In this episode, Wouter Teunissen sits down with Dylan Fox, the founder of AssemblyAI, to unpack how he built one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure companies from scratch. For decades, speech recognition was stuck in the past, clunky APIs, outdated models, and enterprise-only access. Dylan saw it up close while working as an engineer at Cisco. The tech was powerful, but it was buried under layers of friction.
Developers wanted to build with voice, but everything about the process made it painful. Instead of waiting for the giants to fix it, Dylan left his job and started AssemblyAI as a solo founder. lone. The vision was to allow developers to easily tap into world-class speech models with a simple API call. Ensuring transcription, summarization, and audio intelligence were as easy to integrate as Stripe or Twilio. The journey wasn’t glamorous. Dylan bootstrapped early models from his apartment, competing with Big Tech on compute, data, and talent.
But through persistence and a relentless focus on developer experience, AssemblyAI began to win. Today, the company has raised over $110 million, powers products used by millions of users, and is setting the standard for voice intelligence.
I really loved my conversation with Dylan. It was thoughtful and he shared lots of great frameworks and stories about company building. We talk about Dylans journey and how he built a deep-tech company from zero, the discipline required to go head-to-head with giants, and why, 'the only thing that matters is building something developers truly love.'
Follow: Dylan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanbfox/
Assembly AI: https://www.assemblyai.com
Wouter - https://x.com/WouterTeunissen
Biography Newsletter - https://biography.beehiiv.com
