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

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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.

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As opposed to telling you.

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

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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By this point I've already practiced the pitch

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

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

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We hop on the call do a little bit more negotiation

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

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

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

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

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

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I think the interview was scheduled on a Tuesday

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and it was Monday

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

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

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What was your experience?

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

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

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

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

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But we ended up chatting for like an entire hour.

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I kind of ran him through what we were building.

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Now we're headed to the Super Whisper office.

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

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They are very, very successful.

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

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The CEO is one of our angel investors, Neil.

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

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

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

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

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Like, he put in...

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I think you're just a likable guy.

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No, I think...

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

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

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Like nothing worked.

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

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

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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.

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

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So we have two simultaneous user calls happening technically.

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

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Because they only have one machine

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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We appreciate you helping us.

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Yeah.

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Thank you for coming by.

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It was good seeing you again.

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You guys.

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Thanks, sir.

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

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

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

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

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We haven't really tested there.

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Got a ton of good feedback.

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

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Yo, what's up?

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Welcome to the studio slash office slash apartment.

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

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

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

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

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So that kind of made me a little scared.

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

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I haven't seen this.

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This is my first time seeing these changes.

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So I ended up calling Matt right away.

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

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The learning lesson for us as a team is maybe we

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

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

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It's okay if things go wrong.

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

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

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and the problem that he wanted to solve works

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But he does want the Windows version

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so it seemed to work for his workflow

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

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

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

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

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and like chase your interest Everything kind of feels like a

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

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

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

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Of course it's a YouTuber.

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

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

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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.

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So of course we need like infinite space.

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

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

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

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

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It's gonna be an intense period.

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We'll be in the Speedrun program by the time

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

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

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Space is now open to the public.

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Link in description.

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

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

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Go download it, go break it.

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We're looking forward to your review.

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Things might break.

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Join us along for the journey again.

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Yeah.

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Excited.

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Super, super excited.

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

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “How We Raised $2.4M for Our Startup in One Week”. This video has 219 sentences and 2612 words to shadow. The speech runs for 14:23. The speaker talks fast, about 182 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
onboard adjective	/ɒnˈbɔːd/	Carried or used on or in a vehicle or vessel.
investor noun	/ɪnˈvɛs.tə(ɹ)/	A person who invests money in order to make a profit.
startup noun	/ˈstɑɹtˌʌp/	The act or process of starting a process or machine.
disk noun	/dɪsk/	A thin, flat, circular plate or similar object.
terabyte noun	/ˈtɛɹəˌbaɪt/	One trillion (10¹², or 1,000,000,000,000) bytes or 1,000 gigabytes.
byte noun	/baɪt/	A short sequence of bits (binary digits) that can be operated on as a unit by a computer; the smallest usable machine word.
workflow noun	/ˈwɝkfloʊ/	The flowrate at which a flow of work takes place.
fundraising noun	/ˈfʌndˌɹeɪzɪŋ/	The process of collecting money by requesting donations from individuals and businesses.
upload verb	/ˈʌpˌloʊd/	To transfer data to a computer on a network, especially to a server on the Internet.
stack noun	/stæk/	A large pile of hay, grain, straw, or the like, larger at the bottom than the top, sometimes covered with thatch.
demo noun	/ˈdɛm.oʊ/	A demonstration or visual explanation.
infinite adjective	/ˈɪnfɪnɪt/	Indefinably large, countlessly great; immense.
developer noun	/dɪˈvɛləpɚ/	A person or entity engaged in the creation or improvement of certain classes of products.
diverge verb	/daɪˈvɜːd͡ʒ/	To run apart; to separate; to tend into different directions.
flounder verb	/ˈflaʊ̯ndɚ/	To act clumsily or confused; to struggle or be flustered.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
end up verb	To bring to a conclusion.
go through verb	To travel from one end of something to the other.
take up verb	To pick up.
come back from verb	To become successful, confident or effective again after an injury, setback, failure, embarrassment, etc.
figure out verb	To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
get off verb	To move from being on top of (something) to not being on top of it.
go back verb	To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time.
lift off verb	Synonym of take off (leave the ground and begin flight).

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

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?

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	we've come · I've already practiced · I've seen
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	was lifted · was scheduled · be onboarded
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	guys who are · macOS, which is

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 59 contractions and reduced forms, such as we're, I'm, didn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: throttle /ˈθɹɔ.tl̩/, hypothesis /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: objection /əbˈd͡ʒɛkʃən/, negotiation /nɪˌɡəʊ.ʃiˈeɪ.ʃən/, notion /ˈnoʊʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: developer /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/, simultaneous /ˌsaɪ̯.məlˈteɪ̯.ni.əs/, negotiation /nɪˌɡəʊ.ʃiˈeɪ.ʃən/, hypothesis /haɪˈpɒθɪsɪs/, momentum /ˌmə(ʊ)ˈmɛntəm/

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 onboard, investor, startup.

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.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Sentences worth repeating

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?