Shadowing Practice: How We Raised $2.4M for Our Startup in One Week - Learn English Speaking with Video

Kies een oefenmodus

Elke modus opent een volledig scherm oefenruimte.

219 zinnen

Als zinnen te kort of te lang zijn, klik op Bewerken om ze aan te passen.

Good morning.

We're excited to announce.

When we were pivoting from our first startup to our second startup, Eden, we landed on this idea of video search.

Because if you rewind a year ago, video search was very novel back then.

But then the reality became a lot more complicated, where we weren't able to ship on that product the product

that we wanted to build didn't actually align with the startup's main audience.

And so over time, the past kind of diverged.

So then we decided, hey, let's just go to SF together and then see if we can get our previous startup,

Eden, to a point where we can hand it off to Dan and then have him run that completely on his own.

And then also get this idea off the ground.

We had this impossible goal of going to SF and within four or five weeks getting funding for our new idea.

So over the past two months, we went to SF and then we kind of started building our new thing together as a group of three.

We met Jason at an event and then he pitched to us about starting a YouTube channel.

This was a year ago.

Yeah.

And Jason offered to build a YouTube channel for us.

We were kind of just like, wait, this is maybe our first opportunity to have some distribution that we sort of own in our YouTube channel.

The form of our names out there in the public.

I had never done a YouTube channel, Ari's never done a YouTube channel, and we saw it with the first video.

I remember we did a watch party in here with everyone present, and then Jason put on the first YouTube video that he made, and then we were just like, oh my god, this is so f*ing good.

This is so good.

Without Jason, we wouldn't have an audience at all.

I've been making YouTube videos for like 10 years now.

When I started making YouTube videos, I was watching this guy named Kason Eyestad, might have heard of him.

He always preached never deleting any of your footage, and he just had these stacks and stacks of hard drives in his office.

I still couldn't picture them on the wall behind his monitor.

And because of that, he could always just tell these old stories.

He would pull up footage from something 20 years ago

and be able to spin up a vlog in the moment about something in the past.

And I just thought that was a really cool

and interesting way of storytelling that you didn't really see on YouTube at the time.

For some reason, just turned that switch on in my brain and was like, I'm never going to delete any footage.

So from then on, I've basically been collecting terabytes of footage, documenting my entire life.

But now it's taking up 15 terabytes in this really slow hard drive and accessing it is incredibly hard.

So I actually don't find myself going back grabbing that footage anymore, which kind of leads us into building space.

Like it's, it solves such a big problem for me.

So the reason why space exists in the first place

and why we decided to go after it is actually because we were solving our own problem.

We kind of started with this hypothesis.

Would it be possible to edit off of the cloud directly without using any of your computer's storage space

and without waiting for downloads?

Space gives every computer infinite storage.

What that means is once you install space, you never have to worry about how much disk space you have on your computer itself.

Why hasn't anyone else thought of this?

There's a couple of reasons of why haven't other people done this yet.

One of the big ones is like internet speeds.

Previously, just internet speeds were like so slow that it didn't make sense to do this.

Today, we've come to a point where like the drives that Jason has in his home, the 16 terabytes, those hard disks are slower,

orders of magnitude slower than the Wi-Fi that I have here.

With space, you never have to worry about these uploads and downloads.

You just drag the file into Premiere, it doesn't need to download it to your device, it just streams everything.

So you can just start editing immediately.

And then if I open up Premiere, so none of this is taking up any disk storage.

Even the Premiere project itself can live on space as well, so I'm just going to put this onto here.

I'm just going to drag this video into the timeline, and it's there.

This video is from the cloud.

It doesn't exist on your computer.

There.

Zero bytes on disk.

I could imagine a world where your computers have maybe 256 gigs of memory, right, of disk storage.

And that's it.

You could edit 10 terabytes.

It doesn't matter.

You don't need that space on your computer.

It's just all in the cloud.

I think after we started to get a better hang of what we were doing in San Francisco,

we realized that there's this very powerful idea on Twitter built around just like FOMO.

And that's actually basically how every company raises like a pre-seed or seed round, probably even like beyond Series A as well.

It's all hype and FOMO.

How much can you make an investor feel like they're about to miss out on a huge deal?

So we started tapping into that.

Ari started shipping like really cool features.

And basically every single feature he shipped, that same day I would sit down at night, film a demo video, throw it on Twitter and we would see what people would say about it.

Once we started seeing how the San Francisco fundraising game worked, we started realizing that we should be doing this ourselves as well.

Like, we should be completely exhausting our network.

The first two weeks, we were kind of just like floundering around.

We talked to some VCs, clearly things weren't working out.

I think we made a little bit of a fool of ourselves.

Yeah, I distinctly remember towards the end, they asked us like, So are you guys fundraising?

And then I literally said, as of now we are, I guess.

And then they asked how much?

And then I was like, like maybe three to five million.

And we did that so many times.

It was like we'd go, it would go terribly.

We'd regroup.

What happened?

How can we do it better?

Yeah.

We also had to figure out a way to line up more investor meetings.

One thing that really helped there was meeting our friend Jay.

Jay had previously raised for his startup, and then he kind of talked to us, vetted us for a little bit, and then he thought we were promising,

so then he started introing us to a bunch of the investors that he talked to.

First day of the fourth week, I met with Jonathan Lai from A16Z.

In that first meeting, that was when I first had a meeting that I thought, oh, I think this one went well.

As soon as we had some interest from them, I started letting other investors know, by the way, we have these guys who are potentially interested.

That day, we also had the YC interview, and then right after that, the call with Golden Ventures, and that was a call with Amit.

Amit, on the day of, decided, hey, I'm going to rearrange my schedule for the next day to meet with you guys again, even though my team might get mad at me.

And then when we saw that, we were like, oh, this is what it looks like when an investor actually is interested.

100

As opposed to telling you.

101

Oh, we'll like circle back like Next week.

102

Yeah.

103

Yeah.

104

Yeah.

105

By this point I've already practiced the pitch

106

so many times like I've seen the common objections We had answers prepared for like why now how big is the market?

107

What's the go-to-market strategy all these questions?

108

We hop on the call do a little bit more negotiation

109

and then after some back-and-forth a meet finally settles on a specific number

110

and we decide let's do it and we shake virtually on the Zoom link

111

and that night we were just man it was like a huge weight was lifted off our shoulders

112

because we had one week left in SF that was what kick-started all the real momentum.

113

This was also the week where we had our Y Combinator interview.

114

I think the interview was scheduled on a Tuesday

115

and it was Monday

116

and I was thinking okay who do I know that's gone through Y Combinator in the past

117

that would be good to talk to you know just ask them what's the interview process like what What should we say?

118

What was your experience?

119

And then I remembered I had a friend, Neil, who is like a founder himself.

120

He went through YC way back, and I just decided I'd shoot this guy a text.

121

He responded immediately and was like, I'll hop on a call with you right now and we can talk about everything.

122

I was like, oh, that's kind of unexpected.

123

But we ended up chatting for like an entire hour.

124

I kind of ran him through what we were building.

125

Now we're headed to the Super Whisper office.

126

Super Whisper, they're a high growth startup based in Toronto.

127

They are very, very successful.

128

We have users in OpenAI, lots of the big companies.

129

The CEO is one of our angel investors, Neil.

130

So he's inviting us to go to his office to help us out with some macOS stuff.

131

But also, we would love to onboard them, their team, onto the app.

132

Neil is also the friend that introduced us to our first investor.

133

Still don't really know why he helped us out so much.

134

Like, he put in...

135

I think you're just a likable guy.

136

No, I think...

137

The whole thing is like a couple months ago when we were super early, Neil wanted to be onboarded.

138

I showed him the product and it just did not work.

139

Like nothing worked.

140

This was like three months ago, right after we came back from San Francisco.

141

Since then, Ari has done like an entire rebuild of the app, so everything actually works now.

142

But since then we haven't actually shown Neil what this all looks like, So we're going to properly give him the real chef's kiss onboarding today.

143

So Matt's on a user call with a user and Neil is onboarding his mini right now.

144

So we have two simultaneous user calls happening technically.

145

Typically in a call you can really only onboard like a user once

146

Because they only have one machine

147

but Neil has like a special case where he wants to share files between himself across two machines

148

So we kind of want to see him actually do that now We've tested this ton, but like It's always different

149

It wasn't as ideal as I would have liked.

150

One thing that we're suspecting is that doing a shit ton of uploads while being on the call, his network is being throttled by the video call itself.

151

So I want to see how the app performs after he's off the call.

152

But we'll try to make it work for him.

153

We appreciate you helping us.

154

Yeah.

155

Thank you for coming by.

156

It was good seeing you again.

157

You guys.

158

Thanks, sir.

159

We onboarded Neil twice there because he wanted to sync across two machines.

160

His first machine, his regular MacBook, is on the latest version of macOS, which is what we tested on.

161

But his Mac Mini was on the developer version, macOS 27.

162

That's not even out yet, but obviously it rolls out quicker for developers.

163

We haven't really tested there.

164

Got a ton of good feedback.

165

I guess now it's just, now we gotta basically just bump everything.

166

Yo, what's up?

167

Welcome to the studio slash office slash apartment.

168

This is like everything I spend 24-7 in here Okay, so I just got off the phone with Matt

169

because I was mid-onboarding one of our users who was super eager to get on the product

170

and Mid onboarding I noticed that there was a change in the onboarding flow and that only could mean one thing,

171

that Matt had pushed something right then and there because it didn't happen in the onboarding call like an hour previous.

172

So that kind of made me a little scared.

173

I was like, oh man, there's been some changes to the onboarding.

174

I haven't seen this.

175

This is my first time seeing these changes.

176

So I ended up calling Matt right away.

177

I'd be like, yo, what did you end up shipping?

178

The learning lesson for us as a team is maybe we

179

need to rigorously test things a little bit more before shipping to prod.

180

But also, again, back to the notion of taking care of your users.

181

It's okay if things go wrong.

182

It's all a matter of how you handle it.

183

I think we handled that pretty well He actually just texted me saying the workflow

184

and the problem that he wanted to solve works

185

But he does want the Windows version

186

so it seemed to work for his workflow

187

And it definitely it solves the problem that he was trying to solve

188

so I guess that's the most important thing This is

189

so there's a corny to say like full circle moment

190

But I think if you just like do what you want to do in life

191

and like chase your interest Everything kind of feels like a

192

full circle moment I was talking to one of my friends a couple weeks ago

193

And once I told him the product and how long we've been building it, what it looks like, I demoed it to him.

194

His words were just, of course a YouTuber would build this, because like who else would build this?

195

Of course it's a YouTuber.

196

This is such a big problem, especially with like video.

197

It's like I'm filming here, we're filming here.

198

Like there's probably so much data being created right now, and I know that none of it is gonna be able to fit on this machine.

199

So of course we need like infinite space.

200

We're excited to announce that we're building a new startup space,

201

and we raised a 2.4 million dollar pre-seed from A16Z Speedrun with participation from Golden Ventures and Northside Ventures.

202

We're super excited to be back on the channel.

203

By the time you guys see this we're in SF.

204

It's gonna be an intense period.

205

We'll be in the Speedrun program by the time

206

that you're watching this and for those of you who are either running low on space

207

or you want to increase the amount of space on your computer we have a great welcome offer.

208

Space is now open to the public.

209

Link in description.

210

Please sign up for the app, let us know your feedback.

211

We're really, really excited to be on this journey.

212

Go download it, go break it.

213

We're looking forward to your review.

214

Things might break.

215

Join us along for the journey again.

216

Yeah.

217

Excited.

218

Super, super excited.

219

This time around, I think we're building something really special.

App downloaden

Alles wat je nodig hebt om vloeiend te spreken

AI UitspraakScoor elke zin

IPA OefeningBeheers elk geluid

WoordenschatBouw je woordenschat op

WoordenspelLeren terwijl je speelt

Scan QR

Download on theApp Store Get it onGoogle Play

FOR YOU

Aanbevolen Video

117 zinnen

Elon was my only customer of our Al Supercomputer #jensenhuang #elonmusk #openai

Business EnglishDaily ConversationWorking Adults

71 zinnen

She Made Over $20 Million Doing THIS

Business EnglishDaily ConversationWorking Adults

451 zinnen

We Tried EVERY Pudding Flavor

Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students

183 zinnen

Khloé Kardashian & Emma Grede: Our Million Dollar Launch and What Came After | Good American Doc EP1

Daily ConversationWorking Adults

9 zinnen

The story behind this viral video

Daily ConversationWorking Adults

Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les

Deze spreekles op niveau B2 is gebaseerd op de video “How We Raised $2.4M for Our Startup in One Week”. Deze video bevat 219 zinnen en 2612 woorden om na te spreken. Het gesproken deel duurt 14:23. De spreker praat snel, ongeveer 182 woorden per minuut, dus reken op verbonden en ingeslikte klanken. 85% van de woorden hoort bij de 3.000 meest gebruikte Engelse woorden; de rest kun je beter vooraf bekijken.

Belangrijke woorden in deze video

De 15 moeilijkste woorden uit de video, met uitspraak en betekenis:

Woord	Uitspraak	Betekenis
investor zelfstandig naamwoord	/ɪnˈvɛs.tə(ɹ)/	investeerder, belegger
startup zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈstɑɹtˌʌp/	opstart, opstarting
disk zelfstandig naamwoord	/dɪsk/	schijf
fundraising zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈfʌndˌɹeɪzɪŋ/	fondsenwerving, fundraising
upload werkwoord	/ˈʌpˌloʊd/	uploaden
stack zelfstandig naamwoord	/stæk/	stapel
demo zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈdɛm.oʊ/	demo, demonstratie
infinite bijvoeglijk naamwoord	/ˈɪnfɪnɪt/	oneindig, eindeloos
developer zelfstandig naamwoord	/dɪˈvɛləpɚ/	ontwikkelaar, ontwerper
diverge werkwoord	/daɪˈvɜːd͡ʒ/	divergeren, uiteenwijken
flounder werkwoord	/ˈflaʊ̯ndɚ/	spartelen
rearrange werkwoord	/ˌɹiːəˈɹeɪndʒ/	herschikken
regroup werkwoord	/ɹiːˈɡɹuːp/	hergroeperen
rewind werkwoord	/ɹiːˈwaɪnd/	weer oprollen
throttle zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈθɹɔ.tl̩/	versneller

Phrasal verbs die je zult horen

Woord	Uitspraak	Betekenis
end up werkwoord		belanden, terechtkomen
figure out werkwoord		uitvogelen, er achter komen
get off werkwoord		van ... afgaan
go back werkwoord		teruggaan
look forward to werkwoord		uitkijken naar, zich verheugen op
work out werkwoord	/ˌwɝk ˈaʊt/	uitrekenen

Zinnen om te herhalen

Korte, volledige zinnen uit de video die je in alledaagse gesprekken kunt gebruiken:

Why hasn't anyone else thought of this?
It doesn't exist on your computer.
You don't need that space on your computer.
How can we do it better?
I'd be like, yo, what did you end up shipping?

Grammatica in deze video

De structuren die de spreker het meest gebruikt, met de exacte woorden uit de video:

Structuur	In de video
Present perfect have/has + voltooid deelwoord — iets uit het verleden dat nu nog telt	we've come · I've already practiced · I've seen
Lijdende vorm be + voltooid deelwoord — het gaat om wat er gebeurt, niet om wie het doet	was lifted · was scheduled · be onboarded
Betrekkelijke bijzinnen who / which + zin — extra informatie over een persoon of ding	guys who are · macOS, which is

Uitspraak om op te letten

De spreker gebruikt 59 samentrekkingen en verkorte vormen, zoals we're, I'm, didn't. Spreek ze kort uit, zoals je ze hoort.

De “th”-klanken: throttle /ˈθɹɔ.tl̩/, hypothesis /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/
De klanken “sh” en “zh”: objection /əbˈd͡ʒɛkʃən/, negotiation /nɪˌɡəʊ.ʃiˈeɪ.ʃən/, notion /ˈnoʊʃən/
Lange woorden — let op de klemtoon: developer /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/, simultaneous /ˌsaɪ̯.məlˈteɪ̯.ni.əs/, negotiation /nɪˌɡəʊ.ʃiˈeɪ.ʃən/, hypothesis /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/, momentum /ˌmə(ʊ)ˈmɛntəm/

Klanken die Nederlandstaligen lastig vinden:

Stemhebbende eindmedeklinker — /b/, /d/, /g/, /z/, /v/ niet verscherpen: onboard /ɒnˈbɔːd/, upload /ˈʌpˌloʊd/, diverge /daɪˈvɜːd͡ʒ/, rearrange /ˌɹiːəˈɹeɪndʒ/, rewind /ɹiːˈwaɪnd/
/æ/ — opener dan de Nederlandse “e”: stack /stæk/, magnitude /ˈmæɡnɪtjuːd/
/g/ — een harde plofklank, geen Nederlandse “g”: regroup /ɹiːˈɡɹuːp/, negotiation /nɪˌɡəʊ.ʃiˈeɪ.ʃən/, exhaust /ɪɡˈzɔst/, gig /ɡɪɡ/, magnitude /ˈmæɡnɪtjuːd/

Zo oefen je met deze video

Luister de hele video één keer zonder te spreken en noteer de woorden die je niet kent.
Begin op 0,75× snelheid, spreek zin voor zin na en ga terug naar normale snelheid zodra het makkelijk gaat.
Neem jezelf op en vergelijk met het origineel; let daarbij op woorden als investor, startup, disk.

Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?

Shadowing is een wetenschappelijk onderbouwde taalleermethode die oorspronkelijk is ontwikkeld voor professionele tolkentraining en gepopulariseerd door polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. De methode is eenvoudig maar krachtig: je luistert naar native Engelse audio en herhaalt het onmiddellijk hardop — als een schaduw die de spreker volgt met slechts 1–2 seconden vertraging. In tegenstelling tot passief luisteren of grammaticadrills, dwingt shadowing je hersenen en mondspieren om echte spraakpatronen tegelijkertijd te verwerken en te reproduceren. Onderzoek toont aan dat het de uitspraaknauwkeurigheid, intonatie, ritme, verbonden spraak, luisterbegrip en spreekvaardigheid aanzienlijk verbetert — waardoor het een van de meest effectieve methoden is voor IELTS Speaking-voorbereiding en echte Engelse communicatie.

Shadowing-techniek: lees de volledige stap-voor-stap-gids →

Shadowing Practice: How We Raised $2.4M for Our Startup in One Week - Learn English Speaking with Video

Kies een oefenmodus

App downloaden

POV: you built a $1 million youtube business with no expertise

24 Hours Inside a $47M YC AI-native Insurance Startup

I Started With $600... Now I Make $10B/Year

Crumbl: How We Built A Cookie Company That Brings In $1 Billion A Year

I Copied A Huge App. Now I Make $80K/Month

startup diaries ep. 9 - taking on quizlet and duolingo

Conan Learns About His YouTube Audience | Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend

Elon was my only customer of our Al Supercomputer #jensenhuang #elonmusk #openai

She Made Over $20 Million Doing THIS

We Tried EVERY Pudding Flavor

Khloé Kardashian & Emma Grede: Our Million Dollar Launch and What Came After | Good American Doc EP1

The story behind this viral video

Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les

Belangrijke woorden in deze video

Phrasal verbs die je zult horen

Zinnen om te herhalen

Grammatica in deze video

Uitspraak om op te letten

Zo oefen je met deze video

Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?