Interview with John Pollard of Jott
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“Jott”:http://www.jott.com is voice-powered, hands-free texting, email and to do lists. There’s been a thread throughout John’s career of looking for ways to create new things of value, whether in Public Health immediately post college, or in business with consumer CD-ROMs, Sidewalk, Expedia, smart mobile devices, and now Jott. After this last 9 months, John’s time of greatest entrepreneurial intensity was at Expedia, where he was an early employee; John led its international buildout into the UK and Germany, went public, and then started the Expedia Corporate Travel team. |
Talk to me about JottCasts. How do you make the voice transcription work? What are the next steps that will improve the technology?
Jott is about simplifying your life. In the case of JottCast, it’s about using your voice to create text and email messages totally hands-free. Speed dial. Speak. You’re done. Jott handles everything else, including transcription. If we were dealing with a very limited set of words, in a known context, spoken very clearly by a accentless person in a noise-free environment, then pure machine-driven Speech Recognition might have been the way to go. Instead, we wanted to be immediately useful and simple to adopt, letting any English speaker jott using an ordinary cell-phone, their natural voice, in a realistic setting (their car, running between meetings, etc.). So we use a mixed Human/Machine method for transcription, and that blend will change over time.
I understand that you launched Jott with less than $1M, which is quite a small amount for a startup. How have you made that money work for you so well? Are you currently looking for more financing?
We’ve been focussed and frugal, and will continue to be. We haven’t been in a garage, but our kitchen’s been a rubber utility sink in the corner, and there was a wood worker below us who cranked his radio up loud enough to be heard over his lathe. More importantly, we’ve been smart about our investments, using off the shelf components where possible, and hiring creative and productive people. We have a very rich roadmap, but we are hardcore about what’s necessary versus nice to have in any given release.
After eight months of bootstrapping this ourselves, we recently raised a small bridge round from a world-class group of investors. It’s actually pretty humbling given what these guys have accomplished in media and communications. We’ll use this money to refine the product, deliver a few more scenarios, and solidify the core team. And yes, we will be raising more money.
Who do you see as your competitors? With whom do you hope to partner?
There is a lot of cool work going on right now in voice, web-based productivity, messaging, etc. We think we’re taking a pretty unique approach, but I know we had better have great development cycle times and scenario clarity. We’re getting a lot of great feedback, and the challenge will be to triage to what works, move forward on our roadmap, and stay simple. It’s just too easy these days to encrust product with features that get in the way.
I’m incredibly excited about the partnership opportunities. Not only is Jott a useful mobile phone service as it is, but we’ve seen excitement around mashing up with Jott in the future, and we want to enable this. Also, people jott about things they’re trying to get done: stuff to buy, meetings to set, trips to plan, etc. This creates great possibilities for linking, advertising, and broadening what can be jotted. Finally, JottCast is an amazing community enabler today, and we’ll continue to help people do that.
Bonus: What was the first Jott you created?
I think the first one was “Does this actually work?” It did.
Copyright © 2007 by Sonia Aggarwal