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

“Only do things that result in conversion. So we have more than 50 million people who use Speech or Fine Now, the organic B2C product that makes it really easy to read. If you don't download the app and you don't start a trial and you don't convert the paid, there's two options. The first one is I don't care. The second one is I actually do genuinely care that we solve dyslexia and ADHD. And so there's 2 billion people in the world that have either ADHD, low vision, autism, anxiety, concussion, second language learners. Our philosophy is we roll out the red carpet for the user. We give them the best experience possible. If you can't pay, that's fine. You still have a great experience. And so I think about that as that's our form of charity. Like we acquire the user and they can use the product for free. Amazing. But that's not what's going to cover the ad spend. So the ad spend is covered by the people who pay. If you don't get people who actually convert on your product, there's no point in doing the work that you're doing.”
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
“Oh, of course, that works amazing. So, one, formats are the thing that works, right? So, one of the things that works really well for Mr. Beast is ladders. One dollar hotel, $100 hotel, $1,000 hotel, million dollar hotel, competing where you have people age one to 100, like all competing against each other in the same thing. Like, I got trapped on an island, blah, blah, blah. He does the same formats, but changes the view and how it works. So American founder versus British founder is a perfect format and then you switch it to French versus Ghanaian, whatever you want. And then of course repurposing works. You take the same piece of content and you put it on TikTok, you put it on Instagram, you put it on YouTube, you change the hook. Especially in performance marketing, it doesn't matter how many times you post because you're not going to damage your brand by posting something that will not perform organically because it's behind a wall anyway. It only gets served, it lives in the shadows. So just test 800 variations. Why not?”
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 thought that the old spice commercial would absolutely annihilate and got like 300,000 views. The one that I did not expect to work that worked amazing is I wrote a rap song about my experience with dyslexia and ADHD and that thing made us like three million, also like $3 million on a rap song.”
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
“Basically, launched the company, took a whole new stratosphere, and performed for like three years straight. That video got hundreds of millions of impressions on Instagram alone. And then every year I remake that video. Again, I did the nacho commercial from the Super Bowl. I did the Isaiah Old Spice commercial. I literally got a horse for the ad. And just you just take it as far as you can.”
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
“Represents Speechify's headphones, so I got bright red headphones. I put them on my head. I put a suit on, and then I went into a hot tub. And so the first shot is me with red headphones and a suit in hot tub at the time I had long hair. And I just threw behind me like the most random knickknacks, like weird photos and books and stuff like that. And I developed this character called Cruise Silver. Crew Silver appears in many of our ads, and he's a version of me. And he's very gullible. He's kind of dull, but he has great confidence. And so the ad starts, hi, I'm Cliff, founder of Speecherfy. What is speecherfy? Well, you give us stuff you need to read and we read it to you instantly. Yeah. Instantly, the voice is any good? No. Our voices are fucking great. And then it just goes into all these different scenes. And the video was really long. And so then I edited it and I made like my college apps almost 50 variations of that video. And I tested all of them. And one did pretty good. And another did better and 20 didn't perform at all. And one did amazing. And that YouTube app.”
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, rule of 100. I had gone and I had talked to all these people who were good at growth. And then I made a list of the top 100 creators and I talked to them and I'd live in their houses. And then I was making those ads in my apartment. And some of them were good, but I was stuck in a local maxima. And I wanted to break out to a global maxima. And my conclusion is the way that I would do that is I made a list of the top 100 best performing ads in history. Every Super Bowl ad that was really funny. Every ad that I made me cry, every ad that one had won an award. I made a list of maybe 500 ads. And then I whittled them down to the top 100. And then I read the script for each one of them and I rewrote the script to be about speech fight. And then what I would do is I would up the ante on the ad. So the ruling videos typically is you win or lose by the first three seconds. Do you have good retention in the first three seconds? But the rule I developed is actually you win or lose by the first image of the video, like the first 1080 pixels. And so I wanted the first 1080 pixels to be as crazy as possible.”
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 day we upload 1,300 to our testing campaigns. We'll take of those the ones that win might be the nothing one that day, in which case nothing gets launched. It might be the lot won that day, in which case they all get launched. And then you let them, it's like March Mandedness brackets. Like you just graduated to the next level of competition where you can get more spend. It's almost like duplicating the algorithm, the TikTok and Instagram have anyway, where when you post a video, a thousand people see it. And then if it does well, 10,000 people see it. And if it does well, 100,000 people see it. If it does well, 10 million 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
“Don't. You have no idea. So first you test. Once you test, you look for the following. In meta, you can see the click-through rate on the ads, and you can see the CPA cost per action. And you can learn what the CPM cost per thousand impressions are. If we see that the cost of acquiring a user and having a pay is less than a certain amount, we're like, oh, very interesting. This is like a standard deviation better than everything else. Let me put it into the main campaign. Now it's going to compete against our best performing ads ever. And we let it breathe. And if it does well, it gets more spend. And if it does less well, it gets less spend and we cut it. And so you just, it's like evolution. You put it into the wild and you see if it performs.”
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, what you want to do is you throw a lot of things on the wall. No matter how smart you are, you're not going to know ahead of time which thing is going to convert.”
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. And then after those four days, I would continue to monitor it, but I assigned a leader for that project. And that project has done really, really well. So we don't use any external tool. Obviously, we'll use all the LLMs, but that changes on a weekly basis, right? Two was really good. And then Kling was really good. And then C dance was really good. And now ChatGPT's new image model. And then a banana, obviously, is you just constantly test and iterate and iterate and you find flows that work. So we just built our own.”
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. Because it's an arbitrage game, if you use the tool that everybody else uses, typically you're not going to win. So we just built our own platform. So there was a point several months ago where my girlfriend went to Disneyland. So I had four days free. And so in that time, I went to school, Alex Ramosey, shout out. And I did a course for AI generated video ads. And then I hired everybody from inside of the community that was really good. And so I built a team. I hired four new engineers outside of our core team. Like in one week, I hired 10 people. And 24-7, all I was thinking about was AI generated content. And my goal was to get to 1,300 ads that we tested every single day. And we just build tools for it. Initially, I built it on N8N. And then all the N8N instances would time out. So then we built our own platform and our own website that does really, really good AI generated stuff that allows you to reskin. It automatically posts it to Meta and TikTok and YouTube and all the platforms. And it gives me all the data that I want. I'm obsessed with Manus. So I'd get like reporting for Manusis.”
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
“In my house, especially Saturday or Sunday, with my phone, and I'd record. I'd be like, as a medical student, I use featurefly to read while I'm working out. As a lawyer, I love working from home. And you know, you just need to read that contract and find that one gotcha, and speechify can find that for you. You just need to listen asynchronously. And I'll be like, you know, I have dyslexia on blah. I just play all the characters and it was my face. And it converted really, really well. But I got maxed out. And so when Geffen joined and we hired other people to the team, suddenly we found that actually women convert a lot better than men as like audiences. And so right now it's we have more women who use the product than men by like a good margin at the moment. It's just because our team happens to be very woman focused. And you just have to test 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
“Not at all because you're marketing for different demographics. So, for example, you find this interesting. We test almost a thousand day ad generated ads a day right now on top of the roughly 8,000 organic creators we make with humans every single month. And one of the things we do is we reskin. So my sister Gefen leads our ads team and we have a bunch of great ads with Geffen. And then we'll turn her into a 60-year-old lady and we'll turn her into a 40-year-old man. And then we'll turn her into someone who's African American or someone who's Asian. And we'll change the background from a coffee shop to a library to, I was going to say farm, but farm wouldn't convert for our users. Sure. And so you just test all the variations. And so I know that for us, highest converting demographics would be people in their 30s and 40s in terms of paid, but we have like crazy usage in the 18 to 28 year old market. But people who are 60 and above need reading glasses, so they use speechify a ton. And now we're launching voice agents at Simbavoices.ai. And so that's a different demographic. And so all the initial ads for speech of fire were me, it's my face. And I would sit.”
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 let's say you find a creator that is in your niche. For example, for us, maybe it's teachers, maybe it's someone with ADHD or dyslexia, maybe it's an AI creator, they make a video for you, and then you go, hey, make me 20 videos. I don't need you to post them on your profile. I'll run them as ads myself. And actually, if some of them are good, we could post them from your account and we increase the spend. And so users might not see it as a normal organic video, but you get to test all of those videos, see which one performs, and then you have them post organically the one that actually is successful.”
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
“Stood out. Greg had ladder. So ladder is a health and fitness company. Perfect example. He's the CEO of the company, but he buys the ads himself and he found a lot of arbitrage plays that other people have not found. And so you just got to go and figure out what those plays are.”
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
“Unlimited amount of money in Exxon Engineers. I'm not okay just like setting money on fire, doing ads that are not attributable, right? Spending money on a billboard where I don't know if a user comes. I think about everything as a test and if the test succeeds, then I do more. If the test fails, that's fine. The classic adage that you learn from CMOs, I learned this from Kelly at Netflix. They spent $1.7 billion on performance marketing in 2017. And Brex also is really good at this. I know I'm wasting half my spend. I just don't know which half. And so that's okay. Do that and then do the work to figure out which half you're spending, but don't just spend with increased CAC for the sake of growth. It always has to be an experiment you learn something from.”
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 at all. So, if you think about CAC, you have to consider okay, what is my LTV and what's the first payment period? So we like to think about first payment period. So our product is $140. But if you're listening to this show, hit me up, Cliff at speechify.com, I'll give you a discount. I'm never willing to burn CAC for no reason. The blended CAC can go up, not the direct CAC. What does that mean? I'm okay spending $500,000 a month making 20,000 pieces of creative because that is a creative investment. I'm going to learn a format that is new that will unlock additional growth later. I'm okay doing an experiment on App 11 or a specific new product that Google dropped for YouTube videos. We're one of the 200 companies that's provisioned to test ads on OpenAI. So we're spending a ton of money on OpenAI right now. And we're learning it faster than everybody else. So by the time it rolls out to everybody else, we'll already be really, really good at running as on OpenAI. So you grow, you grow, you grow, you test new channels, you test new creative, and I'm very happy to burn an”
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 do both at the same time. You're clicking the gas and clicking the brake at the same time. And so speechify just finished four and a half years of running profitable. And now we're in a hyper growth phase. And so it doesn't matter whether you're a company or you're an”
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 there was a point where I was actually very annoyed because I didn't succeed in having the growth outcomes that I wanted. And so I started logging my time in 30 minute increments. So every day I'd have 48 units. And I noticed that 30% of my time I spent helping other people and 30% of my time I spent learning SEO. So I decided I'm not allowed to learn anything from that point on. I'm only allowed to execute. And like the second I saw myself creating an article, I would delete, like close the article and go do. And so the rule is you just have to go and you have to learn and you have to execute. So you have to have that maniacal focus on the one thing. And then we grew a lot. And now there was a focus on, okay, well, we got to get the margins to be good. And so that's a cutting year. And there you're focused on profits. And the conclusion that I've had across the almost decade I've spent working on speechifying is any Harvard MBA can cut costs. If you're smart, you could do it. It takes a genius to grow revenue. And that's why investors value exponential growth or revenue, even for companies that are not making a profit, but it's very difficult.”
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, companies go through cutting and bulking cycles like bodybuilders do. And there's a reason why cutting and bulking makes sense because you can't oscillate between the two in one week. You have to commit for like six months to doing one. And so for Speechify, for example, it took us four and a half years to find a real product market fit. The product stays exactly the same. The vision today is very much the same as it was in the very beginning. But in 2020, we started growing really fast. And that was around the time where installed trial, trial to paid renewals all went up. People used the product a ton. And I tried to figure out how do I pour fuel on the flame. And the reason why companies succeed is you have a person who puts their beating heart into the product and their will to power. That's the thing that makes the thing successful. And you can only do one of those things at a time. The second you split your, even fundraising, you can't fundraise and do sales at the same. You got to do one. And so all I was thinking about at the time was growth, which is why it was a no-brainer to fly to all these places to meet 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
“We look for three things when we hire people fire in their belly for the product, high loyalty to the team, and the ability to learn fast and ship to production. We have a principle even inside of engineering, which is you've got to respond to messages within 60 seconds because you want to unblock people and just inform them if you're able to unblock them or not. If you can't, that's fine. They're going to go learn it on their own. And so we have a rule if you ship a PR to a repo that your team is not responsible for, it gets fast-tracked. And that team has to very quickly respond because I want to encourage people to learn how to contribute to other code bases. So the person in the company who learns the fastest is my brother Tyler who leads our AI team. And just the whole principle inside of our AI engineering team is just learn everything and then you win.”
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 everybody in our company, no matter how senior they got, always were still not just a fat general sitting at the back, but a warrior who could take out their sword and actually hands-on keyboard by the ads. And we had a situation where we hired a head of growth 30 days in, nothing, 60 days in, nothing. And I was like, all right, man, what's going on? And he's like, well, we're trying to hire the people. I was like, okay, look, well, okay, tell me what you're doing for hiring. Well, I gave the head of HR like the brief of what I'm looking for. Bro, source the people yourself, message the people yourself, get on the calls yourself. You've got seven days. In those seven days, I need to see you making ads in CapCut. I need to see you editing ads in Figma or Photoshop, whatever tool you want, and I need to see you buying the ads. And if that doesn't happen, it's going to be very difficult to keep.”
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 always new tricks that you can come. At the time, adding polls on your Instagram story was really helpful. Right now, whitelisting ads is really helpful. Volume of work of like posting a ton of ads that you test is really, really important. There's different rules for SEO. There's different rules for how you structure your team as it comes to who is the creative director, who writes the scripts, how do you do the editing, et cetera. So every team does their own thing, but for every company, there's a different rule. So one person I learned from is the founder of Blinkist. A small thing he said, like as an aside that really helped me at the time was don't even bother spending money on any platform that's not meta until you reach $100,000 a month and spend on Meta. And then I stopped spending on other places. And then the thing I also realized is that a lot of the people who were senior in this companies were already rusty. They were not very strong individual practitioners of the craft. And so I would go down a couple of levels to find the person who's actually buying the ads, who's actually editing the content, who's actually seeing what the CTA is and what the things are. And I made sure.”
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 the information. The second thing I learned is once we would get on a Zoom call, we chat, and there was one thing that always succeeded, which is I have listened to 100 books a year, every year for the last 15 years. So I'd ask them, what's your favorite books? And they tell me. And most likely I read at least one of them. So we'd connect on the book. And then I'd be like, oh my gosh, I'm going to be in Denmark this Sunday. Do you want to hang out if they were in Denmark? And they'd be like, oh, sure. And then I'd book a flight to Denmark and I'd show up. And so I did this with Anton at Lovable recently. And like I'm still doing the same thing. And after I did this with the heads of growth, I did this with CTOs and I did this with every type of person that I want to learn from. And then I'd go and I'd watch how they bought Facebook ads or I'd watch how they made content. And from that, I figured out what would work. And so the first thing that I learned is growth is just an arbitrage game. You are competing with every single other person in the world who wants to get their product in front of users. And that means that your lever points are either the content that you make or how you distribute that content. When it comes to buying ads,”
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
“Basically, at every point in Speech of Fire history, I have led every department except for AI, design, engineering, QA growth. And my rule is I will read 100 books about the topic, listen to them with Speechify. I will identify 100 experts, and I'll go and have a conversation with them. So the first thing that I learned is if you send a good email, people will respond. No matter how amazing they are. So I did Mike Krieger from Instagram. I did Ev Williams from Twitter. I did the founders of PLAD of 23andMe, of Honey, of Grammarly, Vlad from Robinhood, and all those became speech-ified investors very early on. But they would all respond to the emails. And the second rule was, again, volume of work. If the CEO didn't respond, I would mesh as the CMO. And if the CMO didn't respond, I would message the head of growth. And if they didn't respond to my email, I would politely continue doing so until they either stole me to stop, which is less than 1% of the time, or they agreed to go on chat. And I don't also message them on Instagram. And I would also ask people for intros, just like be unlimited hungry 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
“So when I was 14 years old, freshman year of high school, I was very self-conscious about the fact that I was very bad at spelling and you get a yearbook and typically people will sign the back of the yearbook and write some nice message about you. And I didn't want to misspell stuff in everybody's yearbooks, so I came up with a strategy. I would write the least number of words possible and I would write the same thing in everyone's yearbooks. David, you are a great guy. Steve, you are a great guy. Bill, you are a great guy. And then after the last day of school, we went to sleep over at one of my friends' houses. He goes upstairs to show his mom's earbook, and I hear him scream from the top of stairs. What the hell? Cliff, I'm not gay. And I'm like, oh my God, what have I done? The crazy thing is eight years later, I was graduating college and I wrote a thirty page paper for one of my philosophy classes. And I submitted it before full.”
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
“Yes. So I am super dyslexic. First, like a third, fourth grade could not figure out how to read. And I wanted to read fast. So we built a deep learning-based Texas speech model in 2015 that now reads more than 10 million books worth of words to people every year. So now if you want to read fast but you can't, you can read fast.”
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
“Expect to get into. And so, my overall principle in life is volume of work, more reps, more shots at goal, more three throws, and that's how you get on the bell curve unexpected outcomes.”
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 moved to the US when I was 13. I didn't speak English. My parents knew about three schools Harvard, MIT and Stanford. We had a college counselor in my high school, and she recommended applying to six schools. I was like, okay, so I started filling out the applications. And quickly, I realized that even for kids with perfect SAT scores and perfect grades, you have about a one in 10 chance of getting in. And I was like, okay, it's a lottery. How do you win a lottery? You buy more tickets than everybody else. And so most kids in my school didn't need to do seventh period when they were a senior, but I had academic workshop, which is basically the class you go to if you're on the short bus. And so I went to academic workshop every single day because I just couldn't read very well. I just made it my goal. My job, instead of leaving school, I go back to academic workshop and I would apply to colleges. And when I finish the normal application, I just kept going. So my main essay, instead of making three variations or five variations, I wrote 48th drafts. And then I had to make a second common app account because I ended up applying not to 20 schools, which is the max, but 26. In the end, I didn't get into many schools that I wanted, but I got into a lot of schools that didn't.”
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
“Don't even bother spending money on any platform that's not Meta until you reach $100,000 a month and spend on Meta. Companies go through cutting and bulking cycles like bodybuilders do. We test almost a thousand day I generated ads a day right now. We're getting to the point where soon we're going to spend more in tokens than we spend on actual salaries. If you don't spend a thousand credits a day, I'm disappointed in you. If you could really trust someone, you can afford to pay them significantly more. The world around us was built by people no smarter than you and I. You could do things.”
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