Cliff Weitzman x Speechify
“I get the most satisfaction from creating value in the world”
In every way, Brown alum Cliff Weitzman (‘16), founder and CEO of Speechify, embodies the substance and spirit of a social entrepreneur. Despite an obvious whip-sharp mind and insatiable desire to explore information, he confronted great obstacles due to his dyslexia. Always in possession of a strong desire to connect with others, to accumulate knowledge and information, and to understand how people optimally think and learn, he characterizes himself as having a “strong bias towards action”.
Speechify is a mobile/desktop productivity app that translates text into audible speech enabling people with Dyslexia, ADHD, impaired vision, and other reading disabilities to garner information at different rates of speed. It is highly user friendly, and thus has also found a market among consumers who simply want to maximize their productivity and learning capabilities.
“I’ve listened to about 100 books a year for the past 10-15 years. It let me run through a lot of thought experiments that other people did in their brain and it let me learn from that. The more you build your mental model of the universe the easier it will be for you to come up with ideas that work for you, who you are and what you are passionate about.”
As an undergraduate, he was always seeking to design innovative solutions and pursue projects for which he felt a missionary zeal. He built 36 products, attended over 30 hackathons outside of class, and developed a text-to-speech software program that later served as the foundation for Speechify. He approached his education and entrepreneurship with equal doses of open-mindness and productive action. In his first weeks of school, he spent his evenings in the Ratty sitting with three new, separate groups of students across all grade levels that enabled him to develop a strong, diverse network of friends and connections. He estimated that he knew nearly 60% of his freshman class within the first three to four months of school. He looked to his friends who were balancing schoolwork and athletics, and decided that he was going to pursue his passions with equal determination and time-management. Instead of practice, he worked on his products, and instead of games, he attended hackathons and pitch competitions. Even while working out himself, he would listen to audio versions of his school textbooks. Given that he was pursuing an independent concentration, Renewable Energy Engineering, he did not have the prerequisites for the majority of the classes he was intending to take. Regardless, he would show up in advance and attend the classes every day, even sometimes sitting outside the classroom, until the professor would provide him with an override.
Following his graduation, he remained at Brown as a sponsored Visiting Scholar which gave him enough bandwidth to continue exploring how to integrate AI and deep-learning into product innovation and program design. During this time he asked himself, “If I was a billionaire right now, what would I want to spend my time on?” For him, it was to solve the problem of dyslexia. To date, he retains strong friendships and connections to Brown, and returns to inspire young entrepreneurs to pursue their passion.
“When you are building a product, you are not going to build an incredible piece of technology on the first day… It takes time… It takes a lot of integration”
**Whoever resonates with Weizman and his mission to create value in the world can find additional information by:
Searching “Cliff Weitzman” on Youtube
Searching “Cliff Weitzman” on Medium.com (https://medium.com/@cliffweitzman) where you will find a list of his top 100 books, and tons of his personal productivity tools and tricks
And, most importantly, going to the app store and downloading Speechify