Serial Entrepreneur Omar Tawakol joins Decibel as Founder Advisor

We are excited to announce that Omar Tawakol has joined Decibel as a Founder Advisor. Omar was the founder and CEO of Voicea, the leading voice AI platform used by employees in more than 10,000 companies prior to its acquisition by Cisco in August 2019. Prior to founding Voicea, Omar was the founder and CEO of BlueKai, a data management platform which was acquired by Oracle in 2014 where he was SVP and GM of the Oracle Marketing Cloud. As a serial entrepreneur whose career spans 3 decades, Omar will advise founders on how to start and run companies through unprecedented times. He shared his wisdom for founders managing through the current environment in a recent Q&A.

You have been the founder of three different companies over the course of your celebrated career. What does it take to start a successful startup?

I used to have an analogy that entrepreneurs were artists–we would diligently sculpt masterpieces by carving our work into rock. After starting three companies, and now as a startup advisor to many founders, my analogy has evolved. Now it’s about surfing. A surfer doesn’t create a wave–they understand that a wave is created outside of them. A great surfer learns how to listen to, read, and ride a wave. There is a natural humility that comes from respecting where a wave comes from, and where it may go. You should think about your customers and your market in the same way–you may initially have a very strong viewpoint, but never forget that these forces are much stronger than anything you create on your own so you need to be willing to adapt. You also need to be prepared to change course, fall down, and get back up numerous times while starting a company. It is not for the faint of heart.

You have built three startups and two had to survive recessions. What did you learn from those experiences?

My first company, CoRelation, was founded in the dot com era when it seemed like everyone could raise money, and my second, BlueKai was founded in the financial crisis. We had no idea if we could raise money for BlueKai in October 2008–Lehman Brothers had just gone bankrupt, and it was one of the hardest times to raise money in the past two decades. I try to remind founders that in good times we can all look like geniuses, but when times are tough, you need to sharpen your focus on the customer. In our first company, we made a lot of mistakes. Most critically, we were technologists that didn’t understand our customer. The second time around, we felt we knew our industry better than most, and that was crucial for finding our footing with early adopters in an uncertain environment.

Finding early product and market fit is hard and requires lots of trial and error. What advice would you give to founders about iterating on their initial product?

As a founder, one of the most challenging things is recognizing that your ingrained assumptions about the world can be wrong. I’ve been studying computer science and software engineering for a long time–if you think about writing code, you always get real time feedback when you finally compile and test the quality of your work. Over time you realize that the bugs  never originate in the software; the bugs are always in your brain. I think this is one of the more essential metaphors for pivoting in a startup. When you don’t have an ideal product market fit, your instinct is to look at your marketing or sales or even the design of some feature. But it’s actually the model of the world you’ve built that’s not quite right, and the software merely reflects your flawed assumptions. You need to fix your assumptions before you blame your sales or your product.  

You advise many first time founders today. Looking back on your experience as a leader, what advice would you give them now?

Founders always feel existential pressure in a startup–this is true in good times and in bad. We don’t know if we will succeed or fail along the way, and the volatility can be exhausting. I try to remind people that it’s never as bad as it seems, and it is never as good as it seems, in any one particular moment. With time comes balance and perspective. I also think that as founders, we always want to move incredibly fast, but there is a difference between making a fast decision and making the right decision. We sometimes feel the pressure to make a decision and not take our time, but this can yield suboptimal results. I find if you have confidence and allow yourself to take a deep breath, you more often make the right decision by not making the fast decision.

You immigrated to the US from Egypt to study computer science at MIT. How did your early years shape your journey as an entrepreneur?

I was born in Egypt, grew up in New York, then returned to Egypt for high school before coming back to the States for college. When you move back and forth between drastically different cultures you learn to see the best of both worlds but are also an outsider in each. Growing up as an outsider teaches you skills that are useful as an entrepreneur. For example, you never assume that any single ideology is better than another and always feel comfortable challenging the status quo. And as an immigrant in a new place you tend to focus on what you can control and nothing else. That focus ends up being helpful in life and in business, and also inspires you to work a little harder and take nothing for granted.  

You have been through highly uncertain times in the past. What’s different about COVID-19? How should founders operate in this environment?  

As entrepreneurs, we often learn to be hyper-focused, and our greatest strength is our ability to ignore what is going on outside of our small world. Sometimes, we shut out everything else so we can stay laser-focused on our objectives. But in today’s environment, every business leader has quickly learned that we can’t control much of anything and have to shift our priorities. Hundreds of thousands of people are sick, millions of people are out of work, and many of our best-laid plans have been completely upended and need to be put on temporary pause so that we can focus on helping others. You can’t really be effective solely by focusing on yourself. We’re all interconnected, and the only way to stay relevant and in tune with your customers and employees is to focus on how others are affected by this pandemic.

Tell us about the acquisition of Voicea by Cisco and how you are spending your time now?  

The decision to sell to an acquirer is never easy, and we struggled with it for many sleepless nights, wondering whether it was the right thing to do. Ultimately, what swayed me was that I had a very strong leadership team from a diverse set of disciplines and the team was collectively aligned on the move. One of the key reasons for partnering was the opportunity to accelerate and reach Cisco’s >750,000 customers together. I feel very fortunate that we’re now using our technology in partnership with Webex to reach hundreds of millions of people that rely on our service for critical business communications. In this pandemic, we are helping schools stay online, keeping healthcare services available, and onboarding state and local government agencies to help serve people most in need. I feel the tech industry is in a position to help everyone in this environment and to use this crisis as a call to action. As a Founder Advisor with Decibel, I want to help founders who are also with us on the front lines and do what I can to give back.