Former Spotify executives who sold their podcast platform Anchor for $150 million are back with Oboe, an AI-powered learning platform that generates custom courses on any topic. The startup launched this month, promising to "democratize access to great learning experiences" while tackling concerns that AI might make us all stupid.
The question hits you right on Oboe's homepage: "Is AI going to make us all stupid?" It's the exact concern keeping educators awake at night, and the former Spotify executives behind this new AI learning platform think they have the answer.
Nir Zicherman and Mike Mignano aren't exactly newcomers to the content game. These are the founders who built Anchor, the DIY podcasting platform that Spotify snatched up for $150 million back in 2019. After the acquisition, Zicherman ran Spotify's audiobooks division while Mignano headed up the podcast team. Now they're betting their next act can fix how we learn online.
"We want to democratize access to a great learning experience," Zicherman tells The Verge. It's a bold claim in a market already flooded with AI-powered education tools, especially when hallucinations remain a persistent problem across AI products.
The platform works differently from ChatGPT's back-and-forth chat format. Instead of conversation, Oboe responds to learning prompts with structured "courses" that look more like traditional educational materials - think textbook chapters, bullet-pointed takeaways, FAQs, and even AI-generated podcasts. Users simply type what they want to learn about, and Oboe crafts a comprehensive learning experience around that topic.
Zicherman argues that current learning methods force people to "piece it together" across ChatGPT, Google, YouTube, and Wikipedia in what he calls "a very linear journey that is one-size-fits-all." Oboe, he says, streamlines everything into "a single destination that you need to go to to actually learn effectively."
But there's a significant trust gap. When The Verge's Elissa Welle tested the platform with a query about concrete manufacturing, she received a polished 10-minute "deep dive" complete with headers, tables, and Wikimedia Commons photos. The content felt comprehensive, but Oboe provided no citations or links to verify claims like "aggregates make up 60-75% of concrete's volume." She had to hunt down the herself to confirm the statistic was accurate.
