# Generating your AI Media Empire - with Youssef Rizk of Wondercraft.ai Latent Space · 2023-09-20 Youssef Rizk, co-founder of Wondercraft.ai, explains how his five-month-old startup uses hyperrealistic AI voices to turn blogs, newsletters, and other content into podcasts, arguing that the application layer—not the underlying API—is the real moat. He details Wondercraft's origin from a failed sports-investing startup, the rapid MVP that generated $3K in one day, and the decision to build script generation and audio production tools rather than train its own models. Rizk also announces a new AI dubbing feature for video, discusses the challenges of scaling to 28 languages, and reveals that the company runs on just four people pushing two major features per week. The conversation covers the daily Hacker News Recap podcast—which reached Spotify's top 30 tech podcasts—and Rizk's view that AI-generated content must be clearly disclosed to avoid backlash. ## Questions this episode answers ### How does Wondercraft defend against the criticism that it’s just a thin wrapper around ElevenLabs? Youssef Rizk argues that a moat isn’t about the underlying API but about tailoring a product to a specific use case. Wondercraft builds podcast‑specific tooling (editing, hosting, templates, music, intros/outros) that generic TTS engines lack, making it the easiest way to create a podcast. He flips the question: “What is your moat as an API?” and stresses that focusing on the user, not the implementation, creates defensibility, especially in a huge market with room for many winners. [49:41](https://addtry.com/da6abe88-6552-452a-9333-bcc1f12b3a6f?t=2981000) ### How did Youssef Rizk validate the idea for Wondercraft so quickly? The team built a rough prototype with no authentication—just a single page for script and audio generation. After someone shared it on Twitter, they saw a flood of inbound interest. They immediately added a basic Stripe integration, charging $50 per month, and made $3,000 in a single day. That instant willingness to pay convinced them there was real demand and gave them the signal to double down on the product. [46:55](https://addtry.com/da6abe88-6552-452a-9333-bcc1f12b3a6f?t=2815000) ### What video dubbing feature did Wondercraft just launch? Wondercraft now offers AI‑powered dubbing that translates podcast audio and video into other languages. It uses the original speaker’s voice model and aligns the dubbed speech with the speaker’s on‑screen turn, though it does not include lip sync. Youssef highlights the mission to expand content access beyond English, and the company uses professional human translators for quality assurance to ensure the dubbing sounds authentic in each target language. [30:33](https://addtry.com/da6abe88-6552-452a-9333-bcc1f12b3a6f?t=1833000) ## Key moments - **[0:00] Intro** - [0:06] Anna, an AI voice, opens the episode declaring she’s 'taking our podcasting jobs' - **[0:55] Welcome** - [2:11] Youssef Rizk grew up in Egypt and earned an integrated master’s in EEE at Imperial, originally wanting to build hybrid cars - [2:31] Youssef hated software in high school but loved his intro to C++ course for its instant gratification - [5:07] First university project was a boring line‑following robot car, pushing Youssef toward software - [7:35] Youssef attended the Summer Academy of Code bootcamp in Oxford while suffering a bad gum infection - **[9:26] Product** - [11:46] As a forward‑deployed engineer at Palantir, Youssef combined coding, sales, and contract review - [12:25] "Everyone at Palantir was the kind of people to do the group project themselves" - [12:37] Youssef met his Wondercraft co‑founder Dimi at Palantir — they started on the exact same day - **[14:26] Use Cases** - [15:16] Wondercraft launched in April 2023 as a podcast builder using hyper‑realistic AI voices - [16:45] Wondercraft’s mission is to expand access to content by converting text into multiple audio and video formats - [18:45] Turning blogs into AI‑narrated podcasts helps companies credentialize as thought leaders without heavy recording work - [23:46] Core Wondercraft flow: generate a script from text, then render it with ElevenLabs AI voices - [25:11] Swyx warns listeners not to host podcasts on Anchor or Apple Podcasts, calling for open RSS feed sanctity - **[26:00] Original Shows** - [28:44] Trader Joe’s claimed one of its best marketing techniques was its company podcast, diving into niche industry topics - **[30:33] Dubbing** - [31:46] Wondercraft’s new Zapier integration auto‑publishes a podcast episode each time your newsletter RSS feed updates - [33:54] Scheduling podcast drops at commute hours improves downloads by hitting listeners at the right time - [35:34] Daily podcasting biases Apple rankings because shorter, frequent episodes accumulate more downloads - [37:20] Podcast studios use Wondercraft to quickly produce narration‑style shows and demo specs for client pitches - [43:26] Wondercraft dropped its Product Hunt Daily podcast due to low traction, keeping only HN Recap and PG Essays - **[49:21] Moat** - [50:36] Wondercraft’s new AI dubbing feature translates podcast video and audio into 28 languages with speaker‑aligned timing - [50:51] 60% of the internet is in English — AI dubbing aims to break that language barrier for informational content - **[55:52] Scripts** - [59:10] The Wondercraft team is only 4 people but ships two highly demanded features per week - [1:00:15] "It’s a race without an end" — Youssef says AI startups must ship relentlessly to stay ahead - [1:03:44] Wondercraft’s one‑person customer support turns angry emails into delighted users in under an hour - [1:05:56] Wondercraft’s pricing charges less per unit as you produce more — no overage fees, just tier upgrades - **[1:06:01] Voices** - [1:08:22] Youssef’s previous startup Moonshot let people invest in others’ careers but was too regulated and not a tech product - [1:15:12] Youssef realized Moonshot was a legal product, not a tech product, and they weren’t the right founders for it - **[1:16:48] Podcaster** - [1:18:16] Wondercraft’s first prototype was a single‑page, no‑auth React form that went viral on Twitter and made $3K in one day - [1:22:39] "What is your moat as an API?" — Youssef argues moats come from product and use case, not the underlying model - [1:24:42] "AI is mid by design" — Swyx argues AI‑generated content is average and not what audiences want from thought leaders - [1:25:10] Swyx is willing to hand over his LinkedIn posting to AI because he doesn’t use it anyway — money on the table - **[1:25:55] Lightning** - [1:26:12] Q: What happened in AI faster than you expected? Youssef: "The GPT moment — you can basically do anything with GPT" - [1:26:54] Youssef’s most interesting unsolved AI problem: validation / QA — we still need humans to verify AI output quality - [1:27:48] Youssef’s closing advice: start a podcast with Wondercraft, don’t listen to moat‑skeptics, launch, and don’t burn money - **[1:28:44] Outro** ## Speakers - **Swyx** (host) - **Anna** (guest) - **Youssef Rizk** (guest) ## Topics Audio & Music, Startups ## Mentioned Anthropic (company), Descript (company), ElevenLabs (company), Moonshot (company), OpenAI (company), Palantir (company), Play.ht (company), Wondercraft (company), Y Combinator (company), Audio LM (product), ChatGPT (product), Google Sandstorm (product), Hacker News Recap (product), LangChain (product), PG Essays (product), Papersread.ai (product), Product Hunt Daily (product), Small Podcaster (product), VALL-E (product), Zapier (product) ## Transcript ### Intro **Anna** [0:06] Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast, where we dive into the wild, wild world of AI engineering every week. This is Anna, your friendly neighborhood AI, and I'll be standing in for Alessio today. Yes, you heard right, AI is taking our podcasting jobs. We flew all the way to London to interview Yousef Rizk, co-founder of Wondercraft AI, which has created the number one piece of AI-generated content enjoyed by the Latent Space community. We ask him how he arrived at his idea, what the future of commercial AI-generated content looks like, and confront him with the hardest question of all: What is his moat as an API wrapper startup? At the end, we even have him turn the tables and do a customer interview with swyx. There's lots of audio goodies in this one, and bonus 30 minutes video on youtube.com/latentspacetv. Watch out and take care. **Swyx** [0:55] So we're in the studio here in London with Yousef. Welcome. ### Welcome **Youssef Rizk** [0:59] Thank you. Great to be here. **Swyx** [1:01] Um, it's been such a joy listening to Wondercraft's, uh, podcast over the last four or five months. You guys have been around for only five months. **Youssef Rizk** [1:09] Yep. **Swyx** [1:10] And, um, as you know, I am one of your, your podcast's, like, biggest fans. Um, and I think that it's super interesting because I talk to a lot of vendors, effectively people who create services for other developers to build, and you are at the application layer, which is great and challenging for me as a podcaster because you have some secret sauce that you, you're not gonna share. But, um, but I also wanna just talk to you as someone who's evaluated a lot of things and built something that I actually use every single day. So that's, that's the context. **Youssef Rizk** [1:43] Great. Great. **Swyx** [1:44] How do you feel when I say these things? Like, is, is that, is that exactly what you're going for? **Youssef Rizk** [1:48] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. **Swyx** [1:49] Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [1:49] So it definitely makes sense, right? Resonates definitely on the application layer, and that's definitely by design. Um- **Swyx** [1:54] Yeah. Yeah. And we can talk about the, the origin story leading into, to Wondercraft. Uh, but just to learn a little bit more about you, um, you grew up in Egypt? **Youssef Rizk** [2:01] I grew up in Egypt, yeah. Spent the first 18 years there. **Swyx** [2:04] Yeah. Cairo. Um, and then, um, you came over to the UK. You got your master's in EEE at Imperial? **Youssef Rizk** [2:10] Yeah. It's a funny story. Actually, in the UK you-- I don't have a bachelor's. I only have a master's. **Swyx** [2:15] How-how- **Youssef Rizk** [2:15] You do this, like, four-year integrated bachelor plus master's 'cause in the UK the bachelor's is three years. **Swyx** [2:20] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [2:20] But you can do one more year, which basically counts as a master's, so you graduate with one degree, which is called a Master's of Engineering. **Swyx** [2:26] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [2:26] Um, so I did that. Actually, the reason I studied electrical engineering when I started, I, I hated software- **Swyx** [2:31] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [2:31] ... in high school. I was like, "This is something I'm never gonna do." **Swyx** [2:33] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [2:34] Didn't qualify as real engineering. But, um, so the reason I applied to electrical engineering is that I'm a big car guy. I love cars. And at that time, around 2013, 2014, it was-- You know, all the big rage was starting to be these, like, hybrid electric cars. So I was like, "Cool, this is what I wanna do. I wanna build cars." **Swyx** [2:52] Ah. **Youssef Rizk** [2:52] So I go, start the course. Our first-- Very, like, topically, our first project was building a little, like, robot car that follows a line. And oh my God, was it boring. It was the worst thing I've ever had to work on. **Swyx** [3:07] Uh-huh. **Youssef Rizk** [3:07] So, like-- And then at the same time, we started kind of this intro to programming course, which I loved. It was super basic C++. **Swyx** [3:14] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [3:14] I was like, "This is cool." Um, there's, like, this instant gratification that you get from just building a program, seeing it run, and then seeing that it works or it doesn't. Um, so all of a sudden I started-- Like, what I started out with, I started hating, and what I thought I hated- **Swyx** [3:27] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [3:27] ... I started loving. **Swyx** [3:28] I had a kinda similar journey with finance and programming. Um, I, I thought that I wasn't cut out to be a programmer, so I went the finance route for, like, 10 years, uh, and then realized that software is eating the world which is, uh, cliché but true. **Youssef Rizk** [3:43] Yeah. **Swyx** [3:43] Uh, and I find that a lot of EEE people actually end up th-this way, uh, maybe just 'cause software is easier than hardware. **Youssef Rizk** [3:49] It's easier, and it's also just-- Uh, hardware's so abstract. The only thing you're looking at is, like, this PCB with a bunch of resistors and capacitors plugged in. And if you wanna, you know, if you wanna build some board, you have to go ship it, send it. **Swyx** [3:59] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [4:00] It's just, it's just the iteration process takes so long. That being said, I, I-- It's hugely valuable. **Swyx** [4:04] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [4:05] Like, the, the, you know, the improvements that hardware has driven combined with software, obviously both huge, but hardware is also a huge part of this. **Swyx** [4:12] Yeah, yeah. Totally. And, and you having that background is something that I would probably never be able to pick up as a non-- like, outside of a university setting 'cause you just had to do all these courses. **Youssef Rizk** [4:22] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely. **Swyx** [4:23] Yeah. Um, cool. Um, and, uh, you, you actually call out that, um, that Google Summer of Code was important to you in, on your LinkedIn, uh, in terms of learning to code. Is that, is that-- No? Okay. We can cut, we can cut that. Um, I don't know. It's, it's on your LinkedIn somewhere. **Youssef Rizk** [4:36] Is it? **Swyx** [4:37] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [4:37] I think I did the- **Swyx** [4:38] You did some bootcamp. **Youssef Rizk** [4:39] It wasn't Google. **Swyx** [4:40] Okay, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [4:41] It was-- I forget the name. **Swyx** [4:43] Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [4:43] But if you have your LinkedIn open, I can briefly do a talk about it. But it was basically this, like, summer v- I, I wanted to learn code. This was in my third year of university. So I did this bootcamp in Oxford. **Swyx** [4:53] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [4:54] Um, it was called the Summer Academy of Code, and basically, it was just, like, a one-week thing where you go from the basics of just building a web app. So all the basics of Node, React- **Swyx** [5:05] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [5:05] ... JSX, all this. **Swyx** [5:07] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [5:07] Uh, I, I was already kind of familiar with it, so it was kind of a repeat, but it was good to have that. Um, it was super interesting actually. I mean, the funny story there is, like, when I, I was in Oxford. I was having a great time. At the time of that bootcamp, um, I got this, like, w-the worst gum infection ever. **Swyx** [5:26] Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [5:26] It was the worst pain I've ever been in. So as I'm doing this, like, one week in Oxford doing the summer bootcamp, I'm just in agonizing pain the entire time trying to learn about JSX or whatnot. **Swyx** [5:37] Um, yeah, yeah. Uh, that, that must h-have added extra difficulty. Um, I know it's s-such a pain to learn the JS ecosystem already. Um, uh, well, the reason I ask is, um, I'm a career changer myself, right? Um, I also got into tech through a bootcamp. I think that these support systems in each country, right? San Francisco has a lot of bootcamps. New York is the bootcamp that I went through. Uh, and you had the one in Oxford. Um, it's super important for people to, like, ramp up. **Youssef Rizk** [6:04] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [6:04] And, and, um, I want to encourage more of those things and say that it's basically okay. It's not as prestigious as a degree, but it's probably more practical. **Youssef Rizk** [6:11] Yeah. I think to everyone l-listening, like yeah, I did a, a EEE degree. For those who don't know, that's electrical and electronic engineering. Um, sounds similar enough to computer sci- it really isn't. Like you still do some software. **Swyx** [6:23] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [6:23] But the thing I do wanna highlight is that all of-- I would probably say half, and this is a number out of thin air, so don't quote me on it. Half of software engineers probably are self-trained- **Swyx** [6:32] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [6:32] ... or self-taught. **Swyx** [6:33] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [6:34] And that's kind of the beauty of this, is that you can very much learn this by yourself. **Swyx** [6:37] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [6:37] I do agree with you, like learning electronics by yourself is a little more difficult. You just need the equipment. But something like software, it's super easy to get started. **Swyx** [6:45] Yeah. I mean, now I, now I'm having to m- catch up on it because anytime, like, yeah, it comes to like GPU power calculations and, you know, RAM calculations, it's, it is electrical engineering. **Youssef Rizk** [6:56] Yeah. **Swyx** [6:56] Um, and so there's, there's a lot of, um, actual science in there. **Youssef Rizk** [6:59] Yeah, yeah. **Swyx** [7:00] Um, you then spent four years at Palantir as a forward-deployed engineer. Um, I actually interviewed for that job. **Youssef Rizk** [7:06] Nice. **Swyx** [7:06] I didn't, I didn't make it 'cause I slept through my interview. Uh, it's a different story. But, uh, forward-deployed engineer is a class-- I think it's a role that Palantir invented. **Youssef Rizk** [7:14] Yeah. I-- Look, Palantir's a great company. I think it's like the-- There's a technical aspect and like a, a motivational aspect that they look at when they're evaluating it. Um, I think they just have this interviewer process or it kinda stabs them in, in, in the back sometimes because they tend to just like get people who are super entrepreneurial, so their nature is like they're always looking for the next challenge. I think when I thought of it as like everyone at Palantir, or most people at Palantir, were the kind of people to do the group project themselves. **Swyx** [7:44] Ah. **Youssef Rizk** [7:44] You know what I mean? **Swyx** [7:45] Mm-hmm. **Youssef Rizk** [7:45] It's those, those kind of people. Like they just wanna be challenged. **Swyx** [7:47] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [7:47] So the reality is that you end up having a lot of people just leave to start their own thing. **Swyx** [7:51] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [7:51] That's like the most common thing. You find someone at Palantir, and then you guys go and- **Swyx** [7:55] Right **Youssef Rizk** [7:55] ... and start your own thing. Um- **Swyx** [7:56] And it's where you met Dimi. **Youssef Rizk** [7:57] It's where I met Dimi. Yeah. **Swyx** [7:58] And, and Mati. **Youssef Rizk** [7:58] We actually started on the same day. **Swyx** [7:59] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [8:00] Uh, Mati also started vague there around the same time, not the same day as us. Um, so really the har- the thing that made it like super hard to leave Palantir was just the people. You're working with such a high clari- caliber of people. **Swyx** [8:11] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [8:12] Um, but, uh, you know, interpret that as you will, but also just like people you can be friends with. **Swyx** [8:18] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [8:18] So like I still have a lot of friends from there. **Swyx** [8:19] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [8:20] Um, the job itself, forward-deployed engineer, is a super interesting job because it is kind of at this intersection of being an engineer, so software engineer, but also still doing like business-related things. **Swyx** [8:31] Yeah. Solutions- **Youssef Rizk** [8:32] So- **Swyx** [8:32] ... uh, architects maybe. **Youssef Rizk** [8:34] Yeah. So part of the job was a solutions architect. Part of the job was reviewing contracts. Part of the job was doing sales. Part of the job was coding things. **Swyx** [8:40] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [8:40] Part of the job was interacting with... Right? So, so many different things, and I think that is a really good foundation for someone who does wanna start something in the future. **Swyx** [8:48] Excellent. **Youssef Rizk** [8:48] Right? You just do everything. **Swyx** [8:49] So kind of an endorsement of that job if people wanna- **Youssef Rizk** [8:51] A huge endorsement of that job. Yeah **Swyx** [8:52] ... get that resource. Okay. Excellent. Amazing. Um, yeah. Palantir is surprisingly strong here in the London tech circles. I, I have a number of friends who are all ex-Palantir. **Youssef Rizk** [9:00] Yeah. I think it's actually the, the biggest offices in London. **Swyx** [9:02] Yeah. Surprising- **Youssef Rizk** [9:04] Yeah **Swyx** [9:04] ... because it-- I think of it as like a US defense company. **Youssef Rizk** [9:06] Yeah, yeah, yeah. **Swyx** [9:09] Um, then you started Moonshot for nine months, which is pretty important in your, in your journey. Uh, I'll, I'll bring it up to Wondercraft. **Youssef Rizk** [9:14] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [9:14] Uh, and you started Wondercraft, uh, in April of this year. **Youssef Rizk** [9:16] Correct. **Swyx** [9:16] And it's been, it's been about five months- **Youssef Rizk** [9:18] Yeah **Swyx** [9:18] ... uh, going through YC in, in the winter batch? **Youssef Rizk** [9:21] Summer '22. **Swyx** [9:22] Summer, summer of '22 batch. Um, okay. Cool. Um, what is Wondercraft? ### Product **Youssef Rizk** [9:26] Nice. Wondercraft's a podcast builder that uses hyperrealistic AI voices to create podcasts and make that whole podcast creation process super simple. **Swyx** [9:34] Right. **Youssef Rizk** [9:34] Right? So super simple example is you can, you know, you publish a bunch of blogs. **Swyx** [9:37] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [9:38] You can take that blog, put it in there. It'll just convert it to an audio-friendly format that people can listen to. Um, it's just a-- Sometimes it's a bit more efficient to listen to things rather than read them. I give the very like, you know, this is-- If you wanna think of it specifically as what it is at, at the current instance in time, that's what it is. **Swyx** [9:52] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [9:53] What does it strive to be is a little slightly different because what it really strives to be is it strives to be this platform with the mission of expanding access to content. **Swyx** [10:03] Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [10:05] And I mean this in a variety of different ways, right? Some people just are able to consume content, uh, you know, we have this whole debate in education. It's like, are you a visual learner, an audio learner? **Swyx** [10:13] Mm. **Youssef Rizk** [10:13] What, what do you do? People just consume content better in different ways. I, I'm a visual learner. I need to see things. So for me, actually, it's sometimes a little better to read the blog. But if we're just talking about like I wanna get a lot of information, podcasts are great because you can just do them while doing something else. **Swyx** [10:27] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [10:27] Like there's a reason that there, that podcast functionality is so natively embedded in all these smart speakers. **Swyx** [10:33] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [10:34] It's just 'cause like you're doing anything at home, just put on a podcast. Um, so really what we're trying to do is podcast is the first instantiation of that, which is like how do we expand access to content? **Swyx** [10:45] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [10:46] But the, it, it like spans so much more, right? Um, you know, instead of just going to, I don't know, we talked about this like blog to podcast. You can go blog to video. You can go podcast to blog. You can go podcast to Twitter thread. Like the, the permutations are, are frankly endless. Basically depends on how many platforms there are that people consume things on. But, um, that's essentially what we do. The use cases for this are pretty interesting. Um, the one that we like just see immediate value in is this just this ability to translate the content that you already have into other forms of content. Um, if we just stick with that blog post example again, right? You've written-- So, so, you know, a lot of companies might have this content team that focuses a lot on producing quality blog posts. Blog posts, you know, they're good for SEO and whatnot, but they're not-- Sometimes they, you know, they don't really achieve a specific goal or outcome that you want. Um, one thing we see that is really useful for podcasts is they actually carry a lot more weight in credentializing you as a thought leader or your company as a thought leader. So but, but like, you know, we spent the last 50 minutes trying to set up this room to record the podcast, right? **Swyx** [11:56] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [11:56] So it's, it's not easy. And, um, it's a very synchronous process, right? Me and you have to find the time to go and sit here- **Swyx** [12:02] Yep **Youssef Rizk** [12:03] ... and record this. You have to come up with questions. I have to come up with answers. **Swyx** [12:06] Yep. **Youssef Rizk** [12:06] Right? Um, but this ability to actually just like take the content that you have and transform it is pretty powerful. Um, you know, and there's a lot of other use cases as well, which are just like, uh, podcasts really all they are is like- Like define a podcast, right? Like, uh, the, the, the line between or the difference between an audiobook and a podcast, I guess, just the, the format and the length. **Swyx** [12:27] It's a, it's an MP3 on a RSS feed. **Youssef Rizk** [12:28] It's an MP3 with someone or something speaking. **Swyx** [12:31] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [12:31] Right? So- **Swyx** [12:32] I've actually played around a lot with this stuff, by the way. Uh, so I've, I've, I've done music-only podcasts where you just listen. Tiesto has been podcasting for 15 years, uh, every single week just DJing- **Youssef Rizk** [12:42] Yeah **Swyx** [12:42] ... from his house. **Youssef Rizk** [12:43] It's just basically a radio show. **Swyx** [12:44] It's great. **Youssef Rizk** [12:45] It's just radio shows. **Swyx** [12:46] Async radio. **Youssef Rizk** [12:46] Yeah. **Swyx** [12:47] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [12:47] So it-- Yeah. So it, it's super interesting. Um, but podcasts like, okay, like ignore the word podcast and just think of what we do, which is like we help you create audio content. Super valuable for anyone who just needs that. Um, if you can imagine a world in which like, I don't know what to call them, like Calm or Headspace or any of these things, they can do a lot of their meditation like that super quickly. **Swyx** [13:07] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [13:07] What you can get to is a point where you're doing like these super personalized things. **Swyx** [13:10] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [13:11] Right? Because you just have the ability to scale the content production so quickly. Same with educators. I think there's actually a, a- at this point, there's a few YouTube channels at this point that are all based on synthetic voices- **Swyx** [13:20] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [13:21] ... that produce a ton of educational content. **Swyx** [13:23] Any ones that do a good job? **Youssef Rizk** [13:24] Uh- **Swyx** [13:25] You can do a call out? **Youssef Rizk** [13:26] I do. I just don't remember the name. **Swyx** [13:27] Yeah, okay. You can send it to me later on. **Youssef Rizk** [13:29] Yeah. **Swyx** [13:29] Uh- **Youssef Rizk** [13:30] Um **Swyx** [13:30] ... we can use Wondercraft to synthesize some extra clips. **Youssef Rizk** [13:33] Yeah. Um, now that being said, the, the problem with, with podcasts sometimes is-- It's not sometimes actually. Podcasts just have a slightly slow adoption rate. **Swyx** [13:45] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [13:46] You're listening to a thing for an hour, right? **Swyx** [13:48] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [13:48] Like we as a generation don't have attention spans. **Swyx** [13:50] Don't have much time. Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [13:51] It's the time and the attention span. **Swyx** [13:52] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [13:53] Like TikTok. Give it to me in 30 seconds. We think why clips are taking over. **Swyx** [13:56] Thirty's too long, man. **Youssef Rizk** [13:57] Thirty's too long. **Swyx** [13:58] Seven. **Youssef Rizk** [13:58] Ten seconds. **Swyx** [13:59] Seven, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [13:59] Ten seconds with captions. I need to read it- **Swyx** [14:00] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [14:00] ... and good. Um, so what we also do is actually, and this is kind of still a beta feature, and we're working to improve it, but like we also, you know, let you take that podcast and then clip it into an aud-- a v- a video that you can go and share on socials, right? So it's this ability to take one form of content, produce it in a bunch of different ways that serve different purposes, and be able to distribute it, basically. **Swyx** [14:21] Yeah. Excellent. Um, I wanna go through features so that people have a high-level overview- **Youssef Rizk** [14:26] Mm-hmm **Swyx** [14:26] ... of, um, what you offer. Um, so I think at, at the core, it is basically two things. One is you generate scripts, um, and that's optional, obviously. If you, if you want to just write the script yourself, you can write the script yourself. ### Use Cases **Swyx** [14:38] But most-- I think most of your users will generate a script. **Youssef Rizk** [14:41] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [14:41] Uh, and then two is from that script, you create, uh, use AI voices, uh, currently using ElevenLabs. **Youssef Rizk** [14:47] Yeah. **Swyx** [14:47] Is that, is that the rough flow? **Youssef Rizk** [14:48] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [14:48] That, that, that's like the really core basic flow. **Youssef Rizk** [14:50] That, that's the core basic. Obviously, there's a lot of plumbing on top of it- **Swyx** [14:53] Yes **Youssef Rizk** [14:53] ... but that's the core. **Swyx** [14:54] And then, uh, you offer video clips for YouTube. You offer 28 languages, um, that you can- **Youssef Rizk** [14:59] Yeah **Swyx** [14:59] ... produce. Uh, you offer show notes production and podcast hosting too, so the- they don't have to host it on like Anchor. Don't host it on Anchor, by the way, people. Don't, don't host it on Spotify. Don't host it on Apple Podcasts. It's, uh, these, these people don't respect the RSS feed. Anyway, um, I have very strong feelings about like preserving the sanctity of the RSS feed- **Youssef Rizk** [15:18] Yeah **Swyx** [15:18] ... for open podcasting, and all these Spotifys of the world want to close, uh, the podcasting ecosystem. So I, I have this, uh, tirade about them. Um, but yeah, those are your top-level features on your, on your landing page. Uh, anything that you'd highlight to go deeper on? **Youssef Rizk** [15:33] Um, yeah, I think those are the, the top-level ones. There's also-- It's basically just a lot of like also ancillary tooling that goes around all of this to just make it easier. The goal is like e- every time we speak to a customer or someone who's, who's thinking about it, they're like, "Yeah." Literally yesterday, I was speaking to a, a potential customer, and they're like, "Yeah, I just, you know, I wanna make sure this isn't a distraction 'cause we don't have that much time to do this." **Swyx** [15:55] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [15:55] And really, the whole point is that this doesn't take time, right? The whole point is to provide all the rails that make this not take time, and, and this comes with a million different things, right? Like we, you know-- Sometimes the AI voices don't really know how to pronounce a word. **Swyx** [16:08] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [16:08] So we have a pronunciation feature. Go and define how that, how you want that word pronounced, and it'll take care of it. Um, if you are-- We obviously have that hierarchy of like a podcast, an episode, and then all of that gets published in an RSS feed that you can just upload to Spotify, and we'll host that for you. Um, but what you also have is just like, you know, maybe you want some defaults, right? Every podcast needs some defaults. **Swyx** [16:30] Intro outros. **Youssef Rizk** [16:31] Uh, intro outros. **Swyx** [16:32] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [16:32] The music, the speakers. **Swyx** [16:33] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [16:34] Um, we're working on adding templates for the kind of podcast that you're doing. Instead of it just being this narration style, you can just do an interview-style podcast. Um, and a few more features. But basically, there's a lot of like tooling that just makes this a very useful, usable product for podcasts. **Swyx** [16:47] Yeah. And is it, uh, for stitching these things-- I've actually thought, often thought about making my own. Um, is it just FFmpeg and then like some flags and just stitch, stitch, stitch stuff together? **Youssef Rizk** [16:57] Yeah. I mean, obviously, as a startup, you kind of wanna just like do something quickly. **Swyx** [17:00] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [17:00] So we're not like reinventing the wheel with this stuff. **Swyx** [17:02] Yeah. No, YouTube uses FFmpeg. **Youssef Rizk** [17:03] Yeah. **Swyx** [17:04] You know? Like it's, uh, FFmpeg is, is a workhorse, if anything. **Youssef Rizk** [17:07] Yeah. **Swyx** [17:07] Uh, multimedia. **Youssef Rizk** [17:08] Yeah, yeah. **Swyx** [17:10] Cool. Uh, you list some use cases that I just want to, you know, still stay high level. Uh, businesses, newsletter. Uh, so businesses like Trader Joe's, uh, and you seem to have done a big push there. **Youssef Rizk** [17:21] Well, so we didn't do this for them. **Swyx** [17:23] Yep, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [17:24] Right? It was just kind of a case study, but it's super interesting when, when-- Apparently, Trader Joe's claims that one of their best marketing techniques was their podcast. **Swyx** [17:31] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [17:31] Right? So first of all, if you're just thinking about this as a use case, podcasts are really useful. **Swyx** [17:35] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [17:36] Now, I think your follow-up question, which is like, m- m-- you know, maybe I'm s- uh, getting ahead of myself here, but, you know, okay, companies will do podcasts. Probably 99% of the time, they'll be shit. **Swyx** [17:47] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [17:48] So, so what's the trick? **Swyx** [17:49] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [17:49] Well, Trader Joe's did a super interesting one. **Swyx** [17:51] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [17:51] They didn't do this generic corporate speak of like, "Oh, Trader Joe's is so great. Let's talk about apples or fruit or whatever." No. **Swyx** [17:58] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [17:58] They actually just went into like, you know, the mechanics of the super interesting niche stuff about their industry, and that's something that gets people listening, right? **Swyx** [18:05] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [18:05] You want-- I find it super interesting- **Swyx** [18:06] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [18:06] ... just from a curiosity perspective. **Swyx** [18:08] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [18:08] So yeah, like that, that's an example, right? You can-- Podcasts are actually really useful to just like get people You know, it helps your b-brand building, frankly. **Swyx** [18:17] Yeah. Um, and Trader Joe's, I think, went really hard on it. Um, I think they, they got their-- some of their-- quite their senior management involved. **Youssef Rizk** [18:23] Yeah. **Swyx** [18:23] Um, they told some stories behind some very beloved, um, food selections. I, I listened to the podcast- **Youssef Rizk** [18:29] Yeah **Swyx** [18:29] ... so it was, it was, it was pretty fun. And they also promoted it on their receipts. **Youssef Rizk** [18:33] Yeah. **Swyx** [18:33] And you could-- you, you fe-- guys featured that on your blog post, and I thought it was pretty cool. Um, so I think it's well done by them- **Youssef Rizk** [18:38] Yeah **Swyx** [18:38] ... but also clearly not done by AI yet. **Youssef Rizk** [18:40] Yeah. **Swyx** [18:41] Um, but still, uh, I think the, the, the use case is there. Um, I'll, I'll just kinda go through the list. Newsletter creators. **Youssef Rizk** [18:46] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [18:46] Uh, you have-- you said you have 100 creators, uh, publishing with you? **Youssef Rizk** [18:49] Yeah. So, you know, the interesting thing is if you write a newsletter, r- I mean, I don't know. My email is flooded with, with newsletters at the moment. **Swyx** [18:56] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [18:56] Sometimes I just want, like, the recap of it. **Swyx** [18:58] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [18:58] Again, audio form is just, for some people, easier. If you're on, you know, commuting or whatever, you can just listen to it. Um, so a lot of folks actually just convert their newsletter. Takes, like, two minutes. **Swyx** [19:08] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [19:09] Put the text in there, voilà, you have a, you have an audio version of your newsletter that you just published to Spotify. **Swyx** [19:13] Yeah, yeah. And I am a newsletter writer. Uh, and, uh, I clicked around and wanted to basically just chuck my RSS feed in there. **Youssef Rizk** [19:21] Yeah. **Swyx** [19:22] And I think I, I gave that feedback exactly to you guys like four months ago, uh, or three months ago, and it looks like you've already shipped it. **Youssef Rizk** [19:29] Yep. Uh, well, I'm announcing it basically here today, which is- **Swyx** [19:31] Okay **Youssef Rizk** [19:31] ... we, we, um-- Part of generally what we're building is the ability to just, you know, we wanna make this useful for, for creators of all kinds. So obviously for, you know, we're helping you translate your content from one form to the other. Wanna make this as seamless as possible, so as of today, we've actually built a Zapier integration. Uh, and we have a blood-- bunch of blogs on our website to, to kinda show you how to do this. But what you can now do is as loo-- as soon as you publish a newsletter, it goes on your RSS feed. We'll pick up the newsletter from your RSS feed automatically- **Swyx** [20:01] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [20:01] ... and just publish an episode for you. **Swyx** [20:03] Yeah. Question: What if I change something after I publish? So- **Youssef Rizk** [20:06] So you don't have to publish. **Swyx** [20:07] Ah. **Youssef Rizk** [20:07] It'll basically just generate, do all the work for you. **Swyx** [20:10] Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [20:10] And then you can go in and kinda modify it a little bit- **Swyx** [20:12] Yeah, yeah **Youssef Rizk** [20:12] ... and then publish. **Swyx** [20:13] Makes sense. **Youssef Rizk** [20:13] We also have scheduled publishing so that you can, I don't know, maybe you wanna release it a few hours later or- **Swyx** [20:18] Yeah. Um, the professional podcasters that I've spoken to say that that is very important. I personally don't care, like, it shows up in my feed or not. **Youssef Rizk** [20:26] Yeah. **Swyx** [20:26] Like, I don't care when it drops. **Youssef Rizk** [20:27] Yeah. **Swyx** [20:28] Anyway, so, um, you do, you do wanna basically time it, like, if you're basically targeting, like, a commute, uh, for, like, the US time zone. **Youssef Rizk** [20:34] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [20:34] You wanna be like, oh, 8 AM, you know, Pacific for people driving into work. And then you, then, then you, like, show up at the top of the reverse chronologic- **Youssef Rizk** [20:42] Yeah **Swyx** [20:42] ... chronological feed. **Youssef Rizk** [20:43] Yeah. **Swyx** [20:44] I feel like that's too much tactics. **Youssef Rizk** [20:46] You know, a-and that's a good point. I think it depends a little bit on your audience and, and what- **Swyx** [20:49] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [20:49] ... you're building. But I do think-- So I don't wanna undermine, like, the importance of consistency in podcasting. **Swyx** [20:55] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [20:56] Right? Like, you-- Whether that consistency l-consistency literally translates into I publish at 8 AM every single day- **Swyx** [21:03] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [21:04] ... or I just publish every single day or, you know, whatever. **Swyx** [21:07] Yeah. So, like, I, I- **Youssef Rizk** [21:07] There is a huge importance in just, like, making sure that what you're publishing is always- **Swyx** [21:11] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [21:11] ... it's there. People need to know that your brand is, like, kind of constantly pushing stuff. **Swyx** [21:15] Yeah. So for a, a lot of people talk to me are interested in, like, what's my advice on content creation. Yeah, at least once a week. **Youssef Rizk** [21:21] Yeah. **Swyx** [21:21] Whatever you do. **Youssef Rizk** [21:22] Yeah. **Swyx** [21:22] I don't care when you do it. Just do it once a week. **Youssef Rizk** [21:24] Yeah. **Swyx** [21:24] Put something out. Um, but I do notice that in the-- specifically in the podcasting field, and you, you talk about this, uh, in the next point, daily podcasting is the meta game that is, I think, doing extremely well. **Youssef Rizk** [21:34] Yeah. **Swyx** [21:35] Especially because I think the Apple podcast list biases for daily. **Youssef Rizk** [21:39] Yeah. **Swyx** [21:39] Because obviously then downloads will be higher. **Youssef Rizk** [21:41] Yeah. **Swyx** [21:42] So daily podcasters kind of rank higher more, and obviously because you're daily, you also do shorter podcasts, which guarantees that people-- more people listen to you. **Youssef Rizk** [21:50] Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think the fact that-- So obviously we do the Hacker News Recap. The fact that we did that and that it is daily actually just helped us reach that top 30 tech podcast on Spotify. **Swyx** [22:02] Yeah. That was mostly 'cause you were on HN, right? **Youssef Rizk** [22:04] We did launch, but obviously the fact that, like, you just publish a lot of content, you're just gonna get a lot more lists. Like, it's a statistics thing, right? **Swyx** [22:09] Right. Oh, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [22:10] Obviously, I think they do it by, like, total time listened as well. **Swyx** [22:12] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [22:13] But, you know, the fact that it's daily, it's just not overwhelming. A-again, we don't have that much of a t- of a, like, an attention span anymore. **Swyx** [22:18] Yeah, yeah. That's true. That's true. Yeah. Um, I, I love it. I listen to it every day. Um, okay. So, uh, internal podcasts for daily memos. Um, I think, like, Spotify might have internal podcasts. **Youssef Rizk** [22:29] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [22:29] I don't know of any other famous company that has internal podcasts, but this is interesting. **Youssef Rizk** [22:34] Um, it, it's interesting 'cause I think here we're basically just like, again, we're overloading the term podcast. What is a podcast, right? It's like, I think the, the origin of the word is, like, iPod broadcast. **Swyx** [22:44] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [22:44] Right? I, I don't know what that means, right? It's just like a-- Again, it's on-demand radio if we just take that, that word. But really the idea is like, again, if we're-- We wanna enable access to content, and I think part of that is just, like, efficient information delivery. So communication to companies, like, uh, we all know the perils of, like, how hard it is sometimes to, if you're a big company, to, like, communicate, and I think that kind of stuff is super interesting. I think one particular use case, which is, like, you know, the internal... Y-you use that just to, like, share information quickly, and I don't know if you have the next one kind of on there or maybe I'm- **Swyx** [23:18] It's okay. We can jump around. **Youssef Rizk** [23:19] Yeah. The, um, there's, like, a slightly different twist to it, which I think we can enable with the Zapier integration that we've built, which is this-- I don't know. I, I imagine sometimes, for example, I'm a, I'm a PM at a tech firm. A lot of things is going on on my team. I want just a quick recap, right? Um, I don't know. Some people do that, like, you know. If you're really good at, like, keeping state on some of the different SaaS products that exist, yeah, good, you can just get a recap there. But I think something that might be interesting is, like, can we look at your GitHub issues, PRs, whatever, and whenever there's a status change, kind of bake that into something that you then consume as an audio? **Swyx** [23:57] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [23:57] Um, we have, like-- You, you can do something similar like that with Zapier, and it's actually super interesting because it just saves you time. **Swyx** [24:03] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [24:04] You just get on your commute to work and be like, "These are the things that happened today. This PR was closed. We added this feature," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. **Swyx** [24:09] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [24:10] Right? Um, in a similar way, you can, like, think of something like that for email. Obviously, the privacy implications there are just a l- need a little bit more work. But, like- There's actually all of a sudden like, yeah, cool, I can actually consume a lot of the content that I historically have never been able to listen to now by audio. **Swyx** [24:25] Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, it, it, uh, opens up different forms of learning as you- **Youssef Rizk** [24:30] Yeah **Swyx** [24:30] ... as you mentioned. Um, and then finally, um, I-- I'm skipping ahead a little bit. Uh, podcast studios are using you. So you on- you said you onboarded 10 studios. What, what do studios use you for? **Youssef Rizk** [24:40] Um, a couple of interesting things, actually. So studios, like, they-- Podcasting is like, uh, is like, you know, book publishers in the sense that there's a million genres at this point. **Swyx** [24:49] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [24:50] Um, when we think of podcasts, I think we typically think of, like, the interview style one. **Swyx** [24:54] Mm-hmm. **Youssef Rizk** [24:55] So they're not necessarily using it for that, but it's a lot more for, like, um, two things generally. One is actually just, like, producing the content out there that is more narration style format. So you can think of something like a kids podcast that teaches them about, you know, I don't know, countries or the-- or whatever it is, or, you know, basic science topics. Um, we do that just completely through us, right? Um, obviously, we produce the sound, we produce the music. If they need a little bit more editing, they can just take that to their editors and do it. Um, the other thing that's really interesting is it actually lets them also build out a demo spec of what a more involved podcast can look like. **Swyx** [25:32] I see. **Youssef Rizk** [25:33] Right? So, you know, you were coming up with the idea for this podcast. You kind of wanna show people or some of you guys what it's gonna sound like. You can whip something up. Uh, and I think for them it's obviously really important because podca- the way they operate at least is, like, there's, you know, people are pushing for a different podcast. **Swyx** [25:47] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [25:47] And then you get sign-off to, to pursue it. **Swyx** [25:49] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [25:49] So you need to kind of show just, like, what, what's this gonna sound like. **Swyx** [25:51] Yeah. Excellent. Um, awesome. I think that's a really good overview. Um, then you also produce three in-house podcasts. **Youssef Rizk** [26:00] Yeah. ### Original Shows **Swyx** [26:01] Um, Hacker News Recap, Product Hunt Daily, and PG Essays. **Youssef Rizk** [26:04] So we dropped the Product Hunt Daily. **Swyx** [26:06] Oh, okay. It's still on your landing page. **Youssef Rizk** [26:08] Uh, yeah. We, we, we launched it, but we, like, we, we, we don't push any- **Swyx** [26:11] Okay **Youssef Rizk** [26:11] ... anything new there. I don't think we- **Swyx** [26:12] No, no interest in Product Hunts? **Youssef Rizk** [26:13] We don't, we didn't see too much traction. I think Product Hunt- **Swyx** [26:14] RIP Product Hunts, uh, Alec. No. So, so, yeah. Tell, tell me- **Youssef Rizk** [26:19] Yeah. So, so we do the Hacker News, uh, Hacker News Recap and the PG Essays I think are the two most popular ones. **Swyx** [26:25] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [26:25] Um, we're constantly experimenting with new internal or, like, podcasts that we publish. **Swyx** [26:29] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [26:29] Uh, I think there's gonna be- **Swyx** [26:30] What, what are your other-- You can tease a little bit. What, what are you thinking about? **Youssef Rizk** [26:33] Tease a little bit. Well, um, I really like Reddit. **Swyx** [26:36] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [26:36] I'd love to listen to some of the Reddit things- **Swyx** [26:38] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [26:38] ... uh, going on there, but instead of, like, reading them. **Swyx** [26:41] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [26:41] I don't know. It's always just a notification that I get. I'm like, "Ooh, this sounds interesting." **Swyx** [26:44] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [26:44] But I, I don't know. You can do it, like, per subreddit that you care about. **Swyx** [26:47] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [26:47] A few things like that. I, I love life pro tips. **Swyx** [26:49] Yeah. Life- **Youssef Rizk** [26:50] Super- **Swyx** [26:50] I see. Life pro tips. **Youssef Rizk** [26:50] Right? Like super interesting things or WallStreetBets or whatever you're into. **Swyx** [26:54] Yeah. Well, the problem with these things is that a lot of them could involve images and memes- **Youssef Rizk** [26:59] Mm-hmm **Swyx** [27:00] ... which you cannot consume. **Youssef Rizk** [27:02] Well, yes. We cannot consume this as, like, a simple- **Swyx** [27:05] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [27:05] ... we can't consume that at the moment. But, you know, maybe on the v- uh, a few weeks down the line when that video feature of ours gets a little better, you can actually start shipping it like that. **Swyx** [27:15] Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [27:15] Anyway. **Swyx** [27:16] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [27:16] Um. **Swyx** [27:16] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [27:17] Um- **Swyx** [27:17] And so f- and I'll just feed you an idea. To keep up on AI, a lot of stuff actually happens in Discords. **Youssef Rizk** [27:22] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [27:23] And there's way too many Discords. **Youssef Rizk** [27:24] Way too many, and they're way too active. **Swyx** [27:26] Yes. So I've actually built a little feed for myself, uh, that scrapes a bunch of Discords- **Youssef Rizk** [27:31] Yeah **Swyx** [27:31] ... and creates a daily newsletter for myself. **Youssef Rizk** [27:33] Amazing. **Swyx** [27:34] And I, I have thought about turning it into an, an audio feed. Um, but-- And this is the, the problem for Wondercraft. I read better, I read faster. **Youssef Rizk** [27:42] Yeah. **Swyx** [27:42] I scan up and down faster than I listen. **Youssef Rizk** [27:44] Yeah. **Swyx** [27:44] Right? And there's just too much noise in Discords- **Youssef Rizk** [27:47] Yeah **Swyx** [27:48] ... for me to listen as, as audio format. Your Hacker News stuff is very high, high signal because obviously you're folding, right? Whereas- **Youssef Rizk** [27:54] 'Cause we've-- We haven't done the curation like Hacker News did. **Swyx** [27:56] Exactly. **Youssef Rizk** [27:57] So it's literally- **Swyx** [27:57] That's why it's, like, guaranteed to be good. **Youssef Rizk** [27:58] Yeah. **Swyx** [27:59] Whereas for Discord, it's uh- **Youssef Rizk** [28:00] Yeah. Yeah **Swyx** [28:01] ... it's, uh, a bun- un- uh, bunch of junk. **Youssef Rizk** [28:03] Yeah. But I do think there's something similar. Like, you know, Reddit also does the curation. It's not us- **Swyx** [28:09] Yes **Youssef Rizk** [28:09] ... who are doing it, right? **Swyx** [28:10] Yes, yes. **Youssef Rizk** [28:10] If you do o- only the hot posts or something. **Swyx** [28:11] Still, still a little bit noisier. So, uh- **Youssef Rizk** [28:14] Little bit **Swyx** [28:14] ... uh, I don't know if you know, I, I have-- Uh, I was a moderator of the React to Reddit for four years. **Youssef Rizk** [28:17] Nice. **Swyx** [28:18] Um, so I, I've seen a bunch of stuff, and, like, I know it's noisier than like a Hacker News, but still, still pretty good. **Youssef Rizk** [28:25] Yeah, yeah. **Swyx** [28:25] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [28:26] Um, so we do Hacker News. We do PG Essays. I think PG Essays are also super interesting. I listen to them all the time 'cause I-- Well, first of all, I actually think they're pretty well produced. Like, we do a good job. Like, I don't know if, you know. If we're quoting someone, we'll, like, use a different voice. **Swyx** [28:37] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [28:37] Right? **Swyx** [28:38] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [28:38] Uh, I think it's just well produced. Um, and I also think, you know, the essays are so seminal to, like everyone in startups reads them. **Swyx** [28:45] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [28:46] Uh, his- **Swyx** [28:46] It's actually got me to read more than-- read more PG essays than I would have otherwise, so. **Youssef Rizk** [28:49] Yeah. His, his last one- **Swyx** [28:50] Mission accomplished. **Youssef Rizk** [28:51] I don't know if it was the last one when, when, well, at the time we published this, but- **Swyx** [28:53] How to Do Great Work? **Youssef Rizk** [28:54] How to Do Great-- That was in, like-- That was a one-hour podcast. **Swyx** [28:56] That was a-- Yeah. Oh my God. **Youssef Rizk** [28:57] So, like, no one-- I could-- I did not read it. I just had to listen to it. **Swyx** [29:00] Yeah, yeah. I, I actually also- **Youssef Rizk** [29:01] And I think actually, if I'm being honest, I think the motivation for PG Essays was just like, I, I need this. **Swyx** [29:06] Yeah, yeah. Uh, for, for that one, if it's, like, one hour, I w- I would have actually appreciated, like, a, a, a segmentation. **Youssef Rizk** [29:13] Yeah. **Swyx** [29:13] Or like, like, "Hey, high level. Uh, you know, I know this is about to be an hour." **Youssef Rizk** [29:16] Yeah. **Swyx** [29:17] "But, like, there are three main high-level things, and then keep that image in your mind." And then go, like, "Part one," blah, blah, blah. "Part two," blah, blah, blah. **Youssef Rizk** [29:23] I think we-- So we do that to some extent and, like, we, we produce, like, chapters, I guess. **Swyx** [29:27] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [29:27] So you can just look at them. **Swyx** [29:29] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [29:29] Uh, probably could, could do a better job, like, introducing it. **Swyx** [29:31] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [29:31] But we do try to, like, not play around with the PG essays. **Swyx** [29:34] For sure. **Youssef Rizk** [29:34] Right? Like- **Swyx** [29:35] Yeah. I mean, it's- **Youssef Rizk** [29:36] We just- **Swyx** [29:36] You know how much work he puts into- **Youssef Rizk** [29:37] Yeah **Swyx** [29:37] ... into those things. **Youssef Rizk** [29:37] So we just kinda ship it as is. **Swyx** [29:39] Yeah, yeah. Uh, actually, I'll tell you about one more that-- one more daily-- uh, not daily, but frequent AI-generated podcast that I listen to apart from you guys, which is, uh, papersread.ai. **Youssef Rizk** [29:48] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [29:48] Uh, and I'll recommend it to anyone listening as well. Um- **Youssef Rizk** [29:50] Super interesting, actually. I've come across it a couple times. **Swyx** [29:51] You've, you've come across that. **Youssef Rizk** [29:52] Yeah. **Swyx** [29:52] It's by this guy Rob, and I've tried to look him down. He doesn't want to be found. Um, anyway, but the selections are very good. **Youssef Rizk** [29:58] Yeah. **Swyx** [29:58] Um, I think you guys could do a better job than him. **Youssef Rizk** [30:00] Yeah. **Swyx** [30:02] Uh- **Youssef Rizk** [30:02] Watch out, Rob. **Swyx** [30:03] Uh, yeah. Well, it's 'cause he converts PDFs to podcasts. **Youssef Rizk** [30:06] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [30:06] Right? And the problem with academic PDFs is a lot of references. You know, like Buy It All 2022, and then, like, headers and then a table, and then you have to, like, read the table- **Youssef Rizk** [30:16] Yeah **Swyx** [30:16] ... when you don't need to read the table. **Youssef Rizk** [30:17] Yeah, yeah, yeah. **Swyx** [30:17] You know? **Youssef Rizk** [30:18] Yeah, yeah. **Swyx** [30:18] That kind of stuff. I think, um, better engineering there from you guys would Beat him **Youssef Rizk** [30:23] Yeah **Swyx** [30:24] And, uh, I, I need that. So feature request. **Youssef Rizk** [30:27] Working on it. Working on it. **Swyx** [30:29] Okay. Uh, the final feature related thing is the thing that we're announcing today as, as we release it. ### Dubbing **Youssef Rizk** [30:33] Which we're super, super excited about. **Swyx** [30:35] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [30:36] But Wondercraft now does video translation- **Swyx** [30:38] Okay **Youssef Rizk** [30:38] ... AI dubbing. **Swyx** [30:39] Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [30:39] Um- **Swyx** [30:39] Why do people want that? **Youssef Rizk** [30:41] Again, let's go back to our mission. We're trying to expand access to content. **Swyx** [30:45] Mm. **Youssef Rizk** [30:46] I think-- And don't quote me on this again, like I don't know who, who actually knows the internet, but like 60% of the internet is in English. **Swyx** [30:51] Mm-hmm. **Youssef Rizk** [30:51] You know, what if you don't speak English? You're automatically disbarred or kind of excluded- **Swyx** [30:56] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [30:56] ... from all the content that's produced. Um, and thanks to all the advances that have just recently been made, we can actually make this s- super easy to dub this into other languages. **Swyx** [31:05] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [31:06] So we're super happy to, to, uh, announce this feature. We're super excited. We've been working on it for a really long time. Um, but now basically everyone go on our platform, upload your podcast episode, and see the dub for yourself. **Swyx** [31:18] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [31:18] We'll use your voices. We'll, you know, completely convert it, make sure it's aligned with the-- If you have video, we'll make sure it's aligned. **Swyx** [31:24] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [31:24] Um, and voila, just publish it. **Swyx** [31:26] And specifically for video. So like, um- **Youssef Rizk** [31:30] Well- **Swyx** [31:30] Obviously the thing that's going around is the HeyGen thing, uh, which changes your lips **Youssef Rizk** [31:34] So we don't do lip sync- **Swyx** [31:35] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [31:35] ... at the moment. **Swyx** [31:36] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [31:36] Could be another feature that we work on. **Swyx** [31:37] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [31:38] Um- **Swyx** [31:38] Because you're primarily podcasting, which is no video. **Youssef Rizk** [31:40] Well, primarily no video, but I think we still basically-- If you do have a video, we'll still align it to the chunks that- **Swyx** [31:45] You still align it. Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [31:46] We still align it. **Swyx** [31:46] So the hard problem is the aligning. **Youssef Rizk** [31:48] The alignment is the, is the difficult bit. You're right. Yeah. Um, the actual like- **Swyx** [31:51] As with all things in AI. **Youssef Rizk** [31:53] Yeah. Again, overloading the word alignment. Um, we don't do the lip sync- **Swyx** [31:58] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [31:58] ... yet. My opinion is- **Swyx** [32:00] It's kind of a gimmick, yeah **Youssef Rizk** [32:01] ... it, it's like it's not super necessary. **Swyx** [32:02] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [32:02] If you're really just like listening to a podcast and you actively wanna listen to it in a different language- **Swyx** [32:06] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [32:06] ... then you're more interested in the content. **Swyx** [32:06] Wait, so what are you aligning to? **Youssef Rizk** [32:09] Um, basically the chunks where the speakers are speaking. So you won't have an instance where you'll have me as the dub speaking while the camera's on you. **Swyx** [32:19] Ah. **Youssef Rizk** [32:20] Right? So it's basically just like the speaker- **Swyx** [32:22] Okay **Youssef Rizk** [32:22] ... turns are aligned with the audio. **Swyx** [32:22] So you will like-- If it happens to be a little bit longer, you'll speed it up a little bit. **Youssef Rizk** [32:26] Uh, we do a little bit of, you know, trickery there- **Swyx** [32:28] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [32:28] ... but we get it aligned so that when you're speaking- **Swyx** [32:30] Okay **Youssef Rizk** [32:30] ... it's you, and when I'm speaking, it's me. **Swyx** [32:32] Okay, cool. Um, and then one more thing before we go into like the building Wondercraft side- **Youssef Rizk** [32:36] Mm-hmm **Swyx** [32:36] ... building a company and being a founder, all that stuff. Um, you said y- your, your, your-- You want, you want to ride this wave. You said this, this dubbing thing was very important to you. Um, uh, and I think this is a core stress of a lot of AI founders, which is how do I keep up? How do I pick what trend to ride and be like very, very quick on, and what do I ignore? So just bring me through your thought process on like why this is the one to really pressure and, and build quickly. **Youssef Rizk** [33:10] It's a really good question 'cause I don't think it has a-- I think you'll get nine- **Swyx** [33:14] You can just be like- **Youssef Rizk** [33:14] ... 19 different answers **Swyx** [33:15] ... go for it. **Youssef Rizk** [33:15] I'll ramble a bit, a little bit. **Swyx** [33:16] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [33:17] Um- **Swyx** [33:17] Chain of thought. **Youssef Rizk** [33:20] Dubbing, you know, it's something that I want. There is content that just exists that I can't consume just because it's not there. **Swyx** [33:31] Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [33:32] Um, I'm lucky enough to speak, you know- **Swyx** [33:33] Arabic **Youssef Rizk** [33:34] ... three, four languages. **Swyx** [33:34] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [33:35] Um, so I can listen to some subset of podcasts that exists all around the world. Uh, let's not even say podcasts. Let's just say content. Um, but the rest of it is kind of excluded from me. **Swyx** [33:45] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [33:46] I have no context on what's going for it, and I think that problem is just multiplied a million times when you consider that if you don't speak English, you really are excluded from a lot of things. **Swyx** [33:57] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [33:58] Right? So the ability-- It's just motivating to be able to actually give access to content that historically would be completely obscure f- obscured from most people. **Swyx** [34:08] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [34:08] I think your question though has like a, a-- And the dubbing market we think is huge. I think like, you know, it's, uh, it's, uh, it's easy enough to dub these days, especially with our product. So like it, it's doable. I think, you know, people are gonna-- It, it basically was like a priority that we were tracking to, to push this out. We got a lot of requests for it and so on. That's like the tactical answer on this, this dubbing thing. Obviously, you know, in general, every week we sit down, we prioritize all the different features, and then we build. I think your question probably has a slightly higher level. **Swyx** [34:39] Yes. The meta strategy of- **Youssef Rizk** [34:40] The meta strategy is like how do you just pick things- **Swyx** [34:43] Yes **Youssef Rizk** [34:43] ... and do them, and what do you say yes to and what do you say no to? And frankly, it's a tough one 'cause you don't know. **Swyx** [34:52] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [34:52] You don't know what to pick. Obviously, I can tell you things like, yeah, look at metrics, see-- There's simple metrics. **Swyx** [34:57] There's no metrics for this. **Youssef Rizk** [34:58] There are simple metrics in the sense like how many times are customers asking me for this? **Swyx** [35:01] Sure. **Youssef Rizk** [35:02] And then you can go one level deeper, which is like, how, you know, how much money am I gonna make from the customers who are asking me for this? **Swyx** [35:09] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [35:09] So you can start to quantify from a- **Swyx** [35:11] In, in that case- **Youssef Rizk** [35:11] ... on a revenue perspective. **Swyx** [35:12] In that case, was there something for that? **Youssef Rizk** [35:13] There's a lot of requests- **Swyx** [35:14] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [35:14] ... and obviously that's part of the product. So like we-- You know, the second you dub a podcast, we're making money. **Swyx** [35:21] Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [35:23] The thing that's like slightly tougher is there is no better answer that I can give than try to do as much as you can. **Swyx** [35:33] Mm. **Youssef Rizk** [35:34] I think we pride ourselves in pushing at least like two super highly demanded features from our customers a week. **Swyx** [35:44] Two? Wow. **Youssef Rizk** [35:45] Uh, yeah. **Swyx** [35:45] Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [35:45] So we just move super fast. **Swyx** [35:47] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [35:47] And part of that is 'cause we're frankly just a small team. We're pretty like- **Swyx** [35:50] How big is the team? **Youssef Rizk** [35:50] Four people. **Swyx** [35:51] Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [35:52] Total. The whole company is four people. **Swyx** [35:53] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [35:54] Um, we just move very independently and, and very quickly. So we're just able to push out a lot of things. But I think that's frankly, that's just the requirement of what we're doing. It's not meant to be a chill game. **Swyx** [36:05] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [36:06] And this is kind of a-- Don't wanna use that term, but for lack of a better word, like it, it's, it's a race. Like you have to keep building or else someone else is gonna build. **Swyx** [36:15] It's almost-- But it's like a race without an end. **Youssef Rizk** [36:17] It's a race without an end, so I guess all I'm trying to say is like, yeah, it's, it's, it's tough, but you kinda just like have to be prolific. **Swyx** [36:24] Okay. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, you mentioned that you were listening to the LangChain episode. **Youssef Rizk** [36:29] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [36:29] And LangChain is also similarly like, in my mind, very high tension, but also obviously important for them to stay relevant on top of all the trends. **Youssef Rizk** [36:36] Yeah. **Swyx** [36:37] Um, I just-- It's, it's very stressful. **Youssef Rizk** [36:42] But it's overwhelming, I agree- **Swyx** [36:43] Yeah, it's overwhelming **Youssef Rizk** [36:43] ... 'cause every day, every day my to-do list grows by like 10 times, and I do less. **Swyx** [36:48] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [36:48] Like, you know what I mean? **Swyx** [36:48] Yeah. Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [36:48] Like append only. **Swyx** [36:49] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [36:49] It's just, basically it's append only. So i-it's tough, but the reality is you just like, as a-- I'm not even saying as an AI startup. As a startup- **Swyx** [36:58] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [36:59] ... you just have to be prolific. **Swyx** [37:00] Okay. Yeah, of course. **Youssef Rizk** [37:02] Yeah. **Swyx** [37:02] Um, do you think that you have-- So often people will say they will build, build, build until they find, quote-unquote, "PMF." **Youssef Rizk** [37:12] Yeah. **Swyx** [37:13] And we can talk about what, what you think PMF is. Um, and then like there's core features, right? Like, because there's such a thing as also a feature factory. **Youssef Rizk** [37:19] Yeah. **Swyx** [37:19] I have worked at startups that were feature factory. Build, build, build, and then it's a whole bunch of junk that nobody-- that doesn't have a coherent story. **Youssef Rizk** [37:26] Yeah. I think that's a really tough one actually, to just like build, make sure that the things that you're building all actually like, from a very business perspective, either an upsell or they're somehow related to what you're building. 'Cause otherwise, it's really difficult to-- I, I think, okay, let's just, just start from the baseline that you build a product for a customer. **Swyx** [37:45] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [37:46] It's okay to then build another product that caters to the same customer or sell the same product to a different customer. **Swyx** [37:52] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [37:53] What's really difficult is to build a different product for a different customer, 'cause that's just a new company. **Swyx** [37:56] Yeah. Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [37:57] Right? So- **Swyx** [37:58] Have you seen the Superhuman, uh, PMF score thing? **Youssef Rizk** [38:01] Uh, I, I have read that blog post ages ago, so I don't remember it. **Swyx** [38:03] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [38:03] I think he said like, you know- **Swyx** [38:04] So- **Youssef Rizk** [38:05] ... 40% of people- **Swyx** [38:06] Exactly **Youssef Rizk** [38:06] ... recommend it. **Swyx** [38:06] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [38:07] Um, I don't know, 'cause- **Swyx** [38:09] So, so his, his advice is like spend 60% of your time making your existing customers more happy. **Youssef Rizk** [38:12] Yeah. **Swyx** [38:12] And then 40% the adjacent guys- **Youssef Rizk** [38:14] Yeah **Swyx** [38:14] ... and then, you know, the, the rema-remainder for R&D for future stuff. **Youssef Rizk** [38:18] Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a, that's pretty good advice, to be honest. **Swyx** [38:20] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [38:20] 'Cause I do think like never neglect your current customers. **Swyx** [38:23] Yeah, of course. **Youssef Rizk** [38:24] Right? **Swyx** [38:24] Yeah, totally. **Youssef Rizk** [38:24] 'Cause they're gonna be your biggest promoters. **Swyx** [38:25] Totally. Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [38:26] So we definitely wanna make them feel loved. We, we again try to really like-- I think one thing we also have going for us is our customer support- **Swyx** [38:32] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [38:32] ... which is a one-person show at this point. But it's really good. It's really responsive, and we really try to make sure that the customers like knows what to do and if it's something we-- It's also just really rewarding to, I think, be like at such a small team, and this is a bit of a tangent, but like you, you get an email from a customer being like, "Hey, this doesn't work." And I think people are typically primed to like be a little bit aggressive with companies, right? Like, "Hey, this doesn't work. I need this." And then they're super surprised when within an hour you're like, "Hey, we pushed a fix. This should work now. Hope all is good." And they're like- **Swyx** [39:03] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [39:03] ... "Oh my God, thank you." **Swyx** [39:04] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [39:04] Right. **Swyx** [39:05] Um, yeah, that's, that's the magic that's only possible at early stage. **Youssef Rizk** [39:07] Yeah. Yeah. **Swyx** [39:08] Yeah. It's great. Um, okay. You-- Since you mentioned pricing, maybe just a, a few mi- uh, a minute or two on just how you think about pricing. Uh, you are probably a lot of usage-based stuff. Um, and I, I always have this struggle with usage-based because you're basically charging your heaviest users more and discouraging them from using you more. **Youssef Rizk** [39:29] Um, I think of it slightly differently 'ca-- We were not-- So at the mo- Okay. **Swyx** [39:33] Your tiers. **Youssef Rizk** [39:34] Let's, let's just prime this by saying we haven't figured out what the pricing is yet. **Swyx** [39:36] Sure. **Youssef Rizk** [39:36] I think that's like the- **Swyx** [39:37] Yeah. What, what- **Youssef Rizk** [39:38] ... eternal struggle **Swyx** [39:38] ... what's on your mind? **Youssef Rizk** [39:38] We don't know how to price this thing- **Swyx** [39:39] Yeah, what's in your mind? **Youssef Rizk** [39:41] ... super well. Um, we don't actually at the moment charge you if you consume above your quota. So y- we have tiers. **Swyx** [39:50] Ooh, hot take. **Youssef Rizk** [39:51] As in, as in we, we like if you-- your quota, you just have to upgrade to- **Swyx** [39:55] Yeah. Oh, I see **Youssef Rizk** [39:55] ... to a different one, right? **Swyx** [39:55] I see. **Youssef Rizk** [39:56] Um, we don't have this like additional- **Swyx** [39:59] Meter **Youssef Rizk** [39:59] ... consumption. **Swyx** [39:59] Meter billing, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [40:00] Um, are we charging our biggest users more? We actually just charge them per unit less. **Swyx** [40:07] Mm-hmm. **Youssef Rizk** [40:08] So i-it does work out in their fa- Like, if you just produce more content- **Swyx** [40:10] Of course, yeah **Youssef Rizk** [40:11] ... then the unit- **Swyx** [40:12] Volume, volume discounts **Youssef Rizk** [40:12] ... the units- **Swyx** [40:12] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [40:13] ... you know, the per unit price is just lower. **Swyx** [40:15] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [40:15] So, um, is that-- I don't know. I have to, I, I have to say like our pricing is probably pretty rudimentary at this point. **Swyx** [40:21] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [40:22] There's like a million- **Swyx** [40:22] Just not as, not as important. **Youssef Rizk** [40:23] But if-- It is important 'cause fundamentally it drives revenue, but like there needs to be a bit of a science and an art. It's a bit science, a bit art to like figure out what the right pricing strategy is. I, I think you see like a million different things and a million different things that could work for you, but you frankly just have to test it and like, again, there's a million things to do, like for people to do them. **Swyx** [40:44] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [40:44] So we haven't been moving as quickly as we want on that. I think we're probably gonna release something new soon in terms of pricing. **Swyx** [40:50] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [40:50] Um- **Swyx** [40:51] Cool. **Youssef Rizk** [40:52] But it's a tricky one. **Swyx** [40:53] Hey, uh, nobody has it figured out. **Youssef Rizk** [40:55] No. **Swyx** [40:56] I've, I've been through many, many pricing changes in, in, uh, my, my career. Um, cool. Um, I wanted to talk a little bit about the origin story. **Youssef Rizk** [41:02] Yeah. **Swyx** [41:02] 'Cause you, you flagged that Mooncraft was actually- **Youssef Rizk** [41:05] Moonshot **Swyx** [41:05] ... a big part of-- Moonshot- **Youssef Rizk** [41:07] Yeah **Swyx** [41:07] ... was a big part of, um, your arriving at this idea. **Youssef Rizk** [41:11] Yeah. Uh, yeah, let me get a little, give a little bit of background. So Dimi and I, we're both the founders here. We actually, you know, were flatmates for, for right before we started this, and then we both had this idea that kind of came about from our respective upbringings, uh, which was there's a lot of people, and we're not the first to have this idea by any stretch of imagination, but there's a lot of people out there in the world who are really good, really talented, who just don't have the financing to do the things that they're talented in, right? Like, you need to develop yourself a little bit. Um, so we were like, "Cool, how do we solve this? How do we give people funding to- **Swyx** [41:48] Ah **Youssef Rizk** [41:48] ... do the things that they're good at?" Or like, "Cool, let's align incentives. Let's get people investing in other people." **Swyx** [41:54] Ah. **Youssef Rizk** [41:54] Cool. That was the original idea. Applied to YC. We got in. Long story short, kind of, we got in, and we were like, "Cool, let's see who's done this befo-" We've obviously done that before, but like, "Let's really figure out what our unique edge is gonna be." So we looked at all the other companies that had done that, and I think one particular one that comes to mind is Upstart, which is now a billion-dollar, multi-billion dollar company listed. Um, and they, they s- And we called them moonshots. That was kind of the idea, like people who have the moonshot potential, they called them upstarts, and we both had this idea that you were a backer. Backers back- **Swyx** [42:26] Mm **Youssef Rizk** [42:26] ... moonshots or upstarts. They spent two years on this, and then they pivoted to, I think, a lending platform, some lending platform that they do now. Um- So we were like, you know, we spoke to a couple folks there, um, and we're like, "So what didn't work?" And, and the thing they said is like there is-- I'm, I, I'm also giving a lot of detail right now on some Moonshots, so maybe that's not super relevant, but just added context. **Swyx** [42:46] It's fun. Fun to hear. Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [42:47] Um, they're like, um, it's really hard to get your average Joe interested in backing your other average Joe, right? People like-- It's not really interesting to back this other guy who wants to go get a better education somewhere. **Swyx** [42:57] Mm-hmm. **Youssef Rizk** [42:57] You don't... You know what I mean? Like, there's no driver, 'cause A, the economics typically aren't so good. **Swyx** [43:02] Mm. **Youssef Rizk** [43:03] Um, and historically, they just found that, like, people don't do this. So we were like, "Cool. If that's the problem, then let's focus instead on a group of talent that has this exponential style trajectory." So we picked athletes. People love sports, and people really like feel what we call the emotional dividend of this investment. So we actually stopped calling it investments 'cause the investment wasn't great. Like financially speaking, your investment, you're better off putting it in like the stock market or real estate or whatever. Just the risk/return did not make sense. So we started- **Swyx** [43:34] Also, you might, you might trigger some regulation issue. **Youssef Rizk** [43:36] We, we, we were, we were fully triggering regulation. We were compliant with the SEC. **Swyx** [43:39] Oh, okay. **Youssef Rizk** [43:39] We were-- It was, it was all regulated. **Swyx** [43:40] Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [43:41] We weren't doing this NFT style. Um, and then, uh, so we were selling this-- So you get a financial dividend. You still get part of their like payback or, you know, if tennis player X makes that much, you get 10%. But we also started, um, calling it the emotional dividend. So actually what we're selling a lot is also the experience. You get to be part of the front seat of, of this. **Swyx** [44:04] Mm. **Youssef Rizk** [44:04] Of this person going on this journey. You're with them. Um, we actually found a lot of people like kinda do this already. Now, what we found out after that is this wasn't a big enough market. So long story short, we tried really hard. Uh, I frankly think like-- There's a comment here about founder market fit. We were not the right founders for this. And when we were raising money, VCs would ask us like, "What are two software engineers from Panther doing?" Like, "Why are you funding athletes? What?" And we'd sell this 'cause like, you know, I play a little bit of tennis. **Swyx** [44:30] We like sports. **Youssef Rizk** [44:30] Dimi, Dimi actually played professional basketball, so we'd sell it like that. Um, but you know, for all the hate that VCs get, sometimes they ask good questions. Right? And, and we realized like we were not the right people for this. Our day-to-day was dealing with agents who are not nice people. Uh- **Swyx** [44:44] 'Cause you had to sign them up. **Youssef Rizk** [44:46] Well, you had to sign players up and, and- **Swyx** [44:47] And you have to sell their earnings. **Youssef Rizk** [44:49] Yeah. So A, the-- just the cycle took like so long. **Swyx** [44:52] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [44:52] There was one guy. We were doing this as charity. We were like, "Don't give us back anything." **Swyx** [44:56] You're just gonna give money away. **Youssef Rizk** [44:57] We're gonna give you money. It's-- We still didn't sign them after six months. **Swyx** [45:00] Oh my God. **Youssef Rizk** [45:00] Like I don't understand at this point. Like it just- **Swyx** [45:02] Yeah, yeah, yeah **Youssef Rizk** [45:02] ... it was taking too long. We weren't the right people. **Swyx** [45:04] Zero, zero PMF. **Youssef Rizk** [45:05] And, and the most important thing, which actually leads us to Wandercraft, is this was not a tech product. **Swyx** [45:09] Mm. **Youssef Rizk** [45:09] And- **Swyx** [45:10] I see, yeah **Youssef Rizk** [45:10] ... Moonshot was not a tech product. **Swyx** [45:11] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [45:12] It was a legal product. It was a regulation. **Swyx** [45:13] Yeah, yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [45:13] It was like, "Hey, now you can invest in people." **Swyx** [45:15] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [45:15] The reality is like I think we were-- we just found out the hard way that we were building something people did not want. And, and the thing that like-- So, so we realized like we're building something that isn't our strength. Let's find something else. Um, looking back, I can also kind of like-- There were pointers when we were at Moonshot about like, "Yeah, we should build something technical." Um, I was listening to the LangChain episode that you guys did, and Harrison, right? **Swyx** [45:41] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [45:41] I, I remember you were saying he was a big sports fan. **Swyx** [45:43] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [45:44] And you know, he built this like basketball scraper or whatever. Literally my biggest-- Like the thing I was most excited about m- with, with Moonshot was like, "Okay, let's build out this infra so that people can invest and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we get to the point where we can do like data analytics on, on them and start predicting." I'm like, "This is the most exciting part of this." **Swyx** [45:59] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [45:59] And I was like, "This is definitely not the core part of the business." **Swyx** [46:02] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [46:03] "So I'm excited about something that's gonna take either years to get to or something else." But the core, we, you know, we designed our landing page and built it. That was the funnest thing I've done in Moonshot. **Swyx** [46:12] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [46:12] So we're like-- When we decided to pivot, we were like, "We need to do something technical." **Swyx** [46:16] Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [46:16] Um, the story from there just became like, "Okay, cool. Let's list some ideas. What are we gonna track? Which one do we have the most conviction in?" We ranked them, and Wandercraft was the one we had the most conviction in. It was this idea, again, expanding access and just translating-- or your ability to produce content and so producing content in, in, in one format and then taking that to all the other formats. So we built that. We built the podcast, the, uh, builder. Super quick prototype because I think at this point, to anyone pivoting or hard pivoting or considering it, um, the name of the game isn't like to get attached to your idea. Just like actually you should be trying to invalidate this idea as quickly as possible. **Swyx** [46:52] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [46:52] So get it out there and let people tell you it's a piece of shit. **Swyx** [46:55] Okay. So what did you do to get it out there? **Youssef Rizk** [46:56] So we built it out. We built out a little, uh, like UI. Literally no authentication. It was a form where what you guys see now on our platform, which is like the content script page, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was one page. Like you click, and it was the most janky React stuff that we had. Zero authentication, so in theory, if people found it, they could just- **Swyx** [47:13] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [47:14] ... you know, produce as much audio as they wanted. **Swyx** [47:15] I'm quickly developing an opinion, by the way, that I think all early-stage startups should not have a marketing site. Your, your dot com should just be your app. Just- **Youssef Rizk** [47:24] It's an interesting one. I mean, we-- I don't think we have one too much. I think you still need like discoverability. **Swyx** [47:30] Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [47:30] Whether that's your marketing site or a lot of artifacts. I think we are moving to a- **Swyx** [47:33] Or like embed, embed your app into the land- the marketing site or whatever. Just like have l- get people using it as much as possible, right? **Youssef Rizk** [47:40] Yeah. I think that- **Swyx** [47:41] Okay **Youssef Rizk** [47:41] ... you're, you're like-- The most convincing thing is like, uh-- So we have a feature on our app which is like test with example. As soon as you log in, it says test with example, and the whole point of that was like to between login and audio generated, how few clicks does this take? **Swyx** [47:55] Yeah, yeah. And yours was? **Youssef Rizk** [47:56] Like two or three clicks. **Swyx** [47:57] Nice. **Youssef Rizk** [47:57] It's like test, create podcast. **Swyx** [47:59] You like pre-filled everything. **Youssef Rizk** [48:00] Generate script. **Swyx** [48:01] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [48:01] Generate audio. **Swyx** [48:02] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [48:03] Right? So a-and arguably that was still too many clicks. We should probably put something on the actual landing page so like, like you can see- **Swyx** [48:08] Yeah, no, you have just a player there, right? You can just kinda listen to the- **Youssef Rizk** [48:10] Yeah **Swyx** [48:10] ... Hacker News daily thing. Um- **Youssef Rizk** [48:12] Um- **Swyx** [48:12] But what signals did you get from doing that? **Youssef Rizk** [48:15] The signal that we got is that someone picked it up on Twitter and just like, you know, all these like AI users that exist. **Swyx** [48:19] Influencer voice. **Youssef Rizk** [48:20] So someone picked it up, posted it. We started getting a ton of inbound. So we were like, "Holy shit, let's just like paywall this." **Swyx** [48:27] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [48:28] So we just like, again, the jankiest Stripe integration, which was basically like we have an app with a Stripe integration. This was just to ship it within the hour. We have an app with a Stripe integration- **Swyx** [48:37] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [48:38] ... that once you Click, then takes you to a different app hosted somewhere else. **Swyx** [48:42] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [48:42] So that one was still authen- unauthenticated. Uh, it was, it was, it was hilarious. **Swyx** [48:45] Yeah, security by obscurity. **Youssef Rizk** [48:46] It was hilarious. **Swyx** [48:47] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [48:47] Right? But, uh, but we basically just made that like 3K in, in, in one day. **Swyx** [48:53] One day? **Youssef Rizk** [48:53] Yeah. **Swyx** [48:54] Amazing. **Youssef Rizk** [48:54] And we charged around like 50 bucks. We didn't even-- literally didn't think about it. We just charged 50 bucks, and people paid. And we're like, "Okay. Well, there's something there." **Swyx** [49:00] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [49:01] So then it- **Swyx** [49:01] Fifty bucks for one, uh- **Youssef Rizk** [49:03] For a month. I-- we just- **Swyx** [49:04] Oh, I see. I see **Youssef Rizk** [49:04] ... we were just charging 50 bucks a month. **Swyx** [49:06] I see, I see, I see. **Youssef Rizk** [49:06] Nothing. Like just like will someone pay for this? **Swyx** [49:08] And you were just like on one like VPS somewhere. **Youssef Rizk** [49:10] Yeah. Will someone pay for this? We were like on one EC2 instance. **Swyx** [49:12] EC2 instance, yeah. Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [49:13] You know what I mean? Like it was janky. We're like, "Just someone needs to pay for this- **Swyx** [49:16] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [49:17] ... before we move further." **Swyx** [49:17] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [49:18] Someone did. **Swyx** [49:18] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [49:18] People did. **Swyx** [49:19] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [49:19] So then we're like, "Okay, cool. This is interesting." ### Moat **Swyx** [49:21] Interesting. Um, I'm gonna move up the question that we said was gonna be the meatiest question of this interview. Um, so yous- you, you chose this out of your list of ideas. **Youssef Rizk** [49:30] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [49:31] And, uh, this is one of the things that a lot of AI founders are worried about, right? So the, the, the framing of this is, are you worried that you're a thin wrapper around ElevenLabs? What is your moat? And w- how do you, how do you think about that when you're validating your idea? **Youssef Rizk** [49:45] I think you can-- That's the seminal question. I think anyone in an AI startup is-- I think frankly everyone in an AI startup should convince themselves of this. Don't listen to me and like just make sure from first principles that you can derive this. But I guess I would start by first saying, what is a moat? Well, like or, or, or what is defensible? In theory, if we're just taking it, and this is trivially true, but the fact that someone built it means someone else can build it, right? So moats tend to just be around-- built around like you have a lot of network effects, or you have a really good product for this use case or, you know, something like that. Um, and I think typically when people ask this question in the AI context, they're thinking of like, okay, you're a thin wrapper, you're an application layer thing, um, as opposed to you're one of the like underlying technologies or, or APIs that people use. Um, cool. I, I, I think that's fair, but I think the reality is that like, yeah, these APIs exist, and they probably do serve a million different use cases, but they're not built to serve these million different use cases. So whenever you ask the question of moat, it's always has to be with the perspective of who is the user I'm building this for, right? I, I can use ChatGPT to do half of my writing. **Swyx** [51:06] Mm-hmm. **Youssef Rizk** [51:06] Um, but you know, but I don't know. Jasper claims that they do this much better for marketing, so it's tailored. A- actually, you know, don't quote me on how well they're doing after ChatGPT came out 'cause they were really big before. **Swyx** [51:16] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [51:17] But- **Swyx** [51:17] There's some negative data points, but I'm sure they- **Youssef Rizk** [51:19] I, I don't-- But the point is like you're tail- you're, you're making this easier. We, we make creating a podcast easier, and there is tooling there. There's-- We help you. We-- You can post it directly through us. We have the tooling around, you know, setting the intros and the outros. We have the music. We have a editor. All these things are also getting just much more, more, more and more developed. We're building templates so that you can do different style of podcasts. So the idea is if you're trying to start a podcast, yeah, don't go to a generic text-to-speech engine. Come to us. **Swyx** [51:46] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [51:46] And the reality is that we then can, in a very opinionated way, actually select which text-to-speech engine we want, right? So the-- We actually have just like-- In my mind, it's the application layer fundamentally that, you know, people use, and then all these API layers are what developers use to build products on top of them. **Swyx** [52:04] Right. **Youssef Rizk** [52:04] Right? It, it is-- I, I appreciate that it is like a seminal and, and, and really hard thing to wrap your head around, especially if you're like about to invest in a company. It's like, will they actually just be defensible and be able to grow? **Swyx** [52:14] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [52:15] And yes, there's no doubt that companies can do this. The question is just like, are you building the right product for the right use case? Um, I think particularly if you're like always framing your company as a, as an AI company, then you're, you're putting the like, uh, the carriage before the horse in the sense that you focused on the implementation rather than the use case. Focus on the use case and then build a product for it. **Swyx** [52:36] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [52:36] Right? 'Cause fundamentally, you know, any of the SaaS that exist think like more traditional SaaS. What's their moat? **Swyx** [52:43] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [52:43] The technology everyone has access to it, so they just pick the thing that does it better than, than the other. Now, that moat question is super interesting because I think you should actually- **Swyx** [52:53] Flip it around **Youssef Rizk** [52:54] ... flip it around. **Swyx** [52:54] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [52:54] Which is what is your moat as an API? **Swyx** [52:56] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [52:57] Right? So ChatGPT, like yeah, fine, they had a first-mover advantage, and I think, you know, by no means, this is my opinion, but by no means was Google like caught off guard with this, right? It just-- Google has some-- Half the technologies that Google invented are actually what's used to power all these transformers. But you know, it went against Google's strategy maybe to like be the first mover in this 'cause they'd cannibalize their own market. Whatever it was. I, I'm not sure. But yeah, OpenAI's moat is that they paid for the training bill. **Swyx** [53:29] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [53:30] So they just have a good model. Cool. People now know that that's valuable. **Swyx** [53:32] And, uh, they hired like very top people. **Youssef Rizk** [53:34] Super stars, sorry. Obviously. **Swyx** [53:34] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [53:35] Obviously. I'm not taking that for granted. But like they-- You know, assuming everyone can do the hiring and that these people exist, they paid the, the bill, and they were the first to launch this. But now people know it's a thing, so people are gonna launch similar APIs. So what is your moat as a, as an API? So it's just an ex- a, a-- It's an existential question. **Swyx** [53:52] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [53:52] It's like how do you do-- how do we defend any of this? **Swyx** [53:55] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [53:55] And you do this frankly by being probably better just as a product. Again, the product is always with the perspective of who's your customer that you're selling it to. And the other thing is frankly that, like let's not forget, these-- the market is huge. There is space for everyone. **Swyx** [54:10] Mm-hmm. **Youssef Rizk** [54:10] Right? If you manage to like-- If there's four good products out there in any specific thing, the market is huge, and they're all gonna be able to- **Swyx** [54:16] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [54:17] ... you know, make a living out of it. **Swyx** [54:18] Sometimes people, um, justify markets-- By the way, that was a really good answer. Thanks for taking that hit on. Uh, I, I think it's- **Youssef Rizk** [54:24] I've had to answer that question way too many times, and I- **Swyx** [54:27] Yeah. I'm sure this is not the first time. Um, and a- a- but I think it's actually, you know, having been an investor, it is more important for you to answer that question authentically for yourself. **Youssef Rizk** [54:35] Yeah. **Swyx** [54:35] 'Cause you're the one spending your time on this. **Youssef Rizk** [54:36] Yeah. **Swyx** [54:37] We're just giving you money. **Youssef Rizk** [54:38] Yeah. **Swyx** [54:38] It's not, not that big of a deal. Um- Well, so, uh, oh, I f- I forgot what I was g- what I was gonna say there. Um, yeah, I think ElevenLabs, you know, I think the, the, w- the, the thing you were mentioning is, you know, there is not that much loyalty. Obviously, you got your Matia friends. Uh, but there's not much, not much loyalty if your, your main goal is to serve, um, API because you just need to wait until the next best one comes along. **Youssef Rizk** [55:03] The same thing with Uber. Like, why is Uber defensible? **Swyx** [55:06] Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Um, and my, my favorite, um, quote actually, um, I went to an early, like, pre-ChatGPT, uh, forum with Sam Altman. **Youssef Rizk** [55:15] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [55:15] And I had this video advice from Sam, uh, that said, like, Facebook had no moat, and they just built and got the network and- **Youssef Rizk** [55:22] But frankly, also- **Swyx** [55:23] ... eventually got a moat **Youssef Rizk** [55:23] ... Facebook was building something back then which is kind of ludicrous. Like- **Swyx** [55:26] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [55:27] ... cool, you're building a social media app. Okay, how big can it be, right? Like, how big can the internet be? **Swyx** [55:31] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [55:31] You know what I mean? All of a sudden, it's this behemoth. **Swyx** [55:32] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [55:33] So it's like, yeah, the fact that it was built, again, trivially true, but the fact that it was built means it can be built- **Swyx** [55:38] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [55:39] ... by anyone else. So you-- There is no such thing as, like, a absolute true moat. **Swyx** [55:45] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [55:45] The question is how well, how quickly, how, uh, you know, how much earlier than everyone else did you get there, and a million other things as well. **Swyx** [55:52] Yeah. Cool. Um, two more sort of product-building questions, and then I want t- to turn the mic over to you to ask me anything as a- ### Scripts **Youssef Rizk** [55:59] Yeah **Swyx** [55:59] ... podcaster. Um, so one is scr- script generation, which, uh, you know, sort of the, the two core activities of Wondercraft. I think you guys do a really good job of, uh, summarizing the Hacker News comments and the, the content. **Youssef Rizk** [56:11] Yeah. **Swyx** [56:12] In my mind, the hardest thing is just managing context- **Youssef Rizk** [56:15] Yeah **Swyx** [56:15] ... because obviously it is unbounded for the context window. Um, do you use LangChain? Do you build your own LangChain? **Youssef Rizk** [56:22] You know, I, I like LangChain. Never used it. **Swyx** [56:23] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [56:24] Never, ever used it. **Swyx** [56:25] So you just build your own recursive summarization thing. **Youssef Rizk** [56:27] Y- Yeah. So- **Swyx** [56:28] Or do you use a vector database? Which one? **Youssef Rizk** [56:32] I'm not gonna say any further, lest you realize how unsophisticated we are. **Swyx** [56:35] It's o- no, I, I think it's o- people, build- builders and investors want to know what's actually useful in making- **Youssef Rizk** [56:40] I wanna, I wanna say the thing. The- **Swyx** [56:41] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [56:42] ... Hacker News Recap, I think-- I, I don't know, but we can look on the, the date of the first episode when we launched it. I think it was, like, the 8th of April or something like that. **Swyx** [56:51] Oh. **Youssef Rizk** [56:51] We decided on Wondercraft probably on the, like, 5th of April. So this is- **Swyx** [56:56] What do you mean? **Youssef Rizk** [56:56] ... how quickly it took us- **Swyx** [56:57] The, the name of Wondercraft? **Youssef Rizk** [56:58] As in the company, that this is what we should pursue. **Swyx** [57:00] I see. So two, three days. **Youssef Rizk** [57:01] And this is before people started paying. **Swyx** [57:02] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [57:02] We were just like, Hal- Hacker News started off as a proof of concept. Like, do people even wanna listen to AI-generated content? **Swyx** [57:08] Of course. Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [57:08] And it's been going on since. **Swyx** [57:09] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [57:09] So, like, it didn't-- It wasn't actually that hard to build the Hacker News Recap. **Swyx** [57:12] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [57:13] Obviously, now it went-- became a little bit more sophisticated, so we summarize comments and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. **Swyx** [57:16] Yeah, that's great, by the way. **Youssef Rizk** [57:17] Yeah. **Swyx** [57:17] Like, I love that. **Youssef Rizk** [57:18] But actually, it's like, especially with our API now, it's super easy to, to do something like that. We-- Hacker News frankly just doesn't need a vector database unless we're trying to do something-- At the moment, we just summarize the, the posts. And actually, for anyone listening who listens to the Hacker News Recap, just, like, tell us some feedback on how to improve it. **Swyx** [57:35] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [57:36] 'Cause at the moment it's just, like, it's one long narration. **Swyx** [57:38] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [57:38] But one thing we're doing-- thinking of doing, for example, is sometimes you have multiple posts talking about the same topic. So actually, an idea is, like, do top 10 topics instead of top 10 data- uh- **Swyx** [57:47] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [57:47] ... posts. **Swyx** [57:48] Topic grouping. **Youssef Rizk** [57:48] That starts to need-- I don't think, I don't think that needs a database, a vector database. **Swyx** [57:52] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [57:52] I think it needs something, you know-- You don't need to do some embedding- **Swyx** [57:55] You need MT.BA **Youssef Rizk** [57:55] ... or manipulation. Yeah, exactly. Uh, but something like that. Um, I think for when you start to really, really scale up the content that you're pulling from, then you start needing a vector database and, you know- **Swyx** [58:09] Okay, so what are- **Youssef Rizk** [58:10] ... there's gonna be- **Swyx** [58:10] ... the actual hard problems for script generation? Prompt engineering? **Youssef Rizk** [58:14] Prompt engineering is one of them, especially when you're trying to, like, tune things like tone- **Swyx** [58:19] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [58:19] ... or how long it should be and all of that. **Swyx** [58:21] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [58:22] I actually think-- So the way our app works, and maybe that's, you know, leading to your next question, but the way our app works is, is twofold. It's you have the script generation, and then you have the audio generation. **Swyx** [58:30] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [58:31] In our minds, we imagined it as a really linear flow. **Swyx** [58:34] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [58:34] That, ah, of course I want to generate the script- **Swyx** [58:37] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [58:37] ... and then I wanna, uh, generate the audio for it. Where in reality I don't think it's that linear, to be honest. I think it's very circular in, in how you do this, right? So y- you generate the script, you listen to it, you go, "Mm, doesn't sound quite right. I wanna modify the tone a little bit," and so on. So I think our UI actually, like, doesn't get that wrong unless you're exactly what you're going for is this, like, recap summarization style. Um, so I think what we need to do a much better job is, like, this, this, this templatization and this on-the-go, on-the-run, uh, kind of like, okay, let's play around with this text via some prompt. So, um, I think it's definitely an improvement we're looking to make, but like, yeah, it's a prompt engineering question fundamentally. It's like how-- Uh, prompt engineering on one level. The next level's, like, how good, how fine-tuned is your model to specific tasks? And then maybe you can use your own model if you wanted to. **Swyx** [59:24] Would you look at that, or is that not- **Youssef Rizk** [59:25] We'll definitely look at that- **Swyx** [59:26] ... something you wanna worry for you **Youssef Rizk** [59:26] ... but, like, you look at that when it's a, when it's a problem. **Swyx** [59:29] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [59:29] It's not a problem right now. **Swyx** [59:30] Yeah, yeah. Um, I would say, uh, as a listener, a daily listener, um, I, I think your show notes are really good. Most daily podcasters are horrible at show notes. **Youssef Rizk** [59:38] Yeah. **Swyx** [59:38] They don't, they don't tell you anything. **Youssef Rizk** [59:40] Yeah. **Swyx** [59:40] And here, if I want to click in, I, I can, like, click in there, so definitely keep that. **Youssef Rizk** [59:44] Yeah. **Swyx** [59:44] But the top thing that annoys me about you, and I'm just complaining now, is you don't write the post title. You, you don't, you don't spell out the post title. **Youssef Rizk** [59:53] Really? We don't write the post title? **Swyx** [59:54] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [59:54] I think we used to. **Swyx** [59:56] Well, it's gone. **Youssef Rizk** [59:56] That's horrible. I'm sorry. **Swyx** [59:58] Yeah. So, so, so the, so the, the voice-- By the way, I, I wonder if, if there's any story behind picking the voice. The voice would just say, "This post does..." And it doesn't tell me- **Youssef Rizk** [1:00:05] Oh, in the audio **Swyx** [1:00:06] ... the title of the post. **Youssef Rizk** [1:00:06] In the audio we don't say the- **Swyx** [1:00:07] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:00:07] Ah, sorry, sorry. Got it, got it. **Swyx** [1:00:08] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:00:08] Got it. **Swyx** [1:00:08] And, like, when I'm running- **Youssef Rizk** [1:00:10] Did you email about, us about this? Like- **Swyx** [1:00:11] No. No, I- **Youssef Rizk** [1:00:11] 'Cause someone did **Swyx** [1:00:12] ... I've, I've kept it to myself **Youssef Rizk** [1:00:13] Someone did email us- **Swyx** [1:00:14] But I'm like- **Youssef Rizk** [1:00:14] ... like, "Please state the post" **Swyx** [1:00:15] ... I'm like, "This is so obvious." Like, I would actually just, like, fork Wondercraft just, just to add that one feature because, like, it's so annoying when I don't know what I'm listening to. **Youssef Rizk** [1:00:24] We'll fix it. We'll fix it. Easy peasy. **Swyx** [1:00:25] Yeah. Um, okay, cool. Um, the audio generation, um, you, uh, you use, uh, ElevenLabs. What makes a good podcast voice, right? You have a bunch of options that I clicked, and in my mind, I like a deep voice. I like the Morgan Freemans. Um, you don't have that many deep voices. Do, do we want-- Like, is there such a thing as a high-energy voice? Uh, you also insert breaths. Um, ElevenLabs has also advertised that they c- they have a AI that can laugh, which I think is fun, important. Basically, what makes a good audio, AI-generated audio? **Youssef Rizk** [1:00:55] Yeah. It's, uh-- It depends again on the perspective. Everything is kind of answered with the f- the frame of reference that you're looking at. If you like a deep voice, A, that's kind of a personal preference. **Swyx** [1:01:06] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:01:06] And B, it just kind of depends on, on the thing. So if you-- I don't know, let's do your-- say you're doing something like meditative or kind of affirmations or, or something that, like, encourages people every day. You probably do want a slow, deep voice. **Swyx** [1:01:16] Slow. **Youssef Rizk** [1:01:16] Something relaxing. If you're doing the Hacker News Recap, like- **Swyx** [1:01:20] Cheerful **Youssef Rizk** [1:01:20] ... we picked Anna, who's like our, our default voice- **Swyx** [1:01:23] Yes, Anna. Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [1:01:23] ... because, um- **Swyx** [1:01:24] I have a, I have an attachment to Anna. **Youssef Rizk** [1:01:26] Yeah, we all do. **Swyx** [1:01:27] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:01:28] Um, she's just like news anchory style, very professional- **Swyx** [1:01:31] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [1:01:31] ... very formal, very neutral. **Swyx** [1:01:32] Very pleasant, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:01:33] Very neutral. **Swyx** [1:01:33] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:01:34] Um, so it depends really on, like, what, what makes a good voice. It depends on what you're doing. **Swyx** [1:01:39] Right. **Youssef Rizk** [1:01:40] Um, there's a few things, but, like, if you're doing an interview, I think it also just frankly-- Then you get into the question of what makes a good podcast. Well, a good podcast is like... I think it's also kind of a personal question, which I haven't or probably there's a general trend that I'm yet to decipher. But like, yeah, you probably do want a little bit of humanity in there. You want a stutter. **Swyx** [1:02:00] Mm-hmm. Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:02:00] You want some pauses, right? I'm speaking-- I don't speak in complete utterances. I have an utterance, and then I pause it all, and then I speak again and, and so on. Um, laughs and something to make it human. **Swyx** [1:02:10] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [1:02:10] Kind of overlaying of the two, if you have two speakers, this, like, exchange, right? Like I will be speaking. If you look at the transcript of this episode, we probably overlap in when we're speaking. **Swyx** [1:02:19] And that's fine. **Youssef Rizk** [1:02:20] And that's actually interesting, right? 'Cause it is a conversation that we're having. **Swyx** [1:02:22] Shows a sign of excitement, right? Especially in our studio when we're three people, and if we're all talking at once, you know it's good. **Youssef Rizk** [1:02:28] Yeah. Yeah. I don't like the Zoomification style where, like, if you're gonna big Zoop- **Swyx** [1:02:33] Your turn **Youssef Rizk** [1:02:33] ... and big Zoom- **Swyx** [1:02:33] Your turn **Youssef Rizk** [1:02:33] ... like only two people can speak. The second more than two people try to speak- **Swyx** [1:02:36] Yeah, yeah **Youssef Rizk** [1:02:37] ... it's, it's a disaster. Um, so I, I think it frankly just depends on what you're doing. We are like, yeah, at the moment we're really good at, like, doing this narration stuff, but I think we're, we are building a lot of functionality and tooling to just make this kind of this, like, multi-host thing a more of a reality. **Swyx** [1:02:51] Okay. Okay. Um, I would say, you know, objectively, if I was a friend of the company, not that important, you know? Um, so th-this comes down to how human should your users try to be? Because I'm fine with Hacker News Daily making mistakes because I know it's AI-generated. **Youssef Rizk** [1:03:11] Yep. **Swyx** [1:03:12] Right? Uh, I would be less fine if you were not upfront, and, uh, Alec here actually thought it was a human when he first listened to it 'cause Anna's, Anna's just really good. But then, like, you'll make mistakes like pronunciation mistakes. You'll make-- You'll, you'll, uh... So I, I actually have a clip that I wanted to play you. Um, Anna takes, uh, this, uh-- On September 8th- **Youssef Rizk** [1:03:31] Yeah **Swyx** [1:03:31] ... Anna was taking a lot of breaths. She was very out of breath. **Youssef Rizk** [1:03:33] Damn. **Swyx** [1:03:34] I was very worried about her. She was, she was- ... she was hyperventilating. I was like, I was like, "Anna, are you okay?" Like, um, anyway, so basically, I think if you disclose upfront that you're an AI podcast, then people will be like: "Oh, okay, I tolerate that mistake, and I use you for information." **Youssef Rizk** [1:03:46] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:03:47] "And not for believing that there's some human on the other- **Youssef Rizk** [1:03:50] Yeah **Swyx** [1:03:50] ... the other side that I might meet someday." Um, but if you're investing so much effort into being real, then, then at some-- Th- your end goal is you have to lie to your users or- **Youssef Rizk** [1:04:01] I, I don't think the investing in being real is to-- for the purpose of deception as much as it is for the purpose of making it slightly pleasant to read about. **Swyx** [1:04:08] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:04:08] I think on Hacker N- like we do claim-- We, we, we do say on our, our Spotify page that, like, this is an AI-generated podcast. **Swyx** [1:04:14] Of course. For now. **Youssef Rizk** [1:04:14] Um- **Swyx** [1:04:15] But- **Youssef Rizk** [1:04:16] As in, yeah, yeah. So, so there's two things. I think if you wanna be smart about this, you should say that this is AI-generated content. **Swyx** [1:04:22] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:04:22] The second people find out that it's not, you-- the backlash is gonna be big. **Swyx** [1:04:26] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:04:26] Right? 'Cause it will be interpreted as deception. So you should do this just to be smart. I, I don't think there's a point in lying, um, especially if the content that you're putting out there is just like this is informational for you, so, like, consume it. This was efficient. This helped us put it out there. The second thing is, frankly, I, I don't think it's up to you whether you tell them or not. Very, very soon, like- **Swyx** [1:04:45] They'll know **Youssef Rizk** [1:04:46] ... Google is just gonna mark things as- **Swyx** [1:04:47] I see. I see **Youssef Rizk** [1:04:48] ... as, as AI-generated. So I think there's a new thing. I, I saw like a quick YouTube video about it, so I don't know what the exact, uh, terms and conditions are. But, like, YouTube has, I think, released a new monetization rule, and it does mention something about AI-generated content. **Swyx** [1:05:02] Ah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:05:03] Right? So there is like-- It's not up to you anymore. You're gonna-- People are gonna know that this is AI-generated, so I think it's just in your interest to say that you're AI-generated. Ain't no shame. **Swyx** [1:05:11] Yeah. Yeah, no shame at all. Um- **Youssef Rizk** [1:05:13] 'Cause fundamentally what we do relies on the premise that you have done some content. We don't generate our own content. **Swyx** [1:05:19] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [1:05:19] Right? We don't synthesize our information. **Swyx** [1:05:21] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [1:05:22] It im- it, it assumes that you've, you know, written a blog post, done an actual podcast, or have some artifact on which you want to base what you're feeding through Wondercraft. **Swyx** [1:05:31] Yeah. And you, you said, um, in some of your material that I've seen before that you are interested in watermarking all your stuff. Uh, you haven't done it yet, but- **Youssef Rizk** [1:05:39] Mm-hmm **Swyx** [1:05:40] ... whenever there's a standard for doing that, you will do it. **Youssef Rizk** [1:05:42] Yep. **Swyx** [1:05:42] Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [1:05:42] I think the pr- the thing that's this is blocking on is like the standard. I'm not super up-to-date on like what the, what the work on this is. **Swyx** [1:05:48] I think OpenAI will probably like do something. **Youssef Rizk** [1:05:49] But like there just needs to be a standard so everyone can interpret it. **Swyx** [1:05:53] Yeah. Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:05:53] Um... **Swyx** [1:05:53] Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Um, great. I, I would, uh-- I wanted to dive in a little bit on, uh, tech options. **Youssef Rizk** [1:06:01] Yep. **Swyx** [1:06:01] And then, uh, zoom out to, uh, to just you asking me questions. ### Voices **Youssef Rizk** [1:06:05] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:06:05] Uh, so TTS options. We, we talked a little bit about, um, ElevenLabs. I would also say as a podcaster, the leading competition to you guys, I know it's not exact competition, but it's Descript- **Youssef Rizk** [1:06:16] Yeah **Swyx** [1:06:16] ... because they have overdub. **Youssef Rizk** [1:06:18] Yeah, I think Descript is really good. Um, and they're definitely like a solid company. I've used their video editor before. It's, it's great. **Swyx** [1:06:26] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:06:26] The overdub thing is super useful. I think th- it's really creative to like have edit videos by editing the transcript. **Swyx** [1:06:32] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [1:06:32] Super, super creative. Super user-friendly. **Swyx** [1:06:34] Would you, would you build that? **Youssef Rizk** [1:06:36] Um, I think again, it's like we're not building for the sake of building. We're building more for the purpose of the user. **Swyx** [1:06:42] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:06:42] Whatever users find more interesting. I think like what we're doing is we- The use cases are slightly different, right? And I think the, the people that they're targeting is, are, are slightly different. **Swyx** [1:06:52] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:06:52] Um, we do wanna have a lot of, like, automation on the script side to also just, like, help out with the way you formulate your content or the way you pull your content much more so than just the editing process. **Swyx** [1:07:03] The ingest. Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:07:04] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:07:04] Okay. Got it. Um, and I just wanna map out-- Here's how I think about TTS, text-to-speech. Um, there's the big cloud options, Amazon Polly, Google Text-to-Speech, and Microsoft Cognitive Services. **Youssef Rizk** [1:07:15] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:07:16] Uh, as someone who is ex-Amazon, I'm very embarrassed by Polly. It sucks. **Youssef Rizk** [1:07:21] Yeah, Google's isn't great, and Microsoft isn't great either. **Swyx** [1:07:22] I'm sure you investigated all these things, and you're like, "Okay, this is like not serious." There is Play.ht, which is probably the other big YC- **Youssef Rizk** [1:07:29] Yeah **Swyx** [1:07:30] ... alum. Uh, just quick two seconds on your thoughts on Play, Play.ht. **Youssef Rizk** [1:07:34] Um, sounds good. I think it doesn't sound super, as good as ElevenLabs, my opinion. **Swyx** [1:07:39] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:07:39] Um, but I think sounds good. **Swyx** [1:07:41] By the way, I have heard other founders tell me this as well. **Youssef Rizk** [1:07:43] Yeah. They're- **Swyx** [1:07:44] And I don't know why **Youssef Rizk** [1:07:44] ... they're-- I think they have a, what's it called? A more comprehensive platform. **Swyx** [1:07:51] Okay. **Youssef Rizk** [1:07:51] As in they, like, you know, they let you do this pronunciation. Like, they just have a lot of tooling around it. Um- **Swyx** [1:07:56] So different features **Youssef Rizk** [1:07:58] ... but I think, I think quality in terms of the voice, ElevenLab's still better. **Swyx** [1:08:01] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:08:02] I, I think they are releasing a new model. I don't know if they've released it already or not. **Swyx** [1:08:05] Yes, they did. Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:08:05] Um, could be better. Could-- I, I don't know. **Swyx** [1:08:07] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:08:07] But, uh, they do have some functionality out there. **Swyx** [1:08:09] Yeah. They also released the viral Joe Rogan/Steve Jobs interview from last year. **Youssef Rizk** [1:08:13] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:08:14] And on your landing page, you were like, "This is something that Wondercraft will never do," uh, AI content generating, uh, uh, AI content speaking to each other. **Youssef Rizk** [1:08:22] Yeah. Who wants to listen to that? Like, it's fun- **Swyx** [1:08:24] Apparently, a lot of people. **Youssef Rizk** [1:08:26] It's fun 'cause it's a cool gimmick. I think it's like nice, nice viral material. I, I would never listen to, like, a synthetic Joe Rogan. **Swyx** [1:08:34] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:08:34] This brings us onto a little bit about the whole, like, content question or the proliferation of AI, which is like, okay, if it's this easy for me to create content that's like, you know, somewhat engaging, like all these AI songs, the- **Swyx** [1:08:47] Yeah. The, the tricks **Youssef Rizk** [1:08:48] ... you know, the Drake song. **Swyx** [1:08:49] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:08:50] Well, okay, so if it's this easy, and that's just like if it's this easy to generate content, well, why will I listen to it? Like, I think we already suffer from the problem that there's an oversaturation of content. Um, so I think, you know... I'll give a Netflix example. When I go on Netflix, there's too much content. I don't, I don't, I don't like discovering new things. I either know exactly what I'm about to go and watch, or I will rewatch one of the seven things that I've, I constantly keep rewatching, right? Um, so I'm not-- Like, their discoverability isn't the best, and every now and then I maybe, like, look at some of the other things, but I'm not trying to look at Netflix. So imagine- **Swyx** [1:09:22] It's quite funny because they used to invest a lot in their recommendation systems, and like now nobody- **Youssef Rizk** [1:09:26] But now it's just too big **Swyx** [1:09:26] ... nobody I know uses them. Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:09:27] It's just too big. **Swyx** [1:09:28] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:09:28] And they're like, it's overwhelming. There's so many tiles that you're looking on the screen. **Swyx** [1:09:31] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:09:31] So cool. Now, what if I told you that there's probably, there's gonna 1000x, and half of it's gonna be AI generated? **Swyx** [1:09:37] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:09:38] So what I just said is, like, we all have this internal proxy of what a thing I'm, I'm likely to watch is, which is it was recommended by a friend, or it's one of the things I've previously watched. I'm not doing this discoverability. So imagine that's the case. I think another layer of proxy will just be like from the, in the Netflix category of the, like, shows and movies. Like, was this human-made or is this AI-made? If it's AI-made, I'm not watching it. I want real human stuff. So I think we're just at-- There's gonna be a final equilibrium that reaches, which is like it's not even worth generating that much content with AI. I'm talking from entertainment purposes. I'm not talking so much for the, like, the social media propaganda, blah, blah, blah. That, not getting into it. But at least from like an en-entertainment perspective, if I can just always, like, have an on-demand Drake song that I wanna listen to, like, well, at some point I'm just gonna listen to Drake 'cause like- **Swyx** [1:10:22] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [1:10:23] ... you know what I mean? **Swyx** [1:10:23] This is the, the greatest hits. **Youssef Rizk** [1:10:24] Yeah. It's like I'm just gonna listen to the- **Swyx** [1:10:25] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [1:10:25] ... a curated set. The fundamental thing is curation. It's the, the-- It's just a, like, a parallel example of the Discord thing. It's like full of noise, so I need to, like, figure out what is the right thing to, to consume. **Swyx** [1:10:37] Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Um, great answer. Um, I just wanna bring through-- Here's my map of the market, right? There's Speechify.com, which focuses on celebrity voices. **Youssef Rizk** [1:10:46] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:10:47] I noticed that you don't have celebrity voices, probably because of licensing issues, right? Like you have to- **Youssef Rizk** [1:10:50] Yeah, and it's also- **Swyx** [1:10:51] ... pay them to use their voice **Youssef Rizk** [1:10:51] ... uh, could at some point, but, like, not a priority at the moment. **Swyx** [1:10:54] Yeah. I really want a Morgan Freeman one. **Youssef Rizk** [1:10:57] That's gonna cost. **Swyx** [1:10:58] I know, I know. Uh, Mycroft AI, privacy focused, run offline. Uh, probably not- **Youssef Rizk** [1:11:04] Haven't heard of them actually **Swyx** [1:11:05] ... not important for you. Um, there is some interest in virtual characters for games. So Conv.ai is the one that I had listed here. Did you look at the gaming market? **Youssef Rizk** [1:11:15] Um, not deeply, to be honest. **Swyx** [1:11:17] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:11:17] But it could be an interesting one. **Swyx** [1:11:18] Yeah, people are exploring that. There's obviously HeyGen now. Um, and, and that, that is it for as far as, like, I can scope out the landscape. And then there's the open source systems. So Tortoise TTS, as far as I can tell, is kind of market leader in open source. **Youssef Rizk** [1:11:30] Yeah. I would actually say probably a lot of these models were built on top of it. **Swyx** [1:11:34] Uh, what, what models? **Youssef Rizk** [1:11:34] Maybe. There's some of the, like, you know- **Swyx** [1:11:36] These are the companies **Youssef Rizk** [1:11:37] ... the companies. Yeah. **Swyx** [1:11:37] Yeah, yeah. There's PyTSX. Koki used to, used to be Mozilla, and then, uh, Larynx. **Youssef Rizk** [1:11:43] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:11:43] Anyway, all these things. And then there's also sort of research-grade stuff coming out of the major big tech companies. You talked about Google Sandstorm. **Youssef Rizk** [1:11:51] Probably the one I'm most excited about because they literally- **Swyx** [1:11:53] Okay. Why? **Youssef Rizk** [1:11:53] Well, it's really good. You can, like, check out the paper. They haven't- **Swyx** [1:11:56] Yeah, we'll, we'll play a clip. **Youssef Rizk** [1:11:57] Yeah, they haven't-- Uh, I think all you need is like three seconds. **Swyx** [1:12:00] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:12:00] And it'll just all you-- It's like a three-second sample, and it'll play the audio in your tone. It sounds really human as well. Like, it has utterances. It laughs or... It's pretty accurate to, like-- It sounds human. **Swyx** [1:12:11] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:12:11] Um, so very interested in that. I, I-- They haven't open sourced it, and I assume for good reason. **Swyx** [1:12:16] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:12:16] Uh, but that's- **Swyx** [1:12:17] Google never launches anything. You have to wait for somebody to-- Or you guys could re-implement it yourself. **Youssef Rizk** [1:12:22] Yeah. Yeah. GPUs after PMF. **Swyx** [1:12:25] Ah, that's a nice quote. Uh, how strongly do you believe that? **Youssef Rizk** [1:12:29] GPUs after PMF? **Swyx** [1:12:30] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:12:30] Well, I believe-- I think this was another question, yeah, which is like- **Swyx** [1:12:33] What is PMF? **Youssef Rizk** [1:12:33] No. What is your favorite, like, PG advice in building a company? **Swyx** [1:12:37] Oh, is it? Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:12:37] Right. I think that my favorite thing is just, like, don't spend your money foolishly. **Swyx** [1:12:40] Ah, okay. **Youssef Rizk** [1:12:41] Um, everyone and their mother is trying to get a GPU at the moment. **Swyx** [1:12:45] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:12:45] So I don't think it's-- We're definitely substantially reducing our runway by, by doing that. **Swyx** [1:12:51] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:12:51] Obviously, you do that when you believe the investment is worth it. **Swyx** [1:12:54] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:12:54] Um- And again, you, you have to pick the time at which you do that. **Swyx** [1:12:57] I mean, there's other companies-- Um, I think this is m- somewhat consensus. I think the non-consensus thing is to spend a shit ton. So like Inflection raising a few hundred million dollars and then it spending 95% of it on GPUs. **Youssef Rizk** [1:13:11] Same with Mistral. I, I think it depends- ... on the company you're launching. I think if you're like, you know, maybe you're a brand new TTS company, maybe it is worth just doing that. **Swyx** [1:13:19] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:13:20] I don't know. **Swyx** [1:13:21] Okay. Um, there's also Audio LM, uh, also out of Google, VALL-E from Microsoft, and Meta Voice Box. **Youssef Rizk** [1:13:27] Yeah. Yeah. **Swyx** [1:13:27] Are you just watching any of these? **Youssef Rizk** [1:13:29] Watching any of these, obviously paying any-- paying close attention. **Swyx** [1:13:31] You try them all out? Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:13:32] Try them all out. Um, I don't know if these are like open source- **Swyx** [1:13:33] And like what are you looking for? What, what's, what is like the holy grail? What, what is-- what are you looking for? **Youssef Rizk** [1:13:37] Just honestly how human it sounds and like how likely I'd be to listen to this if I, if I did it. Also how like customizable it is. **Swyx** [1:13:42] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:13:43] I think the problem with all these voice things, and generally with a lot of the AS stuff, is it is somewhat random. **Swyx** [1:13:47] Mm. **Youssef Rizk** [1:13:49] But you're using it in production applications that require certainty. **Swyx** [1:13:52] Mm. **Youssef Rizk** [1:13:53] Right? Just as an example, if I promise my users this podcast or this segment will be 30 seconds, it needs to be 30 seconds. **Swyx** [1:13:59] Mm-hmm. **Youssef Rizk** [1:13:59] Or, you know, given some SLA- **Swyx** [1:14:01] There's some tolerance **Youssef Rizk** [1:14:02] ... some SLA around like, you know- **Swyx** [1:14:03] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [1:14:03] ... it's 95% of that. **Swyx** [1:14:04] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:14:05] But, um, I think a lot of these things just tend to be a little random at the moment. Um, so like how play- Can I, can I literally specify a tone that I'd like this to be read in and be certain that it's doing it and it's not some weird like attempt at sounding surprised? **Swyx** [1:14:20] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:14:20] Um, it's just like, yeah, basically how controllable and how realistic they sound. **Swyx** [1:14:24] Yeah. Um, and then final, final question around, uh, just the landscape of TTS. What are the unique challenges for non-English TTS? Uh, and I'll, I'll tell you, right? So I'm interested in having 28 languages of Latent Space, right? That's on- that's only good things for me, except if it sucks. **Youssef Rizk** [1:14:39] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:14:39] Uh, and I obviously I have no way to, to validate. **Youssef Rizk** [1:14:42] I think that's the problem with, uh- **Swyx** [1:14:43] Latent Space Ukraine. **Youssef Rizk** [1:14:45] Yeah. And I think that's the problem with dubbing, I think. So, so the reason-- One thing we're, we're gradually building out, but we already have as part of our dubbing product, is that we have QA as part of that. **Swyx** [1:14:53] Uh-huh. **Youssef Rizk** [1:14:53] So we actually work with professional translators to just make sure that the things that we publish sound realistic. **Swyx** [1:14:57] Oh, nice. Oh, you should put that up front. **Youssef Rizk** [1:14:58] Yeah. Um, so, so that's really one of the-- Like fundamentally, the problem with dubbing, if you ask anyone who's ever tried to dub, is you don't know what good sounds like in these other languages. **Swyx** [1:15:08] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:15:08] You're like, I can tell you I dub, but I'm gonna tell you that- **Swyx** [1:15:11] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [1:15:11] ... I think there's a lot of big podcast studios who have tried this before. There's one I can think of that's tried this maybe five times with five different companies in the last five years. Their fundamental problem is that you just cannot-- Yeah, fine, Spanish sounds good to me as a person who doesn't speak Spanish, but like it doesn't sound good to a Spanish person or an Argenti-Argentine person who have totally different accents. Right? So, um, I think the tricky thing as well is getting that straight is in English it's very clear, and there's a huge proliferation of content in every single accent, if you will. Australian, English, and British, American, Irish, whatever. In other languages, especially if you, you know, consider the niche ones, um, I don't know. I'll, I'll pick like German. There's like a few German accents. You know, I don't know how much content Austria puts out 'cause they have a specific accent, right? **Swyx** [1:16:01] Yes. Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:16:01] Germany itself- **Swyx** [1:16:02] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [1:16:02] ... probably every- **Swyx** [1:16:02] Swiss German. **Youssef Rizk** [1:16:03] Yeah. Uh, you know, just record Roger Federer speaking. Right? So there's just a lot of nuance that isn't as widely available. The English market is just the biggest. **Swyx** [1:16:13] Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:16:13] Um- **Swyx** [1:16:14] Yeah **Youssef Rizk** [1:16:14] ... and I say this as someone like-- So I say as someone who speaks German, but like, um, think of all the other language. I have no idea what Spanish, Spanish Spains-- Sorry, Spain Spanish sounds like and Argentina Spanish sounds like. There's a difference, I know that. Just don't know what it sounds like. **Swyx** [1:16:28] Yeah, yeah. Cool. Um, well, if you ever need Chinese validation, uh, I know, um, I have some very fanatical, uh, Chinese listeners who translate every podcast. **Youssef Rizk** [1:16:37] Oh, that's amazing. **Swyx** [1:16:38] Uh, so we can use that as QA. **Youssef Rizk** [1:16:40] Yeah. I would definitely love that. **Swyx** [1:16:42] So sho-shout out to the Chinese, uh, Chinese army. Um, great, great. Awesome. Um, what do you want to ask me as a podcaster? ### Podcaster **Youssef Rizk** [1:16:48] So, uh, tell me about your setup process for setting up a podcast. **Swyx** [1:16:52] Oh my God. Um- **Youssef Rizk** [1:16:53] And I think go, go as far back as like, cool, you know what guest you're having on. You've just like-- Or no, no. **Swyx** [1:16:58] Oh, you mean starting- **Youssef Rizk** [1:16:59] Even further back **Swyx** [1:17:00] ... like from zero? **Youssef Rizk** [1:17:00] Even further back. **Swyx** [1:17:00] From zero. **Youssef Rizk** [1:17:00] It's like I want to talk about someone in this space. **Swyx** [1:17:03] So like for a new episode- **Youssef Rizk** [1:17:05] New episode **Swyx** [1:17:05] ... or for a completely new podcast? **Youssef Rizk** [1:17:06] New episode. **Swyx** [1:17:07] A new episode is pretty easy, right? Like the way I set it up with you was like, "Hey, I'm a fan. Do you wanna chat?" **Youssef Rizk** [1:17:11] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:17:11] And you said, you said yes, and we scheduled- **Youssef Rizk** [1:17:13] And how long did it take to get the scheduling right? **Swyx** [1:17:15] Uh, scheduling, um, I-- You are-- You guys are very responsive and very easy to work with. **Youssef Rizk** [1:17:20] Nice. **Swyx** [1:17:20] Um, some others are very hard. Like we took a, we took a few months for Harrison to come on. **Youssef Rizk** [1:17:24] Yeah, and he said that on the air. **Swyx** [1:17:26] Uh, for you guys, you only need two weeks. **Youssef Rizk** [1:17:28] Yeah. Okay. **Swyx** [1:17:28] Yeah. And then, um, and then yeah, we, we, we got this studio, we came here, and, and then, you know, all three of us spent 50, 50 minutes setting up the, the audio for ourselves. **Youssef Rizk** [1:17:38] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:17:39] In, in San Francisco, we pay someone to do it. **Youssef Rizk** [1:17:41] Okay. **Swyx** [1:17:42] And, and so we just kind of walk in and start recording. **Youssef Rizk** [1:17:44] Yeah. And how do you come up with the questions that you want to ask? **Swyx** [1:17:47] I do prep and research on you- **Youssef Rizk** [1:17:49] Yeah **Swyx** [1:17:49] ... and the, and the, the business, and usually it has a format of find information about the, the speaker and then like get to know you personal- on a personal basis, put you at ease so that you'll be more open for the other stuff. **Youssef Rizk** [1:18:01] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:18:01] 'Cause like, 'cause you know I, I, I care about you as a human being- **Youssef Rizk** [1:18:05] Yeah **Swyx** [1:18:05] ... not just as an interview subject. **Youssef Rizk** [1:18:07] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:18:07] Um, then talk about the business. I, I, I do emphasize the what is question. They're very straightforward, like what, what the hell it is you're doing. **Youssef Rizk** [1:18:15] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:18:15] Because people want a, a clear answer, and some people cannot give a cle-clear answer. **Youssef Rizk** [1:18:19] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:18:19] And that's also information. Um, then I always am interested about company building just 'cause I'm a founder myself. Uh, you know, I-- and I want to learn about, um, what it's like on, on your side and as the business side of things as well. Um, some people don't have that side because they're academics, so then you go more into their research and try to keep up with, with, um, any, any, uh, academic and, and theory and math that they might bring up. Um, and then maybe try to at the end-- And this is the hardest bit, and this is the, the stuff that I, I have the most second-guessing about. Try to have a segment at the end where, uh, you ask a consistent set of questions for essentially norming across guests. **Youssef Rizk** [1:18:59] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:18:59] Um, so are we-- Uh, I, I have a- System prompt for our guests, and at the end of it, we basically end every episode with a lightning round, right? Acceleration, exploration, takeaway. **Youssef Rizk** [1:19:09] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:19:10] I don't love the questions that we ask. We're still iterating on that. Um- **Youssef Rizk** [1:19:14] Nice. You gotta experiment to do it. **Swyx** [1:19:15] Yeah. I think just people like, uh, Latent Space mostly because the questions, the kind of questions that, that I ask are, are the stuff that is on everybody's minds because I just talk to a lot of people. **Youssef Rizk** [1:19:25] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:19:26] Uh, and so I just force you to answer them because you're right in front of me. It's great. **Youssef Rizk** [1:19:30] It's great. And so you have a-- This is a whole interesting conversation 'cause, right, human podcaster, AI podcast. **Swyx** [1:19:36] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [1:19:36] Right? So as a human podcaster and someone who was with like a, you know, really popular show, and also someone who can actually like implement this stuff himself- **Swyx** [1:19:46] Hmm **Youssef Rizk** [1:19:46] ... what is some of the AI tooling recently that you've like baked into your processes? **Swyx** [1:19:53] I only use Descript. And, uh- **Youssef Rizk** [1:19:56] For editing **Swyx** [1:19:56] ... we, we built for, for editing. Uh, so for example-- And by the way, uh, this is, this goes into a theory of content, uh, which as a content creator myself professionally and as an advisor, I, uh, have, which is that we develop a few show formats. Latent Space is a channel. It's kind of like a TV channel, and channels need different formats. **Youssef Rizk** [1:20:15] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:20:16] So you have like the reality TV show, you have the news show, you have the- **Youssef Rizk** [1:20:19] Yeah **Swyx** [1:20:19] ... you know, the cooking show, whatever. For us, we have the founder interview, straightforward. **Youssef Rizk** [1:20:24] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:20:24] Everyone has them. We have the breaking news- **Youssef Rizk** [1:20:26] Mm **Swyx** [1:20:26] ... Twitter space, and that's u- that's, that is a, uh, like we want to be the day one first podcast to, to come out with the most in-depth breakdown of something that is that everybody needs to know. **Youssef Rizk** [1:20:37] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:20:38] Um, and that has high value to people, right? Because if you're like a week delayed, one month delayed, then no one cares anymore. **Youssef Rizk** [1:20:44] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:20:45] And then finally, we have the fundamentals, like the 101 evergreen episodes that are less time-bound. So this one is relatively time-bound because it's a snapshot of who you are right now. But we want to have evergreen episodes that people can go back two, three years in the backlog- **Youssef Rizk** [1:20:58] Mm-hmm **Swyx** [1:20:59] ... and still get value from. **Youssef Rizk** [1:21:00] Yeah. And these are more fundamental ones. **Swyx** [1:21:02] Yes. So, so we have three show formats right now, and, uh, I, I would say the-- we have different tooling for each, right? So the one that I don't need any tooling for essentially is the fundamentals one because we plan basically every minute of that show. **Youssef Rizk** [1:21:19] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:21:20] It is a lot of work, um, but it's high quality because people love it. **Youssef Rizk** [1:21:24] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:21:24] It, it's got the longest tail by design, right? Like, yeah. Um, the Twitter spaces require Descript- **Youssef Rizk** [1:21:33] Mm-hmm **Swyx** [1:21:33] ... because a lot of silences and a lot of ums, and that's not good podcast audio. **Youssef Rizk** [1:21:38] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:21:38] So you gotta cut it out. **Youssef Rizk** [1:21:40] So you literally just go and, like you, you, you, you edit out the Twitter space that you did? **Swyx** [1:21:44] Yes. **Youssef Rizk** [1:21:44] You record and then you edit it out. **Swyx** [1:21:46] Usually it's like two hours. We cut it down to one. **Youssef Rizk** [1:21:47] Okay. **Swyx** [1:21:48] Um, and it's a lot of pain and a lot of work. **Youssef Rizk** [1:21:51] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:21:51] But it's the only way that I get some pretty high-profile people onto my podcast without booking them. **Youssef Rizk** [1:21:56] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:21:56] They just show up. **Youssef Rizk** [1:21:57] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:21:58] Um, and that has value to me, right? **Youssef Rizk** [1:21:59] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:21:59] Like Simon Willison has been on my podcast three times, and I never had to schedule him. **Youssef Rizk** [1:22:03] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:22:04] Um, and people love him. **Youssef Rizk** [1:22:05] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:22:05] I mean, he's great. He, he's, uh, yeah. Um, and then this one, we basically, we, we do-- I don't need Descript obviously, but I do u- we do use Small Podcaster, which is a 100-line script, Python script, uh, that throws the transcript into Anthropic and then generates show notes. **Youssef Rizk** [1:22:23] Nice. **Swyx** [1:22:24] So that's about it for now. **Youssef Rizk** [1:22:26] Nice. So but it's interesting 'cause I think, you know, you're in a very nice position where you're able to do what a lot of these services charge you for- **Swyx** [1:22:32] Yeah, you can write your own **Youssef Rizk** [1:22:32] ... you can just do it yourself. **Swyx** [1:22:33] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:22:34] So it's an interesting one. **Swyx** [1:22:35] But obviously, I'm, I'm interested in, in paying for things- **Youssef Rizk** [1:22:37] Mm-hmm **Swyx** [1:22:37] ... 'cause my time is valuable, and if, if, if it does a good job, then I'll, I'll use it. Um, for, uh, Wondercraft, the, the thing that I really wanted was the RSS to podcast thing, right? **Youssef Rizk** [1:22:46] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:22:47] Uh, which, which you now have. So I'll try it out, but chances are I will not be happy with something. **Youssef Rizk** [1:22:52] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:22:52] And so then the question is, how much customizability do you give me- **Youssef Rizk** [1:22:56] Yeah **Swyx** [1:22:57] ... to, to do that? And, uh, we'll see. **Youssef Rizk** [1:23:00] Yeah. Interesting. Cool. These are all my questions. **Swyx** [1:23:03] I will say-- Well, you missed out one thing, which is marketing- **Youssef Rizk** [1:23:06] Mm-hmm **Swyx** [1:23:07] ... the podcast, which is a huge part, right? **Youssef Rizk** [1:23:09] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:23:09] Like that is mostly my job. **Youssef Rizk** [1:23:10] So how do you market your podcast? **Swyx** [1:23:12] Twitter. **Youssef Rizk** [1:23:14] So you think Twitter is gonna be a medium for that? **Swyx** [1:23:15] Twitter, Twitter and hack news. **Youssef Rizk** [1:23:16] In, in threads or, or like you post clips or what do you do? **Swyx** [1:23:20] Um, I have tried posting clips. It's just too much work. **Youssef Rizk** [1:23:23] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:23:24] So if you guys do a good job of clips, I will use your, your stuff, but it's just too much work. **Youssef Rizk** [1:23:27] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:23:28] So mostly I just, you know, put like a, a, a big post saying like, uh, so for like our George Hotz episode, we were like, "Latent Space is excited to present George Hotz- **Youssef Rizk** [1:23:37] Yeah **Swyx** [1:23:37] ... on Tiny Corp commodit- uh, commoditizing petaflops." **Youssef Rizk** [1:23:40] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:23:40] Something like that. Um, and just sometimes the, the, the, the fame of the guest- **Youssef Rizk** [1:23:44] Mm-hmm **Swyx** [1:23:45] ... will, will just lead the episode. **Youssef Rizk** [1:23:46] Will just, you know, bring them to listen. **Swyx** [1:23:46] Uh, so the one I dropped, uh, to- yesterday was Chris Lattner. **Youssef Rizk** [1:23:50] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:23:50] Right? And people were like, "Chris Lattner's the boss. I don't care about anything else. Just like I wanna hear as much- **Youssef Rizk** [1:23:54] Yeah, yeah, yeah **Swyx** [1:23:55] ... as many, as many Chris Lattner tokens as possible." Um, others who are like less famous, like I have to introduce who you are and why I care about you, why they should care about you. **Youssef Rizk** [1:24:02] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:24:03] 'Cause most people will not have heard about you as, as, as well as you've done. **Youssef Rizk** [1:24:06] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:24:06] So then I, I need to make the case a little bit more. **Youssef Rizk** [1:24:08] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:24:09] Um, but that's fine. That's my job. **Youssef Rizk** [1:24:10] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:24:10] Um, I just think it's, it takes a lot of work, and I-- that's the part that will be hardest for me to hand over to AI. **Youssef Rizk** [1:24:16] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:24:17] 'Cause I have a very specific, uh, voice for myself. **Youssef Rizk** [1:24:21] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:24:21] And apparently all AIs think that Twitter-- to, to tweet, you have to have emojis and hashtags, which is so dumb. It's so obviously dumb. Uh- **Youssef Rizk** [1:24:30] Yeah **Swyx** [1:24:30] ... the, the training data is very bad. **Youssef Rizk** [1:24:31] I think it depends, right? Sometimes you do if you're trying to be more on the professional side, you don't. **Swyx** [1:24:35] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:24:35] It just depends kind of on the tone and, and brand voice, I guess. **Swyx** [1:24:38] It's just cringe. **Youssef Rizk** [1:24:39] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:24:39] They-- like-- And that's the problem with AI. AI is mid by design. **Youssef Rizk** [1:24:42] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:24:43] Right? **Youssef Rizk** [1:24:43] It is mid. **Swyx** [1:24:43] And you do not want to be mid as a thought leader, as a content creator. People don't want to subscribe to mid things. They want to subscribe to a, a, a, a level slightly ahead of where they are. Um, and so that's for better or worse where we, where we target. **Youssef Rizk** [1:24:56] Yeah. So I guess the interesting thing for us is like how do we really enable that, you know, you have your process and really bake that in to make sure that what you're presenting and what you're coming out with is unique. **Swyx** [1:25:05] Yeah. I, I'll tell you, I'll tell you one thing though. Um, I am happy to hand over my LinkedIn to you. **Youssef Rizk** [1:25:10] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:25:10] I have a LinkedIn following. I don't use it. Right? So completely money on the table there. So happy, happy to like give that to you. Uh, you don't do social media posting, right? So they have to go get like Spout Social or Buffer, both of which are horrible. **Youssef Rizk** [1:25:24] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:25:24] So if you, if you have an adjacent product someday, uh, you might want to get into basically, uh, money-on-the-table marketing- **Youssef Rizk** [1:25:32] Yeah **Swyx** [1:25:32] ... is, is what I think about it. **Youssef Rizk** [1:25:34] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:25:34] Basically like we would not do this by ourselves and like it, it is still inferior to like a, a human-crafted thing, but doesn't matter because I just am-- I'd have zero LinkedIn presence. **Youssef Rizk** [1:25:43] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:25:44] So. **Youssef Rizk** [1:25:44] Makes sense. **Swyx** [1:25:45] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:25:46] Great answers. **Swyx** [1:25:48] Uh, obviously happy to, uh, offer any thoughts as, as, uh, as you, as you build out for podcasters. Um, okay. Well, shall we go into the lightning round? **Youssef Rizk** [1:25:55] Let's do it. ### Lightning **Swyx** [1:25:55] Yeah, like the, the one I just said that I wasn't confident about. **Youssef Rizk** [1:25:59] Great intro. **Swyx** [1:25:59] Yeah, yeah. Uh, but I-- these came from previous guests. **Youssef Rizk** [1:26:02] Mm-hmm. **Swyx** [1:26:02] So, um, I, I just think we haven't found PMF yet- **Youssef Rizk** [1:26:05] Yeah **Swyx** [1:26:05] ... on, on those things. So acceleration, uh, what has already happened in AI that you thought would take much longer? **Youssef Rizk** [1:26:12] The, the GPT, like the fact- **Swyx** [1:26:14] The GPT moment? **Youssef Rizk** [1:26:14] ... that basically you can do anything. **Swyx** [1:26:16] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:26:17] Obviously it may- might not be the smartest way to do it, but you can basically do anything with GPT. **Swyx** [1:26:20] Yeah. And, and were you watching it while you were at Palantir? 'Cause at Palantir had so many AI stuff. **Youssef Rizk** [1:26:25] Yeah, I think I've-- Uh, vaguely. **Swyx** [1:26:30] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:26:31] I think it really blew up after. **Swyx** [1:26:32] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:26:33] Uh, I think Palantir really- **Swyx** [1:26:34] You just happened to be in the right spot where like Moonshot wasn't like super working. **Youssef Rizk** [1:26:38] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:26:38] So you- **Youssef Rizk** [1:26:39] Yeah **Swyx** [1:26:39] ... you were open enough to actually pursue this seriously. **Youssef Rizk** [1:26:41] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:26:42] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:26:42] And I think Palantir also just like shifted the whole strategy once it blew up the way it did. **Swyx** [1:26:46] Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Um, exploration, what-- If you weren't doing what you're doing, uh, what do you think is the most interesting unsolved question in AI? **Youssef Rizk** [1:26:54] Hmm. Great question. There's so many things. **Swyx** [1:27:04] Pick one. Just the- **Youssef Rizk** [1:27:06] There's like the context lengths, there's just the- **Swyx** [1:27:09] You want longer context length? **Youssef Rizk** [1:27:10] The, the latency and like how to just kinda make everything flow through much quicker 'cause I think you can then enable some really interesting real-time applications. **Swyx** [1:27:16] Are you interested in real time? Uh, actually what I was meaning- **Youssef Rizk** [1:27:18] As Wondercraft- **Swyx** [1:27:19] ... to think about that **Youssef Rizk** [1:27:19] ... not necessarily or maybe. **Swyx** [1:27:21] Right? Because your, your whole thing is async, right? **Youssef Rizk** [1:27:23] Maybe, yeah. But like maybe in the future for some other product. But, uh, as a person, you know, it's interesting. Um, and also just the ability to like-- The-- really the interesting stuff is the validation. **Swyx** [1:27:36] Mm. **Youssef Rizk** [1:27:36] Right? I actually think it's like, it's the QA that we were talking about. **Swyx** [1:27:39] Me eval. Yeah, yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:27:40] You still need, um, you still need human QA unfortunately. **Swyx** [1:27:44] Yeah. Especially yours is the hardest to QA- **Youssef Rizk** [1:27:45] Yeah **Swyx** [1:27:46] ... I would say. Okay, very cool. **Youssef Rizk** [1:27:47] It's very time-consuming. **Swyx** [1:27:48] Uh, takeaway, what is one message you want all of our listeners to remember and take away with them? **Youssef Rizk** [1:27:55] Mm. The-- Okay. If you would like to start a podcast, start. We're here to help. **Swyx** [1:28:01] Uh-huh. **Youssef Rizk** [1:28:01] Super easy. If you have a podcast, we wanna help you make it more expand, ex- you know, accessible by dubbing it. On the other side, if you are like a founder and AI engineer, I think it's really important to convince yourself that what you're building is valuable. Don't like listen to people saying, "Ah, you have a moat," or, "You don't have a moat." Convince yourself of, of what that is, um, and launch. Launch and like don't burn that much money. **Swyx** [1:28:24] Frequently and often- **Youssef Rizk** [1:28:25] It's- **Swyx** [1:28:25] ... don't spend your money. **Youssef Rizk** [1:28:26] Yeah. **Swyx** [1:28:27] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:28:27] Yeah. Be smart about it. **Swyx** [1:28:28] Yeah. Um, I think you are one of the most successful cases of AI engineers, uh, so far. I'm really glad to spend time with you in person, uh, and excited to see what comes next. **Youssef Rizk** [1:28:39] Yeah. It was great coming here, great meeting you guys in London. **Swyx** [1:28:42] Yeah. **Youssef Rizk** [1:28:42] And, you know, see you soon. **Swyx** [1:28:44] All right. See you. ### Outro **Youssef Rizk** [1:28:45] Bye. **Swyx** [1:28:47] How was that? **Youssef Rizk** [1:28:48] Great, man. Hopefully you enjoyed it. **Swyx** [1:28:52] Very, very much. Very much. Uh, it was a good, good conversation and I think you --- This library is powered by PodHood (https://podhood.com), the podcast website platform.