Andrew Mason’s Descript raises $15M and acquires Lyrebird
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Edit: You can get it to go old school tts synthesis if you feed it kanji letters.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/adobe...
Keep in mind, at the time, Andrew was sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars from Groupon.
We walked up to do the tour and to test the product. There were like 4-6 people there, and I'm sure others had already started the tour. My wife had zero idea who he was, I vaguely knew what he looked like.
We get there and Andrew is standing there at the 24th street bart with a Detour t-shirt on. My wife's app doesn't work, and he helps her get it installed. He is annoyed that the software isn't working, but couldn't be nicer. He patiently figures it out and we were off.
I told her, I think that is Andrew Mason, the guy that started this company, and also the guy that started groupon. She laughed, and was like, no wonder he cared so much.
I guess the point of the story is that I have zero idea what he is like to work with from experience, but my moment meeting him, he came off as humble, smart and nice. Most importantly someone who cared deeply about his company. I like working for and with people like that.
The key takeaway from the story is that Andrew, as a founder, was willing to roll up his sleeves, get in the dirt and talk directly with customers to get early feedback. He didn't use his liquidity and profile to hire someone else to do this – that would have been too easy. A good founder will always start at the foundation, and build from the ground up.