This told essay is based on a conversation with founder and CEO William Tunstall Pedoe, 56. Amazon’s acquisition of his startup and his role at Unlikely AI have been reviewed by Business Insider. This piece has been edited for length and clarity.
I helped create Alexa, a product that everyone has heard of and most people have used. I’m proud of what we’ve built.
But by 2016, it was clear that the right decision was to leave Amazon, which I joined after Amazon acquired my startup. Continuing to work on Alexa would have been a very different job than building and launching a startup, which I love.
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I wanted to create something that would change the world.
When I was 13, I went to the university next door to my school to work with mainframes. Since then, I’ve been excited about pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with computers and software.
I studied computer science at Cambridge University, and after graduating in 1991 I went on to teach, but I felt I was better suited to entrepreneurship than academia. If you create something truly new in software, it can be on a billion smartphones within six months and truly change the world. That’s impact.
I set out to solve what I thought was a big problem. Internet searches relied on users guessing keywords to get results, rather than the natural questions we learned as children. I founded True Knowledge in 2006, imagining a world where we could have conversations similar to computers.
Joining Amazon was the right decision
Initially, we tried to build a search engine to compete with Google, but that didn’t work. Later, we allowed other companies to integrate our search engine into their products, but the big companies didn’t. For a while, we focused on SEO.
The last point was building a voice assistant. We created an application called Evi. It was released in the UK in 2012, a year after Apple introduced Siri. To align with our product, we changed our company name from True Knowledge to Evi.
Suddenly, we were a 30-employee startup competing with some of the most valuable companies in the world. We spent much of the year discussing acquisitions with some of the largest companies in the technology industry. In late 2012, Amazon acquired us.
William Tunstall-Pedoe joined Amazon after his startup Evi was acquired by the tech giant. Courtesy of William Tunstall Pedoe
Joining Amazon was the right decision. The company invested heavily in the city of Cambridge, where Evi was based, turning our startup into a major office for Amazon. Our voice assistant has become one of the company’s biggest and most exciting secrets.
Going from running a small startup to working within a company with hundreds of thousands of employees headed by Jeff Bezos was a big change, but I loved working there. I split my time between Amazon’s offices in Seattle and Cambridge and enjoyed traveling back and forth to make things happen.
When we activated Alexa, we were surprised by its response. It was an immediate success. Today, Alexa is a household name. I’m extremely proud of the Evi team.
I wrote a memo deciding whether or not to leave Amazon.
Amazon is known for using six pages of notes instead of PowerPoint presentations to promote clarity of thought. In 2016, I wrote a book to help you decide whether or not to leave Amazon. In that memo, I explained the following facts: I did everything I could, the acquisition was a clear success, and so was the product. At the time, thousands of people were working on Alexa.
After working at Amazon for about three and a half years, it was time to leave in 2016. I wanted to re-enter the startup world.
Startups may be well-suited to exploring unconventional ideas
It is certainly possible to start something new within a large organization, and there are great benefits to doing so. When we launched Alexa, it immediately appeared on the front page of Amazon.com. This was a level of exposure that most startups can only dream of. I think I will work for a large company again at some point in my career.
But if you’re trying to do something new or contrarian, a startup is often a better fit. Within a large company, it only takes one manager to decide that resources are better spent elsewhere to cancel a project. The opposite is true for startups. Even if 99 venture capitalists say no, it only takes one investor to say yes to keep the project alive.
William Tunstall Pedoe became an angel investor after leaving Amazon. Courtesy of William Tunstall Pedoe
After Amazon, I spent time mentoring at startup incubators like Creative destroyer Lab. Through that, I became active as an angel investor and gained a broader perspective on the different ways startups succeed and fail.
In 2019, I launched Likely AI, a deep tech startup focused on building neurosemiotic AI. The goal is to combine powerful but sometimes inaccurate machine learning models with a world of algorithms where computers are almost always correct. The mission of this business is to make AI trustworthy.
As CEO, I’m always busy. Running a startup can be stressful, but working on something really big and ambitious is incredibly exciting.
Although I sometimes miss working in a large organization, I love being in the startup world. For me, leaving Amazon was the right decision. I have no regrets.
