What does it take to be a non-techie in a deep technology company?

It all began at the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs (CUE) awards ceremony 3 years ago, where I won an award on the night with £1,000 prize money. And today I’m sitting in our new offices, surrounded by 32 full-time employees watching as our company continues to scale rapidly in 2017.

So how did it happen?

I first met Tony at a CUE networking event, my initial reaction was “100% no-way that I will get involved in a software company”. A few weeks later Tony posted into the CUE Facebook group and we got talking again. I was already involved in several other start-ups but after some consideration, I thought it might be worth a shot. Tony had developed the technology and frameworks but needed someone to commercialise the company.

I started working with Tony when there were only 5 employees at the company. Myself and my colleague spent our days cold-calling everyone and anyone we could to try and get a sale. It was a numbers game. Eventually someone was going to need and want us. And they did. By the end of 2014 we had doubled in size to 10 people – still working out of a shed.

We focused our efforts on our cloud-based system which we needed to ensure was commercially appealing. When Google made their Speech API available, we knew we had to beat them. So, we ran tests and found that we were 30-50% more accurate than Google.

So where are we now?

We have been generating strong revenues since we commercialised in 2014 and we just closed an investment round at the end of 2016. We have expanded our capabilities to provide our customers with technology that can be deployed on-premises and we recently launched our new real-time technology. The real-time technology can be used offline, on a device. We also developed an automated framework that gives us the ability to develop any language in the world in a matter of weeks. Overcoming the three fundamental challenges with current products on the market today.

Some advice?

• Pick up the phone and speak to anyone

• Be tentacular, speak to everyone you can in an organisation

• Don’t be too smart, there is always someone smarter

• Always manage expectations

• Find your focus as a company

• Challenge people

The CUE event gave me the platform I needed to meet the right contacts at the right time. Jules Robertson, CUE speakers representative says “we encourage entrepreneurs to develop their ideas and skills as future company leaders. With the multiple rounds of competitions, we reward £100, £1000 and £5000 to individuals or teams to help elevate them to produce a successful company. We hold the awards and networking events to help introduce our entrepreneurs to contacts and hear from industry experts”.

Who says you can’t lead a deep technology company as a non-techie?

Benedikt von Thuengen, Speechmatics