Connor Zwick

He was born into a farming family in WisconsinWisconsinWisconsin is a state in the north-central United States; its capital is Madison and its largest city is Milwaukee. Wisconsin was admitted to the Union on May 29, 1848, as the 30th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 5,893,718 residents.Open the full entry and taught himself to code as a middle-school student. He recalled that his mother ran an accounting and tax firm from the basement of the family home, where he first used an old computer, and that since almost no one around him in Wisconsin was interested in computers, he found like-minded people online.⁠[1]

A BuzzFeed News profile states that by the age of 13 he had been taking computers apart for years, and that an Australian technology site, unaware of his age, tried to hire him as a writer.⁠[2]

He attended Waukesha Engineering Preparatory Academy in Waukesha and graduated from it; when Patch interviewed him in January 2011, he was a senior there. He said at the time that the robotics team had taught him professional skills and that the diverse team opened “my eyes to different walks of life.”⁠[3]

He recalled that his first mobile app grew out of a chance meeting with a man at an airport in Wisconsin, who offered to buy him a MacBook if he built an app for him; at the time he had only a Windows computer. The highlights of an 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 podcast episode place the start of his founder career at a chance encounter at the Milwaukee airport.⁠[1][4]

He built the flashcard app Flashcards+ in his senior year of high school. He recalled that the app turned the 3-by-5-inch paper cards that American students use into a digital version sized to the iPhone screen; released for free, it went from a few downloads a week to thousands a day and within a few months became the No. 1 app in the education category.⁠[2][5][1]

He recalled that the film The Social Network came out while he was in high school, and that because Mark ZuckerbergMark ZuckerbergMark Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook, Chairman and CEO of Meta, and a co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. His work spans social networking, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry’s story in it begins at Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry, it made him want to attend Harvard University.⁠[1]

Speaking about the origins of Speak, he mentioned that he had studied Spanish for four years, yet when he went to Spain around the time of his graduation he could hardly say a word.⁠[1]

He recalled that right after high school he went to San Francisco and considered skipping college; in the end he decided to spend a year at Harvard University and enjoyed college life, but he went to San Francisco for technology work nearly every other week and eventually concluded that his real path lay in San Francisco. Patch wrote in June 2012 that he had studied at Harvard University over the past year.⁠[1][3]

BuzzFeed News writes that he believed Flashcards+ helped him get into Harvard University and the startup incubator Y Combinator; he said that Harvard University called him the day after his interview and said “that was very rare.”⁠[2]

He recalled hearing talks at Harvard University by Mark Zuckerberg and 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, though he did not simply set out to follow their paths; he said Peter Thiel’s talk there influenced him, and that it was funny the school had allowed such a talk at all.⁠[1]

The BuzzFeed News profile also relates that the previous summer a company had wanted to invest in Flashcards+; he turned it down, saying “I’m 17; I don’t want the responsibility,” but the company still flew him out for the summer.⁠[2]

He said Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry was a longtime friend and that they first met in 2012.⁠[1]

In June 2012 he was selected for the second class of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry. The class had 20 members, each of whom received $100,000 over two years, plus mentors, to build companies instead of attending college. The list of fellows gives him as 18 and from Waukesha, Wisconsin, describes him as passionate about education and wanting to overhaul the outdated U.S.United 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 education system with technology, and says that as a Fellow he would focus on Flashcards+, which it describes as a mobile learning platform with more than 1.5 million downloads and more than 400 million crowd-sourced flashcards.⁠[6][7][8][3]

The body of the same VentureBeat article gives his age as 19, unlike the 18 in the list.⁠[6]

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, introducing that year’s fellows, wrote that as a Harvard University student he had an iPhone app that made enough to give him a livable income; the flashcard app seemed simple on the surface, but he thought of it as a learning network that responds and adapts to how people progress in taking in new material.⁠[8]

Patch wrote that he said in a 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 video that the fellowship was a validation that let him tell his mother he was not “just going to be a bum.”⁠[3]

He was in the second class of Thiel Fellows, and Andrew Hsu, with whom he later founded Speak, was in the first; the two met through the Thiel Fellowship. 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 wrote in 2025 that they met through the fellowship in 2012, when he had just dropped out of Harvard University for what he calls a “deep learning sabbatical.”⁠[9][1][10][11]

After becoming a Thiel Fellow, he founded Coco Controller with Colton Gyulay and served as its founder and CEO. The company was in Y Combinator’s Summer 2012 batch and made a tactile gaming controller for mobile phones; Y Combinator’s company page now lists it as inactive.⁠[12][5]

TechCrunch wrote on August 14, 2012 that Coco Controller was raising money on Kickstarter with a goal of $175,000 and had so far raised $12,000; the YC-backed company had also opened a $150,000 convertible note. A black or white Coco cost $42 and a color one $50. The controller had an analog stick and an eight-direction pad, had no battery and drew power through the headphone jack, and came with an extender for iPads. The article describes him and Colton Gyulay as Harvard University dropouts.⁠[13]

He said the two came up with the idea on a plane after growing frustrated with touchscreen gaming and built an Arduino-based proof of concept; he spent two months designing manufacturable circuitry and a plastic body and coordinating manufacturing, while Colton Gyulay signed up games and built a simple SDK for several platforms. He said more than 30 games had signed up before the launch.⁠[13]

The BuzzFeed News profile, written as the campaign launched, gives his age as 19 and was based on an interview at a coffee shop in Palo Alto. It states that Flashcards+ had had almost a million downloads; that the controller connected through the audio port rather than Bluetooth, cost $35 and had 31 companies signed on to make their games work with it; that the Kickstarter goal was $175,000; and that a New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry reporter had filmed him for the campaign video. He conceded that the project was not “world-changing” like many Thiel Fellows’ work, but he believed hardware would be the next wave of startups, and said, “This is a first product, and we want to do more.”⁠[2]

The profile adds that he had spent a weekend at the house Mark Zuckerberg rented in Palo Alto; that he was considering staying in the Bay Area and had not decided whether to return to Harvard University; and that the developers he worked with were at least 30, while most of the people he spent time with were older, “More like 21.” He said he was too busy for a girlfriend.⁠[2]

In 2013, after dropping out of Harvard University, he sold Flashcards+ to the education technology company Chegg. His Y Combinator founder page states that he “Sold previous company Flashcards+ to Chegg (NYSENew York Stock ExchangeThe New York Stock Exchange is a securities exchange on Wall Street in New York City. It traces its origins to the Buttonwood Agreement signed by 24 stockbrokers in 1792, has used its present name since 1863 and has been owned by Intercontinental Exchange since 2013.Open the full entry: CHGG)”; Speak’s careers page calls Flashcards+ the No. 1 education app, and his ASU+GSV Summit speaker biography calls it a leading U.S. education app.⁠[9][11][14][15][16]

He recalled that after selling Flashcards+ he had no job and spent nearly 18 months on independent AI research alone, including about a year and a half of quietly sitting in on 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 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 to learn as much deep learning as he could.⁠[1]

Forbes writes that he and Andrew Hsu snuck into classes at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, and even 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.⁠[10]

TechCrunch writes that before starting Speak the two spent a year studying machine learning and developing accent-detection algorithms with YouTube videos as training data. OpenAI’s 2025 article states that in 2015 he and his co-founder did independent AI research, scraping YouTube data as a side project, and that on their first training run the model outperformed the state of the art in accent detection; he said this made them realize how powerful deep learning would be with enough data.⁠[9][11][17]

He recalled that the team tried to implement whatever research papers they could find and built a model that recognized accents from large amounts of YouTube data, which felt like magic and convinced them of Speak’s potential. The summary of a Subversive podcast episode likewise states that the speech-recognition model the two built outperformed existing models, which showed them AI’s potential for language learning.⁠[1][5]

He recalled that people asked what he was doing and that, to others, he and his team seemed a little crazy.⁠[1]

In 2016 he and Andrew Hsu founded Speak in San Francisco; the company’s legal name is Speakeasy Labs, Inc. Andrew Hsu became chief technology officer, and he became chief executive officer.⁠[18][15][19][20]

A TechCrunch article of June 2024 instead states that he and Andrew Hsu, who met while at the Thiel Fellowship, launched Speak in 2014.⁠[21]

He said Speak grew out of AI work around 2015 and 2016, after several side projects, and that he does not see himself as an edtech person but has always liked building things he would use himself.⁠[1]

He recalled that fundraising in 2016 was not easy, and that some investors even asked whether the app was a secret ploy to collect and sell data.⁠[10]

He recalled that OpenAI was founded in 2015 and Speak in 2016, and that Sam Altman invested in Speak early on as an individual.⁠[1]

Speak took part in Y Combinator’s Winter 2017 batch; his Y Combinator founder page lists him in two batches, Summer 2012 and Winter 2017.⁠[22][14]

Sven StrohbandSven StrohbandSven Strohband is an engineer, entrepreneur and venture investor, and a partner and managing director at Khosla Ventures. He helped lead the Stanley autonomous-car project and co-founded MetaMind with Richard Socher.Open the full entry of 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, an early investor in Speak, recalled that early-2017 versions could understand foreign accents but could not yet hold full conversations, and said the two “were AI-first before it was actually cool to be AI-first.”⁠[10]

In November 2017 he sent investors a memo explaining the decision that he and Andrew Hsu had made to launch Speak first in Korea. Accel published the memo on March 18, 2025, calling it “succinct, well-researched, and loaded with the conviction” that he describes as the essential trait of successful founders; Accel wrote that the decision to launch first in Korea had been a massive part of Speak’s early success.⁠[23]

He recalled that neither he nor his co-founder had ever visited Korea before starting the company, and that Korea stood out for the cultural influence of K-pop and K-dramas and for its intense focus on learning English.⁠[1]

Forbes writes that on a trip to Seoul in 2018 he saw skyscrapers full of English classrooms and English-class advertisements on taxi tops and billboards, and realized that Speak’s biggest market was Seoul rather than Silicon Valley, where the company was headquartered. He said that English learning there “was like an obsession,” while existing courses stressed grammar and vocabulary and “there was this fear of making mistakes.” Pitching Speak, he said: “No one’s going to know if you said something embarrassing.”⁠[10]

He recalled driving through central Gangnam in Seoul and seeing huge buildings packed with English classrooms and cram schools; he considered secretly attending a class but decided against it because he would stand out, and Speak instead hired linguists and well-known cram-school instructors.⁠[1]

In 2019 Speak launched in South Korea, its first market. The summary of the Subversive podcast episode states that for its first four years Speak served only English learners in South Korea, and that South Koreans spend 1% of GDP on learning English.⁠[24][21][5]

In November 2022 Speak announced a $27 million Series B round 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 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, 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 others taking part. TechCrunch wrote that Speak was the third startup in which OpenAI had publicly invested through the fund, after Descript and Mem, and that the round brought Speak’s total funding to just over $47 million.⁠[18][9]

Speak announced at the time double-digit-million annual recurring revenue, nearly 100,000 paying subscribers and the top-grossing education app on the App Store; just under 15 million English lessons had been started on the platform in 2022, and users had received more than 10 million pieces of pronunciation feedback. He said that developing this AI speaking companion “has been a goal of Speak’s since inception.” TechCrunch put it as more than 15 million lessons started annually, 100,000 active subscribers and one of the top education apps in Korea on the iOS App Store.⁠[18][9]

TechCrunch wrote that Speak then had 40 employees in offices in San Francisco (its headquarters), Seoul and Ljubljana, Slovenia. He said that under the hood Speak combined the latest from OpenAI with in-house models and was building a large dataset of labeled second-language speech; the article noted that Speak had provided no empirical data showing its platform outperformed rivals. He also said the company had “multiple years of runway.”⁠[9]

He recalled that OpenAI had contacted him about having Speak test a top-secret new model that was very good at speech recognition, and said that the OpenAI Startup Fund, then about $100 million in size, invested about $20 million of it in Speak.⁠[1]

In March 2023 Speak upgraded its AI Tutor with GPT-4, which he said made “highly personalized and contextual” feedback possible; the same month it adopted OpenAI’s Whisper API for multilingual speech recognition and worked with OpenAI on ChatGPTChatGPTChatGPT is a generative AI assistant launched by OpenAI on November 30, 2022. Through websites and applications, it provides conversation, writing, coding, search, file analysis, and image and voice interaction. It evolved from a free research preview into personal, enterprise and education plans, gradually adding deep research, Study mode and cross-application task execution. Its use has prompted continuing discussions about factual accuracy, personal privacy, copyright, education and teen safety.Open the full entry plugins, its first teaching beyond English.⁠[11]

On August 31, 2023 Speak announced a $16 million Series B-2 round led by the angel investor Lachy Groom, with the Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi taking part, bringing its total funding to $63 million. He said the money would support launches in more markets, including the United States by the end of the year, offering English speakers other languages; Speak was then live in about 20 countries, including Japan, Taiwan, Germany, France, Brazil and Mexico.⁠[11]

Speak said it had helped about 3 million people, nearly 6% of Korea’s population, learn English, and that it had “well over 100,000 subscribers” in South Korea. He said the learning experience honed in Korea had resonated with almost no modification in markets and cultures across the globe.⁠[11]

In June 2024 Speak raised $20 million (a Series B-3 in Speak’s announcement, a Series B extension in TechCrunch’s report), led by Buckley Ventures, with all existing investors including the OpenAI Startup Fund and Khosla Ventures participating and Paul Graham and Jeff Weiner joining as strategic investors; its valuation doubled in under a year to $500 million, and total funding reached $84 million.⁠[24][21]

Speak announced more than 10 million learners in more than 40 countries, a learner count that had more than doubled every year for five years, and Spanish alongside English, and said it had launched its English offering in Mandarin-speaking markets. TechCrunch wrote that the company had 75 employees in offices in San Francisco, Seoul, Tokyo and Ljubljana, and that full access cost $20 a month or $99 a year. He said the team had worked on the problem for seven years and that “the most cutting edge speech-to-speech models are the final unlock” for a one-to-one alternative to human tutoring; he also said, “Our core philosophy is centered around getting users to speak out loud as much as possible.”⁠[24][21]

On December 10, 2024 Speak announced a $78 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, led by Accel, with existing investors including the OpenAI Startup Fund, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator taking part. It was Speak’s second preempted raise that year, its valuation had doubled in six months, and its total funding reached $162 million; Ben Quazzo, the Accel partner who led the round, joined the board.⁠[20][25]

The announcement he signed states: “Our vision hasn’t changed since we started Speak eight years ago.” Speak said users had spoken more than a billion sentences with it that year and that it had created more than 25 million personalized lessons, and that Speak for Business, its enterprise offering, had more than 200 customers and an 85% employee adoption rate.⁠[25]

TechCrunch wrote that much of the new money would go to adding target languages, starting with Spanish and French; Andrew Hsu said the app had been downloaded more than 10 million times, with average use of 10 to 20 minutes a day. He said that many of the 1.5 billion people learning English had studied hard for 15 years or more but still could not speak it, and that Speak’s value lay in teaching people to communicate; he also said that when gamification conflicted with efficacy, Speak would choose efficacy “100% of the time,” and that Speak deliberately avoided test preparation because tests are imperfect and people learn to game them rather than to communicate.⁠[20]

On April 22, 2025 OpenAI published an article on Speak, episode 7 of its Executive Function series. In it he says that Speak’s first years focused on speaking experiences, at a time when language-learning apps either lacked a speaking component or had models that could not robustly understand accented speech, and that Speak’s own speech recognition outperformed the big models of the time on accented speech; he names the 2012 AlexNet paper and AlphaGo as meaningful AI moments of the past decade and more, calls OpenAI’s real-time API and audio multimodality the latest breakthrough to change Speak’s thinking, and sees reasoning as the next frontier.⁠[17]

He says that leaders of AI products need deep technical intuition to plan roadmaps and that teams must understand the difference between 90% and 99.9% accuracy; he argues that AI is not meant to replace human teachers but to make tutoring better and more widely available, since billions of people are trying to learn English and other languages and there are not nearly enough good human teachers.⁠[17]

On August 31, 2025 he was interviewed in San Francisco by the Silicon Valley correspondent of The Korea Economic Daily; the interview was published on September 1. He said that the way people have studied for the past 5,000 years is about to change, comparing this with AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry, which began as a bookstore and became a retail giant, and arguing that AI will transform learning far more broadly than people now realize; he likened Speak to having the world’s best conversation teacher in one’s pocket, said that building Speak now was like building a personal computer in 1984, and named Speak for Business and, eventually, subjects beyond languages among future plans, while saying that for now he was focused on language. Speak calls its internal teaching approach the “Speak Method,” aimed at building real speaking fluency as fast as possible; he described the ideal future as learners having a conversation partner they enjoy talking to.⁠[1]

He predicted that in ten years more people, not fewer, would be learning languages, giving as reasons self-improvement, cultural and human connection, and business; he said many Koreans imagine themselves, or their ideal selves, as English speakers, that talking to an AI removes the shame of making mistakes, and that Speak’s message is that mistakes are fine and are the path to growth. He said he still keeps in touch with Sam Altman and often feels guilty because Altman is so busy.⁠[1]

Forbes wrote in November 2025 that Speak had been downloaded about 15 million times, was valued at $1 billion and had more than $100 million in annualized revenue, mostly from its consumer business; users start for free and pay $80 to $200 for more content. Besides English, Speak offered role plays and lessons for Korean, Spanish, Japanese, French and Italian, built primarily on OpenAI’s models. It began pushing into enterprise in 2024, and about 500 companies, including KPMG and HD Hyundai, offered subscriptions, mainly to employees in South Korea; Speak had also gained ground in Japan and Taiwan, began a concerted push in the United States in June 2025, and had raised about $160 million in total from investors including Khosla Ventures, Accel and the OpenAI Startup Fund.⁠[10]

He said Duolingo focuses on grammar and vocabulary while Speak focuses on conversational fluency, muscle memory and pronunciation, and claimed that people speak five to ten times more on Speak than on other language apps; he said that “Mobile games that also teach you language are, at the end of the day, ways to feel less bad about using your phone when you’re bored,” “a healthier alternative to Candy Crush,” and called Speak “something a little bit more serious.” The Accel partner Ben Quazzo said Speak’s focus on South Korea was intentional, a “sandbox” for testing the product.⁠[10]

On February 5, 2026 the Subversive podcast, hosted by Phil Carter, released an interview with him (season 1, episode 29, 45 minutes 38 seconds), with chapters on how he started his first company as a teenager (3:11) and what inspired him and his co-founder to start Speak (6:11); the episode summary states that Speak then taught six languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese and Korean.⁠[5]

As of November 2026 his Y Combinator founder page lists him as CEO of Speak. Speak’s careers page states that the company has a team of 130 people in offices in San Francisco, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei and Ljubljana, serves hundreds of thousands of subscribers in more than 30 countries, and has raised more than $150 million from institutions including Accel, the OpenAI Startup Fund and Founders Fund and from individuals including Sam Altman, Peter Thiel and Lachy Groom.⁠[14][15][16]

He was a guest on Accel’s Spotlight On podcast, season 3, episode 6, hosted by Ben Quazzo; the episode summary states that more than 10 million people had downloaded Speak and taken lessons in the past year. The highlights run in this order: the start of his founder career (0:00); the two founders becoming convinced in 2015 that deep intelligence could teach people a new language (6:24); Speak’s origins, from speech recognition to a learning flywheel (11:12); why they chose Korea as the first market (16:39); thinking about geography when choosing a market (19:12); good ideas being common while conviction is what matters (20:55); lessons on reaching product-market fit (22:45); plans for new regions and user segments (27:30); building consumer AI (32:37, where he says “Productizing consumer AI is super hard”); how people actually learn languages (38:24); and “You can’t outsource a core competency of your company” (41:10).⁠[4]

Speak: Official website: https://www.speak.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[19]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[26]

X: Public account: https://x.com/connorzwick (opens in a new window).⁠[14]

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/connorzwick (opens in a new window).⁠[14][3]