Angus Davis

Angus Davis

 
Official Bio

Providence, RI and Silicon Valley, CA
angus.davis@gmail.com

Entrepreneur & Innovator

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  • Building the first tellme.com web site in 1999, around 3am, before 7am press release announcing the company hits the wire.
  • With my co-founder Mike McCue, in 2007 at Microsoft Studios in Redmond to announce the acquisition of Tellme
  • When we weren't building software to change the world, we built our own desks. It was more of a team-building exercise than a true cost-saver, but then again remember this was pre-Ikea.
  • Doing some of our first press calls in 1999 from our 'Conference Room' (note conf room table: a cardboard box), with Hadi Partovi, who later founded iLike.com, and Chris Holten, who founded Spark PR. Ironically, the call was announcing a $6 million Series A investment, but we did not spend it on furniture.
  • All good ideas start on whiteboard. This was one of the earliest brainstorming sessions Mike and I had.
  • Many press covered Tellme, but our trip to the Maxim interview in 2000 was memorable. The publisher was out of town so the reporter smoked cigars with us in the publisher's corner office. I can't make this stuff up. Pictured with Dave Bottoms, who later went on to run product marketing for Yahoo! and is now with Mozilla.org pimping Firefox, fighting the good fight
  • My technical mentor has always been jg. This is a lousy photo but it shows jg setting up our first-ever internet connection at Tellme's office. He was CTO of the client group at Netscape, and today he is CTO of Metaweb, building the Semantic Web (Freebase)
  • We got some great advice when first starting out from our investor Danny Rimer, pictured here cracking some wine on a Tellme boat trip. Today Danny is shaking up Europe's VC scene in a leadership role at Index Ventures.
  • About 4 years before this photo was taken, their job was to kill each other. Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape, was one of our first investors, and Hadi Partovi, a key member of the founding team who in his last job had run Internet Explorer for Microsoft.
  • This man tought me everything about Internet marketing before most people even knew how to connect. He was a lion, a fierce competitor, provider of tough love. Mike Homer, one of Silicon Valley's greatest marketeers, and Tellme's earliest champion. May he rest in peace.
  • Love this candid photo, because it's about the only time Emil's been caught off guard. Together with Eric Alexander, Emil closed the biggest, baddest, toughest deals. If I am ever imprisoned in a foreign country, I want Emil to negotiate for my release. Pictured with Jed Stremmel, who started at Tellme in bizdev and now runs mobile for Facebook.

I began my entrepreneurial career taking my grandmother's magazines, clipping articles, stapling them together into new magazines of my own creation and selling them door-to-door. My career as an eight-year-old media aggregator and syndicator was short lived, but in high school I joined the early team at one of the country's first commercial ISPs (Our class B was 155.212), where I built the first Web sites for many businesses.

After creating the first Web-based college application, I turned down college to instead become Netscape's youngest employee in 1996, where I had the opportunity to work closely with giants (marca, jimb) who were generous in teaching me what they knew about building what was at that time the world's highest profile start-up success story. I was a product manager for our Web browser, worked on our anti-trust suit, and helped launch mozilla.org.

In 1999, I left Netscape to co-found Tellme with my mentor, Mike McCue. What followed were ten years of startup successes, failures, and lessons learned. Along the way we raised almost a quarter billion dollars in capital, built a profitable business with over $100 million in sales and more than 300 employees, and made speech recognition part of everyday life. Today Tellme answers every call to businesses like American Airlines, UPS and American Express (to name a few) and half of all calls to 411 directory assistance. We launched the first voice mobile search, so you can "say what you want and get it." In 2007, Microsoft acquired Tellme in their largest-ever acquisition of a private company (watch Calacanis interview). By far the most valuable Tellme experience was working with incredibly talented and smart people.

After two years leading speech recognition strategy, I left Microsoft in 2009 to pursue new adventures, returning to my native New England with hopes of bringing a Silicon Valley spark to the East Coast. I'm now gearing up for a new chapter of entrepreneurship and innovation. I still have a lot of gas in my tank!

Education Reformer

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  • Angus in the classroom at Paul Cuffee School, one of Rhode Island's most successful schools serving children of color.
  • At the statehouse, children from Providence's Young Voices youth group join forces with Rhode Island Mayors, charter school leaders and me to demand great schools for Rhode Island kids.
  • Children testify at the Board of Regents hearing to open new charter schools. Listening is RIDE's head of charter schools, Keith Oliviera, and fellow Regents member Colleen Callahan

I had an unusual educational path: four high schools in five years, skipping college to join "start-up U" in the Silicon Valley. My parents gave me opportunities at the world's best schools (where I was thrown out for hacking the phone system). I was lucky to have options.

Unfortunately most low-income children, especially children of color, lack access to effective schools. America's achievement gap is the greatest civil rights injustice of our generation (I'll let my friend Whitney Tilson elaborate), and I aim to do something about it.

After I was quoted in Rhode Island's largest magazine saying, "The public education system is absolutely screwing low-income kids of color," Rhode Island's Governor appointed me in June 2007 to serve on our Board of Regents, the state's chief education policy-making body. Since then, working with Mayor Dan McKee, Leader Gordon Fox, CER, DFER, and others, we passed an ambitious expansion of the state's charter school law, ending the ban on new schools. I introduced and passed new regulations to welcome alternative certification programs like Teach for America to our state, and I co-chaired our search committee to recruit Deborah Gist, a nationally recognized leader, to become Rhode Island's next Commissioner of Education, the first change in leadership in 17 years.

Given the slow pace of policy change, this is a good start (See NBC piece from 2008 covering my work). But in the face of the largest Latino-White achievement gap of any state in the nation, living in a city where 59 percent of students are Hispanic, and without a single open-enrollment urban district middle school where even half the kids read or do math at grade level, we have only just begun to address this daunting yet urgent inequity. Each day I find myself overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge, while at the same time inspired by the opportunity to solve it -- a little bit like a starting a company :-).

Web Sightings

Email: angus.davis@gmail.com

Due to email volume, I may be a little slow in responding.

Recent Tweets (follow @angusdav)

I'd Like to Learn...

Here are a few things not directly related to my work that I am keen to learn:

Teaching

Case studies on Tellme were written by both Harvard Business School and the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. I am a guest lecturer each spring at Haas, in Andrew Isaacs' classes on entrepreneurship. I have also spoken to exec ed, MBA and entrepreneurship classes at MIT Sloan, Stanford Business School, Harvard Business School and Brown University. I always enjoy meeting bright minds, answering questions and sharing lessons learned in these types of forums. Email speaking requests.

 

Family

Rhode Island


Geoff Davis, my dad, is one of the nation's top life sciences lawyers at Ropes & Gray.

Gina Macdonald, my mom, is a consultant with Morgan Group.

Spink Davis, my late grandfather, inspires my work on education reform.

Joanna Siino is my partner in crime and inspires me to dream big.

If you're a successful entrepreneur or plan to be, you should think about doing business in Rhode Island. The state boasts a fabulous quality of life, four beautiful seasons (3 of which are fantastic), affordable homes, affordable office space ($15/sf/yr for cool loft space), easy commute to Boston (45 mins) or New York City (3 hrs by train or car). Our intellectual hubs at Brown and RISD provide a wealth of technology and design horsepower. We have a major arts and theater scene. Long term capital gains tax is 1.7 percent, and there are no individual taxes on stock option gains for Internet companies employing 10+ workers. Contact me if you're considering moving your business to RI and I will give you a personal tour!

© 2009 Angus Davis
This page coded by hand with love in about 2 hours, thanks to 960.gs & Popeye 1.0. It doesn't work in Webkit/Safari. It's on my list. In the meantime, get Firefox.