Episode 54: Mike Phillips - Co-Founder and CEO of Sense

Welcome to Episode 54 of The VentureFizz Podcast, the flagship podcast of your most-trusted source for startup and tech jobs, news, and insights! On this episode of our podcast, I interviewed Mike Phillips, Co-Founder and CEO of Sense. Mike is a serial entrepreneur and a pioneer in speech recognition technology. What was so interesting about my interview with Mike is that it was basically a history lesson through the evolution of speech recognition—a very difficult and complex technology to build. After years and years, it is technology that we now take for granted with things like Siri, Alexa, and Ok Google. After spending time in research at Carnegie Mellon and MIT, Mike co-founded SpeechWorks, a company that created software that allowed you to interact with an automated attendant in call centers in a natural way, which was groundbreaking technology at the time. Mike went on to be a co-founder of Vlingo, which was often referred to as the “Siri for Android,” which helped make consumer adoption of this form of technology a reality. Today, Mike is doing something completely new with Sense, which is making our homes smarter with their intelligent home energy monitor. The company has raised a total of $38.6M in funding, including a $18M Series B round of funding back in October. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: -Mike’s background, and how his interest in electronics started to bloom at a young age by building things like his own computer and an electronic piano tuner. -The details on the early research projects he was working on at Carnegie Mellon and MIT. -Building SpeechWorks to the point of going public, and their evolution of the company through mergers and acquisitions to eventually becoming known as Nuance. -How he was able to convince investors that mobile was the next frontier for speech recognition, which led to Vlingo and was acquired for $225M. -The vision for Sense and how they are letting consumers know what is going on in their homes, all while making them safer, more efficient, and more reliable. -Plus a lot of advice for entrepreneurs. Lastly, if you like the show, please remember to subscribe to and review us on iTunes, or your podcast player of choice!