The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) · Saturday, September 5, 2026
Cliff Weitzman shared an observation that when Speechify engineers used rented GPUs, they tended to be 'parsimonious' due to the high cost. This led to the idea of owning GPUs to encourage more liberal usage for model training, comparing it to Michael Jordan needing affordable access to a basketball court.
“And we used to rent GPUs. And we found that engineers at Speechify would be parsimonious with how they used the GPUs because they were like, oh my god, I'm costing the company tens of thousands of dollars, like I don't want to do that.”
“And the analogy my brother and I came up with is, imagine you're Michael Jordan and you want to be in the NBA, it's the only thing you care about. And you need to pay $20 an hour just to train in a basketball center. Well, that sucks.”