Have you ever watched a show in a language that you did not speak, so you switched it into one that you would understand? Except the voices were too loud, unsynced, and some of them were the same for different characters? Well, Shrikar Lekkala had that same experience watching Money Heist, a popular Spanish show on Netflix.
Watching this show with his friends, the English voices had been so badly dubbed that it downgraded the viewing experience. And that annoyed Shrikar to no end. He commented, “That irritated me so much, where I’m just like, how is this even possible? How is Netflix looking at this and saying, ‘Yeah, we’ll go ahead and push this onto our platform’. It’s one of the highest grossing TV shows of all time.”
Shrikar was disappointed that a large company like Netflix would allow its popular television shows to have bad dubs. Channeling that annoyance into action, Shrikar began to research how to fix this problem, drawing on his background in computer science.
Since this project began before the widespread uptake of generative AI products like ChatGPT, he was was forced to do a deep dive and forge new territory. During his freshman year he had learned how to make dubs– of better quality than those put out by Netflix. Shrikar translated a video of Kobe Bryant’s famous “Job Not Finished” speech into Italian, using a program to voice clone and lip synchronize Kobe Bryant to translate his voice into Italian. Not only was Kobe speaking a different language but it sounded like him, too!
People were astonished by the video. He told me, “Everyone was like, ‘Dude, how did you do this? What is going on right now? Is this magic?’”
No, not magic but an eighteen year old with a passion. He showed his professors the video, and based on their reactions, he knew he was onto something big.
Two years later, Shrikar launched Phraze, a successful translation app. How did he accomplish this feat? Let’s hear from Shrikar himself! Check out this Q&A that tells how Shrikar got 800+ applicants to apply to join his team, built a networking circle of successful businessmen, and took a paid gap year in Chicago.
For our aspiring entrepreneurs, I suggest you read closely.
Q & A
edited for clarity
Q: How did you turn your idea into an actual interface?
I was 18 years old at the time. I wanted someone experienced to come and build this out with me. So I put a LinkedIn job post up for a company that had no revenue, no users, no nothing. And I ended up getting pretty lucky. I got 800 applicants for that job post. And it wasn’t just students. It was like PhDs at Michigan. People with over 15 years of experience in machine learning, and I kind of had to grow up in that moment.
I ended up getting people with over 10 years of experience in the field. That was a really cool experience. I was really intimidated by that whole process, but after finding that confidence, we built an interface where we actually built out the application. People were able to use the application. And then when I showed some people with some serious business experience, I’m talking about eight figure exits in their own companies, they saw the promise. And then at that point I was like, if I take a stab at this, and put all my effort into this business, maybe we’ll scale into something.
Q: What advice would you give to young entrepreneurs?
The biggest advice I’d give is to network.
A young entrepreneur, they don’t have many resources, they don’t have a huge network, and they don’t have the actual tools that a lot of people that are older with experience in the field have. If you’re a student, you have the student card that you’ll only have once in your life. And I used this so much.
When I was 18 years old, I would basically DM everyone in the space that I thought was really cool, or just had a really cool company, and said, ‘I’m an 18 year old. I’m building out this app. This is what I’ve done to date. I really like what you did in this field, and I’d really like to talk to you about this. You want to get on a 15 minute call?’
And then those 15 minute calls would last two and a half hours, and I would be able to learn a lot, and kind of get them as a friend and mentor. After building that foundation of mentors, I was able to go from the advice stage, where I’m just asking them a bunch of questions, to making my own decisions.
If you have an idea, I would just say, ‘go for it’. There’s really nothing you can lose at this time. This is the best time to build a business in your life because you might not have that many responsibilities like taking care of a family, or that job that you’re going to work from nine to five.
There’s this cliche statement, you gain seven months of experience in one month building your own business, whether you like it or not, because you’re going to have to learn about accounting, legal, and building an app. You’re going to learn about leading a team where if you were working for someone else, it would be a little tough to get that experience all in one place.
Overall advice would be to network, and then also, believe in yourself, have that confidence to push through that initial fearful stage. And then I think it gets pretty fun from there.
Q: Did you ever have a fearful stage even though you knew you had something good here?
At the start, it was kind of like me showing people this app, and they’d be like, ‘This is really cool, but you don’t have any resources or you don’t have any marketing experience and you’re just not the right person for this.’
And these would be people that I looked up to, like some of my mentors would tell me this stuff. Thinking back now, they were kind of just pushing me to get over that mental hurdle. Because once you have the internal belief that you can go ahead and build this business out yourself, then it’s kind of inevitable at that point. If you have something real then you have actual validation from your clients or your market
Putting that out was pretty easy for me, so yeah, that initial fearful stage was kind of tough. And I remember getting over that, because it would be me telling my friends and building a business, and ‘they’re like, oh, here we go again’. This is the third idea this month, and it’s going to fizz out.
But I think another thing that helped me out was getting that team of people that were really kind of obsessed with me. Then I had to join meetings every day and lead them, and honestly, just grow up to be a better leader and be more consistent. So yeah, that fearful stage sucks, but once you get over it, it’s actually really fun.
Q: Who and what has been most helpful to you in the process of building your company?
I started this business as a freshman in college. Now I’m a senior in college, and finishing up my degree, but in the middle of my time, I actually took a gap year last year to move to Chicago, and moved to San Francisco. To actually take this on full time, see if this is what I want to do after college. And then I actually really enjoyed it kind of realized, after coming back to school, it just stimulates me more. I mean, I just enjoy running my business a lot more than going to class or taking a test. So it’s just kind of natural for me.
People that really helped me were kind of that initial networking thing that I was talking about earlier. Those people who helped me when I was a little bit unsure if this is what I wanted to do. And then it kind of led me in the right path to getting a first client, or getting my first revenue from the company. And then whenever I have a question for them, now my mentors that are on campus, in the i-Venture Program, or in some accelerator programs, or even just people that I’ve met along the way, I can text them whenever I want, they’ll respond. They’ll give me their time. And it’s not like a transactional thing, because they’ve been there before, and I really respect that they’re able to take the time out of their day to help a young entrepreneur and help them get to the point that they’ve got to. Because they’ve gotten to like, eight or nine figure exits. They have like 100 million dollar companies. And you know, they’re extremely busy, but they’re going to take their time out of their day to help me. So definitely respect those people.
Q: Can you tell me a little more about the gap year experience
I moved to Wrigleyville. I’m like two streets away from the Cubs Stadium, which was really sick. I’m super into sports too. I moved to Chicago, got an office in Chicago. We won a couple pitch competitions–business pitch competitions–my sophomore year. We got a free year and a half in the 1871 space in downtown Chicago. We got a free office, and I was basically working out of there every day for six months. And then I really wanted to explore San Francisco, since San Francisco is kind of portrayed as this beacon of tech. You go over there. Everyone’s talking about tech. Everyone’s super smart, building huge companies. And I went over there. I really enjoyed it. I felt like the smartest people I’ve ever met are over there talking about work all the time. And I kind of figured out that, I kind of want to stay in Illinois, just stay in Chicago.
It was a super cool experience, I think, not having to worry about tests or your schedule for school, or anything that’s set in stone. You make your own schedule. You can tell yourself when you wake up, when your meetings are, how long you’re going to work. Staying disciplined over that time taught me a lot about myself and how much I really care about this. Once you’re bitten by the bug of entrepreneurship, it’s kind of hard to stop. It was natural for me. I just got kind of obsessed with what I was working on.
I really enjoyed moving and just traveling. In general, San Francisco’s a beautiful place, you can hike there, go swimming. There’s a jet ski guy that I became friends with in Chicago, and I had a lot of fun traveling to all these different places. I went to Florida for a couple of days, and then Texas, Seattle, and just traveled that year, too.
Q: How did you balance the stress of running your business while getting your degree?
My sophomore year, second semester, is when it started getting tough because we finally got our first revenue. We had some paying clients. The whole time that I was studying for, my stats finals, or my CS finals, I would kind of just doze off, or start thinking about my work that I had to do for my company itself. It would get kind of hard to focus on school.
At that point, the natural transition into taking some time off of school and focusing on this thing that I really enjoy. Managing stress is something that I think kind of goes up and down because some weeks my business is running really well. Some weeks some people have some issues with the platform, or they just have a huge contract that I need to kind of close, and it’s kind of a little stressful to get over that legal hurdle. But I think at the end of the day, this might not make sense, but it’s just not that deep. I think because I’ve accomplished a decent amount, and I know that internally, I’m confident in my business, it will go well. And I know in school my grades have not performed that well, but compared to my previous years, I did pretty well. But I think balancing everything and kind of understanding you need to sacrifice something. That might be, time, and time you’re studying in school.
Managing stress has been something that I am continuously working on. I need to figure out how to. When you have a good week, or you sign a new client, you’re going to feel like you’re on top of the world. And then some weeks when it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t feel as good because you feel like you’re not growing, and feel like you’re kind of staying stagnant. But I feel like once I get to that middle ground of every time something happens, I’m kind of just, very optimistic about the future. I think that’s when the stress will just go down. Managing stress is cool here because I have my friends. Whenever I’m feeling stressed, I can just go to our living room and just kind of forget about everything. Just like talking and listening to some music and focus on my hobbies too. So that’s another reason I came back to college—my friends are here and managing stress is kind of easy when they’re here.
Q: How have you gone about investors?
We actually got a decent amount of offers for investment. We got into some funds called a dorm room fund. We got into TechStars, which is an accelerator where they basically give you money in exchange for equity in your business. Think of it like a shark tank style deal where they would give you like $120,000 and then in return, you would give them like 6% of your business. We ended up declining all those offers just because we felt like we were going to achieve a higher valuation of just overall worth in the company.
It has turned out to be true. We haven’t gotten investors because of our choice. Actually, at the moment, the way that I like to run the company is having full ownership of it and making sure that I’m able to make decisions and not have to worry about anybody else’s opinion on what the business should do moving forward because I feel like I have a good vision. I’ve put a lot of time into this around two and a half years actually, just thinking about where we’re going to be in one year or in two years. And we don’t really need an insane amount of money with the current clients we have right now. But it is always a good idea to think about, if I went and raised a million or $2 million, how would we use that? How would we hire employees? The business would just grow faster with an injection of capital.
But at the moment, we’re fully bootstrapped. We started this business out with maybe $1000 or $1,500 and then now it’s built out to make over $25,000 a month. We’re pretty profitable. I took this as a learning experience. If I don’t get an investor, then I’ll kind of have to grind for everything and understand everything very deeply. Maybe the next time I build a business I could do good and invest throughout and know what to do moving forward.
What is Phraze?
Phraze is focused on making high-quality multilingual content accessible at scale by combining AI automation with human review to preserve cultural nuance, tone, and speaker identity. The platform is used across media and education, where accuracy and speed are critical, and is designed to support real-world deployments rather than experimental demos. Long term, the company aims to serve as infrastructure for global content distribution, helping organizations reach audiences regardless of language.
The company works across a wide range of use cases, including globalizing mainstream Amazon Prime Video and Netflix television series, localizing sports content for major professional leagues, translating videos for first-ballot Hall of Fame athletes, and supporting creators whose content collectively exceeds 200 million views.