Otter.ai CEO Sam Liang’s lecture recordings inspired a $100M-a-year AI business

Liang moved from China to the United States to study and could barely understand his professors because of the language barrier, so he took a Sony Walkman to class, recorded every lecture, and replayed the tapes until he understood them. That became the inspiration for Otter.ai, which he co-founded in 2016.

The company now has more than 240 employees and has hit $100 million a year in revenue. Last month it secured $320 million in financing from investors that include early backers of Google, Zoom, and Tesla. The pandemic moved meetings onto Zoom. Otter’s revenue grew 800% from 2019 to 2020.

Liang first studied at the University of Arizona and then at Stanford University for his PhD, where his faculty advisor was David Cheriton, who famously wrote a $100,000 check to launch Google. “He instilled in me the importance of true big thinking, and ignited my drive to one day set up a company of my own,” Liang told Fortune.

He worked at Cisco and Tropos Networks before joining Google in 2006 as a tech lead, where his work on the “blue dot” became the backbone of Google Maps. He left in 2010 to co-found his first startup, Alohar Mobile, acquired by Alibaba in 2013 for millions. When he began pitching the idea for Otter, voice data was expensive and AI was not yet on people’s radars. “Many investors thought we were crazy,” he recalled. “We were well ahead of the game, long before ChatGPT and the proliferation of AI meeting assistants.”

Growing up in China during and after the Cultural Revolution, when food was rationed, taught Liang to live very simply, he said. The company provides free lunch for staff, but he skips it and instead drinks Arnold Schwarzenegger’s smoothie recipe, split into three bottles for breakfast, lunch, and an afternoon snack. He lives in the suburbs of Mountain View, near Otter’s office, and sometimes bikes to work.

His main indulgence is traveling the world to run marathons; he has completed 12, including the London Marathon this year with his wife. He runs about three miles each weekday and up to 18 miles on Saturdays. Liang said he does not take much vacation because he is focused on building Otter, and he has no plans to slow down.