Targeting Big Impact Deep Tech: A Discussion with William Tundstall-Pedoe (Part 2)

Summary

In part two we continue William Tunstall-Pedoe’s journey. William discusses his exit from Amazon, his involvement with Toronto based incubator, Creative Destructive Lab and what drove him to be a successful invested investor with over 50 investments with Cambridge Angels and Octopus Investments. He offers us an insight into his passion for big impact, deep tech, in particular, an AI physician app, where he acts as an invested investor and adviser. In this episode we also bring you an Amazon Alexa demonstration carried out by William, we hope you find it as highly entertaining as we do. You can hear more by listening to his
podcast.

About William Tunstall-Pedoe

William Tunstall-Pedoe is a British entrepreneur focused on Artificial Intelligence and other deep technology. He is based in Cambridge, UK and London but also frequently in Toronto and both coasts of the US. (LinkedIn) His biggest recent achievement was founding the British company Evi (formerly True Knowledge) in 2005. After seven years running the business as a venture capital backed start-up, Amazon acquired it in 2012 and its AI technology, platform and team were used to create Alexa. For more than three years he had a senior role in the team that defined, built and launched Amazon Alexa and the Amazon Echo product (the initial Alexa device). Evi is now a subsidiary of Amazon and a large development centre employing many hundreds of scientists and engineers. After a decade since founding the company and with everything he hoped to achieve delivered successfully, he made the difficult decision to leave Amazon in February 2016.

William now spends much of his time helping and investing in other AI startups. He has personally invested in more than 60 such businesses (see his angellistprofile.) . He is a full member of Cambridge Angels and a fellow of the Creative Destruction Lab in Toronto. He is also thinking gently about what to do next – which will likely be founding another AI-based startup.

Produced by Mark Cotton, Twitter.

About Peter Cowley

Peter Cowley, a Cambridge university technology graduate, founded and ran over a dozen businesses in technology and property over the last 40 years. He has built up a portfolio of 75 angel investments with nine good exits (including one that is 107X his investment and returned all the cash he has invested) and thirteen failures. He is a board member of the Global Business Angel Network (GBAN), President Emeritus of the European Business Angel Network (EBAN), former chair of the Cambridge Business Angels and was UK Angel of the Year 2014. He has mentored hundreds of entrepreneurs and is on the board of nine startups.

In 2011, he founded and ran Martlet: a Corporate VC, investing (currently £10M) from the balance sheet of Marshall, a £2.5bn revenue Cambridge engineering company. He is a fellow in Entrepreneurship at the Cambridge Judge Business School and is on the investment committee of the UK Angel Co-fund. He has also had 16 years’ experience as chair, treasurer and trustee of the boards of seven charities.

With his son, Alan, Peter is sharing his and others’ experience and anecdotes in order to educate angels and entrepreneurs via The Invested Investor which publishes two books and 75+ podcasts. A selection of Invested Investor podcasts are republished here on the Entrepreneurship and Leadership channel on the NBN. This is one of them. Peter is a public speaker on entrepreneurship and angel investing throughout the world. Here's Peter on Linkedin.

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