Shadowing Practice: 24h Inside $5M Silicon Valley AI Startup Building Personal Super Intelligence - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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this stack of chicken bake boxes reaches the ceiling.
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We just gotta go give up and find jobs and get mad because we can't keep doing this.
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It's doing everything right.
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Like not just content and not just like the ads and not just like the onboarding, but it has to all work.
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Most venture capital funded AI startups are building for engineers and enterprises.
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And almost no one is building for regular people because consumer is one of the most brutal categories you can touch.
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But on this trip, I met a team taking a more creative approach to consumer AI than most startups have come across so far.
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That's our definition of personal super intelligence.
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It is one that understands your goals and is unequivocally for you.
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What's really special about Tomo is
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that it's really trying to inspire everyone to pursue their life's work in one aspect or another.
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This is a huge space.
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Our team is the entire world.
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We are excited to build something that will go large and big and go beyond the beta.
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Today I'm going behind the scenes with Justin and the team from Tomo, a personal AI that lives in your text messages,
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learns your goals, and is now starting to build custom software around your life.
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They've just raised a five million dollar seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures
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and already have over 500,000 people texting Tomo to run their lives.
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There's like such wide range of interfaces we can create that really motivate people, which is what I'm particularly excited about.
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A lot of developers and founders try to overcomplicate.
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But when you actually look at what consumers want and how hard it is to develop just the most simple features, a company like Tomo is building just for the simple stuff,
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for the everyday people stuff.
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It's a category so new, it's almost impossible to put a number on.
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So the real question I want to answer is whether a
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small team can actually win in the one space most of Silicon Valley is too afraid to build for.
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Oh my god, walking up a hill.
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I feel so unfit.
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I am going behind the scenes with Justin and the team from Tomo.
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They've raised their seed round from some pretty big names
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and they are only a month away from sending this live and launching their first proper product to market.
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Tomo is heavily centered as more of like an AI agent.
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Infrastructure for the average human being and I've always been skeptical about these kind of plays in AI, but Justin gave me access to the product,
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full access the other day, and I've actually used it every day since.
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So if I'm a good indication of using a product like this and something that's actually sticky and defensible,
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I'd hope that's a good litmus test on whether something's actually pretty cool.
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So we're going behind the scenes with them.
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We're gonna go to their house first because I'm pretty sure they just signed the lease for a new office.
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So we're gonna go check out where it all began, and then we're gonna go to the new place.
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So, let's go see him.
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This is where I sat up until like basically yesterday for the last two and a half years.
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Over there is where Ray has sat for the last year or so.
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And then Varun about a couple months ago started sitting over there.
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Yeah, this has been the 100 square feet that we've been working out of.
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Wild.
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Yeah, so what's the story of the chicken bag boxes?
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What is that about?
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We had worked on a lot of different products for consumer.
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For the vast majority, almost everything, we didn't charge, but our op-max was quite high.
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But it got to the point where we just looked at each other and said, OK, if this stack of chicken bag boxes reaches the ceiling, we just got to go give up and find jobs again,
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man, because we can't keep doing this.
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And super luckily, in that sort of idea maze, there's like about a box and a half of clearance that you'll see before, yeah, we would've had to go and like, sort of call it quits.
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Good timing in that there's just enough juice left before things really started working.
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Literally.
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Yeah, stuff really was not working for the better half of two years.
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It's like, maybe a box and a half of clearance, but...
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That's crazy.
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You can probably tell by the expiration dates of the boxes when like, things were really rough, and then we were like, okay, we can afford to eat like, a little better from this week.
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This is insane.
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Oh my god, that's so close, man.
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Yeah, but one of the, maybe it's fate, but one of the cool things about the new office is
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that it's also like a five minute walk from Costco.
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So we can go straight to the source and we don't have to get the frozen stuff anymore.
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So dude, real quick, if you were to sum it up in kind of one or two sentences, like really layman's terms, like basic, what is Tomo?
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Yeah, so Tomo is personal AI for real people.
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And what that means is that it's not AI necessarily for doing the work in the way that we, in Silicon Valley, perceive doing the work,
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but it is AI that learns your goals and will do whatever it takes to help you get there.
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And practice for anyone that oftentimes wants to go and lose weight
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or go to the gym more often
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or wants to keep track of their finances or wants to go
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and do the childhood hobby and maybe they used to go and sing and write together.
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That's what a lot of people are using Tomo for.
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Today I'm going through a couple of sort of like meetings that you have to launch product-wise.
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I made some changes yesterday on Google chats in an effort to make it counter-intuitively less proactive so it feels more assisted.
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That's the feedback that we've seen.
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My focus as with the rest of this week has been app building.
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one that I talked to me about is it's hard to actually iterate on like the
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or even use the end-to-end system right now of like testing
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that building without example context of like here's an example chat
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of like oh this is the goal they care about whether it's like calorie tracking
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or financial things and it's actually like thus build like a proper app on top of
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so going to be working on a way to just like implement ten different scenarios
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that we can we use for the sake of future evals, but primarily now for app building.
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I've been looking into some of how our ping backoffs happen
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and some of the messaging around what Tomo is saying when it decides to back off.
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And instead of merely today backing off and kind of disappearing into the void,
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reframing that as an opportunity to improve what the user was originally trying to do with Tomo.
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I took a look and I think I have like a much cleaner version of this
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which uses a more improved model and also
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cleaner structure that separates first into the first message being like hey I noticed you did this thing
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and then the second message is more actionable and offers like three options for you to re-engage.
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It's kind of related to what we talked about yesterday where
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smoothness is actually not necessarily conducive to reduction
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and some of the like the entropy
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that you might expect within like a real conversation of even
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some of the sharpness can be helpful obviously you don't know what the backoff is going to be like
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but there's some level of delight from the kind of like
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wabi-sabi of like a message that's like hey like what's like why aren't you coming back
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or like hey what about this thing
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that you promised me yeah some people like this this contrast in the sharpness
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and if it came to like a real-life human relationship
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which there's like push and pull and it's not just like constantly pull like like most other sort of language model products.
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What are we doing now?
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We are going to Costco for lunch but then more importantly to make sure
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that Varun and Jessie get their employee benefit which is a Costco executive membership. And Jackie.
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Let's go. And Jackie.
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Very important.
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I've been waiting for this.
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I've been telling Tomo this like every day.
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And getting his badge of adulthood which is a Costco membership card.
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I'm excited.
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I appreciate it.
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He's locked in.
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That's the one that's the one.
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Jesse won honestly.
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Wow.
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Nice sample.
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Good job.
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Oh here it is man.
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The company would not exist without these guys.
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Okay, you asked me if there's a Costco in China.
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Tomo says yes, definitely.
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They opened the first one in Shanghai.
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Oh, they have many?
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Yeah, they have a lot.
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Oh shit!
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I'm gonna ask Tomo how many calories I think all of this is.
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Mmmmm.
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I don't recall.
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Holy, you guys really went for it.
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The spread is actually insane.
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Just for the whole table, you're looking at at least 6,000 to 7,000 calories easy.
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Wait, how many thousand?
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6, 6, 7.
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One fun thing is like unreleased but
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Komo is starting to go and generate interfaces for people and
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so it knows I've been as you know like eating a lot of these chicken bakes
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and it's like oh it'd be fun to keep track of exactly how many outside of the boxes
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and so it's developed this chicken bake app for me and so if I go in
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You can see that it is like 36 this year
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and I guess the month just started so zero and
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so I can take a photo and text it like hey
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and then it'll increment or if it's just easier
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because you know Sometimes you don't want to go and text with these like AI agents.
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I can go into this like fun interface
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and be like oh I just ate one today and then we'll like add on Number of chicken bakes per month.
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Yeah, but then also Tomo obviously has like comments about About this.
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Oh, and he's reminding me that like I have to go in fixed or like
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So it's like actually I need you to do a real thing right now Yeah, I just like okay like after you finish like get back
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to work like this is what you have to do or what you told me But yeah, that's like the sort of like fun sort of chapter two
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that we're excited to release pretty soon Where it's based on everything that you're sharing with your Tomo just texting.
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Yeah What is that personal operating system look like?
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What are games that we can create based off of this?
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And you were saying like you've got you've got really like strong API connections with some pretty cool stuff So like yeah,
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I'm talking about like budget tracking like cuz you got plaid like fitness health like all that stuff Yeah, it's stuff that we've only fitness and health that you'll need after eating this.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, especially after this My tone will probably send me a ping about getting back in track.
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So today we're going to work through everything, like how the communication will go, what is the project like, and also connect a little bit more information from you guys that we needed.
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So this is gonna be the page that we will share with you.
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It's kind of our main source of truth.
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Here you will find all the information about the project.
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This timeline is in line where the kind of hard launch that we're calling it, that Jackie's helping us with.
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But we ultimately want to have products that we can get in the hands of friends quite a bit earlier than that.
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You know, even as soon as the next couple weeks, like you've seen even the couple days last week, we're already cooking and thinking through these different experiences.
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Yeah, yeah, and it keeps us also like early testing, so that's great.
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So we can also use it on users immediately.
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So how did that meeting go for you?
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Like, and actually probably more important question, why are you engaging in an agency from Amsterdam?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, really interesting kickoff meeting, like Justin said.
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I think they're really great cultural people, so I'm excited to get like their perspectives on especially like what are actually meaningful products
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and apps for again like real people out there not those that are, you know, kind of in sort of the tech bubble that, I mean, obviously we see it live in here.
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Yeah, I think Kickoff's great.
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Looking forward to working with them over the next few weeks.
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You wanna see this?
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There's like one thing that you get, it's like Jesse is not an engineer.
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He is our head of growth, but he runs more coding agents than anybody at the company combined.
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Run me through, what's the setup here?
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Overall, I am actually really bad at typing, so...
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The main thing I use a lot, of course, is Whisperflow.
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Um...
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Yeah, yeah, you interviewed them recently.
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Yo, Hector.
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Yeah.
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So something funny that I do is that I have my backspace, so that it deletes by words instead of by character.
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So, it's like...
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Oh, gangster, that's cool.
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Yeah, it's a bit weird, but I...
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But that's because you're speaking into it.
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So Flo will already correct your words.
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So you're just faster, right?
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Yeah, it's just like speed of editing, essentially.
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Nice.
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All I do actually all day, I feel like a salesperson, but all I do all day is talk.
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Tell me about version 2
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because like we talked a little about version 1 we understand how it works
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but like personal OS literally custom building software is based on your preferences like tell me about
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that how does that work? this thought really arrived from all the data
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that we saw
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which is like it's crazy how many people were sending things they cared about to Tomo their preferences some context
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but even more
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so just like images like things they care about for example like tracking like the food they eat
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and sort of like calories or like macros associated with it.
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The fact that they were like going to the gym to work out every time and laying to know.
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And it's sort of like this realization
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that like this UX was pretty suboptimal with like iMessage or really just like any raw chat interface.
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You want to be able to just like talk to this like entity
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and have it have that context and give you like correct answers about like what to do.
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But what's even better is like what
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if you can actually see like visuals of like here's my
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progress here's how I'm doing another example is like what
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if I am like trying to save enough money to like
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buy this car next month reality is like there's actually like
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a lot of ways you can create like budgeting apps
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and use like other sort of like finance tracking apps out there
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but they're not really like optimized for this scenario what would really be cool is like what
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if it was just like a widget
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that was like a progress bar to like a car emoji like that's a lot like simpler more motivating
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and just like clear like here's my goal
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and here's my progress to reach out rather than like uploaded like budget tracking app
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so I'm super excited to sort of like bring this like dynamic like interface world to life.
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One of the things that's really important to understand here is
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the capability of an app like this actually really simple for the end user I'll show you a simple feature I know.
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Hey Tomo I'm getting pretty hungry you know how I like healthy foods you've got my location
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so can you ping me maybe like five of the closest restaurants near here where I kind of like grab
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and go get something takeaway like I don't want to sit
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into a fine dining restaurant find something that's like pretty easy
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also relatively cheap I send it in I'm gonna say on
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it let me find you some good healthy spots nearby
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so it's like got a bit of attitude it's got a bit of its own like language
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and it's just hitting me with locations
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and the cool part is I can say to it okay cool could you remind me at 5 p.m
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because I'm a bit busy now
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but can you remind me to head out of the office
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and actually go eat something I'll send that to it
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and then it's going to save that it's going to message me
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and say yeah no worries but it's a simple thing
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so it's like help me find recommendations help me go to
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the gym help me drink water help me do really basic stuff
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and it's funny when you get into this how hard it is to actually just do basic stuff
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and to not overcomplicate this especially in consumer world
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because consumers are very very very difficult to bring on consumer software is one of the most cutthroat categories
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that you can jump into in consumer okay real quick it is 5.02 pm
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and right on time tomo just messaged me Wild. So cool.
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The thing we do on the channel is we ask one piece of advice from founder to founder.
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So you're in the thick of it right now, right?
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Like raising a seed here.
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So is there any bit of advice you'd give for a
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founder that's maybe just a little bit earlier on in their journey right now?
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Yeah, I think it's really two things.
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They say it a lot, but don't die.
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Like really, really do not die.
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There are a lot of moments where it's just like we were pretty close to death, but it's that that scar tissue becomes burned insights that someone starting out doesn't have.
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And the other thing is as part of that, like you can be the smartest person in the world, but I really do subscribe to the belief that you just gotta get stuff out there.
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And if you aren't, you are doing a disservice to your team and your company and your investors.
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And so if you aren't dying, and you're getting in front of real people and building real product for real people, your success is guaranteed.
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Like there's actually no way, given a long time horizon that you fail.
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And so we've seen the good and the bad and the ugly of that and I'm excited for other people, especially building consumer while outside of WFOS to build some cool stuff for real people.
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Nice, man.
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Appreciate you.
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All right.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “24h Inside $5M Silicon Valley AI Startup Building Personal Super Intelligence”. This video has 258 sentences and 3220 words to shadow. The speech runs for 17:05. The speaker talks fast, about 189 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 87% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| tomo noun | A shaft formed in limestone rock dissolved by groundwater. | |
| interface noun | /ˈɪn(t)ɚˌfeɪs/ | The point of interconnection or contact between entities. |
| calorie noun | /ˈkæləɹi/ | A non-SI unit of energy, equivalent to 4.184 kilojoules, that can raise the temperature of a kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. This is the unit normally… |
| bake verb | /beɪk/ | To cook (something) in an oven (for someone). |
| ping verb | /pɪŋ/ | To make a high-pitched, short and somewhat sharp sound. |
| backoff noun | The situation where an algorithm or process refrains from taking an action it would otherwise have taken. | |
| overcomplicate verb | To make something excessively complicated. | |
| sharpness noun | the cutting ability of an edge; keenness. | |
| motivate verb | /ˈmoʊ.tɪ.veɪt/ | To provide someone with an incentive to do something; to encourage; to actuate. |
| startup noun | /ˈstɑɹtˌʌp/ | The act or process of starting a process or machine. |
| clearance noun | /ˈklɪɚ.əns/ | The act of clearing or something (such as a space) cleared. |
| stack noun | /stæk/ | A large pile of hay, grain, straw, or the like, larger at the bottom than the top, sometimes covered with thatch. |
| preference noun | /ˈpɹɛf(ə)ɹ(ə)ns/ | The selection of one thing or person over others (with the main adposition being "for" in relation to the thing or person, but possibly also "of") |
| ceiling noun | /ˈsilɪŋ/ | The overhead closure of a room. |
| scenario noun | /sɪˈnɛəɹioʊ/ | An outline or model of an expected or supposed sequence of events. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| back off verb | To move backwards away from something. |
| give up verb | To surrender (someone or something); to inform on (someone). |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). |
| come across verb | To change sides; to cross over to work for the opposition. |
| come back verb | To return to a place. |
| get back verb | Return to where one came from. |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. |
| have over verb | To host (a visiting guest) at one's house. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- That's our definition of personal super intelligence.
- That's the feedback that we've seen.
- What are we doing now?
- I've been waiting for this.
- Run me through, what's the setup here?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | we've been working · I've been looking · I've been waiting |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have come · They've just raised · They've raised |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people, which is · benefit which is · adulthood which is |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is based · is guaranteed |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 79 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, we're, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: actionable /ˈæk.ʃə.nə.bəl/, expiration /ˌɛk.spɚˈeɪ̯.ʃən/, realization /ˌɹɪə.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, indication /ɪndɪˈkeɪʃən/, recommendation /ˌɹɛkəmɛnˈdeɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: actionable /ˈæk.ʃə.nə.bəl/, defensible /dɪˈfɛn.sɪ.bəl/, expiration /ˌɛk.spɚˈeɪ̯.ʃən/, suboptimal /sʌbˈɑptɪməl/, unequivocally /ˌʌnɪˈkwɪvək(ə)li/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like tomo, interface, calorie.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.