Introducing Oboe: Making Humanity Smarter

About 10 years ago, my coworker Nir Zicherman and I got talking about podcasts. We felt that podcasts were exploding as a medium, but it was really hard for most people to make them. That conversation turned into an idea, which turned into a prototype, which turned into a company called Anchor, which somehow turned into the biggest podcasting platform in the world. Spotify ended up acquiring us.

More recently, we’ve been talking about education. We can’t make sense of the fact that despite all the technological advancements made over the past several decades — especially in AI — humans seem to be getting less intelligent. That conversation has also now turned into a company, and it’s called Oboe.

Our mission is make humanity smarter, and we’re building products that leverage AI to help people learn 10x more efficiently, effectively, and affordably than ever before. We do this through LLMs and a novel method of education that Nir has been building over the past year. While we’re co-founding this together, Nir is CEO this time around, and I’ll remain a full time partner at Lightspeed.

To help us get started, we’ve raised $4M from some of our former Anchor investors and a few of the smartest humans we know, including Eniac Ventures, Haystack, Factorial Capital, Homebrew, Offline Ventures, Scott Belsky, Kayvon Beykpour, Nikita Bier, Tim Ferriss, and Matt Lieber.

We’re currently hiring the core team—in particular, a product designer. If you or someone you know is based in the NYC area and is interested in joining us, please reach out at [email protected]. And if you're interested in beta testing Oboe once it's ready, sign up here and follow us on LinkedIn and X.