Building the World’s Most Wearable AI | Dan Siroker (CEO Limitless)

it starts with recognizing our own limitations and this is something that you know really inspired me to even start the company realizing I'd been losing my hearing and not noticing it and then only when I got a hearing aid realizing how much I had lost really opened my eyes to the fact that we all live our lives with limitations biological limitations that we don't really recognize are there first and biggest that we're focused on is memory 90% of what you experienced you forget after just one week what that means you know for a normal Tech productivity employee if you have a weekly 1-hour meeting you only really remember at best 6 minutes of that one hour from one week ago and we don't realize it cuz you forget it so you don't know what you don't know so we basically live our lives like Dory in Finding Nemo forgetting most of what we experien and you know maybe most of the time that doesn't matter but there's so many ways in which using those moments that you forget to give you a better experience and to give you context for things that can make you more productive make you more present we think that's a huge opportunity my guest today is Dan Soko CEO of limitus in just 24 hours after launch Dan and team sold over 10,000 AI pendants to help people augment their memory with what they've seen said and H making Limitless arguably the fastest growing AI wearable in the market in this short interview Dan and I talked about his journey to create the most wearable AI in the world how the team ships fast without compromising quality and how he manages his time with three kids Dan also co-founded optimizely and his is one of my favorite entrepreneurs to follow if you enjoy our conversation please like And subscribe to support the podcast all right d welcome super excited to talk to you had a really big week I think that the limitus you reband your limus the pendant you nowc the pendant and I think now you have 10,000 or orders or is it more we've got even more we've got 10,000 orders of the pendant 20,000 total customers which has been kind of crazy and surprisingly many of those are actually un outside the United States about 40% are that that's awesome I would love to talk more about the pendant but before I get there I kind of want to talk about the history of this company like maybe we can start with why you started Limitless or rewind the first place yeah the inspiration for starting the company actually came out of an experience quite a while ago in my 20s I started to lose my hearing and when I turned 30 I tried hearing eight

and it was magical I to lose a sense and gain it back again felt like gaining a superpower and ever since that moment I have been on a hunt for ways that technology can augment human capability and give us superpowers and that led me to the path that we're ultimately on uh today so we started the company back in March 2020 and it was started really trying to find ways that technology can augment human capabilities not replace human capabilities with AI but augment and we took of a Meandering path and ultimately landed where we are now which is a personalized AI powered by everything you've seen said or heard yeah so I would love to learn a b more about the mandrian path I think in the beginning it was most L to like remember your personal activity on the computer or like kind of what you're doing and then you kind of move towards more of a meeting Focus maybe talk about that path first it's a bit zigzag you know one of

our investors andrion horo describes this as the idea maze you're just sort of exploring the idea in kind of a maze and certainly feels like that so the very first idea that we tried and launched pretty quickly was called scribe it was an online meeting bot that would join meetings transcribe the meeting that's why it's called scribe and that was the beginning of the pandemic so lots of people were doing Zoom meetings and we learned a lot from that and one of the things we kept hearing from customers is they wanted to capture way more than just meetings their lives they wanted to capture what they see what they hear what they say and at the same time that we started to hearing this from users we were seeing the emergence of Apple silicon M1 chips M2 chips and that really fast compute that was possible for the first time ever on Native devices and so we had the idea to Pivot really and create a new called rewind which was a Mac app that would capture everything you see saying here including meetings store it all locally compute all locally and that took off and then what was interesting is it sort of came back to meetings because what we found is with rewind what people loved with rewind and still do because it's out there and people still use it is that their data is safe it's safe from their employer it's safe from the government it's safe from us and we realized if there's a way to actually deliver on that same privacy guarantee but also have the convenience of being in the cloud then that would be the best of Both Worlds and so that's what Limitless is it's the same guarantees of a local app but with the convenience in the cloud you can access your data from any device we have you can use the best AI models and you have unlimited storage and so that's partly why we call it Limitless so that's how we landed where we are now and you know we just launched this week so we'll see how it goes but so far so good what was the rationale to extend beyond just like software and the cloud to actually build a hardware device like a AI wearable device yeah it really started with the problem first so

I if I could have avoided building a hardware device I would have you know I think a lot of people there's like oh I want to build Hardware Dice and then what should it go do we have the exact opposite opinion I personally think you know and I'm not the only one who thinks Hardware is hard and if we can stand on the shoulders of giants and build an iPhone app or an watch app like that would have been much easier the challenge is the existing technology and particular the operating systems that run on those devices limit what you can do you can't have an always on microphone that captures everything you say and here as soon as you get a phone call the microphone stops as soon as you watch a YouTube video the microphone stops and so the frictionless we wanted the ability to capture what you say what you say and what you hear without having to remember to go back to turn it on and to have the convenience of being able to ask your AI anything with just a tap of your finger meant that really to deliver on that customer experience we had to build the technology necessary which was unfortunately hardware and you know that was why we started that path and that's what we're doing now and you know one day I'm sure Apple will support these use cases especially if we're really successful in which case you'll be very happy to use their platforms instead of having to physically create things out of matter that is much harder than creating things out of bits got it yeah I was looking at the Limitless pen and there's like so much that I love about it I love how it's focused on meetings it helps with personal note taking I love how it it's like a full solution it's not just Hardware but it comes with software and the confidential cloud and of course I love its price point and battery life only 99 bucks for 100 hours that that's pretty amazing may maybe talk about you're like really good at like speaking directly to the customer online so like talk about how someone's life could be changed with this thing if I buy this thing and I have it like how can my Daily Tech employee life be different yeah well it

starts with recognizing our own limitations and this is something that you know really inspired me to even start the company realizing I'd been losing my hearing and not noticing it and then only when I got a hearing aid realizing how much I had lost really opened my eyes to the fact that we all live our lives with limitations biological limitations that we don't really recognize are there first and biggest that we're focused on is memory 90% of what you experience you forget after just one week what that means you know for a normal Tech you know productivity employee if you have a weekly one-hour meeting you only really remember at best six minutes of that one hour from one week ago and so we and we don't realize it because you forget it so you don't know what you don't know so we basically live our lives you know like Dory in Finding Nemo forgetting most of what we experience and you know maybe most of the time that doesn't matter but there's so many ways in which using those moments that you forget to give you a better experience and to give you context for things that can make you more productive make you more present we think that's a huge opportunity you know and we're focused right now on meetings because I think that's where it's the biggest immediate opportunity in particular you know we take no taking away from you don't have to take notes you there's this myth that taking notes helps you remember the meeting better but really what taking notes helps you do is remember the thing you're writing down but as you're writing it down the thing that's being said immediately afterwards you're going to figure out you put neverone here in the first place and so being able to be present focus on the person directly in front of you not have to worry about not taking about tracking action items coming up with a summary sharing it out afterwards Limitless automates all that for you so that's how we start and we've got long road map of things and by the way it's all public if you go to Road map. li. a you can see all the things we're working on that's going to make that it's going to extend that but that's sort of the key wedge that we're starting with and of course when it comes to like you know meetings are can be the biggest waste of time ever right and like all this best practices around taking notes and like sharing rafter it's just like a lot of busy work that people don't want to do so but I think the biggest here is like you know if I'm going to a meeting in my company like how do I know this thing I'm weing is not like you know sharing information with Limitless or like just like pracy concern and you kind of tackled that head on so maybe talk about that a little bit more I'll just say one quick first thing quick thing the first thing you said which is meetings today are not fun but our hope is that we make meetings of Joy they become the moment if you think about it meetings are at the most fundamental level as a social species what we do we connect with other people but we get distracted from that connection by all the other things that are on our plate the next meeting you know back toback meetings I've got a hard stop I'm thinking about that you know like if we can truly be present and connected with the people we're with I truly believe we can make meetings a joy so that might seem like a crazy claim but that's just I wanted to address that first of all on your the bigger question on privacy so from the very beginning this is something we really focused on because we knew in order for the pendant in order for our web app our Mac app our Windows app to be accepted socially it needs to respect not just the privacy of the user the person running it you but the people around them and their organization and so we've done two things I think are pretty novel here one is called consent mode which means that in a meeting or a conversation we actually keep track of who is speaking we can identify their voice and if somebody starts speaking who we haven't identified before and they haven't previously given consent we don't record it so you can have an entirely you know entire conversation I'm speaking I've given consent you you're speaking and it just gets my side of the conversation until I say hey Peter would it be okay if I record this conversation it's important to me I want to be able to remember it you say sure no problem that's a verbal opt-in as soon as you've given a verbal optin it's identified your voice then for that conversation we record it so that's a huge breakthrough no one else has done that before that's called consent mode the second breakthrough is confidential cloud and that's going back to what I said earlier which is giving you all of the Privacy guarantees you get of a local app but with the convenience of being in the cloud and that was also a major breakthrough we've got you know eight bold claims on our website if you go to limit list. a that all begin with your data what do we mean by your data is legally protected your data is encrypted your data is safe from the government like we really thought through all of the different angles to make sure that when you use our product you don't have to worry about your privacy you get privacy and convenience that's awesome yeah I'm definitely going to try it out hopefully I don't have to pass like a Security review or something I'll definitely try it out yeah so now I like talk about something a little bit different I mean I've been really impressed with how you put together a really awesome team and kind of how you build products and you know you've been an entrepreneur for like 15 plus years one of your advice you shared is to ship faster and higher slower maybe let's talk about the ship faster part like how do you ship fast but still have like such a high quality bar that you guys have

thanks for noticing that yeah it's those four words have so many stories behind them you know ship faster higher slower and I at some point I should just put out a bunch of videos on it because just oh there's so much pain I felt and getting those things wrong and by the way those are things you have to remind yourself of all the time it's very easy to fall back to being extra careful and conservative and shipping slowly like you know it's and hiring too quickly because you've got a problem it's wait I could go on and on but let me start with shipping faster I think it starts with recognizing that in software development and mostly in Hardware development any effort you do really can optimize for only two out of three things and those three things are essentially scope quality and speed or time and you only can really pick two and I would encourage you to really pick just quality and time at you know a date in fact put a date out there as a clarifying function for you and your team to say hey on this date we are going to have a high quality product and we will make it available to the world and the thing should be really ruthless in cutting is scope especially if you're a smart technologist you will find all the clever cool things you could build that probably don't matter the vast majority of users will probably not use that feature you're probably wrong that the problem it's trying to solve is even meaningful and so you're much better off starting with something very Bare Bones that's high quality and building from there than assuming to do all the scope you know you can imagine from day one and I've just learned this lesson over and over again my first successful company was optimizely it's a website AB testing company we had started the company out of my experience in the Obama campaign in 2008 using products from Adobe and from Google and I saw all of this feature blow that we didn't need what really mattered for the campaign and for optimizing was a simple fast lightweight way to do a series of ab tests and get move on to the next test you know if you were like a McKenzie consultant coming into this Market deciding what should the features be you have multivar testing you know multiarm Bandit you have all these fancy things that you think you need on day one the truth is you don't most people don't have time for that and you'll build a simpler better product by starting with minimal scope so that's the key is to really cutting scope being clear on the date uh willing to say no killing Darlings you might have a great idea during brainstorming and then you know there's a lot of things we left on The Cutting Room floor with Limitless that I think are incredible but we'll get to later you know that's the mindset you should have and that will help you ship much faster how do you decide maybe this is a hard question to answer but how do you decide what to really focus on is it just like talking to customers all the time and you have like it's a sick sense or like side well it starts

with recognizing the need to focus this is something I did really poor job of in my first company and you know optimized the I was younger I didn't have a family and basically I make up I made up for a lack of focus by just putting in sheer hours you know I was working insane hours but if I look back at that this is the realization I had is that the vast majority of the things I did in those hours didn't matter you know you think in the moment these things matter that's why you're doing them but in hindsight when you have the benefit of being able to look back at that time you realize if especially if you're a CEO or founder of a company there really is just like two or three or four things that really will mean the difference between success or failure doing those things exceptionally well is so much better than the list you know list five through 100 of going on networking events and you know blah blah all the things you can make yourself busy with being responsive to email all these things that you think are important in the moment but in hindsight really don't matter so starts with that and then the second thing is I have this Mantra I remind myself of often which is the main thing is that the main thing should say the main thing now your question is basically what is the main thing how do you know then that's the hard part you need to have some judgment to say what is the main thing because also if you are focused and you don't just put into your hours you have to be pretty good at picking what the main thing is and usually it's at any given stage of the company it's different it changes you know at any given point maybe a key hire maybe a key product decision but whatever it is I would commit fully to it and not hedge and just say In This Moment Like You know the last few weeks or maybe last few months frankly I have been so headsound focused on this product and this launch I basically everything else says gone by the ways side Partnerships emails investors you know I just completely say like I'm heads on focused on product and that's what I'm focused on and you know usually even if you're wrong if you're focused on at least one thing that's meaningful you will do a good job of that and then you can move on to the thing that you know you'll feel the pain after you're done like this week when I've emerged from the cave of that was you know building a shipping product I you know I was in COD base working hand you hand inand with the their engineering team and now I'm starting to see the pain oh that's something I should have forg whoops that's a partnership I should emailed and you know those are the kinds of things you find out afterwards but most of those aren't actually all that important if they weren't so painful during the moment got it I really love that and like you know you brought some really amazing talent like I know stammy from the twi Twitter days he's now he was designer is now a co-founder I think of the company how do you attract people like this who like or maybe he's just tired of the big company yeah you that helps yeah it's

certainly it's easier to hire people out of big companies where they get a chance to have ownership and autonomy and really Master their craft you know I it is I'm incredibly lucky to work with folks like Sammy and other folks on the team who are just World Class of what they do you know I don't have a secret recipe other than to say that it requires care and attention to the culture you know trying to build the kind of culture where they're going to thrive be energized be motivated give them things they couldn't get at their prior employer like Twitter or Google or Facebook you know the kinds of environment where they can truly do their best the best work of their career I think that's a key part of it and you know in st's case too like we promoted him to co-founder too so he had you know we have a that's a pretty atypical thing to do so giving people the opportunity to take on more and to do more and to reward their Rec and recognize their you know their impact I think is also really important and then other part is I think you just aim high like you keep trying to raise the bar on yourself and on the team and you know don't this is why that this goes back to the higher slow in the advice earlier because people think well if they're no good you'll just fire them whatever but the thing is you don't realize when you hire too fast you are actually creating a large opportunity cost because that person that's in that role in that moment could have been somebody five or 10x better but you just settled on that first person or the person that you think is good enough and so that's another thing to recognize especially as small team each person has incredibly High opportunity cost and almost certainly for the person you're about to hire there's probably somebody out there who's two or three or five or 10 times better it's often better to wait to hire them than to sort of fill the team with the best first the first best person you could think of to hire for a particular role yeah that's interesting because the usual advice is like you got to think like a year or two ahead when your company has like you know double size or something and you got to hire the right people right now but maybe that's not good advice maybe who knows what I don't think that's good advice I think and made this mistake plenty of times you know with optimizing we raised a $28 million series a and then a $57 million series b and a $58 million series we didn't need any of that money and I just thought oh it would be great to have it it's great valuations just keep it in the bank the mistake is the mistake isn't raising the money the mistake is spending the money that was what we did is that we ended up spending it on all kinds of people we probably

didn't need you know we didn't have the visceral pain of the particular role but if you hire some big wig CMO who's come and done this before they're like I need this demand gen person I need a events you end up building this whole Army of people of which the vast majority aren't really having that much of an impact so that's again a good reason to hire slow is to really you want to feel the pain you want to make sure there's really pain you're solving by hiring this person trying to be proactive you're almost always going to get it wrong you're gonna have somebody who's gonna be twiddling their thumbs not having them impacted they should have and again that's opportunity cost as the company gets bigger and bigger you know you start having coordination issues and so just yeah higher slower than you think you should yeah if you high like really Tom Notch a talent like they will rise to the occasion right like they will surprise you what of them by the way want to be at a small team they don't want to be part of a 300 400 person bureaucracy they want to be SM of a Nimble 20 30 person team I'm sad to admit that like even the team we have today 20 people we are able to get more done ship faster than we ever did with a team of hundreds at optimiz Le and so it really shows you that a small Nimble team that's you know truly exceptional like folks like Sammy can really actually have just as much impact as a huge Army of people who are you know who aren't truly the best for the company at that stage all right so two last questions so you know you worked at optimizely which was kind of like an aest in platform how do you feel about this whole like maybe came out left field but how do you feel about this whole product management function and this data oriented approach do you think this is the right time and place maybe you hire some PMS as a company can do scale or yeah I mean I my started my

career is a associate product manager at Google and so I have been a PM we had fantastic PMS at optimizely and we don't have one here I'm basically the PM now at Limitless and I do think product managers play a really critical role but I do think one of the downsides of hiring ing a product manager and hiring the wrong product manager is it allows the rest of the team to Outsource their thinking to that PM you know the PM then sort of dictates the priorities the sort of the work to be done and you miss a lot when you actually have an engineer who's also thinking about what's the highest impact thing we should be doing because they know the benefit of the engineer is they know the effort they know how much effort it's going to take to do that so they are actually in a much better spot to accurately determine for any piece of work what the ROI is the amount of effort to build and the return we're going to get and so great examples this week you know we launched I mentioned posted this video yesterday but we launched on Monday almost immediately we were getting a ton of votes on our road map for additional language support it's not something we really immediately considered but one of our Engineers saw this we're saying wow we've got like 185 votes for additional language support he recognized there's some really low effort ways on our part to leverage other solutions to make that possible and within days shipped support for 33 languages now would a PM have done that I don't know you I don't know if a PM would have been so close the details to understand the effort necessary to actually do that they would have prioritized that ahead of the other things they're hearing so I do think that's the biggest downside of hiring a PM is you don't want your organization to Outsource their thinking to one person who only has one point of view you want to make sure everyone feels a little bit of that product ownership over what they do yeah that's a good point PM would probably like be like oh this sounds like a lot of work so let's just put it on the Q3 road map or something right yeah we just put it on the backlog and it never happens yeah exactly dude so my last

question here is a selfish question is like how do you do this with like three young kids at home like what does your day look like how do you ruthlessly prioritize your day it is very hard let's go back to what I said earlier that's where like the main thing is the main thing stays the main thing I really try every day to get home in time for dinner at 5:00 pm so I'm done with my day at 5 maybe late at night I'll get back on but you know I have dinner with my kids I shower them I put them down at night and so that is a ritual I stick to every week day if I'm not traveling and that's hard I mean it means you do less things and it really and by the way my most productive 15 minutes of my day is 4:45 to 5:00 p. m. because I know I've got the clock is sticking I got to get home and time for dinner and so that forces constraint and that's the thing maybe if you are you know earlier in your career you don't have that I just force yourself to have that constraint because with that constraint comes creativity ways you can figure out how to work and the biggest thing it goes back to the product too it's scope figure out what's the scope that you need to be focused on and cutting your own scope realizing that you can't do everything and if you did everything you're going to do everything you tried to do everything anything you did you're going to do poorly so it's saying what's the main thing for me what's the focus I should have and that goes with the willingness to accept you're going to disappoint people you're not going to get back to people as fast as they would like there's going to be things that drop because it's not your main thing but ultimately if you're successful that's fine you people will forgive that you know so I think it starts with this sort of mindset of I need to really ruthlessly Focus my time let everyone know that's what you're doing you know no one's gonna be offended if you said sorry look I can't get this done because I get home in time for my kids and it's not my top priority and so it starts with that being clear on what your priorities are and focusing on that got it so set the right expectations for co-workers and your wife and everyone else yeah got it this is awesome conversation thanks so much for your time yeah thank you for your time really appreciate it