Spin sister

6 May 2008

Christina Domecq is CEO and co-founder of SpinVox. Starting from the simple premise of converting people’s voicemails into text messages so they don’t have to keep dialling their answerphone, SpinVox has built a global portfolio of consumer and enterprise messaging products. But Domecq, who comes from the Spanish sherry-making dynasty, isn’t stopping there. The 2006 Ernst & Young UK entrepreneur of the year has just raised another $100m to fund the company’s global expansion, and is investigating further opportunities – while her mantra of ‘keeping it simple’ continues to win over customers, carriers and investors.

You’ve raised a total of £100m over the course of the company’s existence including a whopping £50m or so last month. How did you pull that off in these credit-crunch times?

It was no small feat – I’ll have to be honest. I ran the fundraising and it’s testament to the success of the management team around me that we managed this. It’s very challenging managing the day job at the same time and it does take over your life. But as most entrepreneurs will testify, we work around 20 hours a day - it’s just choosing which 20 hours you want to work!

You’ve worked very hard on developing the culture at SpinVox. What’s the most difficult aspect of that?

It’s a dynamic culture, kind of like Silicon Valley in the Thames Valley. We encourage people to be innovative in coming up with ideas about how we run things and how we manage a global business.

One of the biggest challenges I’ve had over the past 18 months in growing the business from 30 employees to over 300 has been maintaining that culture with this pace of growth. One thing I would have done differently is to create more of a culture of communication earlier on with an internal communication programme to support it. It’s very difficult to maintain culture when you grow this quickly but I think it’s the engine of a successful growing business.

We have that now and it’s about keeping consistent messages running through the business, making it part of every agenda in every meeting and making it fun for people to remember to keep communicating with each other. We also have global mentoring and buddy programmes so people in the UK can communicate with people in the US, Canada or Australia. Then even though we’re a global business we can feel like a small aggressive start-up. Moving quickly in an aggressive marketplace is critical to our success, but I don’t want to do that at the expense of our culture.

Did the fact you’d started and run a business before make it easier? Have you done things differently this time around?

I’ve learnt in the past several things not to do, but I’ve still learnt a tremendous amount this time around. The thing we did well here from the beginning was to hire aggressively and to budget for hiring the best. We recruited both for the technical and operational side, and crucially for the commercial side – to do the initial deals with the carriers. About 18 months ago we started on this strategy and we worked with [executive search agency] Russell Reynolds to help with our global recruitment.

You recently recruited the former head of business development at Carphone Warehouse. What’s the secret to getting people like that to join?

The compelling part of SpinVox remains the simplicity of the message, and our focus. Entrepreneurs are often told if you can’t explain it in 30 seconds or less you should go back to the drawing board. In our case we do one thing and one thing only, which is convert voice into text. We execute that in multiple product layers – whether it’s the voicemail products, where you never need listen to your voicemail again; or missed call messenger, which is the ability for non-voicemail users to remain connected to their community; or the blogging product; or the ability to speak an e-mail message from your phone. All those product incarnations are focused on converting voice into text. Over time you’ll see us applying our core technology to other markets too and bringing out additional messaging products.

Why did you build the technology yourself when speech recognition technology already exists, some of it quite good?

We tried many platforms when we first started and over time realised that applying someone else’s technology to our specific issue wasn’t going to give us the results we wanted. Our issue is freeform speech – the language that people actually use in everyday communication. Typically if you look in the speech world, the technology is being applied to what they call constricted or refined speech. Whether it be medical, legal or even dictation, the idea is that you need to train a system. In our environment, the user doesn’t need to train the system.

SpinVox is a hosted platform so we can now apply our system to different spaces. Today we receive a 97% accuracy rating from users and we’ll continue to refine the product. SpinVox addresses a real, live consumer issue which is that voicemail causes a lot of hassle, having to stop what you’re doing and fiddle with pens, papers and purses. We wanted to apply technology to a consumer problem, as opposed to simply giving it to consumers and letting them decide what to do with it.

The ability for the decision-maker in the carrier or even our investors to get emotionally involved in the product is quite rare in technology-based businesses.  It happens in our case because the simplicity of the idea speaks to all of us. It’s intuitive. And that’s really important in the way we design it because we don’t need to re-educate an individual in how to use it. So instead of getting a normal notification saying you’ve got mail, you just get a more robust notification that says what the message is, leaving you free to listen to the original if you want to.

And how has the platform evolved over the years?

Our product is a live learning system – it’s evolutionary. The more users and new voices we have in the system, the more the system continues to learn. So we have an active technology system, which is part of the reason we recently launched our Advanced Speech Group in Cambridge.

You now have over 300 employees around the world. How did you manage that global expansion and where will you go next?

It was really based on where the largest markets existed for us and where the tier 1 carriers were worldwide. You see us strategically in places where they speak English and English subsets. So if you look at our languages we have English, Spanish, French and German - but in English we have about 20 different variants, including the most obvious ones like GB English, US English, Australian English, New Zealand English and so on.

We will tackle the Asian market but not until the latter part of 2010. As you can imagine, we’ve got quite a bit of growth on our plate right now and keeping the team focused on the here-and-now objectives is part of my job.

Christina Domecq was talking to David Longworth of Webster Buchanan Research