find another way of doing it. So, what's the best he's called the podcast? All in. Example you can have a side chapter to your life. Like let's say you now became a fourth or fifth host in all-in podcast. That would be pretty good for your career. It wouldn't take that much time from you, but it would help grow you really fast. It would help grow them really fast too. And so let's say you went on Shark Tank or Dragon's Den would be amazing for you. Huge existing institution takes very little of your time, but you'd be the loudest voice in the room with the most interesting things to say and you'd get a ton more views. By the way, a great example would be maybe you write a book, how I became a VC by the age of 28. And then that book is available in all the airports and newsstands. And you're using Penguin Random House as your launching pad. Figure out what is a launching. And for you, what's interesting is you started, what, 10 years ago, 15 years ago? Podcasting was not a thing at the time, like you were so early. So you rode a wave that came up with you. The question is, can you go now to a different wave that is already big and then because of the strategic position you are in, grow with it. So TV is a great option.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't license Juice and Horror Sequoia. You cannot redirect the snake's head to be going in the direction that you want. Maybe you could. What I would do is I would join Union Square Ventures. I would join an institution that has a really storied name but doesn't have particularly strong leadership. And I would become the leadership for that organization.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. Super hard. So here's what I think about Logan. I don't have a relationship with Jake. I know Logan's super, super well. One of my favorite people. So Logan went through super hard on Vine. He's like the biggest person of Vine. And then Instagram and then Facebook and then YouTube. And this is the concept we talked about, which is bulking and counting cycles for companies”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We just avoid doing news as well. We just don't like it. I want users to come to Speechify because they want to use voice agents or because they want to read their PDFs. Not because I'm looking for competitors.”
2026-05-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: What I Learned from 100 of the Best CEOs in the World | What I Learned from Staying with Mr Beast for 3 Weeks | How We Will Spend More on Tokens than Salaries with Cliff Weitzman, Speechify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source