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 hiring, 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, NBC, and Spotify to access state-of-the-art AI models to transcribe and understand speech and build AI-powered features faster. Highlights from the conversation: 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 product improvement 19:26 - Advice for founders during the AI development process 29:40 - The change across the AI landscape since AssemblyAI started 27:34 - Best practices for cutting through the noise as an AI-native company 35:45 - Predictions about the future of AI apps Hosts: Sara Ittelson and Steve Loughlin, Partners at Accel Featuring: Dylan Fox, CEO and Founder of AssemblyAI Learn more: www.accel.com/SpotlightOn/AssemblyAI