Cliff Weitzman, Founder of Speechify and a Brown University alum, returned to his alma mater this weekend to deliver a deeply personal and motivational keynote address at the annual Hack@Brown hackathon. Speaking to a packed auditorium of aspiring innovators, Weitzman offered more than just advice—he shared a raw, humorous, and motivational account of his journey from a struggling student with severe dyslexia and ADHD to the creator of one of the App Store’s top productivity apps.
His goal? To say something that would radically alter the trajectory of the attendees’ lives in a positive way.
From Struggle to Success
From his earliest memories of academic difficulty to his peanut-butter-fueled coding marathons at Brown, Weitzman painted a vivid picture of resilience. Due to his dyslexia, spelling and writing never came easily to him in school, but he never gave up.
His turning point came during CS15—an intro computer science course he nearly dropped. Instead, he dug in, coding from 8 a.m. to midnight in Brown’s Sun Lab, fueled by homemade sandwiches and sheer will. Due to his own struggles with spelling, he started to become great at noticing bugs in code and debugging, and eventually started building his own apps.
Advice to Coders
Weitzman’s message resonated with both beginners and seasoned hackers. For first-time participants, he offered reassurance: “You should not feel scared, you should not feel afraid, and you should definitely not feel imposter syndrome. Everybody feels it. It's normal.”
For experienced coders, he offered a challenge: “If you feel like you can build products in your sleep, focus on talking to users, and focus on finding amazing people to work with. If you want to scale products really quickly, don't just build excellent products and talk to users, figure out how to grow them, whether it be via SEO, telling your story online, making good content, running ads, etc.”
To all of the attendees, his advice was: “Read a ton of books, be kind to your professors, and do as many hackathons as you can.”
The Story of Speechify
Speechify, his AI-powered text to speech platform, was born from personal need and shaped through relentless iteration and user feedback. In the early days, he built 36 products and even cold-called users directly to understand what was broken and how to make the product better.
Weitzman credited his brother Tyler, a coding prodigy, with initially intimidating him—but ultimately pushed him to not try to win hackathons by building the most technical product, but by building the most usable product. His brother also motivated him to carve out his own strengths, like talking to users and scaling growth.
That people-first approach helped Speechify grow to tens of millions of users. It also drove Weitzman to build a team in unconventional ways—such as recruiting a talented developer from Bulgaria via Facebook and helping him become Speechify’s COO.
The keynote wasn’t just about software. Weitzman shared strategies for reaching out to mentors, building teams, talking to users pre-product, and learning fast through reading and iteration.
“Basically, the framework is I read 100 books about the topic, I talk to 100 experts about the topic who are on the bleeding edge, and then I try a bunch of things, I figure out what works, and then I find someone who's more talented than me to replace me,” Weitzman explained.
Some of his unconventional growth tactics included calling up the top 100 CEOs and learning from them. He even lived with MrBeast and networked with Logan Paul, Yes Theory, and Ali Abdaal to learn how to market his products better. Now Speechify is the 5th highest grossing productivity app on the App Store, above Perplexity, Claude, Google Docs, Google Drive, Outlook, and other major players.
Watch Cliff Weitzman’s Keynote Address
Cliff Weitzman’s talk was a rallying cry not only for coders but for creators of all kinds. In a room filled with future builders, he reminded everyone that starting where you are—with what you have—is enough. What matters most is refusing to give up.
To listen to Cliff Weitzman’s full keynote address, click here.
