20: Omar Tawakol, CEO of Voicea

One of my favorite pieces for how to think about technology platform shifts is Chris Dixon's "What's Next in Computing". Chris notes that if we look at history, we see that irrespective of the way financial markets perform, technology platform shifts happen consistently every 10–15 years.  One of the most important platform shifts of the next decade is voice. Consumer markets have started to appreciate the strength of Alexa, Echo and Google Home but the recent demonstration of Google Assistant at Google I/O 2018 really expanded the imagination for what will be possible in a decade as deep learning and natural language exponentially improve.  Lately, I've been incredibly interested by the impact voice will have in the enterprise. This week, it was a thrill to chat with Omar Tawakol, one of the key players in today's enterprise voice landscape. Omar is the CEO of Voicea, a voice-activated AI for the workplace; he's raised $20M to leverage AI to augment tasks, make meetings more productive and create more efficient workflows. Eva (Voicea's AI-assistant) in actionPrior to Voicea, Omar was the founder and CEO of BlueKai which built the worlds largest consumer data marketplace and DMP. Oracle acquired BlueKai in 2014 & Omar led Oracle Data Cloud where he scaled the team to over 1,000 people and pioneered the ODC to become the leading Data-as-a-Service provider to 96 of the top 100 US marketers. Omar earned an MS in CS from Stanford (BS, MIT) where he researched and published work on AI agents. Check out the conversation and our other episodes on iTunes.