[SaaS Series] Building the Future of Voice AI With Kwin Kramer

Kwindla “Kwin” Kramer is the CEO and Co-founder of Daily, a leading real-time video platform that provides APIs for integrating audio, video, and AI into apps. Under his leadership, Daily has powered millions of video and voice minutes each month for clients like AWS, Google, Epic, and Nvidia, and is recognized as a Y Combinator Top Company. An MIT Media Lab alumnus, Kwin previously co-founded Oblong Industries, creator of the gesture-based interfaces seen in Minority Report. He is passionate about advancing distributed systems and AI to shape the future of telehealth, education, and conversational technology.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [5:12] Kwin Kramer shares his biggest lessons from Y Combinator
• [8:08] How Minority Report’s tech became real-world collaboration tools
• [11:39] Building custom solutions to win early customers
• [16:37] Early use cases for Daily: healthcare, education, and workplace collaboration 
• [18:39] How voice AI is transforming healthcare and saving doctors’ time
• [23:38] Why AI tutoring could revolutionize global education access
• [26:24] Daily’s open-source strategy
• [35:20] Why “talking to computers” will replace typing
• [41:41] AI-generated worlds and unscripted NPC conversations

In this episode…

Imagine a virtual assistant that not only schedules your appointments but also remembers every detail of past interactions — across healthcare, education, and even gaming. What if seamless real-time audio, video, and AI tools could elevate these experiences for everyone, not just the tech elite? How did the journey of making this technology accessible to millions actually unfold?

Kwin Kramer pioneered developer infrastructure that makes embedding real-time audio, video, and AI into products simple and scalable. Drawing on his experience at Y Combinator and Oblong Industries, he learned to bridge the gap between imagination and reality for companies such as Boeing and GE. With Daily, Kwin shifted to empowering startups in telehealth, edtech, and more with open, scalable tools. His work enables doctors, teachers, and other professionals to harness AI and real-time media, signaling a future where AI copilots transform daily life.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Kwin Kramer, CEO and Co-founder of Daily. They explore the evolution of developer tools, lessons from Y Combinator, and how open-source ecosystems are shaping healthcare, education, and more. The conversation covers how Daily powers telehealth, adaptive learning, and conversational agents; the shift from custom demos to scalable APIs; and why the future of software is voice-first and deeply personalized.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Kwindla “Kwin” Kramer on LinkedIn
• Daily
• Y Combinator
• Oblong Industries
• Pipecat
• Norby
• Wispr Flow
• Slack
• Gmail
• Google Maps
• LastPass
• Sweet Process
• Textexpander
• Supercell AI Innovation Lab
• The Legend of Zelda
• MIT Media Lab

Special Mentions:

• Nina Kuruvilla on LinkedIn
• Adrian Mullan on LinkedIn
• Chris Heivly on LinkedIn

Related episodes:

• “The Pixar Story: The Letter of a lifetime That Started Everything With Alvy Ray Smith, Co-Founder of Pixar” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[SaaS Series] Cloning Minds With Dara Ladjevardian of Delphi” on Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

•  “It’s much easier, when you’re trying to think of something new, to be a little too early to market than maybe you think you are.”
• “One of the replicable results of many studies is that one-on-one tutoring support is always impactful across every kind of school.”
• “We’re going to completely rewrite all of the software we use, and all the devices we use.”
• “Hiring people who are really intrinsically motivated to do the thing you want them to do makes up for almost every other challenge in startups.”
• “We are speaking creatures, and now we have the capability to make software that is voice-first.”

Action steps:

1. Build strong, diverse relationships within your field: Joining communities like Y Combinator’s founder network or contributing to open source projects exposes you to new opportunities and insights you may otherwise miss.
2. Experiment and iterate with new technologies early: Early experimentation lets you learn, adapt, and build expertise before a technology becomes mainstream, giving you a competitive edge.
3. Focus on user-centric problem-solving: This approach ensures what you create is compelling, relevant, and more likely to be adopted.
4. Leverage open-source and community-driven resources: It makes your work accessible and adaptable, opening doors to collaborations and rapid problem-solving.
5. Embrace voice and AI-driven interfaces: Adopting and experimenting with voice AI tools now prepares you for the coming wave of software where talking replaces typing, allowing you to work faster and create more intuitive user experiences.

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here Founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders.Today is no different. I have Kwin Kramer. You can check him out at Daily.co. Before I formally introduce you. Kwin, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. Your story, I don’t know, reminds me a lot of. So I had the Co-founder of Pixar, Alvy Ray Smith, on and when he started and they were starting to work on Pixar and coming out with Toy Story, they were ahead of their time. They had to wait for the technology to kind of catch up. This kind of reminds me of your story, a bit like he knew it would catch up, but at what point? So we’ll talk about that because it’s really cool. What, what you and the company do. So people check that out.

Also, I had the Co-founder of Zapier on Wade Foster. That was an interesting one. And how they grew the company also one of the founders of Pipedrive, I remember at the time they had 10,000 customers. Now they have over 100,000 customers and growing. And it was a tumultuous journey, to say the least. Like we always see where they’re at now and oh, it looks like sunshine and rainbows. Well, no, it was it was definitely ups and downs. So check those out and more on InspiredInsider.com. 

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in a couple ways. One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, accountability, and the full execution and production Action behind the scenes. Number two, we’re an easy button for a company’s corporate gifting, so we make gifting and staying top of mind to clients, partners, prospects. People even send their staff. Simple, easy, and actually affordable. People just send us a list of the addresses and we do everything else.

And it’s not just one off gift. We like to send a campaign of gifts. So think couple gifts a year for 3 or 4 years. Okay, so, you know, for me, we call ourselves kind of the magic elves that run in the background and make it stress free for a company to build amazing relationships. And Kwin, for me, I, you know, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways on how I can give to my best relationships. And for me personally, I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I admire, feature them on the podcast, and also send them sweet treats in the mail. So if you have questions, go to Rise25.com or email support at Rise25.com.

I am super excited to introduce Kwin Kramer. He’s the Co-founder of Daily, and Daily is the world’s leading provider of developer infrastructure for real time audio, video and AI. Okay, their APIs make it fast and flexible to add video calls to any product they have had customers such as AWS, Google, Epic, Nvidia, and many, many more. He also created Pipecat, the most widely used voice AI agent framework. And they have this really cool resource as guide to voice AI. It’s a standard reference in this new and fast growing field. You can check it out at voiceaiandvoiceagents.com. I don’t know if you compare it to like the Twilio of texting or something like how do you when when you’re explaining to someone, how do you explain Daily?

Kwin Kramer 03:38

No, that’s a great comparison. I mean, I think a lot about how to build really, really easy to use, but also very powerful tools for developers to build complicated things into their applications and websites and companies like Twilio and Stripe that have done a terrific job with hard problems like texting and voice phone calls and payments are always an inspiration. I love Zapier. I liked that episode you did with Wade a lot. We went through Y Combinator a couple of years after Zapier, and, you know, the creativity side of things is so important, like helping people build things that are new and feel new and exciting.

You know, I went to the MIT Media Lab a long time ago for grad school, and there’s a lot of shared lineage there with Pixar. And you’re totally right. It’s much easier in some ways when you’re trying to think of something new, to be a little too early to market than maybe you think you are. And we can certainly talk about that and how that that plays into your insight that startups are never, never a straight line path.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 04:36

You know, I want to talk about what you learned at Y Combinator. I just had Ravenna on. And Ravenna does kind of internal internal support that starts in slack and resolves with AI and intelligent workflows that take slack and pushes it to, you know, whether kind of ops or a customer support ticket or an SOP or something like that. They went and shared some learnings from Y Combinator. Actually, Ravenna themselves did not go through Y Combinator. They had a separate business at the time and they shared some learnings. I’m curious, what did you learn from Y Combinator experience?

Kwin Kramer 05:12

You know, I think like a lot of things in life and like you said about relationships, the the single best thing about YC is the relationships you become part of through the, the community of founders who’ve who’ve been through YC over the years. And that is a gift that keeps on giving, if you will. I do think going through the YC program itself, the sort of ten or 11 or 12 weeks like of very compressed focus on building your startup to the next stage is also very valuable, and you get to work really closely with YC partners who have seen a huge range of of startups. 

And you know, what founders do and don’t do and should do and shouldn’t do. And then Demo Day, which comes at the end of the YC program, is a really fantastic forcing function for, for, for investors. And one of the things you do as a startup founder, when you are in fundraising time, sometimes you are fundraising, sometimes you aren’t. But if you are fundraising, it’s just incredibly valuable to be able to create some, some, some sense of urgency on the other side of the table. And there I think there is almost no better way to do that than YC Demo Day. They’ve really structured things very, very effectively for that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 06:23

At what stage was Daily when you went? I know companies are in all different kind of stages when they go through Y Combinator. Where were you at?

Kwin Kramer 06:31

We had a a prototype of our first product and no customers, no revenue, which I think when, you know, companies in YC vary a lot. And that’s actually one of the great strengths of being part of the YC program and in the ecosystem. We had companies in our batch in 2016 that had, you know, that were already at escape velocity, and we had companies that were just an idea. We were not just an idea, but we were much earlier on that kind of company growth spectrum. And I think we got into YC even though we were so early because we had a track record in the space we cared about.

We had built a company previously that was focused on very high performance collaboration, networking, audio, video, kind of new user interface, new data processing stuff. And we had built that company to, you know, a a reasonable size, a reasonable success. And we had a chip on our shoulder about doing it again and doing it bigger and doing it for the moment. We were in in 2016. And again, I think we were a little early for that actually. We really didn’t find great traction until 2019, which, you know, feels like a long time in a startup.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 07:47

Talk about what you learn, what you learn from the previous company before starting Daily.

Kwin Kramer 07:53

Oh, so many lessons for an engineer who likes to write code and focus on the technical things. You know, growing a company for eight years and learning how to sell to fortune 500 companies. I mean, you learn a lot about, I think managing people as a company grows.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 08:07

Oblong is that.

Kwin Kramer 08:08

This is Oblong Industries. Yeah. So we started Oblong in LA in 2006. Capsule summary of oblong is that we were well known because we, we built the gestural interfaces that were in the film Minority Report. So very influential sort of, you know, computer science work from my co-founder when he was in grad school.

And then we took that and we made it real. And along the way, John, who founded the company with me, worked on that Steven Spielberg film directly. So we used to say that, you know, we had won. Startups need an advantage. And one of our advantages was not everybody gets Steven Spielberg to film their demo reel for them.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 08:46

Yes, exactly.

Kwin Kramer 08:48

But, you know, the flip side of that is that we started, as, you know, science fair project. We had this thing we had built that we thought was really cool, and we had to figure out, you know, who would pay for what parts of it. Why, how to make that repeatable, how to scale that, how to build a team that could help us, you know, build and sell it. Repeatably and then how to build a company that could sort of take that team and make a growing, you know, evolving team effective over time. All those things are hard.

And they’re they’re particularly hard, you know, if you have if you’re doing them for the first time, which many, many startup founders are. And, you know, I just learned a lot about working with other people, building an effective team or multiple effective teams, and learning how to sell to large companies, because large companies have rhythms and patterns and paces. And, you know, there are things that work in repeatable sales to enterprise companies, and there are techniques you learn.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 09:46

That’s how I was going to ask, actually. What do you remember? How did you get your first customer or milestone customer at Oblongus? I mean, we’re talking customers like Boeing and GE, large customers. How did you get your first customer?

Kwin Kramer 10:03

Our first few customers were always coming to us because we had something that seemed new and really compelling to them, and what we had to do for them was fill in the value proposition, the return on investment, the way they could actually integrate this into their real work. So we would build we would usually build a very compelling demo with the customer’s data, or back end systems or mocks for the customer’s back end systems. 

And then we would figure out who at that big company could actually sort of connect the dots through their process on their side, which is always opaque to you from the startup side. Like, you don’t know who can make the decisions or who has the budget line item. So you have to learn that you can only do that in collaboration with somebody very motivated on the other side, on the customer side, and then you just work through their process with them and, you know, get through every gate, remove every objection until you get through procurement.

And then, you know, you negotiate with procurement, you lose 10% or 15% of the of the of the price you already agreed on, and then you’re in contract. And then in that first year of contract, you have to make sure that the company actually uses your tech and can demonstrate the value. So you get it renewed for the second year. That’s the that’s the very capsule summary version.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 11:20

When you got the were you building something ahead of time to show them, or were you connecting with someone and then being like, listen, we’ll spec because it seems like obviously it’s a lot of time and energy like, but it’s also compelling to be like, hey, we built this something specific to you, let’s have a call. Or did you have the call and then build something?

Kwin Kramer 11:39

We almost always built something very custom for every early customer. And there were a couple reasons for that. One is the things we were doing were so new that to demonstrate them to what I. What I came to call internally closed the imagination gap to close the imagination gap for all the stakeholders on the customer side, we needed to build something that sort of spoke to them in their world. And, you know, this isn’t this is a fairly common pattern for your annual contract values that are in the million dollar plus range, which is where we were early on at oblong, we would install room sized systems for people, usually multiple room size systems, and then connect them over dedicated network links.

So these were sort of very high end, very specialized collaboration environments with screens on every wall. And you could bring any device you had into the room, and it would be part of the data visualization collaboration environment. They were sort of holodeck type environments but specialized for for individual company use cases like data visualization for oil companies doing like very big seismic surveys, or IBM built out a bunch of demonstration centers for their big customers that they could bring people in and sort of blow them away with these IBM like very high value collaborative production design pitches. So everything was custom and over time, what our challenge was at oblong, because we were good at building stuff. Our big challenge was to take the stuff we built and make it more, more generalized so that we didn’t have to build something completely custom.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 13:13

Everything was bespoke to every single customer.

Kwin Kramer 13:15

And we had to get past that to, you know, to be a venture backed company, you have to make things a little more scalable and repeatable. And we also needed a push that, you know, contract value down so that customers had an option. You know, we’re very happy if you write a $2 million check for the first year, but we could reach a much broader customer base if we gave you more options. Maybe that wasn’t the only way in the door with us.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 13:39

To get the call. Were you building anything ahead of time?

Kwin Kramer 13:42

Sometimes if we knew there was a target customer, but our first 20 customers all came to us, which is, I think, a little bit unusual. And and the, you know, the Steven Spielberg demo reel, I think was, was what got us that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 13:57

So talk about where the idea come from for Daily. So a lot while you talk about I’m going to pull up the site just so people can can check it out to.

Kwin Kramer 14:07

This stuff we built at oblong was really interesting from an engineering perspective, very compelling to users, but also because of that price point and the complexity of the technology very, you know, relatively limited. We had, you know, maybe we had to order of 10,000 users, you know, even as we got to scale as a company with revenue. And I really thought the stuff we were building around, making it possible for everybody to have kind of real time audio, video, data and application collaboration was way broader Rorter then you know, the room size systems. 

So I really wanted to build developer tools that let everybody build audio, video, data, collaboration into every website and app. I knew how hard a problem it was, but I also thought I knew how to give the building blocks to other developers to, to, to, to solve that problem.

And so that was the genesis of Daily. When we talked to investors about Daily, we put a particular gloss on it, as you always do, which was that we thought real time audio and video communication was going to become a bigger and bigger part of everything we all do on the internet every day, all the time, and that we could build the standard infrastructure and developer tools for that. 

And I think that that that vision did play out. I mean, you and I are talking remotely on an audio video call now, and we all sort of take that for granted today in 2016, when we were talking to investors about Daily, that was not obvious. And many investors said to us, you know, I like you guys. I like your team. I think you could build something really compelling here, but I don’t know how big the market is. And that’s a super common experience for startup founders. You’re trying to paint the picture of how big a market can be. Before that, you know.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 15:53

You’re like everyone. No, I remember I was listening to another video that you did and it almost seems ridiculous now, but like, people are like, yeah, I don’t see myself going on video calls a lot, and.

Kwin Kramer 16:06

I’d just rather talk on the phone. I heard that so many times in 2016 and 2017, even from people I knew and had known a long time and had respect for what I’d built before, which was an interesting lesson.

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