This week’s guest is Jordan Dearsley, CEO of Vapi. Vapi enables enterprises to deploy humanlike voice agents in minutes. Whether you are building a new voice product or managing millions of calls, Vapi’s infrastructure and flexible APIs make it simple and reliable.

We explore why Waterloo continues to produce world-class engineers and founders, Jordan’s journey from building calendar apps and AI therapy tools to leading Vapi, and why enterprises are turning to voice AI to save engineering time and resources. We also cover the toughest technical challenges including latency, tool calls, determinism, and multi state environments, and why generative voice systems require constant tuning and forward deployed models rather than one size fits all solutions.

Episode Chapters:

2:10 - The MIT of Canada
4:03 - Pivoting 10+ times
6:00 - Why voice AI
11:07 - A faster path to production
12:05 - Voice challenges from enterprises
15:05 - Why stay horizontal
17:20 - Actively moving away from being an AI BPO
19:45 - Forward deployed engineers
21:40 - From scoping to production
22:40 - Recruiting as an early stage startup
26:05 - ElevenLabs leading the model pack
29:00 - Distribution & enterprise integrations
32:35 - Quick fire round

As always, feel free to contact us at partnerpathpodcast@gmail.com. We would love to hear ideas for content, guests, and overall feedback.

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