I’m going to tell you something that might sound crazy. For the past few years, I’ve been recording my life. Not just the highlights, but everything. I have over 6,000 hours of audio capturing conversations with my wife, my team at my startups, and even my own thoughts spoken aloud. It’s all been transcribed, indexed, and fed into a personal AI I’m building from the ground up.
Why would I do this? Because I’m convinced the next massive leap in artificial intelligence won’t just be about building smarter tools to search the web or generate images. It’s about building a smarter you. It’s about creating a second brain, a digital twin of your own mind that can augment your memory, creativity, and self-awareness.
Being a founder in Silicon Valley is a chaotic existence. I’ve been through the gauntlet, building four companies and successfully exiting two of them—RemoteTeam, which was acquired by Gusto, and MovieLaLa, which was acquired by Gfycat. I’ve also been lucky enough to be an angel investor in over 200 companies that are defining the future, including giants like Anthropic, OpenAI, Scale AI, and Hugging Face. Through all this, I’ve seen one thing clearly: the most valuable data in the world isn’t on the internet; it’s locked away inside our own heads.
The Goldmine of Unstructured Personal Data
Think about your own life. Every conversation you have, every idea that pops into your head during a shower, every piece of feedback you give a colleague—it’s a firehose of unstructured data. It’s a rich, complex, and incredibly valuable dataset that, for the most part, is completely lost. It evaporates the moment it’s created.
We have amazing tools for organizing external information. But what about the internal world? What if you could query your own life? Imagine asking: “What were the three main concerns my co-founder and I had when we were first raising our seed round for RemoteTeam?” or “What was that book recommendation my friend gave me last month that I forgot to write down?”
This is the problem I became obsessed with solving. During the early days of RemoteTeam, we were moving at a breakneck pace. Decisions were made in quick hallway chats, on frantic Zoom calls, and over late-night Slack messages. So much context was lost. I found myself wishing I had a perfect memory, a way to rewind the tape. That’s when the idea for my personal AI was born. It started as a simple experiment: what if I just started recording everything?
It wasn’t easy. There were technical hurdles, privacy considerations, and the simple awkwardness of having a microphone on all the time. But the insights I’ve gained have been profound. I’ve uncovered my own communication patterns, identified my blind spots, and rediscovered long-lost ideas that have turned into new ventures. It’s like having a superpower.
From Personal AI to the Voice Revolution
This deep dive into my own data naturally led me to the world of AI voice. Voice is the original user interface. It’s the most intuitive, expressive, and efficient way for us to communicate. For decades, our interactions with computers have been filtered through the clumsy intermediaries of keyboards and screens. We’ve been forced to speak the machine’s language.
That’s finally changing. Thanks to breakthroughs in conversational AI and speech recognition, we are at the beginning of a new era. An era where technology will finally learn to speak our language. AI assistants are moving beyond simple command-and-response. They are starting to understand not just what we say, but how we say it—the nuance, the emotion, the intent behind our words. They are becoming capable of having natural, free-flowing conversations that feel less like interacting with a machine and more like talking to a trusted partner.
This is a monumental shift. It’s the difference between a passive tool and an active collaborator. A tool waits for your instructions. A collaborator understands your goals and works with you to achieve them. This is the future of AI voice, and it’s going to change everything.
What a Voice-First Future Looks Like
So, where is this all heading? This isn’t just a theoretical exercise for me. I’m actively building and investing in this future. Here are a few of the things that I see coming, and that I’m putting my money and time behind:
The True Personal Assistant: Forget setting timers and playing music. I’m talking about an AI assistant that is a true extension of you. An assistant that has read every email you’ve ever sent, heard every meeting you’ve ever attended, and knows your personal and professional goals inside and out. It will be able to draft your emails in your exact style, prepare you for a meeting by summarizing your entire history with the other attendees, and proactively manage your schedule based on a deep understanding of your priorities. It will be your chief of staff, your coach, and your second brain, all rolled into one.
AI-Powered Mentorship at Scale: One of my core beliefs is that every single person can benefit from a coach or mentor. But high-quality mentorship is expensive and scarce. With AI voice, we can change that. Imagine a young entrepreneur in a small town having access to a mentor that has been trained on the collective wisdom of thousands of the world’s best founders. They could practice their pitch, get feedback on their business plan, and receive guidance on navigating the challenges of startup life, all through a natural, conversational interface.
The Disappearance of the Keyboard: I firmly believe that we are seeing the beginning of the end for the keyboard as our primary input method. As AI voice becomes more and more accurate and context-aware, typing will start to feel slow and inefficient. We will simply speak to our devices, our homes, and our cars. The digital world will become an ambient layer that we interact with through the most natural means possible: our voice.
I understand the hesitation. The idea of an AI that knows everything about you can be unsettling. Concerns about privacy and data security are not just valid; they are essential. We, the builders of this technology, have a responsibility to address these challenges head-on, with transparency and a commitment to user control. We must build systems that are secure, private by design, and always aligned with the user’s best interests.
But we can’t let fear of the unknown stop us from building a better future. The potential for this technology to augment human capability is simply too immense. I’m not just an investor watching from the sidelines. I’m an entrepreneur in the arena, building these systems, and I am more optimistic than ever.
This is the next chapter. We’re building it one conversation at a time. And I can’t wait to show you what’s next.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do all experts agree with this view?
No, and that's fine. The best ideas in business are often contrarian. I share my perspective based on my experience and data, but I encourage you to seek out opposing viewpoints and form your own conclusions.
How can I apply this thinking to my own situation?
Start by identifying the core principle behind the opinion, not the specific example. Then ask yourself: does this principle apply to my context? If yes, test it in a small, low-risk way before going all in.
What experience informs this perspective?
This perspective comes from over a decade of building companies in Silicon Valley, two successful exits (RemoteTeam to Gusto, MovieLaLa to Gfycat), and investing in 200+ startups including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Scale AI. I write about what I've lived.
What's the most common pushback you get on this?
People often push back by citing exceptions or edge cases. And they're usually right that exceptions exist. But building a strategy around exceptions rather than patterns is a losing game for most founders.