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.
Related

Luke Sykora,
Stanford University
Starting Up in a Downturn
An Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders mini-guide for aspiring founders facing a troubled economy.
Article
5 minutes

Josh Makower, MD,
Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign
The Biodesign Innovation Process [Entire Talk]
Innovation isn’t random – it’s a process that can be learned, improved, and effectively deployed to solve specific problems.
Video
52 minutes
Josh Makower, MD,
Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign
The Biodesign Innovation Process [Entire Talk]
Innovation isn’t random – it’s a process that can be learned, improved, and effectively deployed to solve specific problems.

John Felts,
Cruz Foam
Engineering Green Materials [Entire Talk]
To scale a technology, engineers need to think beyond the technology itself.
Video
53 minutes
John Felts,
Cruz Foam
Engineering Green Materials [Entire Talk]
To scale a technology, engineers need to think beyond the technology itself.