Dialpad

Craig Walker sold his first company to Yahoo, his second company to Google and just announced that his current company, Dialpad, crossed $300m in ARR. I’ve known and looked up to Craig for my whole career. Interviewing him for the podcast gave me a chance to ask him questions I’ve always had about his career and companies. We covered a lot in this episode of Not Another CEO Podcast: the ROI of their Superbowl ad, getting a global team of 1000+ people aligned and energized, attracting and working with board members like Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz), Will Griffith (ICONIQ Capital), Rich Miner and Michael Block (OMERS). Some of the highlights for me were: Why did he leave Google to start Dialpad? I assumed that with his experience in the unified communications space, Google’s unlimited resources and their focus on Google Workspace it was a perfect time and place to build a Dialpad like product there. In reality, budget isn’t as easy to come by, at a big company you are at the whim of strategy changes (i.e. they wanted Craig to work on Google+) and ultimately when you’re an entrepreneur, you’re an entrepreneur. GV (Google Ventures) did end up investing. What made UberConference (Dialpad’s first product) go viral? I don’t think there was anything more crusty than conference bridges at the time. Craig talked about how they turned the entire experience into a delight and delivered features nobody ever expected for conference calls. Actually when I started using UberConference I would join calls early to listen to the hold music (Alex Cornell, came up with the song). As Craig put it, we’re all consumers and why can’t our B2B products deliver a fun and delightful consumer like experience. How did he learn/memorize Japanese for a presentation in Tokyo? My favorite Craig story is when Tenshi Adachi was at SoftBank and he invited us to present at a CIO event in Tokyo. Craig and I were the two main presenters, he went first. He got up in front (in a beautiful suit by the way) and introduced himself and Dialpad in Japanese and then did a flawless demo (in english). He doesn’t speak Japanese but he learned it for the presentation. I went on after him and bombed, I don’t own a suit, my demo didn’t work and my jokes didn’t land after they were translated. How AI is going to play into the future of Dialpad? He’s been talking about AI long before AI was “cool”. Years ago he told me about an AI company they acquired and how it would change everything. Now Dialpad has 7 billion minutes of business conversations that they’re training their models on. They already understand functions (sales, support, etc) but they’re starting to understand industries. It's going to be interesting to see what they do with that. Links to the full episode: YouTube: https://lnkd.in/eQQFynGx Spotify: https://lnkd.in/emKyjsBF Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/eyXUJHvn It’s a good one.