How Speak Built a $1B AI Language Learning App

Connor Zwick is the cofounder and CEO of Speak, a billion dollar app that is reinventing digital language learning by getting users into real conversations with AI-powered voices. Connor started Speak in 2016 with cofounder Andrew Hsu. Prior to founding Speak, Connor built his first startup called Flashcards+ when he was still in high school and eventually sold it to Chegg. He then went to Harvard, but dropped out to become a Thiel Fellow and found another startup called Coco Controller.

Key Takeaways:

• After dropping out of Harvard to pursue a Thiel Fellowship, Connor became very interested in deep learning along with another Thiel fellow named Andrew Hsu.
• After Connor and Andrew developed a speech recognition model that outperformed all of the existing models at the time, they realized that AI had the potential to revolutionize language learning, which led them to cofound Speak.
• From the beginning, Connor and Andrew believed there was a major gap in the language learning market around immersive language learning. Unlike Duolingo and Rosetta Stone, which focus on helping people learn vocabulary, Speak went all in on AI-powered voice right away to help students learn by speaking.
• For the first four years, Speak exclusively focused on English language learning in South Korea. This is a ruthlessly competitive market, with South Koreans spending 1% of GDP learning English, but this forced Speak to tune its model to be great at one language before the company decided it was ready to expand.
• Since international expansion was part of Speak’s DNA from day one, it allowed the company to expand quickly to other markets once it was ready to grow beyond South Korea. Today, Speak helps people around the world learn six languages, including English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, and Korean. Based on this growth, the company recently raised a Series C at a $1B valuation.

Connor Zwick:

• Website: https://www.speak.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connorzwick/
• X: https://x.com/connorzwick

Phil Carter:

• Website: https://www.philgcarter.com
• Substack: https://philgcarter.substack.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
• X: https://x.com/philgcarter

Chapters

• 3:11 How Connor started his first company as a teenager
• 6:11 What inspired Connor and his cofounder to start Speak
• 12:06 Why early adopters loved speaking with an AI coach
• 14:17 Product updates that drove step function growth
• 16:40 The early challenges of building on probabilistic models
• 18:40 Managing AI hallucinations and moderation risks
• 23:17 Why Speak focused on South Korea for four years
• 25:34 When Speak decided it was ready to expand
• 27:23 Speak’s international growth channels and playbooks
• 31:42 How Speak's monetization strategy covers AI costs
• 34:35 Connor's vision for how Speak evolves with AI
• 39:38 Lightning round