Omar Tawakol (Voicea) - The Future of Voice

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Journey, Startups, Education, Stanford, Culture, Strategy, Stanford University, Entrepreneurship, Business, Life Lessons, Thought Leadership, Creativity, Etl, Challenges, Leadership, Innovation, Founders

4.4 • 739 Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2020

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Backed by corporate investors that included Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce, Omar Tawakol founded Voicea in 2017, and served as the company’s CEO until its acquisition by Cisco in September 2019. Voicea’s core offering was EVA, an in-meeting AI assistant that transcribed meetings, generated highlights, and pushed relevant meeting content to productivity tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. EVA is now being rolled into Cisco’s Webex Assistant, and Tawakol is currently the VP and GM of the Cisco Contact Center. In this talk, he explores the strategies he employed as he scaled Voicea and landed it at Cisco. He also draws on his experience building BlueKai, a data exchange and data management platform company he founded in 2007 and sold to Oracle in 2014, and draws contrasts between the two very different B2B business models.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Who you are defines how you build.
0:05.0	This is the Entrepreneurals Thought Leader series.
0:09.0	Brought to you by Stanford E-Corner.
0:13.0	On this episode, we're joined by Omar Tolical.
0:18.0	Omar is the founder of Voicya, an AI-enabled voice assistant platform that turns live meetings
0:25.6	into notes and action items.
0:27.6	He joined Cisco when it acquired Voicea in September 2019.
0:33.6	Here's Omar.
0:35.6	What I'm going to do today is I'm going to walk you through my journey and building.
0:42.3	First off, maybe a minority of the time, I'll talk about building Blue Chi, the acquisition by Oracle, and how that went.
0:49.3	Then I'll talk about building Voicea and the acquisition by Cisco, and then I'll talk about my five rules of thumb for building a business and for building a team and we'll have a
0:58.0	conversation here's the goal don't wait till the end to ask questions if you got
1:01.2	questions ask them if they fluster me I'll tell you I'll answer them later so don't
1:04.8	worry if I make it through this whole thing without a question I would have failed
1:07.5	don't let me fail so I will start now by talking about kind of what was really interesting about building Blue Kai.
1:18.5	Blue Kai taught me one rule of starting companies that I have. I don't know if it's 100% true. We can have this debate, but my belief is that if you're going to start a B2B company,
1:27.9	you need to be an expert in the area you're going to disrupt.
1:31.6	And when I say expert, I mean to say that if you go out to a handful of CEOs in that industry,
1:37.9	they know you.
1:38.8	They know you by name.
1:40.7	Because when you're disrupting a B2B industry,
1:44.4	the way decisions are made are quite complex,
	...

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