A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders His startup powers OpenAI's Voice Mode. Last month, they became a unicorn. | Russ d’Sa, Co-Founder of LiveKit
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Feb 23, 2026 
Russ d’Sa, Founder and CEO of LiveKit, built the infrastructure behind real-time audio/video and powered ChatGPT’s voice mode. He tells how a pivot from a consumer app to open source infrastructure changed everything. Stories include a scary sell-or-die threat, a secret OpenAI outreach, and how LiveKit scaled stateful voice agents to become a unicorn.
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Use Strategic Partnerships To Create Sale Leverage
- When selling a struggling startup, create strategic partnerships first to gain leverage and time instead of immediately accepting acqui‑hire offers.
- Russ's banker advised using a partnership that makes acquirer dependent on your product to raise valuation.
Open Source Drove Rapid Enterprise Adoption
- Launching LiveKit as open source created rapid developer adoption because companies could inspect code and deploy it themselves.
- That trust and API design attracted Spotify, Reddit, Oracle and others who valued control and visibility over closed commercial options.
The Early Voice AI Demo That Nobody Noticed
- Russ built a demo pairing LiveKit's WebRTC stack with GPT to create a spoken 'Samantha'-style AI demo.
- He expected it to go viral but it got little attention, yet the idea foreshadowed later work with OpenAI on voice mode.