The Spark. I did not expect to feel it again. The last time I felt it was in 2011, when I joined Zendesk and sensed that I was stepping into something much bigger than a job. The spark is created by a rare mix of timing, people, product, and cultural shift. Back then it was a revolutionary way of reinventing customer support software and SaaS – this time it’s something much more fundamental.

The first Spark

The last 13 years I was my own boss and had all the freedom of the world. Why would I leave all that behind to work for someone again?

Because of that spark. Some companies have it, during a specific time. It can easily fade away but as long as it’s there I love to ride on it’s wave as long as possible. Back in 2011 I randomly filled in an online application form, just for fun. I didn’t even know what Zendesk was. All I did was googling “Coolest Job of the World”. I wasn’t looking for a job.

“Hi, this is Maxime from Zendesk, I’m calling you because of your application”, echoed the words through my old Nokia 2710 the morning after when I woke up on the floor, still having a fever from the Malaria. And there it was that spark, in Maximes voice. It’s something between the words, something intuitive. A couple of weeks later I’d learn how badly he wanted to work at Zendesk that he showed up unannounced at the San Francisco office and literally cried when they told him he did not have a US work visa. They offered him a support role in London, and a few weeks later he was leading the enablement team. Zendesk did not need to chase people. People wanted in.
Customers wanted pictures with us after bootcamps. There was something bigger than software happening, and with Wispr I feel it even more strongly.

The life between two sparks

After being at Zendesk and seeing it grow from 50 to 2000 people, I built my own company. Leaving London to open an office in Berlin and employing my first two employees. There was a day when I sat down and thought this is all way too easy. It felt like a movie which I already knew the end of. Intuitively, I wrote to a friend on Whatsapp and literally wrote: “What should I do with my life?” The friend answered a minute later: “Buy this Land Rover!” And sent me a link to a message board where a converted Land Rover was for sale somewhere close to Buenos Aires. What the heck would I do with the Land Rover, I thought. After a quick toilet break, I realized that if we buy the Land Rover and rent the company while we drive from Buenos Aires to Colombia, nothing would be too foreseeable and we’d live an amazing challenge.

It was serendipity, the driving force that got me to Zendesk in the first place, which again stroke and had me buy a Land Rover. In fact, Serendipity was the driving force in all the important twists in my life.
A month later, we ran Helpando from the most impossible places: ranging from the Land Rover to Peruvian Desert Cyber Coffee places, jungle lodges, mountain tops and petrol stations. We also had to deal with the constant problems of the Land Rover breaking down and drive 12.000 kilometers, film a video documentary (Todo: Link), interview entrepreneurs and show up for interviews and talk shows ourselves. It was challenging. We somehow had to compress our 8-10 hour workday to just 4 hours for the simple fact that we just had less time compared to regular office life in Berlin. If you have no time, your back hurts, and you have to work from the uncomfortable seat of a Land Rover, you become amazingly good at cutting out everything that creates friction. I became really good at constantly thinking about this key question:

What are the repetitive tasks we do on a daily basis that steal us time and create friction?

Especially while driving, a time I couldn’t work I would think about above question and identifying repeatable tasks, then speaking them into a voice note to later found a solution for it.
Back at the computer I’d create custom shortcuts in AlfredApp and share them via a dropbox folder with the team.

Sending a link to my Calendly to a client? Takes one keystroke.
Logging in via ssh to a particular tmux session via the terminal? “CMD-Space login skyscanner ENTER”
My Passport details? One key stroke
Scheduling a calendar event for tomorrow 5pm? All I need to do is to type “cal tmr 5pm meeting with richard” and it ends up in my calendar.

After a year in South America, we had more than 500 custom shortcuts and snippets configured in AlfredApp. I am using them to this day.

Still, things were not ideal:

• I could only use the snippets and shortcuts on my Mac, they weren’t available on my phone
• I still had to use the keyboard of my computer to execute the shortucts, while driving this was not always easy (I still had the computer on the passanger seat and would do stuff while waiting at the red lights)
• While driving I could communicate with people, but only via voice messages which recipients sometimes found annoying

Not a single week passed where I didn’t fantasize about a little hardware gadget that I might have next to my ear and I could press a button on to then utter voice commands that would trigger actions on my computer, on my phone.

At the time this felt like science fiction, but the problem was obvious to me.

My thoughts were not the bottleneck.

My fingers were.

My screen was.

The interface was.

I did not want another productivity app. I did not want another dashboard, another inbox, another system I had to maintain. I wanted something much simpler and much more radical: I wanted to speak my intention into the machine and have it understand what I meant.

Not just transcribe my words.

Understand the task.

For years, I kept coming back to the same frustration. I could think faster than I could type. I could speak more naturally than I could structure. I could feel ideas arriving while walking, driving, cooking, showering, jogging, moving through the world, but the moment I had to sit down, open the laptop, find the right app, place the cursor in the right field and type it all out, something had already been lost.

And this is why Wispr hit me so hard. It was December the 20th of 2025 when I was sitting in a coffee place in Playa de Carmen, Mexico hacking away on my keyboard when someone who had scanned my 4in7out.com Sticker in Berlin’s street send me a message via Whatsapp saying I should use Wispr Flow. It was pretty random but the minute I installed it and finished the tutorial I was hooked and thought “I want to work for this company!”.
It felt like a serious attempt to build the layer I had been fantasizing about since those Land Rover days.

A way to remove the unnecessary distance between what appears in the mind and what appears in the world. What if the big shift is not that computers become faster and smarter?
What if the next big shift is a shift in the fundamental we interact with computers?

The reason we started the company in the first place was that I hate people looking down on their phones all day long. And to me, if we wanted to get people off of that, it was clear it’s not gonna be a screen time app that’s going to do it. It’s going to be a fundamental transformation of what personal computing looks like.

…I heard Tanay, the CEO and co-founder of Wispr say in a Podcast.

And ultimately this is why I join Wispr. Not to work more efficiently, not to get more done. But because I believe we as