Building Ai Powered Podcast Learning With Kevin Smith
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Today's guest is Kevin Smith, who is co-founder of Snipd, one of the world's most popular podcast apps. With Kevin, we talked about:
This episode is brought to you by Swarmia! The engineering intelligence platform that serves some of the best software companies in the world. You can get 20% off by booking a demo at swarmia.com/refactoring! 🎙️ EpisodeYou can watch the full episode on Youtube:  Or listen to it on Spotify, Apple, Overcast, or your podcast app of choice. 🥇 Interview SummaryIf you are a 🔒 paid subscriber 🔒 you will find my own summary of the interview below. It’s the 10-minute, handcrafted takeaways of what we talked about, with timestamps to the relevant video moments, for those who don’t have time to sit through the 1-hour chat. Here is the agenda for today:
Let's dive in 👇 1) 🎓 Kevin's Journey from Finance to AI (01:54)Kevin’s path into tech began with a background in quantitative finance, where he built mathematical models for understanding stock markets and financial derivatives. However, what truly captivated him was the intersection of mathematics and data.
In 2014, Kevin was introduced to machine learning by a friend (who would later become his co-founder at Snipd). This discovery was transformative because machine learning represented exactly what he enjoyed most about his finance work: applying mathematics to data to create intelligent systems. The timing was significant - this was well before the AI boom that would come with ChatGPT. Kevin noted that while the November 2022 ChatGPT moment caught everyone off guard, foundational progress had been building steadily since 2012's AlexNet breakthrough in deep learning. Kevin's transition from finance to tech involved joining an early-stage startup where he built the AI team from scratch, providing him with invaluable entrepreneurial experience that would later inform his approach to founding Snipd. 2) 🚀 From Hackathon to Startup Success (12:17)The origin story of Snipd began with Kevin and his co-founder Bradley Nantes regularly meeting to discuss startup ideas. Their breakthrough came when they decided to participate in Europe's largest hackathon in Zurich to test their concept of applying AI to audio content. Their hackathon project was ambitious: a natural language search engine for podcasts. Their demo was memorable - they searched for "smoking weed" in a Joe Rogan episode featuring Elon Musk, and their system instantly found and played the exact moment.
Not only did they win the hackathon, but the real validation came afterward when multiple participants approached them asking them to use the technology for their own podcast-related problems. This organic interest from strangers convinced them they had identified a real market need. Kevin emphasizes that joining early-stage startups before founding your own company is invaluable - it provides learning opportunities, potential funding connections, and real-world entrepreneurial experience. 3) ⚙️ Technical Challenges of AI-Powered Products (21:25)Kevin approaches AI development with a crucial mindset shift: viewing AI models as a collection of interns rather than deterministic code. This analogy helps navigate the inherent randomness and unpredictability of AI systems... Subscribe to Refactoring to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Refactoring to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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