Software Engineering Daily LiveKit and OpenAI with Russ d’Sa
9 snips
May 1, 2025 
Russ d’Sa, the Founder of LiveKit and a startup veteran, dives into the exciting intersection of real-time technology and AI. He shares insights from his journey through Y Combinator and discusses the significance of scalable communication tools in a post-pandemic world. The conversation highlights LiveKit's innovative shift to server-mediated models and collaboration with OpenAI for advanced voice features. D’Sa also explores the challenges of audio-video synchronization and the potential of voice-driven interfaces as the future of human-computer interaction.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Russ d'Sa's Early Startup Journey
- Russ d'Sa shares his early startup journey, including being in Y Combinator's fifth batch in 2007.
- He highlights the close-knit community feel of early YC and the slower, less heated startup ecosystem then.
LiveKit Fills Real-Time Infrastructure Gap
- LiveKit emerged to fill a gap in scalable, open source real-time audio and video infrastructure.
- Russ identifies LiveKit as an infrastructure layer for communication, similar to what Stripe did for payments.
Scaling Real-Time Media Systems
- To scale real-time media, move from peer-to-peer to server-mediated selective forwarding units (SFUs).
- For global scale and reliability, build a mesh network of servers near users that synchronize state and handle failover seamlessly.
