Tanay Kothari

The Journey

Tanay taught himself to code at nine and by his teens had co-founded Convert.cc, a music intelligence platform that reached 2.5 million monthly users without any marketing spend, alongside Proximity, a social travel app.

He studied Computer Science and AI at Stanford, interned at Microsoft where he led a personalisation project for Microsoft News, then co-founded FeatherX after graduating, a startup that personalised website content based on user behaviour. It was acquired within a year and Tanay stayed on through the acquisition at Cerebra, first as Head of Product, then Head of AI & Engineering.

In 2021 he and his Stanford batchmate Sahaj Garg founded Wispr Flow to build the best voice interfaces in the world. The product turns speech into polished writing inside any app, running through multiple AI layers to handle transcription, remove filler words, apply punctuation, and adapt tone to context. The company has raised $81M and is now available across Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android.

The Exact Tools

Hex powers a custom-built system sitting on top of Wispr Flow's own data for expansion and qualification intelligence, identifying which users are showing signals of deeper adoption and which accounts are ready for outbound.

Outreach handles email sequences. When the data signals from Hex surface the right accounts, Outreach is where those sequences run.

Stripe manages billing across the self-serve motion, handling everything from individual subscriptions to expansion revenue.

What Channels Work For Them

Product-led growth is the core engine. Wispr Flow is the kind of product people try once and immediately start telling others about, so the PLG motion drives the majority of growth with users discovering and converting through the experience itself.

LinkedIn is the primary social channel, where the target audience for a product at the intersection of productivity and AI tends to live and where organic content gets the most traction.

Distribution partnerships with AI resellers round out the mix, partnering with resellers already embedded in the AI ecosystem to extend reach without scaling headcount.

What To Look For in the Age of AI

Tanay has turned down salespeople who crushed quota at companies like Google and Salesforce because the metrics most companies hire for don't predict what actually matters. He screens for three things instead.

Reading the room without being told. The micro-signals like a prospect checking their phone or a slight shift in body language when you've lost them. Less than 5% of salespeople he's interviewed can pick up on these cues, and the ones who do don't just close deals, they re-engage a drifting prospect before the prospect even realises they drifted.

Already selling the product before being hired. Every great salesperson they've hired had the same pattern: they discovered Wispr Flow, fell in love with it, and started telling everyone they know without any comp plans or incentives. If you need a quota to start selling, you're not the person he's looking for.

Using AI to make yourself faster without anyone telling you to. Not using ChatGPT sometimes, but actually automating your own grunt work, going from Gong calls to CRM updates automatically, reclaiming the two to three hours a day most salespeople waste on admin. The best salespeople are already doing this independently rather than waiting for their company to roll out an AI strategy.

Wispr Flow isn't optimising for closed deals. They're building for a seven-star experience at every touchpoint, and that starts with who they hire.