“Alexa, add Champagne to my shopping list”

Podcast transcription - 16th January 2019

Peter Cowley: So, welcome again to another Invested Investor podcast. Today we have William Tunstall-Pedoe, who I've known for several years as a Cambridge angel. We did the same degree course, although probably 15 years more recently. So, William, can you just describe a bit about your background, your education and your early career.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: I'm a Cambridge University Computer Scientists. Born in London. High school in Dundee. Been fanatically programming computers since I was 13, so all my teenage years were spent writing computer software and selling it. I did a Computer Science degree in Cambridge University and I've always been interested in business, always been interested in writing more and more difficult computer software. Difficult computer software is a fairly good definition for what artificial intelligence is.

Peter Cowley:                  Then why didn't you do a Ph.D.?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: I looked at doing a Ph.D. I got a first, they offered me a place, but I couldn't think of a good reason for doing it. So, I didn't do a Ph.D.

Peter Cowley:                  You did some normal jobs for a while and then decided to become an entrepreneur, did you? Or what's your thought process there?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: So, I was always interested in business, so even when I was like 12 or 13, I was looking at taking courses in business. When I was at high school, my Computer Science teacher actually had a software business, and I was working for him whilst I was a student at high school, with him as a teacher. In my breaks and lunch times, I would write software for his business. And because he was on unsteady ground commercially, exploiting the students, I got a very big royalty. He wasn't going to offer a royalty rate that looked even vaguely unreasonable.

Peter Cowley:                  What was the platform and language then?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: This was for Acorn computers, BBC micro, basic and assembler. There was a technical college next to my high school which let students use their mainframe as well. So, I was also going in there and programming there. So, I've been doing commercial stuff with computer software essentially for 30 something years, or continuously for 30 something years. The entrepreneurial journey, that was a serious entrepreneurial journey involving large numbers of staff and venture capital, it started when I decided that I wanted to tackle something really big. I think that's a lesson, that the depth of the tech is not necessarily related to the size of the problem that you're tackling. You can apply very deep tech to very trivial problems, but things get exciting when you try and tackle really, really big problems.

Peter Cowley:                  What was the premise initially?  I didn't know you at that point when you formed the company.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: The premise, it was a world where computers understand natural language, where you can just ask a computer, be understood, have the computer give back exactly what you've asked for. So, why is it that we guess keywords and browse links when we do internet search? Why is it that most computer software involves creating a custom user interface with buttons and menu items? And the buttons and menu items that are designed just to be what the software can do? You can't just ask the computer to do what you want it to do. You have to learn a new user interface every time you start up an application. Surely, the most natural user interface is to interact with a computer just like you would a human being.

Peter Cowley:                  Yes.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: So, this is not my vision. If you look at science fiction, that's the way computers work. But unfortunately there's enormous technical difficulty standing in the way. When you're talking to someone or reading, your brain is doing something absolutely, magical to understand that.

Peter Cowley:                  Right.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: And you don't appreciate quite how magical, until you try and programme a computer.

Peter Cowley:                  So, it's come a long way since then, of course.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Well, it's progressed. It's progressed slowly over decades. And yes, I think it's now crossed a magical point where I think this is what we prove. And Amazon Building Alexa shows it's now crossed this magical point where you can build a product that's useful enough to get daily usage. To get many tens of millions of people using it daily, and some innovation involved in that as well. But it's the continuation of a process that's been going for decades.

Peter Cowley:                  So, when was the year when you started what was then, True Knowledge, wasn't it?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: So, the core tech I was working on in 1999, 2000. The official founding of True Knowledge was late 2005. So, the dotcom crash put pay to my ambitions of kind of kicking it off. What I had in 2001 was a patent application, a very, very crude prototype which could kind of answer a few questions, and took 45 seconds to do it.

Peter Cowley:                  With a keyboard?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: With a keyboard, yeah. But the speech is just a layer that you add on.

Peter Cowley:                  Yeah, sure.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: The dotcom crash happened, I didn't quite have a business there either, I didn't quite know how to turn this tech into a business, or what the business would be.

Peter Cowley:                  What were you doing in that time? Or you just continued working for somebody else?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: I was doing some of my other projects.

Peter Cowley:                  But earning money from those?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes, and in 2005 the markets recovered, I'd filled in one of the missing pieces, which is, how to populate the knowledge base that was needed. So, part of the premise of this, was instead of trying to understand natural language, which computer still can't really do, the idea was to invent a way of representing knowledge that computers could understand, and reason with. The gap I had in 2001, was how you build that knowledge base. And in 2005, I had some ideas about how to do it. So, the business was started off with some friends and family money.

Peter Cowley:                  Single founder?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes, my business, as a single founder business. So, it started off with some friends and family money and government grants. We had a budget of 125K for 12 months. That got my first two employees sitting in the smallest office in the St. John's Innovation Centre in Cambridge, they took that very crude prototype and turned it into a better prototype. That better prototype got us an angel round.

Peter Cowley:                  What was the vision? Family and friends don't need a vision, do they? They just trust and love you. So, you say, "I could do something cool," and they put some money in.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes.

Peter Cowley:                  But it must have been a different story when you went for angel money?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Well, what was hot in 2005 was internet search. So, Google was a super, super hot company. Obviously, it still is. Innovation in search was considered to be the most valuable thing you could do in tech. So, not understanding natural language, there's a huge problem with search, which still exists, which is that the best that search engines can do is give you 10 blue links. They don't understand Google's index, literally trillions of documents, but it doesn't understand what's in those documents. So, the best it can do is rank the documents based on a statistical match between the keyword that you type. And then that you sought out which ones are of interest to you.

                                           And the premise I had was surely, a far better experience, to just ask for the information, just as I was saying, ask for the information that you want. Have the computer understand you and give it straight back to you. Obviously, for voice that's fundamental. You speak to Alexa, she's going to give you the answer straight back.

Peter Cowley:                  Yes.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: And mobile of course was also a trend that was against 10 blue links as well. The small screen on mobile, it's very difficult to do ten blue links on a small screen. So, ten blue links only really works to the extent it works on a desktop computer with a big screen. And all the trends that have actually come in the last 10 years, voice and Mobile, very, very much point towards direct answers. Having said that, when I founded the business there were people in Google who are ideologically opposed to anything other than 10 blue links.

Peter Cowley:                  Yeah. Because they want a choice to be made by the user and not the software presumably?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes. Partly it was about an aversion to selecting winners, but they are selecting winners by ranking, so that's not necessarily hugely persuasive. But having said that, Google's come along enormously.

Peter Cowley:                  In the 10 years.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes. Voice is now are a huge priority for them, and so they are trying very hard to put a box at the top of the results as often as possible. And they even have their own content, which is absolutely huge. It's very, very rare, but if you type certain medical conditions into Google, you'll get responses which are Google proprietary content. They aren't anywhere else on the web.

Peter Cowley:                  Right.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: It's content that Google's created. All of their philosophical barriers that they had a while ago are starting to change.

Peter Cowley:                  Because the market wants that?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: I think so. And I think the internal narrative inside these big companies is also changing as a result too.

Peter Cowley:                  So, you raised some money from angels here in Cambridge?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: No, the angel round was from what's now Octopus Ventures. Octopus Ventures didn't actually exist when that round was done, it was the precursor business called Katalyst Ventures, but which was a collection of high net worth individuals who collaborated. But there was an organisation above them that did all of the negotiations, and the deal terms.

Peter Cowley:                  They are a club really?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes. But it was a very curated investment process offered by the organisation too.

Peter Cowley:                  Can I ask you why did that there, and not here? Because there was two angel groups here in Cambridge at that point.

William Tunstall-Pedoe:             So, I did pitch to Cambridge angels, but I didn't get very far. So, I had a couple of meetings with Samsung. But, they kind of faded away. I then pitched to a group in Oxford, and then Katalyst found out about the opportunity via that.

Peter Cowley:                  Right. And how much did you raise then?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: That was 650K.

Peter Cowley:                  Oh, that's quite a lot on the original valuation?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: I can't remember what the violation was, but it was reasonable.

Peter Cowley:                  Yeah, you didn't dilute too heavily yourself?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: No, no. That's fine.

Peter Cowley:                  Okay.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: In those days, that was a fairly big angel round.

Peter Cowley:                  It was.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: And whilst I was spending that money, Katalysts Ventures got acquired by Octopus investments. And then, very fortuitously, they were controlling the VCT funds after the acquisition. So, the follow on could come from the Titan venture capital trusts. So, we then raised a 2 million VC round.

Peter Cowley:                  This was in what, '07, '08?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: That was in '08. And then there were multiple rounds afterwards. So, we were primarily backed by Octopus through the seven years that we were an independent start-up.

Peter Cowley:                  And so, you were then recruiting and building a team?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yeah.

Peter Cowley:                  How big did the team become?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: It was about 30 people at acquisition.

Peter Cowley:                  Right, okay.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: We pivoted several times. Octopus were very good investors, very patient investors. The excitement of the tech remained, so I think that was what preserved us, we had a very big story and tech, that provably moved the story forward.

Peter Cowley:                  So, when could you demonstrate it easily on the keyboard?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: We were always able to directly answer questions. We were always able to demo things that Google couldn't.

Peter Cowley:                  Really?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: The tech was heavily patented. It was validated in all sorts of ways. We struggled, it took us several attempts to find a path for the business. So, we started off with a standalone consumer website, Trueknowledge.com, which was basically competing directly with Google. We had no UX or consumer skills whatsoever, but it was a very good technology demo. There was no way that we're ever going to have hundreds of millions of users with that site.

Peter Cowley:                  Yes, sure.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: The next pivot was to licence the platform to what we call big search. So, Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, Yahoo, we had conversations, with all of the big companies. We were talking to one of them for two years. We never quite closed a big deal, or got an acquisition.

Peter Cowley:                  So, no monetisation at that point?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: No. We closed some smaller deals. So, there were some smaller search engines that licenced our stuff. Eventually, when the Siri clone started, we were in quite a few of those. In fact, we were in Siri as well as these start-ups.

Peter Cowley:                  Before Apple bought them?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Before Apple bought them, yes. They got acquired by Apple unfortunately, but we were a chunk of the experience of the Siri start-ups. So, the pivot, after the platform, for big search was a frustrating two years, trying to sell our technology directly into search. There is an easier way to get in, which is to just publish answers. So, we had this SEO phase, where we published literally tens of millions of Q&A pairs. Google indexed it, sent us traffic, we monetise that traffic with advertising. And that was actually pretty successful from a pure traffic point of view. We became one of the largest sites in the UK at one point. We had many, many millions of users and 10% a week growth for the best part of a year.

Peter Cowley:                  With advertising around the edges of the page?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Well, all over the page, not just the edges. It was a really, horrible experience, but yeah, we were very good at SEO. We had unlimited amounts of content, because we could answer unlimited numbers of questions.

Peter Cowley:                  Where did the questions come from? your user base? Did you create the questions?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: From our user base, from our logs, and we recreated questions as well. We had scripts that would ask a few million questions, related questions, there was also, an infinite number of pages on the site, because the pages were generated by the platform. So, the URL was actually just an encoding of the question. But obviously, the SEO requires pointing the search engines at those pages.

Peter Cowley:                  And you didn't get black listed or anything by anybody?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Well, we eventually did fall foul of a Google Algorithm change, which cost us 50% of our traffic. But we still had many, many millions of monthly users after that, that's what killed off that pivot, the realisation that we were the mercy of Google's algorithm. So, the final pivot was, let's just bet the company on our own consumer brand. Let's build our own mobile consumer experience, gain the UX skills that we've been lacking for all of these years, and just bet the business on a consumer product. It was a very brave decision, but it was essentially the last roll of the dice, and our investors backed us for this.

Peter Cowley:                  This is Octopus and anybody else?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: This was Octopus.

Peter Cowley:                  Just purely Octopus, though?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yeah, yeah. This was essentially our big pivot. We'd been trying for a number, of years, everything was validated in order to create a consumer product. And that required team changes. We didn't need so many web programmers. We needed UX and mobile skills. We had an investor milestone based on getting to a kind of first version with these products. We had the team in lockdown. We were buying breakfast for the team, buying dinner for the team. People working 24 hours stints to kind of hit this milestone. We hit the milestone, we got the validation that we needed. Part of the milestone with some external validation of the product as well. So, is this something that was commercially interesting? Yes.

                                           We launched it in January 2012, Apple had launched Siri in October 2011. Whilst we were doing that, Apple had launched the Siri product. And we then launched our products just weeks after Apple had launched Siri. Having literally, the world's biggest company competing with you, you might think it a really, big problem, but it was enormously helpful for us, because Apple was busy investing billions defining the space for us, and we were positioned as Apple's main competitor. So, we had a very, very busy year in 2012. When we launched we had literally millions of downloads. We were number one in the Apple store. We had 40 big businesses trying to talk to us.

Peter Cowley:                  For their own usage? Like a pharmaceutical company?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: They were all trying to figure out the competitive response to Siri, and they wanted to talk to us for various reasons. One of those was Amazon. At the end of the year when the dust settled, we had an acquisition offer from Amazon. We had an acquisition offer from another household name technology company, along with a big financing round on the table.

Peter Cowley:                  Did you have customers? Did you actually have an income from this app now?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes, yes, so we did so accidentally. There was a licence fee that we had to pay for the Apple version. So, the apple version, we charged a nominal amount on the app store just to cover the cost of this licence. And then of course, we had millions of downloads, so we actually ended up making serious revenue from that. The android version was free, so we accidentally made quite a lot of revenue that year as well. And yeah, we were also negotiating with big tech companies and we had big deals lined up. We didn't proceed because we got acquired.

Peter Cowley:                  Did you go through a process? Or were they just incoming offers?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Well, obviously there's a process. It wasn't like the first meeting.

Peter Cowley:                  But you didn't go out to the market trying to sell yourselves?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: No, we didn't do that. The other thing that happened that year, is that it was my cue to hire an external CEO. At that point I'd been the CEO up until the launch of Evi.  We brought in, somebody I already knew, who was a Silicon Valley executive. What he was doing for the six months he was in the business, was managing this massive funnel of interest from these big companies. So, there was a process, in the sense, that we were progressing a discussion with many tens of people.

Peter Cowley:                  Can we talk about that? Did you decide to bring in a CEO? Did the investor decide? Was it a process that you were happy with?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: It wasn't the investor saying, "We've got to bring in a CEO." It was a discussion that had been going on for some time.

Peter Cowley:                  Which you're okay with?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes. I was definitely, I was okay with it.  I get on with him, and obviously the investors want to see somebody that gets on well with the founder as well. And that was very useful, particularly useful when we were coming to sell, because he could stand in between me and the buyer, and tread on their toes in a way that I would have been more problematic for me to do, as I was going to be working for them afterwards.

Peter Cowley:                  And you had a large proportion of the company as well.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes, that's right. So, that was very helpful from the negotiation point of view. He didn't join Amazon, so his need to stay on good terms with the acquirer was less.

Peter Cowley:                  Did you generate a competitive process between Amazon and others?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes. All of the people were aware of the interest. That didn't necessarily result in some crazy auction, but there was some competitive pressure. And having auctions always helps, so we also had a financing offer on the table too.

Peter Cowley:                  From Octopus again?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: No, no, from another.

Peter Cowley:                  Another VC?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Another VC yes. A big financing offer that was new. So, we could have chosen to stay independent, and the alternative acquisition offer we had would have resulted in half the team being relocated to Silicon Valley, and the other half of the team laid off. Amazon wants to invest in Cambridge with the team doing broadly what it was already doing, that was a much more attractive offer and with hindsight, it was absolutely the right choice.

Peter Cowley:                  Yes.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: They've been completely true to their word, there is now 1000 people in Cambridge all working for, Evi Technologies Limited. Well, they're working for this subsidiary, which essentially was my startup. So, the team's gone from 30 to 1000 in five years with a few hundred vacancies. They invested very heavily in the space, obviously, they didn't know that it was going to be so big, but the outcome, the launch of Alexa which has been fantastically successful.

Peter Cowley:                  So, you closed the deal in 2013 at some point?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: It was closed in October 2012.

Peter Cowley:                  Oh really? It all happened very rapidly in that year.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes, we launched Evi in January 2012, and the deal closed with Amazon in October 2012.

Peter Cowley:                  Okay. Before we go into your relationship with Amazon, can we just talk about the board that you had at True Knowledge and Evi. Who else was on the board?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: William Reeve was executive chairman for a long period of time.

Peter Cowley:                  Full-time exec?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: No. He was one day a week. He'd come and attend the management meetings, and in the early days he was like a constant source of support.

Peter Cowley:                  Was he from Octopus?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: No, he was introduced by octopus, but he was truly independent.

Peter Cowley:                  He was an entrepreneur previously, was he?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes, that's right. Love Film and various other things, very much, still a London entrepreneur, he stayed until the Evi pivot. At that point, Simon Murdoch became our chairman who was working for Octopus. He was less independent, but he was very helpful in supporting the decision to bet the business on a consumer product.

Peter Cowley:                  Well, he had a consumer.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes.

Peter Cowley:                  They sell to Amazon anyway.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes, that's right. Well, he didn't know we were going to sell to Amazon of course, but that decision to bet the business on the Evi product, to go all in on a consumer product was the critical successful decision. He was very useful in getting behind that.

Peter Cowley:                  I've interviewed him for the Invested Investor podcast and he was incredibly useful. He has been for many businesses, and particularly for you. This is about the Invested Investor, the investor actually investing some time. Who else was on the board then?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: So, there were various representative from Octopus Ventures, that changed a lot. Alan Wallace was the key Octopus person, he was the person that spotted us when we were a three-person business and continued to help us for many years. He was the key Octopus person, but in subsequent years, others within Octopus were our official rep.

Peter Cowley:                  And any execs?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: John Brimacombe, a very old friend. He became a non-exec for us for a few years, he was there until the acquisition as well.

Peter Cowley:                  So, you one day you're working for yourself, you're the entrepreneur, the next day you're working for a big American corporate. How was that transition?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Interesting, yes, that's exactly right. So, I was running a 30-person company one day, and then I was an executive in what was then 130,000-person company straight afterwards. Amazon is one perfect pyramid, it has Jeff Bezos at the top, and it has layers of management underneath, going right down. It was 130,000 when I joined, it's now 400,000-500,000, I'm inventing that, it's published every quarter, but it's growing very quickly. Amazon is just an extraordinary business, it's growing revenues 30% a year, year after year after year. The headcount is also growing quite dramatically year after year.

                                           Having said that, I absolutely love Amazon. I think culturally it was an extremely good fit for me, down to even the eccentric things. Amazon works with documents, for example, it doesn't work with PowerPoint, and some people find that difficult. But before Amazon acquired us, I was writing documents. I find it easier to get my thoughts down in written form than I do in any other form, particularly if the thoughts are difficult or deep. Amazon has a single page document called the Leadership Principles, which defines what they consider to be best practise, best qualities of people that work there, it defines the culture of the business. Again, I'm a huge fan of that as well, so yes, I really enjoyed working for Amazon, and I think it's an amazing business. And it's an amazingly successful business as well.

                                           It was a very good fit culturally for me. It was also a good fit culturally for the Evi team. The acquisition is an unambiguous success internally and externally, and part of that was the cultural fit.

Peter Cowley:                  So, a rather direct question. Why did you leave? If you're enjoying it so much?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yeah, so I even wrote a six-page document about that. A number, of things came together, I'd been there for three and a half years, that was obviously one reason. The financial handcuffs they put on, had come off. The big psychological one was the 10th anniversary of the business. So, the 10th anniversary of the business was a few months before, and I realised I'd been doing this, doing Evi, True Knowledge 120% for a full decade. Do I want to do it for another decade or don't want to do something else?

                                           The other thing is, I'd delivered everything I promised to do.  Alexa had been launched, it was a massive success, the vision for the start-up had essentially been delivered. The product was becoming huge, so that was the other thing as well. Thousands of new people were joining the project, so, when I joined it was just the beginnings of a project, just the start, and then I'm in a project with thousands of people, it's a completely different atmosphere, the ability to get things done or have an impact is diminished, because of the sheer volume of people. All of those things came together, it was the perfect time to go.

Peter Cowley:                  So, William, you are with an organisation and culture that you're enjoying, but you're also achieving something very special. You've got the product, it's now out cumulatively in tens, or even, a hundred million homes. Can you talk through that?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes. When we were acquired by Amazon, we joined the very beginnings of what was a completely secret project, which was Echo, Alexa. And it was totally secret, we managed to keep it totally secret. When we eventually launched in late 2014, which was two years after the acquisition, it took everybody by surprise. We launched it very gently, we just put out a video, unceremoniously launched it, you had to apply to buy it. It was almost a closed beta, it wasn't called that, but essentially, it was. We were uncertain about the product in many ways, so we launched it very gently.

Peter Cowley:                  And how many did you ship then, do you think? Just a few thousand I guess?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: I can't remember how many we shipped, it wasn't huge numbers. But almost out of the gate it was a success, we had very, very good reviews. People were blown away by it and we were quite surprised by how well it was received, because it still had lots of issues, and it still does have issues. All of the technology is very, very difficult, so it's all imperfect, and it was particularly imperfect when we launched it in 2014. It's been a surprise hit. It's just been amazingly successful, and every year I kind of have to re-align my expectations to how successful it is. When I first started talking about it, people had not heard of it, or some people had heard of it. I do public speaking, you know, I ask how many of the audience have heard of it, everybody's heard of Alexa. 70% plus of the audience have used it. 50% plus have one or more devices in their homes.

                                           So, it has become absolutely mainstream. I'm kind of used to seeing adverts on the side of buses, billboards, adverts in the tube. Two Superbowl ads, there's even Amazon's quarterly results that were published just last year, had a big thing about Alexa being massively more successful than they thought and how they were going to be doubling down on the huge amount they've already done.

Peter Cowley:                  There are, of course, competitors like Google Home, and of course the Home Pod that came out in the last few weeks.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes, that's the consequence of success, is has now become very strategic. Google's produced, what is essentially a copycat product, the Google home, which is essentially an echo with a slightly different shape and different coloured of the LEDs.

Peter Cowley:                  Different software presumably.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes, different software, but essentially the same product. Siri's has languished a little bit over the years, but Apple's produced their version, which is focusing on the quality of the speaker and focusing on music. And there's loads of other companies that are trying to do something similar. So, it has become very, very strategic, which is very interesting.

Peter Cowley:                  So, you must be very proud of this.

William Tunstall-Pedoe: Yes, I'm incredibly proud of it. And I'm very proud of role the team and my start-up had in terms of tech and talent. But also I'm very proud of what I contributed as a kind of senior member of the team. I can see battles that I fought and won for the product, inside Amazon, I'm very, very proud of it.

Peter Cowley:                  And the core code is still written here in Cambridge, is it?

William Tunstall-Pedoe: There are Alexa teams all over the world now. There are a number of sites. Cambridge is one of the big sites, but it's one of several sites. And yeah, there's substantial engineering effort happening here in Cambridge for Alexa. 

Peter Cowley:                  Excellent.

Alan Cowley:                    Thank you for listening to part one of William Tunstall-Pedoe’s Invested Investor podcast. It was fascinating to hear the story of Amazon Alexa. William has quite clearly broken through many barriers and successfully pivoted several times during his business journey with Evi Technologies. We hope you enjoyed William's podcast. Be sure to listen to part two.

Peter Cowley:                    Thanks for listening to another Invested Investor podcast. You can subscribe to all future podcasts via our website investedinvestor.com, or via a number of podcast platforms online. Remember, you can order our book online. And be sure to follow us on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook to get the most up to date, interesting and insightful content from the Invested Investor.