Jordan
Dearsley

Airdropped business cards on SF buses. Then Amazon called.

In the summer of 2023, Jordan Dearsley walked the streets of San Francisco talking to a voice AI he had built for himself. He called it Harmon. It was an AI therapist — not a company pitch, not a product roadmap. Something he actually needed.

To find out if anyone else might find it useful, he did what resourceful founders do when they have no distribution: he walked onto buses and airdropped digital contact cards to strangers, asking them to call his AI. Most didn't. The ones who did weren't looking for therapy. They were developers who wanted to know how he had built something that actually sounded like a real conversation.

That gap between what Dearsley made and what people wanted turned out to be worth more than the original idea. Within two years, those early voice conversations became Vapi — the infrastructure platform now handling one to five million calls daily, trusted by Amazon Ring, Intuit, New York Life, and a million-plus developers around the world.

The leap from bus rides to sold-out developer conferences did not happen through product-led growth alone. It happened because Dearsley and co-founder Nikhil Gupta — both University of Waterloo software engineering dropouts who met as roommates — understood something most voice AI builders got wrong: the models were never the bottleneck. The infrastructure around them was.

When Dearsley says "we're everything in between the models and actually talking to customers on the phone," he means it literally. Vapi handles the plumbing that nobody wants to build but everyone needs: real-time audio transmission, model chaining, conversation flow logic, tool calling APIs, and the after-call analytics that help enterprises iterate.

His estimate: only about 10% of companies genuinely benefit from building a custom voice stack. For the other 90%, the time investment is impossible to justify. And for those companies — Amazon Ring, Intuit, New York Life — Vapi became the answer after a long search.

Amazon Ring's evaluation alone tells the story. Ring considered more than 40 AI voice vendors before choosing Vapi. Once selected, Ring moved from zero to full production deployment in two weeks. One hundred percent of Ring's inbound calls now route through Vapi. Customer satisfaction scores improved.

What actually makes Jordan Dearsley move

He is not comfortable with small. The soup kitchens, the dozen pivots, the decision to walk away from half a million dollars in ARR — all of it points to someone for whom the cost of the wrong problem is higher than the cost of starting over.

Dearsley has described the hardship of the early Superpowered years not as a badge of suffering but as a forcing function. When you've dropped out of school, relocated across a continent, and are eating at a soup kitchen in San Francisco, you don't have the luxury of being precious about your product. You ship, you talk to users, you pivot. The fidget spinner store on Etsy years earlier was the same instinct — find the market, move fast, don't overthink the category.

The detail that captures his approach best might be the walking. When he built Harmon, the AI therapist, he walked two hours a day testing it. That's not a launch strategy. That's a founder who genuinely uses his own product because he needs it — and whose clarity about what doesn't work comes from lived experience rather than a user research report.

His honesty about that period — and his willingness to talk about it publicly — is one reason the developer community around Vapi is as engaged as it is. People build with founders they trust. Trust comes from the ones who don't pretend the messy parts didn't happen.

• Resilient - rebuilt multiple times from scratch, including relocating to SF after hitting a wall with Superpowered
• Pragmatic - follows what customers actually want, not what he initially thought they needed
• Technically deep - understands real-time audio infrastructure at a systems level, not just the product surface
• High-agency - airdropped contact cards on buses; pivoted 12 times; won Amazon Ring's contract over 40 rivals
• Community-focused - sponsors developer events, builds in public, openly discusses failures and hardships
• Contrarian - built personal AI tools for his own needs before seeing the commercial opportunity