Russ was running a moderately successful live streaming startup. Then he got a terrifying offer from a tech giant: sell to us for cheap, or we'll crush you. He had no leverage. He was about to fold.

Then he got an email from a random Gmail account. It was OpenAI. They had secretly built ChatGPT's voice mode on his infrastructure. Overnight, everything changed.

In this episode, Russ reveals the wild story of how LiveKit became the backbone of multimodal AI, why he almost sold his previous company for parts, and how to survive when the biggest companies in the world are breathing down your neck.

Why You Should Listen

• How to secretly power ChatGPT’s voice mode.
• Why you should build "boring" infrastructure instead of AI apps.
• How to negotiate an acquihire when you have no leverage.
• Why a "sell or die" threat from a tech giant was the best thing to happen.
• How to pivot from a failed consumer app to a unicorn infrastructure play.

Keywords

startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, product market fit, AI infrastructure, multimodal AI, OpenAI, ChatGPT voice mode, founder stories, pivot, LiveKit

00:00:00 Intro
00:02:49 The OG YC Batch Experience
00:07:08 How to Sell a Failing Startup
00:15:51 The "Good Cop, Bad Cop" Investor Negotiation
00:35:56 The First Voice AI Demo That Flopped
00:38:29 The Secret Email from OpenAI
00:43:47 How to Scale Stateful Voice Agents

Send me a message to let me know what you think!