How Wispr Flow's rethinking voice and AI interfaces

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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Meet the startup that is growing revenue 50% month over month right now How Wispr Flow's rethinking voice and AI interfaces Oct 9   READ IN APP   ✨ Hey there this is a free edition of next play’s newsletter, where we share under-the-radar opportunities to help you figure out what’s next in your journey. Join our private Slack community here and access $1000s of dollars of product discounts here. Scrolling Twitter these days, you can probably find lots of fancy AI demos but very few actually useful new products and workflows. Sahaj Garg puts it well in his essay about AI voice interfaces: “The most common demo of a voice assistant: booking an Uber or flight with voice, while it seems cool, is basically…. useless? People book flights once in a while, and using voice doesn’t make the workflow much faster (especially if you have a strong preference). Instead of optimizing for this rare occurrence, we focus on the workflows people repeat many times a day, and where our understanding of how people want to communicate allows us to build a better product than anyone else in the world.” To really get the most out of AI, I think people will need to channel this blend of pragmatism and ambition. As you dream up the future, you probably want to start by defining what problems are even useful to solve in the first place. And so I thought, what better way to learn more about what that process is than to speak with Sahaj’s company—Wispr Flow—that is rethinking what it could be like to work and live with AI. Their first product, Flow, is a voice-to-text AI that turns speech into clear, polished writing in every app. “Flow is already helping thousands of users cut their daily typing time nearly in half across both mobile and desktop. After six months, the average user types 72% of their characters with Flow across nearly 70 apps and sites.” Fast Company called it one of the best designed AI products of 2025. In 2025, they’ve grown our revenue 50% month-over-month. They raised a $30M Series A led by Menlo Ventures. And they are hiring for 19 roles in SF right now: engineering, operations, marketing, product, design, and more. Flow is the outcome of a very deliberate company culture. We decided to go deep with the team in this Next Play Spotlight to learn more about the How behind their early success. How have they built their company? How do they think about hiring and management? How do they uphold a high design standard? All that and more below. Major thanks to the Wispr Flow team for sharing behind-the-scenes details and supporting Next Play. It is tempting to convince yourself that brilliant products come from some genius artist meditating on a hill somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Some unexplainable process that results in innovation. Hopefully I am not the first to tell you that real life is often (like 99% of the time!) far less picturesque. And, importantly, great products are often the results of lots of hard work and nuanced decision making. The story of Flow is no different. It starts with a hypothesis formed by Tanay Kothari, the founder/CEO. He, like many others, always believed there could be a future similar to what you’d seen in the movie Ironman: “My childhood dream was to build a real-life JARVIS, Tony Stark’s AI assistant. And in 2021, as LLMs were becoming popular, it looked like I’d have my shot.” Tanay and his co-founder Sahaj started the company building a small wearable device that converted neural signals from silent speech into text or voice. They spent nearly three years building a hardware product only to, after many iterations, make a very hard decision: pivoting entirely to building a software-based voice dictation platform. It was a risky bet but it paid off as they quickly reached product-market fit. “It was actually pretty successful. We got millions of views and hit #1 on Product Hunt for the day and the week. Two months before that, we weren’t even a consumer software company.” “We were seeing long posts on LinkedIn and X about how the product had changed people’s lives. We also saw ~20% of our users convert to paid (vs. the usual 3–4%), and organic growth of ~90% month-over-month in January and February. On average, users were doing around 100 dictations a day and typing only 25–30% of their total input on a keyboard.” What may look like an overnight success from the outside was actually the product of a small team insanely focused on thinking about their customers and using those earned insights to iterate their way to success. I think this founding story is incredibly representative of what it often takes to build a great product. Hard work. Focus. Commitment. Creativity. Care. It’s also very revealing of how the Wispr Flow team today thinks about continuing to dream up, design, and build high quality products for their customers. The Wispr Flow team today is working backwards from a very clear mission statement: “Wispr’s mission is to make technology more conversational–reducing screen time, context-switching, and cognitive overload, and helping people spend more time on what matters.” You can hear Sahaj explain the mission and plan in detail here: What makes this mission effective is that it articulates a high-level vision for the future that very much excites the team. Everyone we spoke with at the company mentioned the ambition and nature of the mission being a hugely motivating factor for them joining. “Wispr sits at the intersection of my interests in human-computer interaction and human-AI interaction. I was really excited about both the work of helping to advance the frontier of how people interact with their computers.” “The product brought me in—I’ve always been bullish on voice, and wanted to build a future with fewer screens.” It’s one thing to have written out a company mission. It’s another thing entirely to actually incorporate that mission in the day-to-day decision making of the company. Wispr Flow has really strived to do the latter. The mission drives priorities. It drives design details. It drives hiring. Etc. “I joined Wispr Flow because I wanted to be part of a team that’s not just smart, but mission-driven. Everyone I met shared the same passion: making technology feel as natural and effortless as talking to a friend. The idea of bringing voice to the forefront of how we interact with our devices felt both bold and deeply human. What stood out most was the team’s commitment to accessibility and behavior change – using voice to make technology more intuitive, more inclusive, and ultimately, more impactful in people’s lives.” When you take the mission seriously, and use it as a core component of your hiring process and organizational development, you often end up with a very distinct company culture. The biggest thing you’ll notice…and it may sound small but I cannot tell you enough how impactful it is to the success of the company: People caring. People really caring. Does the team seem to just show up and clock in and out or are they there to help achieve some deeper purpose? You’ll be able to tell when you talk to people on the team. What motivates them? What gives them energy? Why are they working so hard? “People who thrive at Wispr Flow care deeply about shaping how humans interact with technology, particularly through the power of voice.” At Wispr Flow, caring takes many forms. At the product level, they use terms like “being user obsessed and detail focused.” “Curiosity and empathy go a long way here too. We’re not building tech just for the sake of it. We’re building solutions that solve real, everyday problems and make people’s lives better. That means listening to our customers, chasing the moments where technology feels like magic, and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with voice.” “Talk to users, every day if you can.” “I think the most common type of person who’s not going to be a good fit is somebody who really just wants to put their head down and churn through a bunch of work, not thinking about the product context or the business context.” At the process level, they look for people who can learn quickly and work with high agency: “I think success at Wispr is about building a domain of expertise and responsibility as quickly as possible. In order to do that effectively, you need to try to build a working knowledge of what’s going to be important and what’s going to be impactful. We don’t have a lot of documentation, and people won’t take a lot of time to explain context by default, so it’s important to ask a lot of questions and try to build a fundamental understanding of what’s going on.” “We don’t have time for every project to involve a full set of requirements from a product or a full set of Figma designs from one of our designers. We need our engineers to be able to think critically about the user experience, draft their own requirements, and think through their own edge cases.” “Our tech stack is uncommon if you compare it to the standard SaaS web app that many startups have. Figuring out how desktop environments work, how to interact with native APIs, how Electron works as a cross-platform technology, and where things can go wrong in the dictation lifecycle are all skills that essentially nobody comes in having already. So success means being excited about building up competency in those areas. We’ve structured our team to operate in a very high-trust, management-light way where each person is responsible for their domain and for the outcomes of their work.” “People who succeed at Wispr are people who are really high agency, like to operate independently, and are excited to learn a new set of technologies.” Caring, importantly, is not just about trying hard. It’s about being effective. There are plenty of examples of founders and managers who say they care a lot but spend all of their time distracting the team and getting in the way of progress. Tanay seems to be great at leading by example while giving people sufficient clarity and room to run: “Working with him feels both collaborative and empowering. He never micromanages; instead, he creates the conditions for others to thrive, offering trust and ownership while giving clear context for where we’re headed. One moment he might be discussing the purpose of a single pixel, and the next he’s laying out how Wispr can redefine human-technology interaction in the years ahead. That mix of depth, vision, and humanity makes him a truly inspiring founder to work with.” “Tanay is a very intense person to work for because he has really high expectations of everyone, and he inspires people to stretch beyond the boundaries of where they’re comfortable. He also is a top 0.1% engineer in his own right and is an incredible source of technical mentorship.” “Tanay is a rare kind of leader. He’s someone who can zoom into the smallest product detail and also zoom out to a multi-year vision for the company. He has an incredible technical mind, but what stands out even more is his care for the product experience and for the people building it.” This delicate balance also extends to the leadership team. “Leadership at Wispr Flow combines vision with humility. They set a bold direction, but empower the team to shape the path forward. What stands out is their willingness to make hard but right decisions – even if that means, for example, stopping work on an exciting new technology that isn’t solving the right problem for our users.” During my interview process, Sahaj, our CTO, casually pulled me aside and asked, “What do you think is the right word to trigger this experience in the product?” We ended up diving into every edge case around a tiny user moment. That conversation showed me the level of care, detail, and passion this team brings to even the smallest interactions and the desire everyone has to learn from each other.” “Ownership is seen and rewarded here. The founders are adamant about culture coming from the team, and it’s cool to see their support of events pitched by the team.” “The management and exec teams try to celebrate people publicly and verbally whenever possible. We ring a gong every time we do a release to prod of the desktop app, and if you shipped a big feature that week, then you get to ring the gong and be celebrated by the company.” Finding a way to fold short-term progress into a long-term vision is often how you end up with really great, high-impact products. And that’s the Wispr Flow team’s pitch for joining the company: “Wispr is one of the few companies on the planet that has a real shot of changing how people interact with their computers for the first time in the last 60 years, really. If you want to be a part of that and are excited to live in a very high agency environment where we solve incredibly deep technical problems in order to support an extremely simple and beautiful user interaction, then Wispr is almost singular as an amazing place to work.” If this opportunity and team excites you, Wispr Flow is hiring for 19 roles in SF right now: engineering, operations, marketing, product, design, and more. And if you are looking for more opportunities, be sure to check out Next Play. You're currently a free subscriber to next play. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. Upgrade to paid   Like Comment Restack   © 2025 Ben Lang 200 E61 St, New York, NY Unsubscribe