Dan Turchen is the CEO of People Rain, an AI platform for IT and HR employee service. Dan O'Connell founded talk IQ back in 2017 after more than a decade at Google and also at Adroll. Talk IQ was subsequently acquired by dial pad in 2018. Today we learn about the challenges of being a venture back founder but also about the power of voice as a technology.
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...