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

“There's only three reasons people typically share these numbers. Number one, they want to bring more users in. We get so many users every single week. There's no reason to. Number two, for hiring 178,000 people applied to open engineering positions, the speech of Fire Light Steer. We don't need to make splashes about fundraising to hire. And number three is to get more investors in. But there's 10 investors in my inbox every week who are wonderful people who want to invest in the company. That's not what we need either. Like what I need is if you have grown a product to more than $10 million a month, please send me an email. Cliffatspeechified.com. I would love to talk to you. Like teach me how to get more users. We just launched the enterprise business, like literally like in this week. If you know how to get enterprise users, great. I would love to talk to you. That's a new part of my business.”
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
“First investor. Yeah. And so we started scaling the business like that. And then we just found product market fit. And the business started to grow like crazy. And what I realized is if you find lightning in a bottle, you don't want to tell other people about it. Like Speechify has 1.1 million five-star reuse. We have 94% of the B2C voice agents market. We read more to people than any other AI product in the world.”
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
“Buy four and a half years, and yeah, we were making more than $5 million at that point. And so we started growing really fast from the $5 million upwards. And then a ton of the people who I talked to were the early investors. So Dylan Field from Figma, Mike Krieger from Instagram, Ev from Twitter, Zillow Founders, Audible Founders, Grammarly Founders, Robin Hood founders, Honey Founders, 23 Me Founders, Plaid Founders, Media and BRICS, Richard Branson, Gary Cohn, who led all of Goldman, Charlie Songkurst was my very first investor.”
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 started a speech refine when I was in college. I was like 21 years old. For four and a half years, it didn't grow really fast. I just iterated on it until it did. And then it started growing really fast. And then I did this blitz of like finding all the people who could teach me.”
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, I think everybody can be a door. I have this concept which is I like awakening people. Like I meet people and Steve Jobs has this great quote. It's like, you know, the world around us was built by people no smarter than you and I, right? You live your life. You want to try to not bump it to the world too much. But like someone just needs to tell you that you can do things sometimes. And the second you see it, especially if you're next to someone who's like a really high quality operator, you're like, oh yeah, I can do those things. There's a great question that I like is like, who's the first person who believed in you more than you believed in yourself? And so that's my favorite thing to do is like I'll meet someone. I'll be like, this is such a talented person. And I can see how amazing they are. And it gets to the point that I believe in their ability more than they believe in their ability. And so I just give them more responsibility and more opportunity and almost always rise to the occasion. Sometimes they don't, in which case we figure out how to help them get to that place. But yes, everybody can become a door.”
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
“Way I think about it is I like if we hire you, I'm not going to be your manager, you need to manage me. I need you to tell me where I need to unblock you. And if I know that, I will go and unblock you. And we had this a lot in the beginning of the company. I would just hire a ton of people and then I give them the goal. And then if they got it, I'll give them the next one. And if they got it, I give them the next one. But some people would just stop communicating. Like they naturally just stopped working at Speech of Five because they didn't keep communicating. Like you just need to be interested in the problem and think about it all the time and work towards it and send demos and then you make progress. And that energy is the thing that I'm hiring for. Like our leadership team is stacked because everybody is a savage. They think about the product constantly. They're constantly like Rohan just launched this great thing. If you go to speechifyvoiced.ai and if you email me cliff at speechify.com will give you a million minutes for free to use speechify. He just like thought about it in the shower, launched it. You just want to do a situation where your team pushes as hard as you do.”
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
“By HR, you mean recruiting. I love recruiting. If by HR, you mean like dealing with internal politics and issues, we, for the most part, have succeeded in sidestepping it so far. Amen. Thanks.”
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
“Behave meetings. So, number one, I like having an asynchronous culture. I don't want you to not be able to go and take your kid to soccer practices. And I don't want you to not be able to go hang out with your wife.”
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 fix. Like, let's fix it. And so let's say you build a feature with one shot of a great prompt on cloud code, and now it's on your phone the next 48 hours is just you finding the bugs and making just indelible piece of software that does not break. And then you ship that thing to production. That's what separates a product from a great product, just QA. So this is the other thing that we do. Let's say you have a person who's done an amazing outcome owner. They just can't ride people like that. Hey, that's okay. That's the personality trait. But if they're still a good software engineer, they will be good at QA. So before letting them go, I'd actually rather put them in QA for a little bit, see how well they do in QA. And if they do well there, that tells me something. And we should not get rid of that person. Like we should just coach them properly. But if they're also bad at QA, then you should let them go.”
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 right, so in a world where software engineering is commoditized and design gets commoditized, if you try to build stuff with cloud code, even if you give it all the tools in the world, it will not succeed in queing itself to perfection. Definitely not on different devices and different phones. And like when the Wi-Fi goes down and all that stuff, you still need a human to do that. I'm amazed to see, even with very good software engineers and designers, how often they fail to put themselves on the user's shoes and just test age cases. I have a friend who works directly for Elon. Elon's like the best QA. He'll always find your bugs. And it's like super embarrassing. And I find the same thing as Peachify. Like, I sometimes find more bugs than the actual QA team does because it's in production live. Like I see it. And so then I call people immediately or I send them a screen recording. I'm like, why do we have this bug? And like, either there's a good explanation for why the bug is there, in which case I'm cool, got it. It's just a huge lift to fix this. And like, we'll fix it later. Maybe we'll tweak the scope to like bury it a little bit. Or like it's actually relatively.”
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
“Get recognized is when things go to production. I need you to put your thing in production in the next whatever, how big 72 hours. If you can't reduce the scope of the future, if it has eight features, only focus on one. But ship that thing to production, like get it through PR. And that doesn't mean you submit the PR. It means whoever needs to approve your pull request, get on the phone with them and get them to review it live right now. Then you go and QA it. And if you're not allowed to QA it, call the QAs, get them to approve right now. And if there's an issue, then you go fix it. all the timelines make them faster ride that feature until it is in production and then i know that you're an actual outcome owner not just an engineer and so as long as you communicate that the 72 hours end you still didn't send the sheets to production you don't need a performance review the person's just not an outcome owner and then you need to decide are you okay with not having an outcome owner in the company that's up to you then”
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, the problem is that you didn't communicate to them ahead of time what the goal was. So, typically, the reason why people end up on a PIP is because they didn't ship something to production. And so I have a philosophy that if you made something amazing, but it's not a production, it's a waste of time. Like you get no credit unless it's in production. The analogy I always give someone is you're a farmer and you are a milk delivery guy and you have the best milk in the world and you put it in a bottle, but you didn't put it on my doorstep. You put it down the street. And now the milk is spoiled. There's literally no point for all this milk that you created. It's like you're a football player and you didn't put the ball in the goal. You put it right before the line. You didn't cross the end zone. No credit. And so the problem that the leader has in that situation is they should have informed the person ahead of time that they have not shipped the thing to production. And so all you do is you get in a call. You go, hey, Matthew, Harry. Hey, Harry, listen. We've been working together for 30 days. You still haven't shipped anything to production. We're a startup. And so like the only time that I as a CEO.”
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
“Most long slack message should have been a phone call. Just call. You'll get the answer immediately, and then the person can ask you follow up questions. Like, that's so easy. And then all your engineers who are supposed to be coding are spending time reading Slack. I'd rather you put that in the PR commit message. Like, there's just no reason. And so, yes, there's things that you do need to communicate on Slack, but just call. The other thing is, right, we have this internal voice agent. Like the world is getting eaten by voice agents now. It's just so much faster to communicate by voice to communicate by text, period. And so text is great for asynchronous, but if you try to move fast, you don't want to go in synchronous. You want to move now.”
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
“Every single day. One, we try to run ads and snap all the time. We never succeed. If you're a rep in the growth, you miss Snap. Send me an email, teach me how to make Snap work. I haven't succeeded up at trying. Two, there is a portion of the population that uses Snapchat as their main form of communication, like over iMessage, they message on Snapchat. I don't think that the way that they're dealing with their cash is fastidious today. I think they're overpaying creators left, right, and sender. And I just think that the lunch is completely eaten by meta at this point.”
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 think he did an episode of Mark Andreasen who was like, I don't introspect because you want to learn the wrong lesson. I'm trying to think about it. I can't come up with something that was objectively a mistake. The closest thing I can think of is we had two people that we hired from Apple and Snapchat, like very legit people. And they messed up the culture of the company. They would leave at 5.30 p.m. didn't live and breathe the company. And in the end, both of them quit after three months. And we got very lucky that they quit, but I didn't let them go within the first 30 days, right? Like that was a mistake. But I was young. I didn't know, like, I didn't know what to, like, what good meant later I learned. Also, I was like begging and borrowing for people to work for my company at the time. We didn't have any, like, thank you for working for me at the time, at least.”
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
“Deadlines are challenging. Goals are also like you definitely said goals. So a dream is a goal without a deadline. So always at a deadline. And it goes on a calendar with multiple people on the invite. So I'm going to ship this to production by not Tuesday, by 3 p.m. on Tuesday invite Rohan Simon Cliff. So everybody knows. And then sometimes we have calendar invites that start with this is not a meeting is a deadline. And then if that day, the second you know it's not going to be released by that time, you're responsible to update everybody else. Hey, it's not going to be done by peer. Here's why. I'm going to do it 24 hours later. That's fine. But just update us. And when you launch it, send me a screen recording or a loom video showing me that it's done so I can give you feedback. I'd love to get a test flight link too, but Ideally just send me a screen recording to begin. That's number one. And then the other thing is just increase speed is show it yourself. Like when people message you, message back. When you need something, call people. If you are moving fast and it's clear that you are hungry.”
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 by the way, the reason is we are so privileged to live in a world where you can work from your house, you can work remotely, you can take vacation, you can do whatever you want, be anywhere in the world. You don't even need to work nine to five. Like you want to work at 3 p.m. on a Saturday, that's fine too. Like take all of Tuesday off, but just get the work done that you said you were going to do and make sure you have a responsibility for your team because it is a living organism. Help the organism win. You need to fire under your ass that said everything”
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
“Wrong culture. It's fine. Like, obviously, if you're asleep, don't respond if you're with. But even if you're with the kids, like you could tell me I'm not free right now. Tell me I'm not free right now. I'm not free”
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
“Everybody, yeah, young people are very scared to call. And I think that at this point, people above 45 are willing to call and below 45 are not because everybody's that skill has atrophied. Just get the answer, move on.”
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
“It is beholden on you to give them a response. And that response can be hey, busy right now, can give you the response by 4 p.m. Or, hey, won't be able to get the use to you until like three days from now. Just like give me a timeline or just give me the answer. And then if you're the person asking and you didn't get the response, call them on the phone. Like I don't know why people don't use WhatsApp calls more. Just call on the phone. They'll give you the answer and then move on.”
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 speechify is a remote first team. There's 45 AI engineers on our research team. There's about 150 product facing software engineers. And we have people in 36 countryness now, 200 people in total. Everybody's really good at engineering. The communication has become really important. And I can't have a situation where you're blocking somebody else. Like if someone else is blocking you, number one, it's your responsibility to inform them that they are your bottleneck and inform them multiple times a day that they are your bottleneck. But we also really believe in people learning. So if that person cannot unblock you, you should go and learn how to unblock yourself right now. But if that person doesn't give you an answer, you're stuck. You don't know whether you should invest the time to unblock yourself or you should wait for that person. Another principle that we have is managing up. If your team leader needs something from you, obviously you need to respond, but you should update them anyway about what you're doing. Like in the morning, the first thing that you should do is send your leader, hey, here's my top three goals for the day. And then they shouldn't respond unless you're going in the wrong direction, in which case they'll adjust your direction. But if someone is messaging you to get unblocked.”
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 sometimes people have never used AI before, and you force them to sit with it for 48 hours. And by the end of the 48 hours, they're phenomenal.”
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 never know. Like, you just have to try with everybody. Sometimes people tell you that they're great at AI and then you give them a challenge and they suck. You just got to test.”
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, I have a bench who were older hires because they read textbooks about software engineering when they see what's coming out of the LLMA, but they understand it. Not all of them are adopters of AI, but some of them are. So you can hire people who are both grizzled veterans and good at AI. Now, if I see a cracked young engineer who's great at cloud code and I can see the project, of course I'm going to hire that person on the spot. Like there's no question. Regardless, a prerequisite is we have like this entrance exam, this gigantic code repo that you need to read very fast. You can't read it with your eyes. You have to use AI. You have to use LLMs to ship all the features and then you get a test at the end, which is how much of the code repo did you break. And then you get 30 minutes to fix what you broke. And so we're already like into our functional engineering challenge is not just challenges of like how good you are at TypeScript and Python, but like how do you use LLM coding agents? And that's key. And like if you don't pass that, like there's no way that we can work together.”
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
“Of course. I'm super worried. I think the one thing that we like we don't think about enough is in a world where we create more value than ever before and the Ginny index gets really messed up and value accrues to the top 0.1% and not to the rest of the population. Like what happens? How do you upscale people? And I think about that a lot. And I don't know the answer. And if you look at this graduating class of computer science students, there's basically no jobs. You need to really make your own side projects to look impressive. And I don't have a great answer for it other than more people should be entrepreneurs.”
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
“Because for whatever reason, not satisfied. Figure out what's not satisfying and solve that thing for the purpose. And sometimes it's money, in which case, just solve 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
“He stayed. And so often it'll be stuff like that. Early, early speechify, the person who's now our COO, we couldn't get him a visa. And we went to 15 lawyers. No one would do the visa thing. So in the end, I read the immigration law myself and I figured out how to get him a green card directly. Took a lot of work, but like we got it. And after that, we became really good at immigration. There was a person who worked at Speechify, really, really amazing engineer, and he was based in Ukraine. He was going to leave. This is like right around when the war was about to start. I flew to Ukraine. I ignored the US restriction of you cannot go to Ukraine, literally to board the plane, I had to sign a form saying the airline is not responsible for what happens beyond this point. I worked out with him there for like three days. I ran a hackathon with other people there. We sorted out the problem and he stayed. Typically, this is not the case in speechifying. In most companies, this is true. People don't quit companies, they quit managers. That has not happened at Speechify. Typically, if there's an issue, we've solved it very, very fast. But people typically leave not for money. They leave for another thing in their life that's not satisfying 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
“A lot. I'll give you an example from early days of Speecher Fight. We had an amazing teammate. I loved him. He took time off school to work for us and he told me that he wanted to leave because he wanted to have more friends. Like there were not a lot of friends in the Bay Area for him. He wanted to go back to where he was. Okay. No worries. And the way I found that out, he said he was going to leave. And I was like, why? And he didn't really know. So I sat him down. I put my phone in his hand, notes file open. I was like, write the 10 top goals you have in life. And it was became very clear that it was all around friendships. And I was like, okay, can you describe to me what you're looking for in his friends? He described what he looks for in his friends. Cool. My assignment for you for today, don't do any speech if I work. Give me by the end of the day a Google Sheet with 50 people in the Bay Area that you want to be friends with. So he gave me like teal fellows and people who won the award for being the best student at Stanford and Berkeley and whatever. And then I DM'd all those people on Instagram and I was like, hey, we have dinners on my patio every Friday. I know some of you. I don't know others of you. You're all invited this Friday and next Friday. So the 50 people, 35 people showed up. He was there and he made a ton of friends.”
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
“When we tried to hire from large organizations, we do have very similar DNA to Amazon. Typically, we found, this is my personal experience. When we hire folks from Google, they come from a place of a ton of abundance. So the hunger is not the same hunger. And you need to coach them out of essentially bad habits. That can infest your culture in a bad way. The other thing is this is true in general of hiring in the Bay Area. The loyalty is a lot less high than you would get from hiring in Europe. Because in Europe, people really value a good company and a good job. And it's just not the same thing in New York or San Francisco. And sometimes you find diamonds in the rough. Don't get me wrong. And you should definitely hire those people. But by and large, you're taking a big risk. Now, for us, we really like to invest in people. It's extremely important to us. And so we've only had one real case of attrition in speechify of someone who worked at us for a long time. And that person went to work for Elon Musk directly. Like, okay, makes sense. But generally, I don't want people who we coach and understand the context of the company to leave. And so we just find the people.”
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 have the same philosophy about hiring. If you could really trust someone, you can afford to pay them significantly more. And it's actually just hire the person for more money. And if they don't work out, you part ways. Like it's fine. You should always be trigger happy to hire really good people if you see that they're really good. And just ignore the fact that they're expensive. Just make it work.”
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
“Hired him as a consultant. We worked with him for a while. I had super high conviction on him. I couldn't get to the level of conviction I needed from other people. And I made a huge mistake because I didn't get a resounding, we have to hire him from everybody else. I didn't do it. I should have trusted my gut and like done everything to give the sexiest offer possible because he's also like obviously a very expensive hire. So there's like a cost to whatever we should just give him next because it was clear he was such speech of IDN”
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 we do a lot in Speechify is to coach people on how to use AI better, force them to use AI better. So we're still hiring people at a crazy rate. Last year we had 778,000 people who applied to work at the open engineering positions of Speechify. We have an asynchronous technical challenge. 19,800 people finished that challenge. So we're very good at hiring good people. Still, we much more focus on coaching the people who are inside of the company. And this is something that has been my battle internally, actually, convincing our leaders to do because they have a lot of things that they need to do. It almost feels like a waste of time to go and spend time teaching other people, but you have to do it. You have to have to have to do it. I have a friend, Austin Ray at Ramp, and like his entire job is teaching the organization how to use AI tools. And we almost had Austin join Speechify, and it's one of my biggest mistakes that we didn't make that happen.”
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
“40% of billionaires, yeah. And it ends up being the case that you coach yourself that when it's okay to fail. And that's exactly what startups are. You're stacking the odds against you. You're doing something that feels impossible, but you're developing this AQ to never give up. If you have ADHD, people with ADHD, they're definitely not slow and they're not lazy and they're not stupid. Their mind just works differently. And actually, we find that for speechify users, if your brain works at 600 words per minute, but you only read a 200 words per minute, of course you'll get distracted. If you start listening to 600 words per minute, you love that you stay engaged. Running a company requires you to be responsible for and understand the engineering, the design, the quality assurance, the go-to-market, all these different things are stimulating you at the same time. Being ADHD is actually very good to be a CEO. The problem is how do you get from like zero to one to 10? Like the 10 to 100, amazing place to be ADHD. But you got to go from the zero to 100 where you're doing all the IC work yourself. We need to stay focused and that's really difficult. And so it's great to be the sex security DHD as the person who is running a large”
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, Michael Dell has this great analogy, which is when you're running a company, it's like you're driving a car and you want the car to fit the driver. So you want the company to fit the person who's running the company. If you have dyslexia and you're nine years old and you suck at the one thing you're supposed to be good at, which is reading, there's two options. The first one is you think the world is stacked against you and school sucks and you go down this really dark path. 40% of people who are incarcerated have dyslexia, even though 17% of the population has it. The second option is you keep trying and you try again and you try again, you try again, and you develop this belief that it's okay to fail and that even in things that seem impossible if you try enough, you'll succeed. So 40% of billionaires also have dyslexia”
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 have a kid with dyslexia. I have a niece with ADHD. I use the product myself every single day. Those are great answers. You know, I read the blog post by Tyler Weitzman on how he skipped four and a half years of math in high school and built 47 iPhone apps when he was there. And then he went and did this coaster at Stanford. And I really liked his explanation of how he shipped the first deep learning model that worked on the CPU of an iPhone. So I'd love to work with him. That's a great answer. Like, just do a little bit of research about the company. I want to see a reason why people are there.”
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
“Because someone else can come and offer you more money and then you leave after we spent like a year coaching you up and making you 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
“So, no, there's a lot. The first one is any situation where you can discover dishonesty. So, what I really don't like is when people give me a stat and they say, oh, I raised the stat X, Y, Z, and the more questions you ask, the more you realize they change the definition of what the denominator was. So like that's one thing that I really dislike. The second thing is people who talk too much. The amount of signal per sentence that I get needs to be high. And if it's not, I don't want you wasting the time with the rest of the people on the team. Like we're all about execution here. And so sometimes I'll meet someone who I think is really talented. They might even be really technical, but they just talk so much. And I'm like, you're just going to annoy everybody else and get us off track. I want someone who's hyper focused on the accurately one goal, the thing that really matters. And then the last thing is you don't want people who are too comfortable. You want people who will be loyal. And so I always ask people what made you interested to interview with speechifying. And if the answer is bad, we shouldn't hire that person because there's no differentiating reason why they're here and not another company and they might leave.”
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's a great question from YC, which is what is a non computer science system you've hacked to your advantage. It's a really, really good one. Because I'm looking for the story that shows me your ability to A build a system, B, learn something, and then C, have an inhuman amount of desire and will and grit. So I'm then looking for the rest.”
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
“That call is for me to find out how awesome you are. And so I want to hear about your side projects that you've built. I want you to screen share and show me the things that you've made. But if you haven't made them, you're just not willing to deal with a little bit annoying thing that requires to register an Apple developer account and put an app on the App Store, the little annoying things that require to set up a Cloudflare instance and like make sure that your website sticks around.”
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 people talk a lot about IQ, intelligent quotient, or EQ, emotional quotient, but the most important one is AQ, adversity quotient. How good are you when things get really tough? And so I think about it, think it through a Jeep that's going through the savannah. I don't want the Jeep that goes the fastest. I want the Jeep that's not going to have a flat tire. They're going to stick with it the longest. And so there's a heuristic I use for this, which is sometimes you look at an engineer and they're willing to grapple with a really hard problem for eight hours straight. Most people, if it's really hard, they quit after 30 minutes. But the things that really move the company are on the other side of five hours of grappling with a hard problem. And you kind of have to be obsessed to do that. And so the way that I find that is I look for projects that people actually did that they published to production. Let's say you went and you spent four years learning computer science and we have a call together. My goal in that call is not to not hire you. Nothing will make me happier than hiring you. I just need to get you to give me the information that proves to me that I can underwrite hiring you. The whole point is.”
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 I'm more extreme about it than it needs to be because I need to move people from all the way over here on the right to all the way over here on the left. And I'm okay if they meet me in the middle. So I'm just extreme about it. I'm like, if you don't spend 1,000 credits a day, I'm disappointed in you. Like I need to see that happen. And so send these screenshots and I will get people on a Zoom call screen share the entire engineering and I'll show them how I use it. And it'll go, Tim, you're really good at this. Show us what you do. Tyler, you're amazing at this. Show us what you do. Simon, show us what you do. And we're just constantly demoing and you just got to make sure that people are aware of how much other people are using it. And then I'm like, if you are not using this tool right now, it's like a chat in everyone's slack. Comment, explain why. It's going to be very difficult to continue working together if you don't use it and you don't explain to me why. So they have to explain to me why, and then I will call them and convince them to use it. And I'm like, you have 24 hours. Send me a loom video with what you use AI to make.”
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 could tell you what we do. So remember Speedify is a voice agents ecosystem with 50 million users and 1.1 million five-star reviews across platforms. We need to educate even our users on how to use AI. And so our first agent was a text-to-speech tool that reads to you. The second one was a speech-to-text tool that does dictation. The third one was a podcast generator where you can be in the podcast as well as two new hosts. Then we launched teacher agent that will ask you questions about the document and then teach you back the content gap that you were missing. And now we just launched Jarvis, which is the speech drive for work. It lets you do productivity and then the enterprise simbavoices.ai. We're constantly educating our own users on how to use AI. And what we found is it takes about 100 iterations on a feature before the feature gets adopted. But once it gets adopted, it gets adopted really well. So you need to do the same education for your B2C users as you need to do internally. Internally, I am constantly screaming from the rooftops that people have to use cloud code.”
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, across engineering. Across engineering. I would like to be spending more tokens on our growth team in creative. We're not there yet. We need a lot more testing mechanisms to be put in place for that to make sense.”
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
“Cloud code. So we were huge adopters of cursor about two years ago. I think I got the Anthropic team plan in December. And it actually drives me crazy that not everybody has moved over to Cloud Code. A lot of people will use Cloud Code from inside the terminal in cursor. I prefer if they use Cloud Code inside of the CloudCode ID. I think it's more powerful, but it's fine to use it inside a cursor as well. But just most important is you have to use it to the Max. And I'm always surprised like there's some limitations that you need to enable. It took people like three months to ask for some of the features to be enabled. I was like, why did it take you three months to ask me about this? I'm pushing people constantly to hit limits. We're getting to the point where soon we're going to spend more in tokens than we spend on actual salaries.”
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. I also think that Figmites are relatively anti-fragile company just because it's a really good team. They're excellent at sales. They have really good taste. FigMa itself is a great product because Dylan coded the original thing. I think it was in C++. It was the first product that would render vector-based architecture in a browser. They can do the same thing. And today what happens is you have a world where everything is moving really fast. Do I bet on an old incumbent that's really bad at innovating or do I bet on the figment team? I would bet on the Figma team. So it might be the product that they end up with is not the product that they have today, but I think it's a great company. I think they're actually benefited by being a publicly traded company. And I think that they'll continue to rise and do really great. Remember, Figma traded at 40x revenue. And now they're at 6x revenue. So it's less so that it's not a good company. It's more so that the market is making a correction. And that's fine.”
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, no, it's not bullshit. Everything is in taste as well. When I'm saying design, I mean the actual grind of sitting in Photoshop, sitting in Figma, sitting in Illustrator, sitting in Canva and Pixel Perfect making things. So we're already at the state that most of my leadership team is sending their emails from inside of IDE, like cloud code terminals. Definitely like design when we want to launch a new product. We do not assign a designer in the beginning. Like we say just use the default clot code stuff. And then we'll bring designers after and they'll make it a lot better. And we definitely do use design for user experience interviews and stuff like that. And like that matters a lot. Like design is a really important part of speechify. But the hammer and chisel part of design is not as important. And therefore, the thing that's left is taste. Very few people have taste. I have taste in some things, but in other things I have bad taste, which is why we hire really great designers at speechify to make up for my shortcamings. And so, no, taste really, really meant.”
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
“Number one Mark Zuckerberg is an absolute savage. He will hire people if they're right, no matter what. Number two, I think that in a world where engineering is commoditized and designed for the most part is commoditized, the most important thing becomes excellent QA, which we can talk about later, and customer acquisition. Google has pressure on it from all the LLMs, but Meta doesn't. The only real pressure on Meta now is TikTok. And TikTok has a lot of issues now that it's been separated, yada, yada. And Zuck also has proven that he is the number one acquirer in the world.”
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
“Of course. Yeah, massive, massive, massive because it knows so much about you. It's the same thing as meta, right? We talked about this earlier. The reason why meta ads are so good is because they know what you message on Instagram and what you message on WhatsApp is as a result they can target really, really well so people convert. OpenAI knows everything about your history and what you're interested in and the inside of your psyche. And it's exactly the same way that Google has built such an amazing business because there's relatively high intent when you talk to it and the ads convert. Now, it's extremely high CPMs. But if you find content that converts, the CPMs don't matter. And that's something that people really don't realize. Like it's okay to pay a high CPM as long as people convert and as long as you have attribution. So they just launched the SDK for tracking, like that's really important.”
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
“It's still word of mouth, is like the biggest way of us getting people, right? It's someone telling their friend, hey, I know you like podcasts and audiobooks. And I can see that you're reading like a normal reading speed. Like, don't you want to read 3x faster? Like use speech or fight to make AI generated audiobooks. That's the biggest one. We crush it on Apple. So we were like, we want to design award last year. We got featured by them like 14 times last year. SEO is huge for us 10%, 15% now. 15% of our users come organically from ChatGPT inside of performance marketing. Meta is still the best winner. Google is the most profitable. YouTube is pretty good, especially on desktop. App 11 is interesting. TikTok is interesting, but they're not as big. And you have this great halo effect. So the more that you get the message out there in different ways, the more you sow the seeds that result in people talking about it and telling each other about 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
“It's all in one. Yeah, yeah. It's not split. And it's like there's sub teams inside of growth, but they all report into the same people.”
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