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

**Cliff Weitzman** (0:00)
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-a-generated ads a day right now. We're getting to the point where soon we're gonna spend more on tokens than we spend on actual salaries. If you don't spend a thousand credits a day, I'm disappointed in you. If you can 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.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:26)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stabbings, and in our show's day, we have Cliff Weitzman, founder and CEO of Speechify. So this is the guy who solved his dyslexia and ADHD by building a voice AI agent that's now used by over 60 million people and has over a million five-star ratings. I've never had a guest who has such bad shit crazy stories. So check this out. What I learned from sleeping at Mr. Beast's house for three weeks, this is the man that got hacked, went and tracked down the hacker, then hired him and got him to live with him also. He spent 11 days sleeping in a Walmart parking lot in the middle of America. There is the most insane amount of stories from Cliff, and this is one of the most fun and fascinating stories we've ever featured on 20VC. But before we dive into the show today, meet Ava, the first autonomous AI BDR built by Artisan to run your entire outbound on autopilot.

**Jason Lemkin** (1:25)
Hey, Jason Lemkin from Saster here. Artisan is S tier. We've replaced our entire outbound sales team with Artisan. I believe we've sent over 50,000 highly customized emails to Artisan. The open rate is twice what it was with humans, and they close 100k deals day after day.

**Harry Stebbings** (1:39)
Ava sources leads from over 250 million contacts, enriches every prospect with intent signals, then writes and sends personalized multi-channel outreach, self optimizing over time. When a lead replies, she handles objections and books meetings straight into your AEs calendars. Without any human input, Artisan is backed by Y Combinator and has raised 36 million dollars to build the first truly autonomous AIBDR. Hire Ava the AIBDR and put your outbound on autopilot at artisan.co.uk/20vc, that's A-R-T-I-S-A-N dot co-C-O slash 20VC. While Artisan scales outreach, Intercom helps you support faster. As AI agents become more common in customer experience, teams often end up juggling multiple silo tools for every job. Well, Finn was built to change that. It's a single unified agent that works across your entire customer experience, from service to sales to success and beyond. Finn is the agent making perfect customer experiences possible for thousands of customers, is powered by custom models, trained on years of real customer interactions, so it understands the nuance and complexity of customer service better than any other agent. That means faster resolutions, more consistent support, and just better experiences for every customer. It's also designed to be fully self-manageable, so you can easily improve and adapt it as your business evolves. No third parties required. Leading companies like Gamma, Asana, DoorDash and crypto.com already use and love Finn to deliver better customer experiences. So see what Finn can do for your team at finn.ai/20vc.
You have now arrived at your destination. Cliff, I normally ask for great suggestions beforehand. And honestly, most of the time they're like six out of ten. And I actually have to get really creative. I have to do so many references and I love that. But then you sent me yours and I was like, oh my God. I actually sent them to the team and I was like, this is wild. So we have some of the most insane stories coming up. First, thank you for making my life easier with the schedule. Second, thank you so much for joining me in person.

**Cliff Weitzman** (3:48)
My pleasure. It's great to be here.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:50)
Now, I do just want to start. University, you applied to 26 colleges when everyone else applied to eight. Can you talk to me about this and just the strategy behind that?

**Cliff Weitzman** (4:02)
So I moved to the US when I was 13 I didn't speak English. My parents knew about three schools, Harvard, MIT and Stanford. And 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 ten 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.