Day: November 10, 2025

• Turbo AI is a notetaking app that’s adding 20,000 new users per day.
• Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan, 20-year-old founders, built it to help students.
• “I could never take notes and pay attention to the teacher at the same time,” Dhawan said.

Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan, now both 20, have been friends since sixth grade.

By high school, they were coding together and building viral apps — including a Christmas light installation app that made $60,000 in revenue, Dhawan told Business Insider.

They’re still in business together, now running Turbo AI, a notetaking app that has grown from 1 million to 5.7 million users in the past six months. The company says the app is adding about 20,000 new users each day and is on track to earn eight-figures in annual recurring revenue.

They couldn’t find an AI tool for students, so they built one.

The idea for Turbo came after the two started college in 2023. Arora was attending Northwestern, and Dhawan was at Duke.

“I had a problem where I could never take notes and pay attention to the teacher at the same time,” Dhawan said. “At the same time, AI was starting to boom.”

Dhawan and Arora decided to build and test a tool that leveraged AI to record lectures and generate notes, flashcards, and quizzes to enhance the learning process.

Don’t mistake Turbo as a shortcut for slackers, however. Dhawan and Arora both have serious academic credentials. Dhawan was the salutatorian of his high school, took 21 AP classes, and earned a perfect score on the ACT, while Arora took 16 AP courses and earned a 1560 on the SAT, which they’ve noted on their LinkedIn profiles.

They’re channeling their own experience as top students to develop Turbo’s internal benchmarking system, which tests different combinations of inputs and outputs to pinpoint the information that matters most.

AI notetaking apps have become a hot category in Silicon Valley over the past year. Granola, an AI notetaking app that launched in 2024, announced a $43 million Series B round in May. Read AI, an AI assistant founded in 2021 that creates AI-generated summaries, transcriptions, and video highlights of meetings, announced a $50 million Series B funding round in October 2024. Even established players in the productivity market like Zoom and Notion have launched AI notetaking tools.

When Dhawan and Arora first launched Turbo last year, they said there wasn’t much competition.

“There was actually nothing for students on the market,” he said. “That’s also part of a reason for our success — we’ve been doing it for longer than the other competitors.”

Their launch was scrappy. They made rounds on their respective campuses, gave out cookies, and put up posters inside bathroom stalls, Arora said. Then they took to social media. “I posted like 40, 50 TikToks, and then the 40th or 50th one went mega viral. It got like 20 million views,” Arora said.

They now have users at colleges across the country, including Harvard and MIT. They said they even have customers at Goldman Sachs and a few employees at McKinsey. They’ve both now dropped out of college and have a full-time team of 15 people.

The company makes money through subscriptions — $20 a month or $120 a year — and has been bootstrapped since launch. It raised a little over $750,000 from inbound investor interest. The founders said they have no plans to seek additional funding since it’s already operating profitably.

Quality is key in the AI age

Dhawan and Arora say quality is their top priority.

“What AI has done is it’s taken the barrier to entry to building software and it’s decreased it,” Dhawan said. “Now, because consumers expect more, and AI has enabled us to ship features faster, the emphasis is all on quality, retention, usage, stickiness.”

The pair has redesigned their quiz question feature, for instance, three or four times, Dhawan said. While it wasn’t initially their top focus, it’s now their most used tool, he added.

Another big insight they’ve learned: Presentation is crucial. “No one wants to look at something that’s not pretty, and especially students, there’s a whole trend of people spending hours and hours on their iPad making notes pretty,” Dhawan said.

They’ve seen that many users turn to Turbo just to transform “PDFs that look kind of ugly” into a more readable, aesthetically pleasing format, he said.

As they look ahead, their mandate is simple: “We’re trying to show that AI can be used positively,” Dhawan said. “It’s a very powerful tool for actually enhancing the speed at which you learn.”

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tori Dunlap, the 31-year-old founder and CEO of Her First $100K, a financial education company geared toward Gen Z and millennial women. She’s also an author and podcast host based in Seattle. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I founded Her First $100K when I was 25 to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money.

I didn’t build a business to work so hard that I burn myself out. That’s why I left a 9-to-5 job. I built a company culture where we do really important work, but we say all the time, “We’re not curing cancer.”

We have six full-time employees, we’re about to hire two more, and we have another nine contractors. We’re a team of all women.

If you’re a menstruating founder, you lose at least five days a month to feeling gross, plus another few days during the luteal phase, during which I feel like an insane person. Men don’t have to deal with these things.

That’s one of the reasons we have menstruation leave at Her First $100K. We also have quarterly weeks off for our employees during which they’re paid, but the entire company pauses.

Here’s what a workday in my life is like.

My day usually begins around 7:30 a.m.

I’m not up at 5 a.m. drinking my lemon water because I like my sleep. I’m not a coffee drinker, so if I don’t get at least eight hours of sleep, I’m a little grumpy.

If I have to be up early for a flight, a podcast, or a press interview, that’s going to impact my wakeup time, but if I have control of my schedule that day, I’m usually up about 7:30 a.m.

As soon as I get out of bed, I check my phone. I know I shouldn’t be doing so, and I don’t love that I do, but I do. I check emails and Slack, our social content’s performance, and my texts from friends.

Then I do what my friend Liz Moody talks about as a “circ walk” — a circadian walk. The idea is that if you can get sunlight in your eyes as soon as possible after waking up, your digestion improves, you feel more awake throughout the day, and your metabolism’s better. Honestly, it just makes me feel really good.

I live close to the water, so I walk to the beach. Sometimes, the walk is only 10 minutes. Other times, it’s a half hour.

I usually eat the same thing for breakfast every day; I split a protein smoothie with my partner. It’s a berry chocolate smoothie, and I’ve been drinking a version of that since 2016. He usually makes that while I’m doing chores around the house or preparing for calls.

I usually start work around 9 a.m.

I always find mornings to be most productive for me. I might have meetings with my team, be getting on a flight to speak somewhere, or just be answering emails.

Thursdays typically are our recording days. I record my own podcast, and then I may go on someone else’s show.

My company is fully remote. Those of us who live in Seattle try to see each other and work together once or twice a month. It’s nice to gather in person, but since we have people all over, we also offer virtual coworking on Zoom. That’s one way we keep up our company culture, even though we’re remote.

Lunch is a nice break for me

I usually cook lunch myself, or I have leftovers from the night before. Sometimes my COO comes over to cowork with me, and we might order lunch.

I really try not to eat while working. It’s a nice break, and I try to take at least half an hour.

I’ll usually watch a TV show, such as on Food Network or the Try Guys. I dream of being a guest judge on the Food Network, so I’m studying up. I’ve worked with the Try Guys before; I politely bullied them until they let me in, which is how I’ve gotten every opportunity in my business — just politely asking until they say yes.

I do things around the house during breaks

In the afternoons, I sometimes have more meetings and interviews. I also try to sneak in my actual work in between those — creating content, being the public face of the company, working on my next book proposal, and CEO work of big vision planning, thinking about our strategy, and testing certain things.

If I have breaks between tasks, I usually try to get something done around the house. I’ll throw in a load of laundry or tidy up. I have a house cleaning service come twice a month, and honestly, I’ll probably move to once a week because it’s really nice and frees up my time.

Taking time during the workday is something that we’ve built into our work and fully approve of and support through our company policies. People have lives outside work. Our full-time employees already have unlimited PTO, but if someone needs to take the afternoon or a half hour off, they can do so without needing approval.

My workday typically ends around 5 p.m.

If it’s a standard day, I’m off at 5 p.m. and I won’t touch my laptop again. If I get an idea or a spark, I’ll sometimes open my laptop after dinner or at 10 p.m., because I genuinely enjoy working on my business, but I don’t expect this of any of my other team members.

After work, I’ll typically either cook dinner, meet friends, or go out for date night. If I’m having dinner at home with my partner, we usually split a salad kit and add chicken. It’s a go-to option — it’s healthy and quick.

Usually, after dinner — and I’ll sometimes do it in the morning, too — I do barre. It’s my workout of choice, and I try to do it three times a week.

I used to think that working out was about getting as skinny as possible. One of the things I love about barre is that you show up, make modifications, do the exercises that are right for you, and get as strong as you can. It really positively affected my relationship with fitness and with my body, and I think it has 100% affected the way I show up as a business owner.

I read and journal before bed

My partner and I might watch an episode or two of our show — right now, we’re watching Money Heist — or do some reading. I’m a big reader, and so is he. When I don’t read, I don’t feel as good. Currently, I’m reading “Wild Dark Shore,” a novel. I track every book that I read.

I read a variety of genres, including fairy smut fantasy, murder mystery thrillers, and general literary fiction. I read very little nonfiction because my entire life is a nonfiction book, and books are my escape.

I try to journal every single night, and I’ve done so almost every night for the last five or six years. The journal has been a huge part of helping me become the best person I can be and process my thoughts.

I try to be in bed with the lights out at 10:30 p.m., but usually that ends up being 11.

• Marriott says it ended its licensing partnership with the short-term rental company Sonder.
• Guests at rentals say they were blindsided. One was told to vacate his room halfway through his stay.
• Sonder’s stock price was down more than 13% after the termination announcement.

Marriott and Sonder have broken up, and guests are bearing the brunt of the fallout.

Hotel operator Marriott International signed a licensing agreement with short-term rental company Sonder in August 2024. On Sunday, Marriott announced that the agreement had been terminated due to “Sonder’s default.” The change canceled guests’ current reservations and stopped future bookings.

Marriott guests who had booked accommodations at Sonder properties say they were blindsided by the announcement.

Tim Schaefer, a blogger from New York, told Business Insider he had booked two separate Sonder apartments in New York City for a total of 10 days. But he received cancellation emails from Sonder and Marriott about an hour before his check-in on Sunday.

He said he spoke with Marriott’s help desk for an hour, asking for help booking another hotel for himself and his spouse at the same price, but was kept on hold.

“We have a high loyalty status — Platinum Elite — with them. We are not happy,” Schaefer said.

David Klingbeil, an NYU course instructor who studies luxury and marketing, said that he was halfway through his two-week stay at Sonder Flatiron in New York when he received an email on Sunday afternoon telling him he had to vacate the hotel by 8 a.m. on Monday.

“I didn’t believe it when I saw the email, I had to check that this wasn’t a phishing attempt or something. Then I saw the articles and posts on X,” Klingbeil told Business Insider.

Klingbeil said he had to book another hotel at a much higher price.

He said he was a Marriott Bonvoy Gold Elite member and had spent $15,000 with the hotel group this year.

“If I don’t see a strong reaction from them, I believe I will never choose Marriott again,” he said.

The company said online that customers who had booked a Sonder property through Marriott’s channels would get a full refund. It added that customers with future reservations would receive an email about the “potential to rebook at another Marriott Bonvoy property.”

Sonder’s stock is down about 87% in the past year, to a $6.8 million market cap. Founded in 2014, the company went public in 2021 through a special-purpose acquisition company. The company had 9,400 live units in its portfolio as of March, according to its earnings report for the first quarter of 2025.

Representatives for Marriott and Sonder did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Were you affected by the termination of Marriott-Sonder’s licensing agreement? Contact this reporter via email at abharade@businessinsider.com.

• Eric Roberge hired a house manager to work 10 hours a week at $28 an hour in August.
• Outsourcing household chores allowed him and his wife to focus on their daughter and their business.
• Investing in help increased their quality of life and highlighted time as a key measure of wealth.

Using money well is a skill. Having this skill means knowing how to invest wisely and maintain a strong savings habit, but it also means you understand how to spend money with intention.

One of the most powerful ways to spend well is to buy back time.

That’s what my family did when we decided to hire a house manager. Our top priority is having more time and energy to be fully present with our 4-year-old daughter. We also wanted to devote more time to our financial planning business, which my wife and I run together, rather than managing our household.

Here’s how we accomplished both.

Outsourcing housework is a high-impact, low-cost way to enjoy more time

Initially, growing the business I founded so that it didn’t rely solely on me to operate was the best way to reclaim my time. If I wasn’t working in the past, neither was the business.

We now have a larger team, and I’ve established strict working hours limits. I also have a greater degree of freedom and flexibility.

I eat breakfast and dinner with my family every day because I’m actually home to do that, and I take random Monday afternoons off to take my daughter to events or the playground.

When we looked at how we could buy back my wife’s time, we first considered hiring someone in the business to take on some of her workplace responsibilities. We realized two things:

1. This would take meaningful work she loved away from her while leaving other tasks she didn’t, like laundry and household errands, still on her plate.
2. It was more cost-effective to outsource household chores that took time away from not just her workday, but also time she wanted to spend with our daughter.

We weighed the pros and cons

We grew up in working-class families; my mother was a nurse for 40 years, and my wife’s father was a firefighter for 30. The idea of having “household help” was extremely foreign to us. Honestly, it felt somewhat embarrassing, too. Everyone else could “do it all;” why couldn’t we?

However, we know that many people who “do it all” aren’t very happy. Reports of burnout and depression are at extreme highs. Mothers, in particular, are often extremely overwhelmed and overloaded, still shouldering the majority of the housework, even in dual-income families.

Our own numbers — both in terms of where our hours went versus where we wanted them to go, and how much it would cost to change that — didn’t lie. They indicated we needed help around the house.

How we hired our house manager

We started by creating a list of everything we felt we could “shed” from our household responsibilities. We used that list to create the following job description:

We’re seeking a part-time house manager/family assistant with light nanny responsibilities for our family of three. Schedule is flexible and can be built around your preferences. Our ideal candidate is willing to assist with light housework, including laundry and meal preparation, and would be open to helping with our two cats as well. We expect the role to start at 10 hours a week, but there is room to expand it. $25-$30 per hour, dependent on experience.

We are looking for someone who:

• Appreciates autonomy and enjoys having control over their schedule, and doesn’t need constant direction
• Is a self-starter and can take charge of their own projects
• Is interested in and passionate about kids
• Has a willingness to learn our family’s routines and preferences
• Is curious, energetic, and compassionate — especially with young children

Responsibilities and tasks:

• Meal prep/help with cooking/grocery pickup/preschooler lunch and snack prep
• Laundry (one load of towels, two sets of sheets, one load of kids’ laundry a week)
• Basic errands like mailing a package at the post office, returning items to the store, returning library books, taking the car in for a maintenance appointment, running to the store to grab paper towels, etc
• Light cleaning (wipe down counters, sweep or vacuum as needed, put away clean dishes as needed)
• Helping with appointments (i.e., be at the home to let scheduled maintenance in)
• Home organization/decluttering projects (reorganizing a messy closet on occasion, helping put up or take down seasonal decorations, etc.)
• Help with cat care (brushing our two cats, helping take both to the vet, spending ~15 minutes/day playing with them)

Once we had our description, we posted it in local parents’ and moms’ groups on Facebook. We thought it would be better to find someone familiar in our community than a stranger from somewhere like Care.com. We received eight applications and hired our current house manager for $28 per hour in August.

She’s a stay-at-home mom whose own kids reached elementary school, so she had more time in her day and genuinely loved the work we needed help doing. We pay her about $1,200 a month.

There haven’t really been any downsides. The only thing is I try to stay out of the kitchen when she’s doing meal prep, which can be a slight inconvenience. But we’ve gotten along very well.

Wealth is more than money; it’s the time you control, too

My wife has been able to devote more hours to the work she wants to do in the business and spend more focused, quality time with our daughter without distraction.

Getting this help also gives us leverage. The additional time devoted to our business provides the opportunity to increase our income more than we could save by trying to avoid hiring additional support.

Wealth is about a lot more than what’s in your bank account — it’s how much autonomy you have; how much you can choose what you do or don’t do with the time you have.

Could we save more money by doing everything ourselves? Perhaps we’d have a little more cash on hand, but we’d be extremely depleted in terms of time and energy. Could I have a higher net worth if I devoted all my time to work? Of course, but my life would also be a lot smaller and emptier.

Time, peace, energy, and health are all measures of wealth, alongside money. Arguably, those things are all more valuable than the dollars on my balance sheet.

• OpenAI’s new hires in health and massive reach have investors betting it can win in consumer health.
• Big Tech has spent decades trying to give consumers control of their health data.
• OpenAI is now exploring building its own consumer health tools, according to sources close to the company.

OpenAI is pushing into healthcare — and the AI giant could be poised to reinvent Big Tech’s consumer health bets.

Tech behemoths like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have spent decades working to give consumers control of their health data. Many of their efforts have crashed and burned. But investors and healthcare leaders think OpenAI has the right ingredients to try again.

Sources close to the company told Business Insider that OpenAI is exploring building its own consumer health tools. It’s weighing several opportunities, such as creating a personal health assistant or a health data aggregator.

OpenAI’s foray into healthcare marks one of its boldest moves, beyond AI infrastructure and into industry-specific software. After transforming how companies build new tech with generative AI, OpenAI is setting its sights on launching its own applications in sectors dominated by legacy enterprise giants — from sales and marketing to law, and perhaps now, medicine.

OpenAI declined to comment for this story.

The company’s recent hires reflect big healthcare ambitions. OpenAI tapped Nate Gross, the cofounder of public healthtech company Doximity, to lead its healthcare strategy in June. Two months later, it brought on Instagram’s Ashley Alexander as its vice president of health products. At the HLTH conference in October, Gross pointed to OpenAI’s vast reach; ChatGPT gets around 800 million active users every week, many of whom come with medical questions.

That scale has healthcare founders and investors watching OpenAI closely for its next move.

“Consumers have historically gone to Google to ask their health questions, and it’s clear that they’re now starting to shift those questions over to LLMs to capture that knowledge base through a more conversational discovery process,” said Greg Yap, a partner at Menlo Ventures, which isn’t an investor in OpenAI. “I think OpenAI has a tremendous opportunity in that sector.”

Several investors told Business Insider they think OpenAI could tackle a problem that’s tripped up Big Tech for years: the personal health record.

Health data privacy rules and financial incentives keep your health data scattered and siloed across all the doctors you’ve ever been to. The idea of a personal health record is to pull that information into one place, owned and managed by the patient.

It’s a difficult problem to solve, but tech hasn’t stopped trying. Should OpenAI choose to build a personal health assistant with consolidated health records, it’ll be competing with Alphabet’s Verily, which released its own AI-powered personal health record app in October.

OpenAI has mostly stayed quiet about its plans in healthcare. But the company’s explosive growth and dominance in foundational AI have some investors worried that the AI giant has a better shot than many previous Big Tech entrants at building transformative healthtech and trampling startup competition.

“Amazon’s a great company, but they’ve been one foot in healthcare, one foot out. Microsoft, kind of the same way. We haven’t seen that same type of behavior with OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s been pedal all the way down, aggressive, let’s look at everything, let’s talk with everyone. So I’d say I view them much more as a serious potential threat,” said Blake Wu, a partner at NEA, which isn’t an investor in OpenAI or Anthropic.

The personal health record problem

Jennifer Yoo, a healthcare regulatory partner at Fenwick & West, says she’s seeing many companies using AI to build personal health assistants, often with the hopes of connecting a patient’s medical records for tailored support.

But those companies are following a trail blazed by and littered with Big Tech’s past health projects.

Microsoft, Google, and Apple have all tried to build personal health records for consumers, with mixed results. Microsoft’s HealthVault launched in 2007 but shuttered in 2019 after failing to gain user traction, largely because it required patients to manually upload their health records.

Google’s efforts took a similar path — its 2008 health record project died in 2012, only for the company to begin work on an electronic health records search tool a few years later that came under regulatory fire over how Google accessed and handled patient data. Apple still offers a native Health Records feature on iPhones, but that service requires hospitals to sign data-sharing agreements for patients to connect their records to the app.

“Apple’s health record, and any of them that rely on us to log into every portal, download and manually share data, that’s friction that keeps people from getting value from their own health data,” Yap said. “AI suffers from that friction just like anyone else. You can’t personalize information if you don’t have the data.”

The good news: some of those challenges are beginning to chip away. A recent federal ban on “information blocking” prevents hospitals from keeping health data locked up or making it hard for people to access their own records. In practice, however, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has found that many hospitals still limit what patients can download.

Companies like Health Gorilla and Particle Health have stepped up as intermediaries between health systems and patients, pulling records from multiple sources, cleaning and standardizing the data, and sharing it with third-party apps at the patient’s request. Yoo suggested that companies seeking to develop AI health assistants with built-in health records would be wise to partner with an intermediary to avoid the headaches of manually retrieving records.

Consumers, too, are increasingly eager than ever to control their health, including their health data. When OpenAI released GPT-5 in August, CEO Sam Altman said health was one of ChatGPT’s top use cases, and bragged that the new model “can help you understand your healthcare and make decisions on your journey.”

“They’re already using ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude for their health questions. I think users are seeing the value of, “hey, if that also had all my long-term medical records, how much better would the information be for me?” Yoo said.

OpenAI’s partnership approach

OpenAI isn’t yet encouraging users to upload their medical data, and it’s treading carefully as more users turn to ChatGPT for health information.

Viral posts circulating in early November, including a now-deleted post from prediction markets startup Kalshi, suggested that ChatGPT would no longer provide health advice. It was a misinterpretation of OpenAI’s rules. The company’s recently updated usage policies tell consumers not to use its products to do a doctor’s job, including for diagnosis or treatment, but the policies don’t preclude ChatGPT from offering general medical information. OpenAI’s health AI research lead said the company hasn’t changed its models.

If OpenAI steers clear of handling medical records directly, it could take a different page from Apple’s health data playbook. Apple’s Healthkit, launched in 2014, collects health and fitness data from third-party apps and wearables like Apple Watches and centralizes that information into its Health app.

OpenAI could partner with other health companies to collect that data. As Gross said during his HLTH panel, “I think the way that we’re going to achieve the greatest amount of good is by a robust ecosystem of partners.” Investors pointed to consumer lab testing companies like Superpower and Function Health as potentially attractive partners for OpenAI’s health push.

While some investors are eager for OpenAI to go deep in consumer health, the AI giant is digging into the healthcare sector from multiple angles. Gross’s early mandate includes co-creating new healthcare technologies with clinicians and researchers, while Alexander is building healthcare products for clinicians as well as individual consumers. OpenAI is already working with pharma giants like Eli Lilly and Sanofi on drug discovery and development, as well as with healthtech companies like Penda Health on AI-powered clinical decision support. It’s also landing ChatGPT enterprise deals and other partnerships with health systems.

Meanwhile, the latest wave of healthcare VC investment has gone straight to AI tools that automate administrative work, especially for clinicians and health systems. OpenAI’s provider-facing projects could challenge those bets, too, another sign of AI giants steadily encroaching on startups’ territory.