Personalized AI Language Education — with Andrew Hsu, Speak

**Alessio** (0:05)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel, and I'm joined by Michael Joswicks, founder of Small AI.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:12)
Hello, hello. We're back in the studio with Andrew Hsu. Welcome.

**Andrew Hsu** (0:15)
Thank you for having me.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:16)
I have to start this off. I didn't prep you on this at all, but you were a Thiel Fellow in 2011

**Andrew Hsu** (0:22)
First class. First class.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:24)
Is that the one with SBF?

**Andrew Hsu** (0:27)
No, he was, I think, several years later, actually. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:29)
What was it like? Just talk about the...

**Andrew Hsu** (0:32)
That's a good question. Haven't been asked that one in a while. It was a really crazy idea at the time and very controversial. I think the first few years of the fellowship were definitely, let's just find 20 people in their 20 and give them $100,000 to drop out of college.
It was no holds barred. You could do anything. You could be doing some crazy research idea, a startup, anything. I actually met my current co-founder at Speak. He was in the second year of the fellowship and made many very close friends from the first few years. But for me, it was life-changing. I had a very unusual path where I did finish college, unfortunately. I was in grad school at the time because I went to school really early.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:19)
Yeah, I was like, aren't you too old? Thiel likes I'm young.

**Andrew Hsu** (1:25)
I was 19 at the time and in grad school. It was a very accelerated path, but I think like I knew at the time that I was going to leave grad school and do startups anyway, and the timing lined up really well. Yeah.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:39)
Vitalik, I think.

**Andrew Hsu** (1:40)
He was also in a later year. Yeah.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:43)
Damn. Okay. Anyway.

**Andrew Hsu** (1:44)
But the first two years, I mean, there are some crazy successes. You know, Dylan from Figma. I mean, yeah, a lot of people.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:52)
Awesome. Well, you know, feel free to bring in those stories as and when because only you know those kinds of people. You are now, CTO co-founder of Speak. I would say from a very early stage, like one of the most successful and prominent OpenAI partners that like anyone would know is like doing well. And like teaching English to Koreans is like your rough remit at the time. How did that all come about?

**Andrew Hsu** (2:17)
It's funny that you say that because despite our current sort of revenue scale and objectively, I think how successful we are, we've always operated in a market, at least initially on the other side of the world, and been much, much more popular in the sort of Eastern world and a bunch of Asian markets and relatively unknown in the West. So it hasn't really felt like we've had that sort of awareness until, you know, the past few years, really. But brief story is that my co-founder and I back in 2016 were fascinated by the promise of AI. And we spent a year sabbatical basically learning everything we could. We talked to Karpathy back then actually when he was like just finishing grad school and did a lot of sort of self-study research. And we were just so convinced, I think fundamentally, that speech models were going like this, language models were going like this. And in the five to ten year span, they would become superhuman. And we were utterly convinced of this future. And we saw that the way people learn things and specifically learn languages, which was a very sort of human based thing, if you really care about fluency, that would completely change and we'd be able to build language shooters that were pure software, pure AI. So that was kind of the Genesis story of speak. It took much, much longer than we expected to build a great product and find good PMF.
The first few years were very painful and I think without this really compelling vision of the future, we would have quit. We actually never pivoted. Last year, we brought the entire company to Taipei. We do this company trip every year and we played our original YC application video on screen. It was really funny because the things we were saying in that video were the exact same things that I still say today, about the long-term vision and what we're building towards. So that was really cool to see.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:16)
Can you summarize the long-term vision again?

**Andrew Hsu** (4:18)
It was that as speech models and language models become superhuman, that would let us create an AI language tutor that would help you become fluent faster than any human could. And I think we're like 80 to 90% of the tech is here now.