Andrew Hsu
685 posts
Andrew Hsu
@adhsu
@speak cofounder/CTO - AI language learning
San Francisco Katılım Ekim 2009
1.2K Takip Edilen3.7K Takipçiler
I joined @GradientVC at the start of 2024 after 10 years as an operator or founder at Jobr, Newfront, and Vial.
I wasn’t sure if venture would be for me, but the chance to build the best platform for early AI founders was too compelling to miss.
Today marks another step in that journey; we’re launching Fund V: $220M, as a fully independent firm.
We sit in a unique spot: we take bets before ideas are obvious, lead rounds, and partner closely with founders through the highs and lows of building.
Our team is all former operators and engineers, so we bring real empathy for how insanely hard it is and a lot of curiosity for what’s next.
It's an absolute pleasure to work with @darian314 @thezbg, @Cdpetty, @denise_teng25, @EylulKayin, @jackie_eicholz, @kylerduffy, @vigsachi, and devon jarred!
fortune.com/2026/03/17/goo…
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As we all know on X, agentic AI coding crossed a capability threshold at the end of 2025 such that the era of software engineers writing code by hand was over. @speak, we're urgently embracing this fundamental change to the way we develop software. I wrote up a snapshot of what we’re observing and learning, and where we think things are going:
speak.com/blog/agentic-e…
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My last company, Opendoor ($7B), replaced real estate brokers.
Today, my new company WithCoverage raised $42M to replace insurance brokers.
It was led by Sequoia & Khosla, the first time @RoelofBotha and @Rabois partnered since PayPal.
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Andrew Hsu retweetledi
Can voice AI actually get you to fluency?💡
Join us LIVE Wednesday at 4PM CST with Andrew Hsu, Co-founder & CTO, @speak — the voice-first AI language tutor that’s hit $100M ARR and 15M+ downloads.
We'll see you here on X soon!📷
#AI #LanguageLearning
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Andrew Hsu retweetledi
Thanks @RashiShrivast18 for telling the @speak story!
We’re pushing hard to make the world’s best AI language tutor available to everyone. Super excited for the slate of new feature launches coming later this year! Stay tuned.
forbes.com/sites/rashishr…
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House of Hsu
Patrick Hsu@pdhsu
Thrilled to share that I’ve joined @ThriveCapital as a Venture Partner, where I will be helping to build and invest in companies that can push the boundaries of science and technology. I’ve known many of the Thrive team for years and have always admired their warmth, intellect, optimism, and boundless ambition to be the most meaningful partner to founders across every stage and sector. My work has been guided by the belief that alpha is always found at the frontier, with AI starting to achieve human-level performance in generating independent work products, robotics transforming the physical world, biotechnology becoming engineerable, and energy abundance within reach… This is an incredible time to invent and build new companies and I’m excited to get going. I’m grateful for the last few years investing at NFDG across seed to growth. Oh - and @arcinstitute will still be my main gig! My science isn’t going anywhere :)
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i'm hiring for a new team @openai: Applied Evals
our goal is to build the world's best evals for the economically valuable tasks our customers care about most.
we'll execute as a group of high‑taste engineers, combining hands-on, unscalable efforts with systems that others can extend, creating a compounding loop of model improvement.
broadly, the art of evals is figuring out how to ask the right questions. but asking the right questions is really hard -- in any domain, it takes real, deep, lived expertise to define what truly good looks like.
this work is super important and we want to scale it.
excited about shaping model interaction paradigms by partnering with customers, engineering, research, and product teams on how models are deployed and measured?
apply via link in reply or DM me!
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Congrats @OpenAI! Some thoughts from testing the new GPT-5 models @speak over the past several weeks:
- Significant leap in the reasoning frontier - your strong assumption now should be that it can crush most real-world complex tasks across a giant context window/dump, and if it doesn’t, it’s more than likely that your prompt isn’t good enough or you need to provide more clarity. Your ability to think in a structured manner and write with clarity is the big bottleneck now.
- We were the most impressed by GPT-5's pattern recognition and reverse engineering capabilities across giant context dumps. It’s super good at systematically understanding and generalizing from examples to create structured workflows or playbooks.
- Example - over the years, we’ve developed a highly opinionated and structured pedagogical methodology for functional language fluency that we call the Speak Method, but have struggled for years to distill and document it into a playbook clearly enough. Gemini 2.5 Pro and o3-pro couldn’t do this, but GPT-5 did an amazing job analyzing a large dump of our curriculum/content and breaking down/generalizing the principles necessary to scale our content. This was really surprising and felt superhuman.
- We've found previous reasoning models both slow and inconsistent in their logical leaps. GPT-5 feels far more consistent and accurate on reasoning tasks, which is transformative for our curriculum scaling process and language tutoring capabilities.
- Zooming out and speaking as an extremely heavy user of both ChatGPT and the API, I’m super excited (and relieved!) that the constellation of models is going away and everything is getting unified. It’s absurd that the full model is priced ~same as o3/4.1 and 5-mini is 5x cheaper! This day has been coming for a long time, and we expect to switch all of our realtime usecases over with reasoning=minimal.
Huge congrats to the OpenAI team and we can’t wait to bring all this to our users this quarter!
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We just raised $10M to put a data analyst in every knowledge worker's pocket📊
From marketing managers to product managers to founders, everyone now has the power to seek their own data insights
We're eliminating the gap between curiosity and clarity. See how we plan to do it👇
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Andrew Hsu retweetledi
A special bit of silicon valley is that everyone is willing to help each other.
Back in 2015, we pinged @karpathy for AI help and (within 2 min!) he offered to meet up w/ us the next day.
One of a few formative convos that led to us doing AI research and starting @speak.
Latent.Space@latentspacepod
🆕 Personalized AI Language Education, with @adhsu, CTO of @Speak! youtube.com/watch?v=tIVKgz… For the first time, Andrew tells the story about building the next generation of AI Language Learning, starting pre-Transformers, getting advice from @karpathy, and why they went bet hard on South Korea and on personalized, realtime, conversational fluency as the ultimate language learning goal! "It took much, much longer than we expected to build a great product and find good PMF. The first few years were very painful. And I think without this really compelling vision of the future, we would have quit."
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Thanks for having me on @latentspacepod @swyx!
Latent.Space@latentspacepod
🆕 Personalized AI Language Education, with @adhsu, CTO of @Speak! youtube.com/watch?v=tIVKgz… For the first time, Andrew tells the story about building the next generation of AI Language Learning, starting pre-Transformers, getting advice from @karpathy, and why they went bet hard on South Korea and on personalized, realtime, conversational fluency as the ultimate language learning goal! "It took much, much longer than we expected to build a great product and find good PMF. The first few years were very painful. And I think without this really compelling vision of the future, we would have quit."
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Excited to announce that we've raised a $187m Series C!!
Plenty of fuel to continue accomplishing our mission
To expand the economic bounds of humankind
You'll know we've gotten there when you look up at the night sky & see Varda laboratories in orbit the size of cities
Varda Space Industries@VardaSpace
Today we’re announcing two pieces of news: 1) We raised $187 million Series C led by @NatCapCentral and @ShrugCap. 2) We’re expanding into a new lab space to begin work on biologics. Soon, space reentry will be ordinary and drugs made in orbit will be part of everyday care.
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Thanks for having me on @ashleevance - was a very fun convo!
Ashlee Vance@ashleevance
Full episode with @adhsu on life as a child prodigy, being one of the first Thiel Fellows and building @speak Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:03:05 - Started college at twelve 00:05:34 - Homeschooled by immigrant parents 00:08:30 - Three degrees by sixteen 00:19:53 - First Thiel Fellowship class 00:21:07 - Dropping out Stanford PhD 00:25:01 - Why not cure cancer 00:34:47 - Building Speak with AI 00:38:00 - Deep learning winter thawing 00:41:25 - Three failed product launches 00:42:07 - Choosing South Korea market 00:43:03 - Product takes off rocket 00:48:00 - ChatGPT threatens language learning 00:51:15 - OpenAI partnership and investment 00:56:16 - AI completely changes learning
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This is the first thing you see when you open the premium version of Jack Dorsey’s new app
TFTC@TFTC21
Jack Dorsey unveils “Bitchat,” a new Bluetooth-based messaging app. No Wi-Fi. No cell service. Messages hop peer-to-peer, up to 300 meters. Fully end-to-end encrypted.
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this is awesome!
I’ve known @adhsu for a long time as a friend thru the thiel fellowship, and he’s really great, smart, kinda normal too like gets along with many people
@ashleevance asks about what it was like as a kid in college at 12. he lived at home and took the bus to university (something i did too, at 12.)
and i too benefitted from access to athletics, growing and competing physically taught me many things.
that one of the reasons i keep fighting for trans students access to sports. it’s like the people who are blocking this don’t even care about them at all. it’s all for show. at least put some effort into making sure that there is some access to sports for trans athletes, co-ed or whatever.
thank you for coming to my ted talk
Ashlee Vance@ashleevance
From the pod this week with @adhsu
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