Ron Croen was the founding CEO of Nuance who worked with three researchers at SRI to launch the company in 1994. Nuance went public in 2000 and merged with Scansoft a few years later. Today Nuance's market cap is just under $5 billion and for about a decade the company was THE voice company worldwide. Ron had a front row seat to many formative developments and events in the early days of voice technology. Amazon Echo truly impressed him when it came out in 2014 because it broke many tenets of industry conventional wisdom. He is now a partner at You and Mr. Jones Brandtech Ventures where he is looking at investing in voice once again but even is more enthusiastic about virtual humans. Welcome to the longest Voicebot Podcast to date. If you want to learn a lot about the early days of voice technology and what it tells us about where we are today, Ron is a great tour guide.