Today Madrona Managing Director Karan Mahandru and Scott Stephenson, Co-Founder and CEO of Deepgram, a foundational AI company building a voice AI platform providing APIs for speech-to-text and text-to-speech. From medical transcription to autonomous agents, Deepgram is the go-to for developers of voice AI experiences, and they're already working with over 500 companies, including NASA, Spotify, and Twilio.

Today, Scott and Karan dive into the realities of building a foundational AI company, meaning they're building models and modalities from scratch. They discuss the challenges of moving from prototype to production, how startups need to out-fox the hyperscalers while also partnering with them, and, of course, how Scott went from being a particle physicist working on detecting dark matter to building large language models for speech recognition. This is a must-listen for anyone building in AI.

Full Transcript:  http://www.madrona.com/founded-funded-deepgram-scott-stephenson

Chapters: 

(00:00) Introduction (01:15) From Particle Physics to Voice AI (03:16) The Birth of Deepgram (03:40) Building a Developer-Centric AI Company (06:11) Challenges and Early Decisions (09:49) Navigating the AI Market (13:33) OpenAI's Whisper and Deepgram's Response (17:30) The Future of AI and Speech Recognition (21:59) Deepgram's Real-World Applications (31:19) From Prototype to Production