Girl Decoded by Rana el Kaliouby & Carol Colman

Author:Rana el Kaliouby & Carol Colman [el Kaliouby, Rana & Colman, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2020-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

“THE TEAM”

When you’re out pitching a start-up, one of the first things investors ask about is “the team.” At the time, our team consisted of Roz, our two employees, and me. We didn’t have a CEO—another strike against us. Given our lack of experience in running a company, Roz and I realized that we would need to hire a seasoned one. We interviewed quite a few candidates in Boston and were getting discouraged. One was a too-laid-back midlifer who seemed more interested in our vacation policy and whether we had a nightly cocktail hour for the staff than in growing the company. He didn’t grasp our sense of purpose or our urgency to get moving, and we got the feeling he’d run the place like a country club. Another prospect didn’t seem to get us or our technology at all but was still confident he could “bring us to new heights.”

Finally, on one of our fundraising trips to Silicon Valley, an investor we were pitching suggested that we contact Dave Berman, who had been president of worldwide sales and services for WebEx Communications, which had recently been sold to Cisco. Dave was looking for the next big thing, and the investor thought this would be the perfect match.

We made a date with Berman to meet him for dinner. Once again, I couldn’t find a babysitter, so Adam had to join us. I parked him in his car seat at our table. Dave, the father of three boys, was undeterred by the presence of a baby, and we hit it off right away. He was smart, driven, and ambitious, and really wanted to be our CEO. When we demo’d our technology, he was blown away. We talked about our commitment to ethical uses, and he nodded enthusiastically. The only caveat: He’d need to commute weekly to Boston from California, where his wife and sons lived. Why not? I thought. I was commuting from Cairo. Dave’s commute would be a few thousand miles shorter. We’d make it work. So, we gave him the job.

To his credit, Dave turned us into a real start-up. He hired an executive team and someone to run our sales division, all based in California. The caliber of the people was amazing. We later hired Tim Peacock to run engineering. An MIT alum and computer pioneer who had led the development of Lotus 1-2-3, IBM’s “killer app” in the 1980s, Tim would later become my chief operations officer and a trusted partner in running Affectiva. Unlike me, Roz did not resign her position at the MIT Media Lab when she became chief scientist at Affectiva, but she wasn’t a day-to-day employee. I was our chief technology officer, overseeing the development of the core technology—and trying to spend as much time onsite as I could.

After all my schlepping from Cairo to Boston to Sand Hill Road and back, our first investment came from a group that knew and admired Roz from her work in the Media Lab. Peder

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