Building Jarvis: The Voice AI Startup Making Computer Interaction Invisible | Tanay Kothari (WisprFlow)

**Tanay Kothari** (0:00)
We connected to Chad GPT, Siri, Alexa, and they all sucked. We called five contestants, and they had to try to beat Wispr, so they were trying different things to make it break. And the award was to get a Porsche 911 GD3 RS. When you double your team size, the output does not double.

**Anne Dwane** (0:28)
Okay, everyone, welcome. And we are pleased today. We're going to talk with Tanay Kothari of Wispr Flow. But he's running late. But we have a secret insider to give us the background. And that is his brother, Jaisal.
And so, let's give him a hand.
Portfolio founder, working on Gallium, which you should all get to know if you're marketing your company. But let's go back to your childhood. And what was it like? Was Tanay building stuff as a teenager?

**Jaisal Kothari** (1:10)
Yeah. So Tanay and I, by the way, have a seven-year age gap.

**Anne Dwane** (1:14)
Okay.

**Jaisal Kothari** (1:15)
And so when I was five years old and he was 12 years old, he used to secretly stay up every night because my parents only gave him one hour of screen time every day. And he used to sleep alternative nights. And he just used to build apps and go throughout the night. He was only 12 years old.
And I think by the time he was out of high school, he published like 50 total apps on the App Store.

**Anne Dwane** (1:42)
Okay, and one of them famously got quite popular and was banned by Google. Can you talk about that app?

**Jaisal Kothari** (1:49)
Yes, so that was like an early version of Sejam or if you've used any of those YouTube to MP3 apps. So he bought one of the first ones. It got to 2.5 million users with obviously no marketing. He was I think 15 when he did that.
And then Google sent him a season to this.

**Anne Dwane** (2:12)
Okay, and what did your parents think of all this technology and building and things like that?

**Jaisal Kothari** (2:19)
So, for a long time, they didn't know because he kept it secret and as much as he loved doing all these things, he was living like 20 hour days here, like twice the amount of time as any other person or any other kid. So he also loved playing Pokemon and all of the other things that kids love. He was also a normal child, but they didn't know it. But I'm very grateful for our parents because they were super open minded.
They gave us resources. I got my first laptop when I was nine years old. So it was a lot easier to get started and find your way into the tech world.

**Anne Dwane** (3:00)
We're gonna come back to you later. But let me just, do you recall, was there a movie that Tanay watched that is kind of formative?

**Jaisal Kothari** (3:07)
Oh, yes, of course. So I think the biggest inspiration for him was he watched Iron Man, and he just fell in love with everything he saw. And to him, he was a child. It wasn't unachievable. He almost believed that that was a real thing that could exist. So his lifelong dream kind of became to build Jarvis. And actually, before Citi existed, before Alexa existed, he built the first version of a voice assistant. It was called Aria.
And it worked flawlessly, and that's kind of what he is now doing at Wispr Flow.

**Anne Dwane** (3:47)
Yeah. It's an amazing arc. Okay. So you were seven years younger.
When did you get an iPhone or a phone? You got a laptop and nine.

**Jaisal Kothari** (3:59)
My first phone was in iPhone 3, which I'll have to calculate, but very early, a little too early, I would say.

**Anne Dwane** (4:09)
Okay. That's what I was going to say, because many parents in the room, and they're thinking about this now.
You turned out okay.

**Jaisal Kothari** (4:16)
I hope so.

**Anne Dwane** (4:18)
Okay. And what was it like? Because sometimes the older sibling being into something like technology can cause the other sibling to say, I'm not into that. But you were more inspired to go into technology, or how did that work for you?

**Jaisal Kothari** (4:33)
100%. I mean, everything I know today, he has taught me almost forcefully.
But, you know, it's like just seeing him, what technology enables you to do is just to think of something and then make it feasible. And you have it in your hand. And that's just something that I feel like is so influential to everyone is like you see someone else do it and it's like I want to do this as well.