When you work at any business for that long, as I said, it was almost a 10-year run. You have to then realize how to get a little bit scrappier for yourself and make harder decisions. And initially, those were some of the things that I had to unlearn. The other things got into as Google got large is how to maintain a connection with people.
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...