Ophir Samson

Hey, Dr. T. Nice to meet you.

Thank you so much for having me.

Really, really excited for this conversation.

I've been a long-time listener to your podcast.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, um, so my, my father was an inventor, um, and every night he would be kind of awake, uh, coming up with different ideas and building prototypes and, manifesting his ideas into real products and putting them out into the world.

And that environment surrounded me with, you know, a lot of creativity and science, cuz he was at the core.

So the core, I'm a technologist who has had to make a lot of very kind of consequential decisions with very little information that's in the realm of a lot of kind of creative thinking for my career.

whether it's been in autonomous vehicles or academic mathematics or hedge funds or social impact investing or even magic, because I'm a professional magician in my space.

And throughout my career, I've hired lots of people.

I've built teams and I've realized that that can be the most consequential decision you have on the impact of your life.

The people I've hired, I've ended up spending more time with them than I have with my own wife.

So, you know, I think, you know, being really thoughtful about that decision is so important for like how happy you're going to be on a day to day basis.

So what really kind of pushed me over the edge with this idea was just seeing how much, how AI was just kind of making things so much harder in the problem of like selecting good candidates and, you know, who you bring onto the team.

and that kind of brought me over to voice because I believe that voice is the most kind of natural interface we have we speak more than we write we have been speaking for hundreds of thousands of years we've been typing for tens of years and so if you really want to get to understand someone you talk to them and so I wanted to kind of apply that to hiring so that we can make better hiring decisions so that we surround ourselves with kind of better people for us and

and generally lead happier, healthier, more fulfilling lives.

Yeah, absolutely.

So the way it works is if you're a recruiter, you set up Ezra to do an interview for you.

And it doesn't just work out of the box.

You have to train it in the same way that you would train a real recruiter on your team.