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. 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...

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