"When I was 13, I would go to a college next to my school to use their mainframe, and since then I've been excited by computers and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with software. I studied computer science at the University of Cambridge and taught there after graduating in 1991, but I felt better suited to entrepreneurship than to academia. If you create something genuinely new in software, it can be on a billion smartphones in six months and truly change the world."
"I helped create Alexa, a product that everyone has heard of and most people have used. I'm proud of what we built. But by 2016, it was clear that leaving Amazon, which I joined after the company acquired my startup, was the right decision. Continuing to work on Alexa would have been a very different job from building and launching startups, which I love to do."
William Tunstall-Pedoe founded True Knowledge (later Evi) in 2006 to enable conversational search and address limitations of keyword-based internet search. Amazon acquired his startup and he joined the company, contributing to the creation of Alexa. He left Amazon in 2016 after almost four years to re-enter the startup world and used a six-page memo to decide to depart. He developed an early passion for computing at age 13, studied computer science at the University of Cambridge, taught there after graduating, and favored entrepreneurship over academia because software can rapidly scale and create large impact.
Read at Business Insider
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