Connor Zwick: Making Language Immersion Possible Through AI

Connor Zwick was a formidable founder on the day he graduated high school, and that hasn’t changed in the intervening years. He’s the founder of Flashcards+, which was acquired by Chegg, and CEO and co-founder of Speak, the cutting edge app using AI speech models to help users perfect their conversational English. In this episode, Connor Zwick sits down with host and Partner at Lightspeed Michael Mignano to talk software iteration, finding a useful use case, and building a new business abroad. Episode Chapters (00:00) - Intro to Connor Zwick (04:48) - Building Flashcards in high school (08:42) - Lessons from Flashcards product market fit pull and how to value for sale (13:31) - The hype of becoming a Thiel Fellow (23:45) - Sneaking into a Berkeley graduate course on reinforcement learning (27:45) - John Schulman built OpenAI’s playground for a homework assignment (36:07) - The big AI unlocks went to incumbents (38:33) - ChatGPT proved that UI matters (41:49) - Language learning models don’t need perfection to be viable (46:40) - Speak is a painkiller for English language-learners, not a vitamin for English speakers (57:09) - Operating in San Francisco while iterating in Seoul (01:05:13) - What does product market fit feel like? (01:09:30) - One-on-one tutors are the holy grail of education (01:14:33) - The moving goalposts of AGI (01:17:17) - Is Speak hiring? Stay in touch: ⁠www.lsvp.com⁠ X: ⁠https://twitter.com/lightspeedvp⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/⁠ Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/lightspeedventurepartners/⁠ Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: ⁠generativenow.co⁠ Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠ The content here does not constitute tax, legal, business or investment advice or an offer to provide such advice, should not be construed as advocating the purchase or sale of any security or investment or a recommendation of any company, and is not an offer, or solicitation of an offer, for the purchase or sale of any security or investment product. For more details please see ⁠lsvp.com/legal⁠.