Today, Snapchat is an $18B company with 400 million daily active users. But on launch day, Evan acquired exactly 0 users. It took him 6 months to get 100 people to use the app. In this episode, we explore how Snapchat went from idea to product-market fit.

Our guest is Jeremy Liew, a Partner at Lightspeed and the first investor in Snapchat. He led Lightspeed's seed round in 2012 at a $5M valuation (!!). He understood why Snapchat and Evan were special before anyone else.

If you want to understand why Snapchat took off when so many other consumer startups fail to do so, check this episode out.

If you feel like the ‘unicorn or bust’ playbook isn’t for you, then this episode definitely will be. Rand Fishkin is a multi-time founder and published author of Lost and Founder. He founded Moz, raised $29M in VC, grew to $50M in revenue and exited for $70M.

But he ultimately realized that the VC-backed life wasn’t for him.

So he went on to start SparkToro, a profitable 3-person startup that does $2M in revenue and takes only 30 hours a week of work. For those of us in the VC-backed startup world, it’s a totally different way to play the game. It won’t make you a billionaire. But it very well may make you $10M— with less stress, less work, and less risk.

If you want a transparent account of the pros/cons of a venture-backed vs a bootstrapped startup, check this episode out.

While Voice AI is all the rage now, it wasn't a hot sector in 2017. After Dylan graduated from YC, VCs rejected him. He couldn't raise a round. They all assumed Google would do it. So he raised what he could from angels and made it work for the next 3 years.

He's now built the world's most accurate Speech AI model. He's grown to 5,000 customers and raised $115M in venture capital. Last quarter, he raised a $50M Series C from Accel.

Just this week, Assembly launched Universal-1, their most powerful speech recognition model to date. Trained on over 12.5 million hours of multilingual audio data, Universal-1 is 22% more accurate than APIs from Azure/AWS/Google and has 30% fewer hallucinations than competing models.

In this episode, we go through how Dylan came up with the idea, how he saw Gen AI coming long before others, and what he did in the early days to grow to $1M in ARR.