#132 - Rana Gujral, CEO Behavioral Signals - On creating value through richer, more human conversations

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform our society from being very transactional into very empathetic. My guest is Rana Gujral, CEO of Behavioral Signals

Rana Gujral is an entrepreneur, speaker, and investor. He founded TiZE, a cloud software for specialty chemicals, in 2014. He was recruited to be a part of the core turnaround team for Cricut Inc. where he built a first-of-its-kind product for the DIY community and helped turn bankruptcy to profitability within a span of 2 years. Rana also held leadership positions at Logitech S.A. and Kronos Inc., where he was responsible for the development of best-in-class products generating billions in revenue and contributed towards several award-winning engineering innovations.

He has been awarded the ‘Entrepreneur of the Month’ by CIO Magazine and the ‘US China Pioneer’ Award by IEIE. He has been listed among 8 A.I. Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2019 by INC Magazine and Top 10 Entrepreneurs to follow in 2017 by Huffington Post.

Today, he is the CEO of Behavioral Signals, an enterprise software company that delivers a robust and fast evolving emotion AI engine that introduces emotional intelligence into speech recognition technology.

And this triggered me, and hence I invited him to my podcast. We explore the challenge with today’s voice technology and what has kept it from reaching its true potential. We discuss a variety of use cases that will create transformative experiences and impact when some of the limitations are taken away. Not only for us individuals, but also the level of business and society at large.

Here are some of his quotes:

Behavioral Signals was really driven from this sort of really intrinsic desire to improve voice communications and take it to the next level, whether it's communication happening between two humans or whether it's communication happening between a machine or a human.

This is the best utopian experience that matches our human interests. And that's led to the whole voice-first design movement.

The whole promise was that we are going to take this to the next level, which means we're going to talk to our devices and devices are going to communicate back to us, as humans do. We could use those experiences to replace some of those elements in our livelihoods, and use those as companions. But that hasn't happened.

That is why we are actually very rude to voice assistance in general, because we feel that they're beneath us, not because it's a machine, we know it's a machine, of course, it's not a human. But we also feel that, hey, it doesn't have the basic capability to understand how I feel. So, our mission is to really take that interaction to the next level.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That solving critical problems is often not about following the right process, but connecting people that are on the same wavelength
2. Why the secret behind growing momentum behind the adaption of your application is in making it human and empathetic
3. How you can exponential grow the impact your solution can create for your customers by capturing intent, rather than the transaction
4. How imagination and your ability to connect the dots into a vision are essential skills to create a remarkable software business