New @villageglobal Podcast: @tankots, cofounder and CEO of @WisprFlow, joined us at our Villagers Retreat to talk about building a $2B voice-to-text AI company.
The episode opens with his younger brother, @jaisal_kothari, sharing stories from Tanay’s early years.
At 12, Tanay built a voice assistant before Siri or Alexa. 15 years later, he’s still chasing the same Jarvis-like idea: technology that works so well we can spend less time staring at screens.
Getting there required a hard change in direction. Tanay and @SahajGarg6 spent 3 years building a silent-speech wearable with a 40-person team. The hardware worked, but users kept choosing the software, so they followed the signal and built Wispr Flow.
We got into:
1/ how Tanay pairs delusion with truth-seeking to decide which part of a huge vision users are ready for
2/ how Wispr turned its Android launch into a MrBeast-style competition with a Porsche 911 prize
3/ why Tanay personally ran the first 500 onboarding calls and still hands Wispr to strangers to watch their reactions
4/ why he thinks an AI advantage may last only 3 months, and how Wispr builds product love, enterprise workflows, and switching costs around it
Thank you, Tanay, for a fascinating conversation.
Full episode below.
