Dylan Fox, founder and CEO of AssemblyAI discusses the profound changes to the AI landscape over the past eight years, gives insight into where he thinks AI is going as a category, and offers advice on how founders should approach problem identification, customer interaction, and more.

In 2015 Dylan Fox was a machine learning engineer at Cisco. Amazon Alexa launched earlier that year, taking the world by storm, and creating a significant demand for companies to add voice controls to their products; Cisco was one such company.

Dylan had to get familiar with the various speech recognition software solutions in the market. Much to his frustration, they all had poor developer experiences. He knew there was an opportunity for advanced speech technology. Soon after that, AssemblyAI was born.

Today, AssemblyAI is used by enterprises like @wsj, @nbcuniversalmusic, and @Spotify to access state-of-the-art AI models that transcribe and understand speech and build AI-powered features faster.

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Access the episode on Spotlight On: https://www.accel.com/spotlight-on/ep...

Season 1:
Season 1 focuses on AI. In this season, we’re bringing together a range of company leaders across different industries and stages to discuss how they’re navigating the current AI revolution. Learn from 12 leaders applying AI in all parts of the ecosystem. They have enabled new industries and profoundly influenced productivity, creativity, and the global economy. Several founders of AI-native companies we spoke to, such as  @AssemblyAI ,  @ironcladapp ,  @Scale_AI , and  @synthesia-io  embarked on their AI journey years before the current cycle. They were the crazy ones, the early visionaries, the risk-takers, who patiently built early AI products.

Spotlight On:
Spotlight On examines the technology shaping our world. Highlighting a new topic each season, company builders at all stages of company growth will share their learnings, challenges, and breakthroughs.

Accel:
Accel is a global venture capital firm that is the first partner to exceptional teams everywhere, from inception through all phases of private company growth. Atlassian, Bumble, CrowdStrike, Fiverr, Flipkart, Freshworks, Qualtrics, Scale, Segment, Slack, Spotify, Squarespace, Tenable, and UiPath are among the companies Accel has backed over the past 40+ years. We help ambitious entrepreneurs build iconic global businesses.

Hosts: Sara Ittelson and Steve Loughlin, Partners at @AccelVC
Featuring: Dylan Fox, CEO and Founder of AssemblyAI, www.assemblyai.com

Conversation highlights:
00:00 - Intro
06:15 - AssemblyAI's origin story and Dylan's journey as a solo founder in @ycombinator
08:10 - Advice for founders around hiring and early product improvement
19:26 - Advice for founders during the AI development process
29:40 - The radical change that has happened across the AI landscape since AssemblyAI started, from Amazon Alexa to the explosion of Generative AI
27:34 - Best practices for cutting through the noise as an AI-native company
35:45 - Predictions about the future of AI apps

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AssemblyAI CEO Dylan Fox | Building an AI Company Before ChatGPT | Spotlight On: AI | S1E1 | AccelVC
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