Shadowing-Übung: 24 Hours Inside a YC AI Startup - Englisch Sprechen Lernen mit Video
Lektion wird erstellt...
1
We have a thing that is extremely useful and is used by a lot of companies, a lot of enterprises, and it's growing quickly.
2
The question is, there's this window where AI is taking over the world of research
3
and we are kind of at the forefront.
4
We need to take advantage of that and grow extraordinarily quickly.
5
We are not happy with little amount of growth in this stage.
6
We need to be having massive growth.
7
In the world of startups, most people think raising venture capital is the hardest part, but in reality, it's not.
8
The hardest part is what happens after.
9
When the money is in the bank, the headcount doubles overnight and every investor is watching to see if you can actually scale.
10
How do you actually talk to enough people to get a compelling answer to your question?
11
And there is just no way to do that.
12
And so this ability for AI to actually run these interviews, talk to users for you, connect those dots for you, across thousands of people, is just infinitely more powerful.
13
With pre-seed and seed investing, VCs are betting on the founder, the idea, and their conviction.
14
But by Series A+, they're betting on a machine.
15
It's a little frantic.
16
It's a big design question, design problem that we don't have yet a solution for.
17
Kind of the core point of this is that this feedback has been coming up over and over and over again.
18
This is the defining moment of a company like
19
that where VCs are determining whether there's enough conviction in the market for their product.
20
They've raised the capital, but now the hardest part comes to light.
21
And the real question is, can they scale fast enough?
22
Today, we're actually catching up with Michael Hess and his co-founder Aaron from Outset AI.
23
They are an AI moderated research platform.
24
They actually just raised a $30 million Series B.
25
They've gone from roughly seven people to 45 in the last 12 months, which is an absolutely insane headcount change.
26
And they're currently dealing with the aftermath of that, which is finding new office space and moving into that new office.
27
So I'm gonna go check them out and hang out with them at a really crucial time.
28
Hey, if you have any forover tips, drop your X in the comments.
29
Adam Adam hi.
30
Will, lovely to meet you.
31
Adam is our most tenured account exec and core part of the team.
32
The average tenure of an outside employee right now is like two months, something like that.
33
We've had a lot of people in the last three, four months.
34
I think we were 20 people in December.
35
Yes, I think I was 12.
36
You were 12, yeah.
37
And now my third office, which is crazy.
38
Yeah, that is crazy.
39
You've been here eight months and you've been through three offices.
40
Yeah, we outgrew this office way faster than we thought we would.
41
This was our revenue thermometer in YC.
42
We did the summer 23 batch.
43
Goal is 150k by end of batch.
44
So I drew this very crude thermometer that we had hanging in our first office.
45
You can see first deal eight and a half thousand plus ten thousand plus two and a half thousand.
46
I mean tiny deal sizes, but we filled it up and then Jessica, our office manager, had the idea to frame it.
47
And so we put it up.
48
It's kind of like art gallery style, like with the light above.
49
Yeah, literally. So cool.
50
If you were to give the audience like a sum up in one sentence of actually what Outset is, could you run me through it?
51
We're a qualitative research platform, so we serve market research and user research teams primarily at enterprise companies and help them better understand their customers.
52
We have an AI moderator that will actually conduct user research interviews, dig in deeper, ask follow-up questions.
53
A big thing for us is we're not replacing humans.
54
You'll see that in like our out-of-home advertising.
55
The tagline was Listen to humans, don't replace them.
56
We're away from the team now.
57
What's actually going on for you guys?
58
You've grown exponentially.
59
You're moving into a new office.
60
Tell me about it.
61
of software is infinitely scalable, right?
62
You can write code and build a product that's useful to people.
63
And if you are lucky, you can scale up to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue almost overnight, tens of thousands, millions of users.
64
But you can't scale physical office spaces infinitely.
65
We are bursting at the seams in our current office, which is why we're moving to this new one.
66
It's about double the size.
67
We have enough desk space, but the meeting rooms end up being really crowded.
68
So, actually, that's our ad.
69
I see you there.
70
Were you a firefighter before?
71
Yeah.
72
Right after college, I went to Fire Academy and then started working as a volunteer firefighter up in Lake County.
73
And I did that for three or four years while I was at another tech startup, actually.
74
The plan originally was to go be a full-time firefighter, but I kind of got pulled into this startup, worked there for a number of years, did firefighting on the side.
75
I'll never be the guy to post on LinkedIn five things firefighting taught me about how to start a company.
76
B2B SAS.
77
There's a thing called ICS, which is the Incident Command System.
78
It's just like scientifically developed to be a highly efficient way to run an incident.
79
And so we draw from that in like how we treat incidents in our code base or at our company.
80
There's a clear incident commander.
81
We have clear roles and responsibilities, clear channels of communication.
82
There's an old joke that's like, how do you, how can you tell us when it's a firefighter?
83
They tell you.
84
I feel like as an investor, like I would say there's certain qualities and discipline that come with something like that.
85
Like you're in extreme environments all of the time.
86
You must have such a high level of emotional intelligence to be able to deal with people in those situations too, right?
87
Like it's high pressure all the time.
88
Yeah.
89
Yeah, this is the new office.
90
It's about twice the size, so we're pretty excited to move in.
91
What are the challenges for you guys right now as you're growing?
92
There's two main buckets of challenges.
93
There's kind of the standard hyper-growth challenges.
94
Any company is going to go through growing pains when you add as many people as we're adding.
95
The other bucket is maybe unique to AI companies, which is just staying on the bleeding edge and pushing forward with product and making sure that,
96
you know, we are doing things that were never possible before.
97
I think that's the only way to win in this market, right?
98
If you look at any AI company, like there's no software emote anymore because you can write software in a matter of hours with cloud code and whatnot.
99
I use this analogy all the time.
100
Like what it feels like right now is we're on a boat where someone's broken the throttle off
101
and it's jammed at 100 and there's no way we can slow down.
102
All we can do is steer around the icebergs.
103
If you look on X or whatever, right?
104
VCs, but also aspiring founders and all the rest, right?
105
They're seeing so much noise on social media platforms about what's changing with AI.
106
How are you staying focused during this period while the shiny ball syndrome is literally everywhere?
107
Stay off Twitter.
108
Stay off X.
109
I'm quite good at compartmentalizing, and so is Aaron.
110
You have to be able to take in the data around you.
111
And remember what really matters is do our customers find our product useful?
112
Are we able to market the product, and are we able to close new customers?
113
That's really what matters.
114
Nothing else matters.
115
Fundraising doesn't matter.
116
And if we're not doing those things, then we shouldn't be a company.
117
Just went over to the new office.
118
It's fully painted.
119
Wi-Fi is installed.
120
We are good to go for Monday. So, woohoo!
121
Super exciting.
122
Yeah.
123
Yeah, go to the office.
124
Before we get a normal stand-up.
125
So as some of you know, we're calling another Code Purple.
126
For those who don't remember what that is, Code Purple is like we have enough data that we want to go focus on something, and even at the expense of other things.
127
So it's like extreme focus for a couple of weeks.
128
What's the purpose of the Code Purple meeting after?
129
Give it a reminder, we had conversations last night.
130
Right.
131
My take is that in the stand-up, we talk about the Code Purple.
132
Maybe I'll take it.
133
The important part is that we are framing it in a motivating way.
134
This is an exciting thing.
135
It's a little frantic.
136
In that kind of spirit, we got a few bits of data
137
that came in around the same time last week about some opportunities for us to improve a certain price of our product.
138
We're still scoping out exactly what we're going to do, but there was a lot of talk late night in the office last night, in the morning, on Slack,
139
and so we are going to go heads down on that for a little bit.
140
Thanks, everyone.
141
Let's have a great day.
142
It's just nice having everyone together, you know?
143
And it's fun to get to see everyone's faces and then it's just easy to disseminate this stuff.
144
Instead of over Slack, it's just so much better to be able to say it to everybody.
145
Hell yeah.
146
Our jobs to some degree are leading this group of very exceptional people.
147
So that means having the right leaders, giving them the right kind of opportunities, pushing people in the right direction.
148
We're doing a really intense sprint on a subset of features because,
149
hey, we have enough data now that we can like really focus in on like two or three features.
150
So we're going to drop everything and just focus on that.
151
Right.
152
And so like that's us having enough understanding and context
153
and finger on the pulse of the market that we can like make
154
that call and focus our resources on a couple of things.
155
We need to be doing that.
156
We should talk about what we want to build and making sure
157
that the things we are building have the most disproportionate impact.
158
Kind of the core point of this is that this feedback has been coming up over and over and over again.
159
And so I would love for none of us to ever hear this again.
160
And so whatever we do, hopefully we do it with that in mind.
161
So we are doing a sprint, and we're doing it fast.
162
As we identify the points, we will obviously scope to what are we going to ship in the next n weeks.
163
But the end result must be a coherent user experience.
164
Yeah, I think what I want to use this exact meeting
165
for is there's these kind of two main work streams in my, like maybe three main work streams, and just what do we actually want to do in these and discuss.
166
I think very broadly, what we started just circling around yesterday.
167
It seems like there are kind of three big areas that we can improve and like the problems.
168
Latency, speed, guide creation, and editing.
169
We've just stepped out of this code purple meeting
170
and Michael earlier in the day had a fair bit to say about the general team culture here.
171
It's one thing to say, but it's another thing to see in action.
172
One of the key points I've just seen is we're in this morning standup and they're talking about this code purple, which is essentially like a sprint briefing.
173
It's urgent for them.
174
They're going to knock off a bunch of resources from the dev team to actually pull this all together.
175
But the important part was how they addressed the team and how they positioned what this was about.
176
And it was really cool to see.
177
So Aaron said, this is an opportunity.
178
We've gotten some amazing feedback here and we can now innovate on the product.
179
Essentially, it's product improvements that they're trying to implement here.
180
But he could have taken that in a very different direction.
181
He shaped it in a way for the team to go, wow, okay, that's so cool we're growing and let's innovate on the existing product and let's make this better
182
one of the reasons that I love working at outset
183
and working at a startup is having those types of meetings
184
where we have a roadmap for this quarter right like sometimes information comes in
185
that changes that and we have to adjust on the fly.
186
But I think the core tension is how much do we want to be band-aiding
187
and fixing something versus how much do we take a beat, take even a day, and just like think about okay where does this get us to where we want to be in three months, six months, nine months down the line.
188
That's in our DNA as a startup, as a research startup, and as a startup just in general is okay how do
189
we figure out who we need to actually go talk to and get feedback on this.
190
Launch the best version of this.
191
The reason that we win is how insanely, not just customer obsessed we are, but research obsessed we are within the community, how we show up in the community,
192
how we engage people in the community, how we build for them.
193
That's why we show up very authentically in the way that we go to market and people really resonate with that, especially with this audience.
194
I've loved working in the research space because they're such authentic people.
195
Okay, here's my favorite advice for Young Founders is if you want to start a company, just decide you're going to start a company quit your job and then figure out what to build.
196
You don't need to, the number one thing I hear from people who are thinking about it are like, I'm waiting for the right idea.
197
I think the right idea is never gonna just like hit you.
198
You're going to like spend all day obsessing over interesting ideas and then go build something.
199
But you gotta have all day to do that.
200
So quit your job and go do it.
201
It's a hard journey, but if you do a good job
202
and you're lucky enough to build a company where people choose to plant their flag with you and join the journey, have fun on it.
203
The problem is if you want the 20K, that's a bad idea.
204
You have to catch all 20K.
205
We're putting the camera off.
206
What are we doing this all for
207
if not to build something really cool with a bunch of really great people
208
and produce a company and a product we're really proud of?
📺 Gleicher Kanal
B21
Inside a YC Startup Disrupting a $900B Industry That Runs the US
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B224h Inside $5M Silicon Valley AI Startup Building Personal Super Intelligence
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B224 Hours Inside a $47M YC AI-native Insurance Startup
Business EnglishWorking Adults
✨ Empfohlenes Video
B25
85 Sätze
How Pitching Investors is Different Than Pitching Customers - Michael Seibel
Business EnglishInterview EnglishUniversity Students
B21
321 Sätze
How One of NYC’s Fastest-Growing Startups Scaled to $5 Billion
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
79 Sätze
How AI Is Ruining Job Interviews
Business EnglishInterview EnglishUniversity Students
B21
216 Sätze
The Leaked Audit That Exposes OpenAI's Real Financial Crisis
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
307 Sätze
The New AI prompting Method Everyone Is Talking About: Loops (And How To Use Them)
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
190 Sätze
This 25-Year-Old Built a 2-Year Moat Nobody Can Bet Against | Corgi, Nico Laqua & Emily Yuan
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B2662 Sätze
Daniel Ek: Life After Spotify, Broken Healthcare Incentives, Catching Disease Early & AI's Potential
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B2154 Sätze
Are We Getting Too Comfortable With Claude?
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B23
219 Sätze
How We Raised $2.4M for Our Startup in One Week
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
169 Sätze
Can This Vibe Coder Beat a Senior Developer?
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
Für wen ist dieses Video geeignet?
Dieses Video ist perfekt für Englischlerner, die an realen, gesprochenen Sätzen üben wollen – ob du ein Fortgeschrittener bist, der seine Shadowing-Fähigkeiten vertiefen möchte, oder ein Mittelstufener, der lernen will, wie Unternehmer im Alltag sprechen. Es eignet sich besonders, um das Verständnis von schneller, informeller Sprache zu verbessern und gleichzeitig Business-Vokabeln aufzunehmen. Ideal für alle, die "shadowspeak" üben wollen – also das Nachsprechen von Reden, um Akzent und Rhythmus zu trainieren!
Wörter und Redewendungen, die du stehlen solltest
- At the forefront: In der Spitze, an der vordersten Front. Beispiel: "Wir stehen an der Spitze der AI-Entwicklung."
- Scale: Skalieren, wachsen (insbesondere im Business-Kontext). "Können wir das Unternehmen schnell genug skalieren?"
- Outgrow: Überwachen, zu klein werden für. "Wir haben das Büro schneller überwacht, als wir dachten."
- Aftermath: Die Folge, die Nachwirkung. "Sie behandeln die Folgen des schnellen Wachstums."
- Tiny deal sizes: Kleine Vertragsvolumen. "Anfangs hatten wir nur kleine Vertragsvolumen."
Diese Redewendungen tauchen oft in Gesprächen über Startups auf – lerne sie, um selbstbewusst in solchen Kontexten zu sprechen!
Wie man den Akzent richtig bekommt
Der Sprecher spricht flüssig, mit einem natürlichen Rhythmus – ideal für "Englisch Shadowing". Achte auf folgende Dinge: Reduzierte Wörter wie "kind of" oder "sort of" – sie klingen oft wie "kinda" oder "sorta". Übe, sie nicht zu deutlich auszusprechen, um den natürlichen Fluss zu erhalten. Betonung in Wörtern wie "extraordinarily" (akzentuiere "or-di-NAR-i-ly") oder "conviction" (auf "vic" legen). Nutze "shadow speech", um den Tonfall nachzuahmen – höre den Satz ein paar Mal, dann sprich sofort hinterher. So trainierst du nicht nur die Aussprache, sondern auch das Timing und die Intonation. Probier's mit Sätzen wie: "The hardest part is what happens after" – achte darauf, "hardest" und "happens" etwas deutlicher zu betonen!
Mit diesem Video kannst du "shadowspeaks" effektiv üben – und gleichzeitig einen Einblick in die Welt von Startups gewinnen. Also: Drücke play, höre gut zu und sprich mit! 🚀
Was ist die Shadowing-Technik?
Shadowing ist eine wissenschaftlich fundierte Sprachlerntechnik, die ursprünglich für die professionelle Dolmetscherausbildung entwickelt und durch den Polyglotten Dr. Alexander Arguelles populär gemacht wurde. Die Methode ist einfach aber wirkungsvoll: Du hörst englisches Audio von Muttersprachlern und wiederholst es sofort laut — wie ein Schatten, der dem Sprecher mit nur 1–2 Sekunden Verzögerung folgt. Anders als passives Hören oder Grammatikübungen zwingt Shadowing dein Gehirn und deine Mundmuskulatur, gleichzeitig echte Sprachmuster zu verarbeiten und zu reproduzieren. Studien zeigen, dass es Aussprachegenauigkeit, Intonation, Rhythmus, verbundene Sprache, Hörverständnis und Sprechflüssigkeit signifikant verbessert — was es zu einer der effektivsten Methoden für die IELTS Speaking-Vorbereitung und reale englische Kommunikation macht.