Andrew Hsu

He grew up in Seattle; his family is from Taiwan.⁠[1][2]

In 2001, at the age of 10, he began molecular biology research in a pathology laboratory at the University of Washington.⁠[3][4]

At the age of 11 he won the grand prize at the Washington State Science and Engineering Fair.⁠[4]

Core Memory’s 2025 episode description states that as a teenager he won science contests, wrote an award-winning autobiography, started a foundation to help children in need, was often interviewed on television and toured the country telling his story. TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote in 2011 that he was the author of several books and had once been a competitive swimmer.⁠[2][4]

In 2003, aged 12, he formally enrolled at the University of Washington.⁠[3][4][1]

In 2007, at 16, he graduated from the University of Washington with three bachelor’s degrees, in biochemistry, chemistry and neurobiology, and a minor in mathematics.⁠[3][4][2]

Core Memory writes that The Seattle Times ran a story on his graduation in 2007.⁠[2]

The same year he entered the Neuroscience Ph.D. program at Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry, beginning his doctoral studies at the age of 16.⁠[3][1][4]

In early 2011, aged 19 and a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the neuroscience program, he left Stanford University to start his own company; his ASU+GSV Summit biography and Forbes write that he left to join the Thiel Fellowship.⁠[4][5][3][1][6]

On the Latent Space podcast in 2025 he recalled that he was 19 and in graduate school when he joined the Thiel Fellowship and already knew he would leave graduate school to do startups; he said that he dropped out of graduate school, had a few failed startups and eventually started Speak. A different account appears in a 2022 TechCrunch article, which states that he completed a neuroscience Ph.D. at Stanford before joining Connor ZwickConnor ZwickConnor Zwick is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Speak, an AI language-learning app that he founded with Andrew Hsu in 2016; earlier, the flashcard app Flashcards+ that he built was acquired by Chegg, and he was selected as a Thiel Fellow in 2012.Open the full entry to co-launch Speak.⁠[7][8]

On May 25, 2011, Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry’s Thiel Fellowship, then called “20 Under 20,” announced its first class of 24 fellows, grouped under nine fields; he was listed in the “Education” group with Nick Cammarata, David Merfield and John Marbach.⁠[9]

His project as a fellow was Airy Labs, which built social learning games for children; Game Developer wrote that the grant program for young entrepreneurs provided his company with $100,000.⁠[5][10][3]

On a 2025 podcast he recalled the program as “a really crazy idea at the time and very controversial.” Through it he met Connor Zwick, his later co-founder at Speak; TechCrunch wrote in 2022 that he was in the first class and Connor Zwick in the second, while ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry writes that the two met through the fellowship in 2012.⁠[7][1][8][6]

He founded Airy Labs in 2011 to build mobile, tablet and browser games with an educational twist for young children; the company was part of StartX (formerly SSE Labs), a Stanford student startup accelerator, and began operations in Palo Alto after raising its seed funding.⁠[4][3]

On August 3, 2011, Airy Labs announced $1.5 million in seed funding from Foundation CapitalFoundation CapitalFoundation Capital is an American early-stage venture capital firm founded in 1995, with offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco. It invests in enterprise software, artificial intelligence, fintech and crypto, and was an early backer of companies including Netflix, Solana and Cerebras.Open the full entry, GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry Ventures and the Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson; TechCrunch wrote that December that the round was led by Foundation Capital, with other prominent angel investors and micro-cap venture firms also taking part.⁠[4][10][5]

The company said its games were designed in the spirit of “learning through play” and “learning by doing,” and that its first games would teach English, math and memory building to children aged 5 to 13; its aim was to make games that parents could feel good about handing to their children “and that don’t suck.”⁠[10]

TechCrunch wrote in 2012 that he was the first Thiel Fellow to raise venture funding and for a time looked like the program’s biggest success story.⁠[11]

TechCrunch wrote in 2012 that Airy Labs released seven games in relatively quick succession in the autumn of 2011, some of which, such as Mini Catch, ranked high in AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry’s App Store; the games were free at first, and in-app purchases were added several months later. Fast Company wrote in 2012 that the Airy Labs game Mini Minute had players shoot monsters while learning to tell time.⁠[11][3]

On February 11, 2012, TechCrunch published an article stating that Airy Labs had eliminated the vast majority of its 20-person staff, leaving a skeleton crew. The article rested on accounts from former employees, which its author, Anthony Ha, wrote might be colored by their negativity toward the company at the time. Former employees said that only an engineer, two artists, an administrator/executive assistant and Hsu himself remained; that the company had said investors were worried and the team would have to take a pay cut, after which some quit and others were laid off or asked to take unpaid leave; and that desks in the Palo Alto office were being rented out to other companies. They also said that he had promised a Series A round was coming and hired aggressively, growing the company to 20 people and saying it would soon have 40, but that the Series A had not materialized. The author wrote that he had asked the Thiel Fellowship for comment and received no response.⁠[11]

Former employees in the article blamed the management: they said that his father, David Hsu, was the real boss, introduced to staff as chief strategist and later as chief operating officer, that his mother was also involved in management and his younger brother was often around, and that the family relationship was never explicitly disclosed to staff; that the hours from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. were designated “library” hours, when staff were to communicate only by instant message and email; that end-of-day debriefings with David Hsu or with him sometimes ran until 9 or 10 p.m. or later and six- or seven-day weeks were common; and that late in 2011 the team demanded more reasonable hours and the Hsus agreed. They also said the company had no clear vision or sense of how it would reach its goal and for several months in the autumn of 2011 had no full-time game designer.⁠[11]

In response he acknowledged the cuts, saying: “We’re a young company and we tried some early experiments… some worked and some didn’t, so now we’re focusing a smaller team on the areas that worked.” He added: “I’m a first-time CEO and certainly made some mistakes, including growing the company too fast,” and “I was and continue to be the sole decision maker in the company.” He said he was making management team changes, had advisors, investors and experienced mentors to lean on, and that the company was working on new projects coming out soon. One former employee in the article recalled him saying that he was fully committed to the vision.⁠[11]

Core Memory wrote in 2025 that Airy Labs struggled.⁠[2]

On April 27, 2012, Fast Company placed him 68th on its Most Creative People 2012 list. In the profile he said that he moved around a lot while working, drew on whiteboards and had started holding walking meetings; he noted that parents paid for the apps but that the games also had to appeal to children: “We want to make it attractive and fun for the kids, otherwise we could just be designing textbooks.” He also said the company gathered user feedback constantly, including through an in-app feedback option.⁠[3]

On a 2025 podcast he said that before Speak he had a startup named Bloom, after the “Bloom 2 sigma” problem in education research, which did not find product–market fit.⁠[7]

Before starting Speak he and Connor Zwick spent a year studying and researching machine learning and developed accent-detection algorithms using YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry videos as training data; Forbes writes that the two slipped into classes at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry and Stanford University to learn machine-learning techniques such as reinforcement learning, and listened in on lectures by the OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry co-founder John Schulman without ever being caught. He recalled that in 2016 he and his co-founder were fascinated by the promise of AI, spent a year-long sabbatical learning everything they could, and believed that language models would become superhuman within five to ten years.⁠[8][12][6][7]

Connor Zwick and he founded Speak in 2016, with Connor Zwick as chief executive and himself as chief technology officer; a TechCrunch article of June 2024 instead says that the two launched Speak in 2014.⁠[8][12][6][13][14]

He said in 2025 that Speak’s first few years were very painful but that the company never pivoted.⁠[7]

Speak went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2017 batch (W17); Y Combinator’s founder page lists him as Speak’s co-founder and chief technology officer and as an alumnus of Stanford University.⁠[15][16]

In November 2017 Connor Zwick sent investors a memo setting out why he and his co-founder Andrew had decided to make South Korea Speak’s first market; AccelAccelAccel is a venture capital firm co-founded in 1983 by Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz. It invests through regional teams and early-stage, growth and late-stage funds, with operations in the United States, Europe, Israel and India. Its investment history includes Facebook, Flipkart, Atlassian, Slack and other technology businesses. Fundraising totals, regulatory assets under management and portfolio-company transaction values are distinct measures.Open the full entry wrote in 2025 that this choice had been a massive part of Speak’s early success.⁠[17]

He recalled in 2025 that they almost chose Taiwan and that choosing Korea was somewhat serendipitous: the company’s first employee was Korean and had been his co-founder’s college roommate; he said Korea was obsessed with learning English and had every human-based solution possible. He also said that the co-founders knew nothing about enterprise software and cared a great deal about the app being native, feeling great, performing well and being highly polished, so consumers were the only path.⁠[7]

He recalled that Speak’s early app was free and organized around packs of content rather than courses; in 2018 the team tore everything down and fully changed course, focusing on teaching English in South Korea, and abandoned the free version to go straight to a paid model. Forbes writes that Connor Zwick’s idea came from a 2018 trip to Seoul, where he saw English classes and advertisements everywhere. A TechCrunch article of June 2024 states that Speak launched in its first market, South Korea, in 2019.⁠[7][6][14]

He said that Speak’s first iOS engineer, hired through a Y Combinator referral, was in Slovenia, which led the company to keep an engineering office there for several years.⁠[7]

In November 2022 Speak announced a $27 million Series B led by the OpenAI Startup FundOpenAI Startup FundThe OpenAI Startup Fund is a venture fund set up by OpenAI in May 2021 with an initial $100 million from Microsoft and other partners to invest in early-stage AI companies. It had raised about $175 million by 2023, and control passed to Ian Hathaway in March 2024.Open the full entry, with participation from Lachy Groom, Josh Buckley, Justin Mateen, Gokul RajaramGokul RajaramGokul Rajaram is a Silicon Valley product leader and investor who helped build Google AdSense early in his career, went on to serve as an executive at Facebook, Square (Block), and DoorDash, and sits on the boards of public companies including Coinbase and Pinterest; in 2024 he co-founded the investment firm Marathon Management Partners with a partner.Open the full entry and Founders FundFounders FundFounders Fund is a venture capital firm founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Peter Thiel and his former PayPal colleagues Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Run by partners who were entrepreneurs themselves, it argues that founders should keep more control and is known for betting on difficult technology projects in areas such as space, defense, and artificial intelligence. It was Palantir’s first institutional investor, has invested in SpaceX many times since 2008, and its other notable investments include Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, and Anduril; as of March 2026 it had raised nine early-stage funds and four growth funds.Open the full entry, bringing its total raised to just over $47 million. TechCrunch wrote that at the time Speak was one of the top education apps in Korea on the iOS App Store, with over 15 million lessons started annually, 100,000 active subscribers, “double-digit million” annual recurring revenue and 40 employees across its San Francisco headquarters and offices in Seoul and Ljubljana, Slovenia. Speak’s own announcement of November 18, 2022, states that just under 15 million English lessons had been started on the platform in 2022, that it had nearly 100,000 paying subscribers, and that Speak was the top-grossing education app in the App Store.⁠[8][18]

He recalled in 2025 that OpenAI’s speech-recognition model Whisper was “really that magic moment” for Speak: the team tested it on a recording of a beginner English learner in Korea, and none of the four people in the room could make out what was said with their eyes closed, but the model got it right.⁠[7]

In March 2023 Speak upgraded its AI tutor to OpenAI’s GPT-4 and adopted OpenAI’s Whisper API for multilingual speech recognition; he recalled that when Speak first launched AI role plays using GPT-4 in 2023, people were far more concerned about safety than later.⁠[12][7]

On August 31, 2023, Speak announced a $16 million Series B-2 led by the angel investor Lachy Groom, with the Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi taking part, bringing its total raised to $63 million. Speak was by then live in about 20 countries and had well over 100,000 subscribers in South Korea, and said it had helped nearly 6% of Korea’s population, about 3 million people, learn English.⁠[12]

In June 2024 Speak raised $20 million, which TechCrunch calls a Series B extension and Speak’s own announcement calls Series B-3 financing; the round was led by Buckley Ventures, with the OpenAI Startup Fund, Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry, Paul Graham and Jeff Weiner participating; its valuation doubled to $500 million and its total raised reached $84 million. Speak then had more than 10 million users and customers in more than 40 countries, and 75 employees across offices in San Francisco, Seoul, Tokyo and Ljubljana.⁠[14][19]

On December 10, 2024, Speak announced a $78 million Series C led by Accel, with existing investors including the OpenAI Startup Fund, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator taking part, at a valuation of $1 billion, double that of six months earlier, bringing its total raised to $162 million; Accel’s Ben Quazzo joined Speak’s board.⁠[13][20]

At the time of the round he said the Speak app had been downloaded more than 10 million times; TechCrunch put average usage at around 10 to 20 minutes a day. He also referred to a system the company was building to measure fluency and learning results: “This system we’re building right now to quantify fluency and efficacy.”⁠[13]

On July 2, 2025, Ashlee Vance’s Core Memory podcast published an interview with him (episode 23) covering his child-prodigy years, how Speak bet on AI and language learning early, and how people can learn better.⁠[2]

On July 11, 2025, the Latent Space podcast released an interview with him. He said that Speak was now the biggest English-learning app in South Korea, that about 6% of the Korean population had tried it, and that its annual recurring revenue was well over $50 million, mostly from consumer subscriptions; that the business-to-business offering had begun about a year earlier as a side experiment; that Speak was well along in other Asian markets such as Japan and Taiwan, also taught English in about 40 more countries, and had Spanish and French live, with several more languages coming that year; and that 90% of its core product development team was in San Francisco.⁠[7]

On September 17, 2025, TaiwanPlus’s Zoom In Zoom Out program featured Speak, with him interviewed as co-founder and chief technology officer. He said that Speak saw itself as an “AI native language app” that did not teach explicit grammar rules or vocabulary, and that “A huge part of the reason that people want to learn a new language like English is for human connection.” The program stated that Speak had more than 10 million users across Asia and was growing quickly in Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.⁠[21]

Forbes wrote in November 2025 that Speak had more than $100 million in annualized revenue, about 15 million downloads and roughly $160 million in total funding from investors including Khosla Ventures, Accel and the OpenAI Startup Fund; that it had begun pushing into the enterprise market in 2024, with about 500 companies, including KPMG and HD Hyundai, offering subscriptions to employees, mainly in South Korea; that it had gained ground in Japan and Taiwan and began a concerted push into the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry in June 2025; and that it offered role plays and lesson plans in English, Korean, Spanish, Japanese, French and Italian, built primarily on OpenAI’s models.⁠[6]

On September 10, 2026, writing as Speak’s co-founder and chief technology officer on the company blog, he announced Live Tutor Lessons powered by OpenAI’s GPT-Live-1, beginning with a limited rollout for English and Spanish learners. The post states that the AI tutor can help while a learner is still answering, leave room to think during pauses without interrupting and offer hints when a learner stalls; in Speak’s tests, framing the model as a language tutor rather than a generic assistant cut its interruptions of learners’ thinking pauses from 27.6% to 13.6%.⁠[22]

OpenAI’s voice API page quotes him: “A good language tutor knows when to give learners space and when to step in,” adding that in Speak’s early evaluations interruptions during thinking pauses fell by almost 80% compared with previous turn-based systems.⁠[23]

As of November 2026 he is co-founder and chief technology officer of Speak. His ASU+GSV Summit speaker biography describes Speak as the top education brand in South Korea, with subscribers in more than 40 countries and over $150 million raised from investors including Accel and the OpenAI Startup Fund.⁠[1][22]

He lives in San Francisco with his wife. His ASU+GSV Summit biography notes his lifelong interest in education technology and rapid learning.⁠[1]

He said on a 2025 podcast that the Speak team takes an annual trip together and that the previous year’s trip had been to Taipei.⁠[7]

He said on a 2025 podcast that Speak at that time offered a pronunciation coach for English only, based on a fine-tuned wav2vec model.⁠[7]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[24]

Speak: Official website: https://www.speak.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[25]

X: Public account: https://x.com/adhsu (opens in a new window).⁠[1][16]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adhsu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]