You should build a consumer AI company today (Connor Zwick, Speak)

Connor Zwick (0:00)

The entire idea of what it takes to build software, there's a complete paradigm shift that's happening. I think this is all literally over the last six weeks, things have changed here, in a way that people do not understand. I think it's the equivalent of the Chachapiti moment.

Wouter Teunissen (0:14)

This is Connor Zwick. He built the number one app on the App Store in high school, sold it to Chegg, dropped out of college and became a Teal fellow, and then spent a decade building an AI company before anyone was even calling it AI. He is a fan of Speak, the most effective way to learn a new language.

Connor Zwick (0:29)

AI will change the way that people learn things in a fundamental way, because we've always known for thousands of years that the best way to learn something is by having a tutor next to you that just has a conversation with you and teaches you. That's the promise of AI.

Wouter Teunissen (0:42)

Today, Speak has over 50 million downloads across 40 countries, and it's valued at over a billion dollars and is backed by OpenAI. In this episode, you will learn why Connor walked away from an app with millions of users and what it taught him about choosing the right project, how magical thinking kills more startups than running out of money, and why his first piece of advice to anyone who wants to start a company is, don't do it.

Connor Zwick (1:03)

Every day I wake up and thinking about the product. I have developed a mild case of insomnia because I can't stop thinking about the product when I go to sleep. That is how much I care about the core thing that we're building.

Wouter Teunissen (1:14)

To tell me a little bit about the Flashcards app, you sold to Chegg when you were 21, you had millions of downloads, millions of users. That's not like a typical thing that someone does before they've even launched a company.

Connor Zwick (1:26)

Flashcards Plus was something I built in high school. It was literally like an app where you could just have digital flashcards on your phone. It was like me as a high schooler interested in building technology and the iPhone came out and I realized, if you turn the iPhone sideways, it looks like the flashcards I see everyone using in school. Why don't I just build an app to solve my own problem and learn more about building these new iPhone apps? And I knew absolutely nothing about distribution. I wasn't thinking about it as a business. I just thought it would be a cool thing to build. And then I released it in high school.

And on the first day, I got eight downloads. And I was like, cool, this is the eight friends I have that I told about it. It was the super early version. It was just giving me the daily download count. And seven days in, it was thousands of downloads per day. And I was like, okay, to me, that number seemed really, really, really big. And I think the trajectory from there is it just, I guess it was just an early app that was high quality. I wasn't trying to make money from it, just release something that was useful. And a lot of people found value of it and it became the number one app in the App Store and it changed my life the way I thought about things that maybe connected to Silicon Valley and was one of the reasons why I ended up out here. Actually, how have I realized, people are really using this. I don't even think I had real analytics in place. I think I put basic Google Analytics in. This was like while I was still going to school every day. And so obviously, I ended up working on it whenever I could, nights and weekends, and it became this really main project. And I had built a lot of things in the past. It wasn't my first venture. In high school, I had started blogging and professionally blogging for educational material for learning how to code. And I built a lot of websites for people in my local area and made money doing that. So I'd made money on the internet before, but the scale of this was just extraordinary. And I started getting VCs reaching out to me, wanting me to fly out to San Francisco. And I'd gotten job offers on the internet before too. Someone tried to move me to Australia to become a full-time tech blogger for a website called Tuts Plus back in the day. But that's when I think I was like, okay, this is kind of opening this whole new thing to me.