Why I've Stayed with the Same Startup for 4 Years

Four years is enough time to earn a full bachelor's degree. It's an entire presidential term. It's the time an athlete gets to train from one Olympic Games to the next. In other words, four years is a long time.

And in a place like Silicon Valley, where it's normal to switch companies every year or so, staying anywhere that long gets noticed. People ask about it. Recruiters ask about it. My friends definitely ask about it. "You're still at Deepgram?"

Yes, I am. So here's why I've stayed.

No, this is not propaganda. Nobody asked me to write this, and nobody is holding a microphone to my head (well, we're a voice AI company, so there are a lot of microphones around, but none of them are pointed at me right now).

I like the people I work with, and I enjoy the kind of projects I get to work on. Most recently, I've been in charge of Deepgram's blog. That means that when something big happens here, I'm the one making sure the world hears about it. That includes big company news like our Series C, and developer-focused pieces like our guide to building a voice agent with Pipecat and Deepgram Flux STT and TTS.

It feels cool knowing that I have an impact. When Deepgram raised $130M earlier this year, the world heard about it because I hit the "Publish" button on the blog and across our other channels. When we launched a speech-to-text model built specifically for pharmaceutical terminology, people found out about Nova-3 Pharma because my teammates and I got the word out.

That's the thing about working at a startup this size. Your work doesn't disappear into a queue of approvals and committees. You can draw a straight line from what you did on Tuesday to what thousands of developers are reading on Wednesday.

The lightning talk I gave in Austin, Texas less than one year into my Deepgram career.

And, of course, it didn't hurt that a few hundred thousand people got to hear my voice and see my face making some of these announcements, too. My mom was thrilled. I was only mildly terrified.

What keeps it fun is the variety. One week I'm writing about fundraising, the next I'm deep in a tutorial about turn detection, and the week after that I'm on camera. I've never had the chance to get bored, and four years in, I still learn something new almost every week.

My first year at Deepgram, we had our company offsite in Cabo. That's where I got to meet some incredible people face to face: engineers, sales reps, VPs, researchers, and everyone in between. Between karaoke nights and internal hackathons, I felt like I really bonded with the people I was working alongside. It's hard to stay strangers with someone after you've heard them sing a power ballad.

My second year, we went back to Cabo. This time, I hosted a trivia night for the whole company, which is still one of my favorite things I've done here. (Yes, people got competitive. No, I will not be taking questions about the tiebreaker.) Of course, we also got a lot of work done that week, too.

That was around the time I started feeling like we were a battalion, moving forward together across the Silicon Valley landscape, slaying any bugs and bursting through any bottlenecks we came across along the way. When your team feels like that, the hard weeks don't feel as hard, and the good weeks feel even better.

Our last two offsites took place in Austin and then San Francisco (aka my backyard). By then, the company had grown a lot. And here's what surprised me: the new crop of Deepgrammers raised the bar. They were talented, curious, and full of energy, and they pushed the rest of us to keep up. Every time a new wave of people joins, I end up learning from them.

That's something I didn't expect when I first signed on. I thought I'd stay for the work. I ended up also staying for the people.

I could never work for a company whose product I don't believe in. It would make every announcement feel like a stretch, and I'd be able to hear it in my own writing.

Thankfully, Deepgram has a product that matches its team. I won't gush too much here, at the risk of sounding heavy-handed or too much like an advertisement. But I get a front-row seat to what our Research and Engineering teams ship, and I keep being impressed.

Part of what makes it exciting is where voice AI is headed. When we announced our Series C, our CEO, Scott Stephenson, said the goal is to "pass the Audio Turing Test at scale in 2026." In plain terms, that means building voice AI that sounds and responds so naturally that you can't tell you're talking to a machine. That's a big, ambitious goal, and it's the kind of goal that makes you want to show up on Monday morning.

It also helps that I get to see the work up close. Before every launch post, I sit down with the researchers and engineers who built the thing, and they walk me through the demos, the benchmarks, and the tricky problems they had to solve along the way. By the time I start writing, I'm usually already sold. When you can hear the results with your own ears, you don't need anyone to convince you.

If you'd like to see why for yourself, here are a few posts I'd point you to:

• Fluxing conversational state and speech-to-text: how Flux models transcription and conversational turn-taking together, instead of stacking separate models on top of each other.
• Flux on-the-fly configuration: how developers can change keyterms and turn-detection settings mid-conversation, without reconnecting.
• Deepgram and IBM introduce advanced voice capabilities for enterprise AI: how Deepgram became IBM's first voice partner for watsonx Orchestrate.
• Introducing Flux Multilingual: conversational speech recognition across 10 languages through a single API.
• Text-to-speech comes of age: the launch of Flux TTS, which can start responding in as little as 80 milliseconds.

When I write about launches like these, I don't have to invent excitement. The excitement is already there, and my job is to make sure people hear about it.

In summary:

1. ❤️ I love what I get to do. My work has real, visible impact, and no two weeks look the same.
2. ✅ The people make the job even better. From karaoke in Cabo to trivia nights to the talented new folks joining every quarter, I like showing up for this team.
3. 📈 The product delivers what it promises, and more. I get to tell the world about things I actually believe in.

(And I haven't even mentioned the compensation and benefits yet!)

That's why I've stayed with the same startup for four years. And I'm not planning on going anywhere.

If any of this sounds like the kind of place you'd want to be, come join us. We have open roles across Engineering, Research, Sales, Marketing, Product, and more, in the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Apply to Deepgram →

Not seeing the right role yet? Join our talent community, and we'll reach out when something fits.