Otter.ai’s CEO grew up with rationed food in China—now his AI startup makes $100 million a year, and he runs on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s smoothie daily

Résumé détaillé

Otter.ai’s Sam Liang left China for the American Dream but struggled with English. Taping lectures on a Walkman sparked the idea that made him a millionaire.

When Sam Liang, the milliomaire CEO and co-founder of Otter.ai, moved from China to the U.S. to study, he could barely understand his professors because of the language barrier. So he took a Sony Walkman to class, recorded every lecture, and replayed the tapes until he understood them.

That became the inspiration for the AI notetaker, Otter.ai, that he co-founded in 2016. The company says it has since transcribed more than 1 billion meetings for over 40 million users. Last month, it secured $320 million in financing, and investors include early backers of Google, Zoom and Tesla.

Growing up in China, Liang always dreamed of studying in America—and that’s exactly what he did, first at the University of Arizona and then Stanford for his PhD. There, he hit the jackpot with his faculty advisor: David Cheriton, who famously mentored Larry Page and Sergey Brin and wrote them a $100,000 check to launch Google.

“He instilled in me the importance of true big thinking, and ignited my drive to one day set up a company of my own,” Liang tells Fortune.

He got his start with Silicon Valley engineering jobs at Cisco and Tropos Networks, before joining Google in 2006 as a tech lead. His work on the “blue dot” became the backbone of Google Maps. He quit his cushy job in 2010 to co-found his first startup, Alohar Mobile, which was acquired by Alibaba in 2013 for millions, and gave him the taste of entrepreneurship.

But when he started pitching his idea for Otter, voice data was expensive and AI wasn’t on people’s radars yet.

“Many investors thought we were crazy,” he recalls. “We were well ahead of the game, long before ChatGPT and the proliferation of AI meeting assistants.

They weren’t crazy, just early. Liang and his co-founder Yun Fu, spent two years building the technology under the name AISense before launching a free version of Otter in February 2018, followed three months later by a paid tier.

Then the pandemic moved the world’s meetings onto Zoom.

Début de l'article, extrait de Fortune. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.