One of the challenges of selling NLP technology into the enterprise is that we get very skewed perspectives of the quality of NLP from interactions with Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant. They have such an unfair data advantage that it's impossible to appreciate that in the enterprise, we're trying to solve a small data problem. Dialpad as a telephony provider has access to an immense, immense vast of our trough of trading data.
Dan O'Connell, former founder and CEO of TalkIQ which was acquired by Dialpad, discusses the future of cloud communications. Dan's vision for helping teams sell more with less churn led to Dialpad becoming a unicorn last year having raised $100M at a $1.2B pre-money valuation. Exceptional investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures are betting on Dialpad's ability to convert legacy telephony infrastructure into cloud-native, SaaS systems using AI to analyze voice transcripts.
Listen and learn...
- Dan's entrepreneurial journey from incubator to launch to fundraising to acquisition.
- Why TalkIQ was really three startups in one... and how Dan navigated his team through the process of finding one big customer problem to fix.
- Why voice will soon be the primary computing interface.
- The challenges of developing NLP technology for voice transcription and AI-based analytics.
- What Dan learned from nearly a decade at Google... and, more important, what he learned not to do.
References in the episode...