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INTERVIEW 🎙️

Russ d’Sa, Co-Founder & CEO of LiveKit

Russ d'Sa is the Co-Founder and CEO of LiveKit, an open-source platform that provides real-time audio and video communication infrastructure for applications, including AI-powered systems, like OpenAI. He has a rich background in technology and entrepreneurship, having previously worked at notable companies such as Twitter and 23andMe.

His journey in tech began early, influenced by his upbringing in Silicon Valley, where he was inspired by the startup culture around him. Before founding LiveKit, Russ co-founded Evie Labs, which was acquired by Medium in 2019, where he led product development for creators and readers. His experience in building scalable, low-latency communication systems has positioned LiveKit as a key player in enabling real-time, multimodal AI applications.

Tell us about your acquisition via Medium?

Oh yeah, that was a crazy one. I started a company in 2012 after spending almost three years at Twitter. We went through a lot of pivots. At first, we were building HR software—basically a competitor to Zenefits. At one point, we even considered going back into YC, but Paul Graham told us there was already someone in the batch working on the exact same thing with the same strategy. That turned out to be Parker from Zenefits, who later went on to start Rippling.

I co-founded the company with someone I met back in the 2007 YC batch—we were both in that fifth batch, working on separate companies at the time. Over the years, we pivoted a bunch. At one point, we started exploring how mobile was fundamentally different from the web. Unlike websites, you can't just go to a URL and instantly use a mobile app. So we came up with this idea to run mobile apps on the server and stream them over video to your device. It was kind of like cloud gaming but for mobile apps.

That led to a deal with Verizon. They wanted to pre-install these little app icons on phones and stream the apps instead of installing bloatware directly on the devices. Eventually, they asked us to put those apps on the -1 screen on Android phones. We had a lot of users engaging with it, and people started asking for news on that screen; since it had replaced Google Now.

To avoid losing the deal, we built a news recommendation engine to pull in articles from across the internet. After about six years of building and pivoting, Medium, which wanted to get into the news space, acquired us. I had worked with Ev at Twitter, so we reconnected, and that led to the acquisition. I became head of product at Medium, and my co-founder became head of engineering.

What were the learnings from the acquisition?

Yeah, I’d say the biggest learning for me—and something that’s really informed what I’m working on now with LiveKit—is around the whole ‘never give up’ mentality that people glorify in startups. There’s this idea that if you just keep grinding it out, you’ll eventually win. Be the cockroach, right? But honestly, I think starting companies is a lot more like poker. Yes, you have some agency over the outcome, but you’ve also got to know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.

Time is the one resource you can’t get more of. It’s finite. So if you're continuing to push a boulder uphill for years, there’s a real opportunity cost. And I think that’s the mistake I made. We did eventually sell the company and it was a decent acquisition, but we spent six or seven years on it—that’s a huge chunk of a career. Looking back, I think we should have shut things down earlier, returned the capital, and moved on to something we were more passionate about.

What I should’ve done is said: ‘Okay, we’ve got some cash in the bank, let’s make a real pivot—to something completely different that I care about.’ Instead, we kept inching sideways. I think that’s the big takeaway: go bold with your pivots, not incremental, especially if you’re not excited about where you’re headed.

Tell us about the problem you're trying to solve with LiveKit?

Yeah, there’s a bit of a longer story here. To be honest, I didn’t start out with some grand vision for LiveKit. When we began, I wasn’t fully aware this was the direction we’d end up going in. After Medium acquired my last company, I went from being in a 13-person office in Palo Alto to suddenly being part of a 350-person company in San Francisco. Then six months later, the pandemic hit and we were all working from home.

Around that time, Clubhouse came out, it was still in alpha, and I thought the casual, drop-in vibe was really cool. I wanted something like that internally at Medium. Something to recreate those impromptu cafeteria conversations we used to have in the office. So I found out what infrastructure Clubhouse was using, and I built a kind of ‘Clubhouse for companies’ as a side project.

It blew up. I had a 1,300-company waitlist, and VCs were reaching out asking if I was going to raise money. I wasn’t planning to. It was just a side project. But then Pinterest contacted me and said they wanted to buy 500 seats. They asked where the audio data was going, because they’d be discussing sensitive stuff and needed to make sure it was secure. At the time, I was using a third-party cloud provider, and they said maybe I should consider something open source.

That’s when I realized there wasn’t any open-source infrastructure for real-time audio and video. It just didn’t exist. For the past decade, nobody really needed it—until the pandemic, this kind of tech was mostly used for things like video calls. But suddenly, with everything moving online, the demand spiked, and developers needed it. So I reached out to my old co-founder—the same one we sold the company to Medium with—and we started building it. The goal was to make an open-source project that helped developers build apps like Clubhouse or Zoom easily, with low-latency audio and video.

We launched LiveKit in 2021, and it took off. It became a top 10 trending repo on GitHub across all languages. Companies started deploying it and asked us, ‘Where’s your hosted version?’ So we raised a round and built LiveKit Cloud.

Then, right as we launched the cloud product, ChatGPT launched. I thought it would be cool if you could talk to ChatGPT instead of typing. So we wired up LiveKit to the ChatGPT website and built a voice interface demo. Four months later, OpenAI found it and reached out. They had been planning to build voice mode and wanted to collaborate.

That kicked off our work with them; first voice mode, now advanced voice mode, and even vision. What’s wild is that we didn’t set out to be an AI company, but now we’re building infrastructure that connects humans to AIs, not just humans to other humans.

The way I see it, OpenAI is building a brain, AGI, and the input/output to that brain won’t be a keyboard and mouse. It’ll be vision and voice, just like how humans interact. Cameras and microphones are the eyes and ears of machines, and that’s exactly what LiveKit was built to support.

What does your team look like? Who are your direct reports?

We’re still a pretty small and scrappy team; about 45 people right now. Most of the team is engineering. I’d say around 37 of those 45 are engineers, which makes sense because the problem we’re working on—transmitting real-time audio and video anywhere in the world with under 150 milliseconds of latency—is really hard. Especially at scale. Especially at OpenAI scale.

My co-founder is the CTO and leads product and engineering. That’s a bit unusual, but because we’re an infrastructure company, product and engineering are so tightly linked. He owns the technical side, but also things like API design and developer ergonomics. His job is to make sure that when someone ‘takes the box off the shelf,’ the product feels great. That it works well and delivers on what it promises.

My job is to make sure everyone in the world knows that the box exists. So we kind of split things like this: he makes sure the product is amazing; I make sure people know about it. On my side, I work closely with developer relations, which focuses on making sure developers know about LiveKit and how to get started. I also work with developer success, which is all about helping teams thrive once they’ve adopted the product—ensuring they get answers to their questions and the support they need. And then there’s design, which is something I’ve always cared about deeply.

Our design team spans both product and brand, shaping the entire experience end-to-end—from the user interface to how we present ourselves in the world. Those are the main groups that report to me directly, and I work with them really closely.

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What would you say is the North Star?

I think the North Star metric for us is really about becoming the default choice for developers. When you think about payments, you think Stripe. They’re not the only player, but they’re top of mind. Same with databases—Mongo comes up a lot, even though personally we use Cockroach. Postgres is probably the true default now. But that’s the kind of mental space we want LiveKit to occupy for real-time communications and especially for building voice interfaces to AI.

It’s not a strictly quantitative metric—it’s more qualitative. It’s hard to pin down exactly what ‘default’ means or when you’ve officially arrived there. But in some ways, I think that’s actually a feature, not a bug. If you never feel like you’ve arrived, you just keep pushing. You never stop or get complacent. And I think that mindset is healthy for the kind of company we’re building.

What will you and your investors need to see in order to raise a Series B?

I think there are a few things. Revenue growth is obviously important. And we’ve actually had really strong growth over the last couple of years. In our first year operating commercially, we went from zero to a $2.5–3 million run rate, and we’ve done multiple X growth since then in our second year. That’s been great to see.

Interestingly, we haven’t even touched our Series A yet. Maybe that’s a bad thing—maybe we should be spending faster—but I’ve always believed in keeping the team small and focused. You can get a lot more done that way.

We haven’t talked about many of those logos yet publicly, but that’s coming soon.

So it’s really a combination: momentum of our own growth and the momentum of the broader industry. When we started working with OpenAI, voice AI wasn’t even a category. My co-founder jokes that I kind of manifested it. We built a demo, OpenAI found it, and now we’re part of this new wave. The GPT-4o launch, which we helped power, really opened people’s eyes to what’s possible. It made voice AI feel real, and that’s created an entire industry around it. So yeah, if that momentum continues—both for us and the space—we’ll be in a strong position for a Series B.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

That’s a good question—and honestly, it’s something I’m constantly working on. I don’t think I’ve cracked the code yet or become as efficient as I could be. But one framework I come back to a lot is the parallel between building a company and working out.

There are two big takeaways from that comparison. The first is thinking long term. Fitness and strength don’t come overnight. You can’t really shortcut the process.

I try to bring that same mindset to being a founder—playing the long game, not optimizing for short-term wins.

The second thing is about making progress every day. Just like with training, you’ve got to show up. Move something heavy. Put in the work. It doesn’t always matter what exact workout you do—what matters is that you’re in the gym and pushing yourself. I think that same principle applies to building. If you do that long enough, with a long-term view and consistent effort, I really believe things will work out—not just for me, but for anyone who sticks with it.

And that’s it! You can follow Russ on LinkedIn and X and also checkout LiveKit on their website to learn more.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

Caveat before I start: I am sharing a video version of an audio only podcast. Probably better on Apple or Spotify here. Nevertheless, this is an awesome centrist breakdown of the tariff saga from this past week from investing legend Howard Marks. It’s just a pure tell it like it is breakdowns of what’s going on and what may happen next.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

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