Tyler Kieft

The Short Version

• Proud to be from the great state of Vermont.
• Loved computers and technology from an early age, started hacking in BASIC in 4th grade.
• Electrical Engineering / Computer Science degree from University of Rochester.
• Studied zebrafish craniofacial genetics at Research Science Institute (2004 MIT).
• Internships at IBM (3x) and Lockheed Martin.
• Long-distance runner, musician, environmentalist, humanist.

The Long Version

Born in Vermont, Raised on Technology

The son of two lifelong IBMers, It’s only natural that I would be interested in technology from an early age. I cut my teeth on DOS, swapping out sound cards with my dad and hacking the school computers so that I could get to a command line. I played Commander Keen and Dr. Brain.

My first programming experience was in the 4th grade. Someone gave me a copy of Microsoft QBasic on a floppy disk and a few games to go along with it. Soon I was hacking new levels and gameplay modes into Nibbles and playing around with the physics in Gorillas. My first experience with web development was around this time; I made a class website. I remember fondly how much time I spent coding the image map of our class picture that linked to everyone’s profile page. I taught myself C++ in high school, my first “real” language, learned Java shortly after, then Python, and kept piling on from there.

A False Start

I had an amazing biology teacher in high school, Adam Weiss, who helped me to appreciate the beauty and intricacy of cellular processes, especially relating to genetics. I was lucky enough to be accepted to Research Science Institute at MIT, one of the most prestigious summer science programs in the nation. I studied the genetics of craniofacial development in zebrafish in Pam Yelick’s lab at the Forsyth Institute. Besides the transformative experience of living in a big city with little supervision for six weeks, my biggest takeaway was that I wasn’t cut out for a career as a genetics researcher. Too much waiting for genes to replicate and then make their way across gels, not enough active “doing.”

Finding My Way

The next summer, I was extremely lucky to land an internship at IBM, overhauling and automating one of their business processes as part of a team of six interns. I actually started working there a week before I graduated from high school. Although my immediate responsibilities were to write a lot of Python code, I picked up enough about the Electrical Engineering side of the business to know that I had found my academic niche.

I went to school at the University of Rochester on a full-tuition scholarship, turning down offers from schools such as Harvard, Duke and Tufts. I reasoned that I could still get a great education, and the lack of debt upon exiting would give me a lot of options. During college I pursued both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, while dabbling in Physics. For a while, I was really into computer architecture, which I saw as the boundary between software and hardware. I spent a summer doing research with Michael Huang on using statistical techniques to speed up architectural simulators. I spent my other summers back at IBM (a total of three internships), and at Lockheed Martin where I worked on computer vision software, combining 2D aerial imagery to automatically form 3D terrain models which could be used in soldier traning simulators.

The Hesitant Entrepreneur

I met my co-founder Matt Mireles at a job fair at Columbia University. He was at a small table in the corner, sporting a rebellious-looking mohawk and handing out pamphlets about how SpeakerText was going to change the world. I did freelance PHP development for a while in exchange for getting my iPhone bill paid. We launched SpeakerText v1.0 in early January 2010, and around that time Matt began the long process of convincing me to join SpeakerText full-time after I graduated. I had always fantasized about becoming an entrepreneur, having been an avid reader of Paul Graham’s essays for a few years by that point. I made the decision to commit my post-collegiate life to SpeakerText in April, moved to Pittsburgh, then Mountain View, and haven’t looked back since. I can say without hesitation that being an entrepreneur is one of the most challenging and exhiliarating things I have ever done, and it has changed my whole outlook on what it means to be successful.