Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Village Global Luminary LP Bob Iger on what he hopes AI will and will not become for storytelling:
"What I don't want to accept is that AI will ultimately destroy human creativity. I think the human mind is capable of telling a great original story in ways that no machine will be able to replace, hopefully for many, many decades to come, if ever."
"I think it's fine, as Walt Disney did, to use technology as a powerful tool for the storyteller."
"Steve Jobs likened the laptop computer to a bicycle of the mind. It might sound naive of me to hope that's what AI will become."
"I know there are many who worry that it's much more than the bicycle of the mind, that it is a powerful tool that would be so disruptive and so destructive.”
Village Global Luminary LP Bob Iger on what he hopes AI will and will not become for storytelling:
"What I don't want to accept is that AI will ultimately destroy human creativity. I think the human mind is capable of telling a great original story in ways that no machine will be able to replace, hopefully for many, many decades to come, if ever."
"I think it's fine, as Walt Disney did, to use technology as a powerful tool for the storyteller."
"Steve Jobs likened the laptop computer to a bicycle of the mind. It might sound naive of me to hope that's what AI will become."
"I know there are many who worry that it's much more than the bicycle of the mind, that it is a powerful tool that would be so disruptive and so destructive.”




![Building Jarvis: A Voice AI Startup Making Computer Interaction Invisible |Tanay Kothari (WisprFlow)
Tanay Kothari is co-founder and CEO of Wispr Flow, a voice AI company he started with co-founder Sahaj Garg in 2021, building toward a Jarvis-like assistant that lets people interact with computers through natural speech instead of keyboards and screens. His younger brother, Jaisal Kothari, is co-founder and CEO of Gallium and was Wisprs first software engineer, joining as a Stanford freshman to help build the companys earliest voice dictation technology.
Anne Dwane sits down with Tanay and Jaisal at a Village Global event to trace Tanays path from building and shipping nearly 50 apps in secret as a teenager, including one that hit 2.5 million users before Google sent him a cease and desist, to founding Wispr as a hardware company and pivoting entirely to software after watching users ignore the physical device in favor of the app alone. Tanay breaks down Wisprs zero edit rate metric, a stricter and more user-centered standard than the industrys typical word error rate, walks through the viral Porsche-giveaway marketing stunt that pulled in tens of millions of views, and explains why he personally sat in on the companys first 500 onboarding calls. The conversation also covers how Wispr thinks about competing with frontier AI labs entering voice, why the company stacks multiple layers of defensibility instead of relying on one moat, and Tanays approach to keeping teams small and communication overhead low as the company scales. Jaisal opens the conversation with the story of growing up alongside Tanays secretive late-night coding sessions and how that early exposure shaped his own path into tech.
[00:00] Cold open
[00:29] Welcome to the event; introducing Jaisal
[00:53] Growing up with a 7-year age gap
[01:42] The app that hit 2.5 million users and got a cease and desist from Google
[02:12] What their parents thought about the secrecy
[03:00] The movie that inspired Tanay: Iron Man and the dream of building Jarvis
[03:47] Jaisals own path into tech
[04:59] Joining Wispr as its first software engineer
[06:15] Tanay arrives; the origin story of Wispr
[06:39] Starting the company with co-founder Sahaj Garg in 2021
[07:59] Building a wearable hardware device for silent speech
[08:54] The pivot: realizing users only wanted the software
[09:06] Sometimes the best product decisions come from humility, not conviction
[10:20] The long-term vision: technology that fades into the background
[11:41] Why agentic AI assistants still dont work yet
[13:03] Building toward Jarvis, one step at a time
[13:08] The zero edit rate metric and why it beats word error rate
[14:27] The viral Porsche giveaway marketing stunt
[16:32] Personally running the first 500 onboarding calls
[18:33] Competing with OpenAI and other frontier labs on voice
[20:07] Why moats need to stack, not stand alone
[21:21] Growing the ML team and hiring Amazon and Metas former voice AI leads
[21:22] Why Wispr avoids small edge models
[22:35] How Wispr trains on individual user data and privacy tradeoffs
[24:25] Scaling the team without losing efficiency
[25:56] Why bigger teams dont mean proportionally more output
[28:22] Predictions: multiple AI agents, personal compartmentalization, and the future of Apples role Building Jarvis: A Voice AI Startup Making Computer Interaction Invisible |Tanay Kothari (WisprFlow)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vXi4EdrFj9s/mqdefault.jpg)

![From a Village in Kyrgyzstan to Founding a Law Firm | Aizada Marat (Alma)
Aizada Marat is co-founder and CEO of Alma, an AI immigration law firm. Before building a company, she lived a story that reads almost like fiction: growing up in a small village in Kyrgyzstan, learning English by transcribing Britney Spears lyrics, and eventually finding herself twice locked out of the country shed dreamed about since childhood, once by visa rules and once by a botched immigration case that left her unable to work for over a year.
Amrit Rao, General Partner at Village Global, sits down with Aizada to trace that path in detail, from her childhood in rural Kyrgyzstan and the US Senate-backed exchange program that first brought her to America, through law school, a corporate law career she never wanted, and the personal immigration crisis that reshaped how she thought about her own future. She also shares the story of how she interviewed three now-famous tech leaders, Richard Socher, Arvind Jain, and Dario Amodei, in her backyard before deciding shed rather build her own company than work for any of them.
This is an excerpt from our full conversation with Aizada Marat. Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/gKd06kskB8s?si=I1dUOpxEe1JaRp_k
[00:00] Growing up in rural Kyrgyzstan
[01:20] Wanting to go to the US
[02:23] The Future Leaders Exchange Program
[03:27] Arriving in the US at 17
[04:25] What Alma does today
[05:49] Departing the US twice
[06:57] The year she couldnt work
[08:00] Solving her own pain point
[08:37] From Cooley to McKinsey
[09:44] Discovering AI in 2023
[10:54] The leap to start Alma
[12:05] Interviewing Richard Socher, Arvind Jain, and Dario Amodei
[12:42] Hosting them in her backyard
[12:53] Deciding to build her own company From a Village in Kyrgyzstan to Founding a Law Firm | Aizada Marat (Alma)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vuBCP0CXf4U/mqdefault.jpg)



