Interview

1) How did you end up in voice?

I often explain on calls, at the beginning of talks, or in meetings I find myself in that I'm not an engineer, and not a PhD....I'm just a guy. A guy who, in this case, had just sold off a business about a decade ago (in 2015) and couldn't rush into anything new just yet, and became intrigued by Siri, Alexa, and the idea of speaking to computers. I started learning as much as I could and meeting as many new people as I could to try to learn about this new area of technology.

I started a podcast called This Week In Voice, which I thought would last just a small amount of time, and ended up going for nine seasons and introducing me to a who's-who of the nascent voice AI universe. Mark Cuban was my biggest guest on the show, which was awesome, and I succeeded in learning a ton and meeting some amazing people.

From there, I started a conference - this will be the 10th anniversary of Project Voice's namesake event, and glad to have you there. I consulted with a wide variety of companies, started formally serving as advisor for a few, released quite a bit of content of different types (the 2023 Conversational AI Industry Landscape Map has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, which is cool) and eventually made my way into venture, launching Project Voice Capital Partners with longtime voice AI venture capitalist Marc Ladin the last few years as well.

It's fun when one thing leads to another. I've been fortunate in many ways over my career.

2) What have you learned about the voice ecosystem while organizing Project Voice for a decade?

Way too much to go into here, but I will point out one thing I've begun paying more attention to lately: the difference between pre-COVID / pre-ChatGPT founders in the voice AI/conversational AI spaces, and post-COVID / post-ChatGPT founders.

Before COVID, the voice AI space was dominated by big tech thanks to the mainstream voice assistants taking up so much oxygen. This meant that founders doing meaningful work with voice AI were often older and slightly more academic in nature, needing a higher pedigree in order to be taken seriously trying to play in the land of the giants. Think people like Scott Stephenson (Deepgram), Amy Stapleton (Tellables), John Kelvie (Bespoken), Mark Webster (Sayspring), Keyvan Mohajer and Katie McMahon as chief evangelist (SoundHound), and many others.

Coming out of COVID, I think OpenAI's ascension along with a wariness of privacy and security issues related to the big tech players created a much broader opportunity for founders of a wide variety of types to get involved in voice AI. If you go to the Bay, or NYC, or even places like Miami or Seattle, you'll observe the types of founders who find voice AI of interest and who are creating compelling startups in the space often skew younger now, and have a much more divergent array of backgrounds than before.

This has been a catalyst in accelerating the space significantly by creating competition in every pocket of the voice AI value chain, and in my opinion, has set the stage for 2026 to be a big year of M&A activity. 

3) Where do you think voice is going?

I think we will continue to see hyper-focused, incredibly specialized implementations of voice AI within specific industry verticals and corporate niches, largely in response to the return of big tech to dominate the voice AI landscape like we saw from 2014 through 2017 or so. There are enough gains to be made by tuning voice AI specifically for hotels or for emergency vehicles or for high-end retailers that the number of companies doing meaningful work within voice AI should explode to accommodate all the various niches that exist. And doing so will be a way for smaller, more nimble startups to be able to continue to exist and compete and win even as we see Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta move to conquer more horizontal components of the conversational stack.

Key Links
PVCP VOX fund page
Project Voice 2026 event page