Adam Cheyer

4 exits: Apple, Samsung, Cognizant, Airbnb.

Most people know one line of it: he co-founded Siri, that was bought by Apple.

Before Siri he spent more than a decade at SRI International, ending as Chief Architect of CALO — a five-year, $150 million DARPA program with over 300 researchers from 22 institutions, the largest AI project the US government had ever funded. That started in 2003. Back then "AI" was a word that closed doors, not one that opened funding rounds.

Siri came out of that work. It launched as an iPhone app in February 2010. Apple bought it 2 months later.
A year after that it shipped inside the phone, and a generation learned to talk to a machine.

Then he did it again: founded Viv Labs, sold to Samsung, where it became Bixby.
And again, founded Sentient, to be purchased by Cognizant.
And once again, GamePlanner.AI → Airbnb, reportedly around $200M, in 2023.

Somewhere in the middle of all this he was a founding member and the first developer of Change.org: the petition platform that now has more than half a billion members.

60+ publications and 50+ patents.
Judge for the $5M AI XPRIZE.
Scientific advisory board of the Allen Institute for AI.
In 2019 Voicebot ranked him #2 among visionaries in voice — behind Bezos, ahead of Pichai.

And then there's the part that makes him impossible to file.

Adam is an award-winning magician. Member of the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, where he was hired for 21 shows in the Close-up Gallery. He's performed on Penn & Teller: Fool Us, won first place at the Oakland Magic Circle close-up competition, done card work in palaces for heads of state and in stadiums for thousands. And he has performed for David Copperfield, David Blaine and Shin Lim.

His ten-year-old niece was in the audience the night he taped Fool Us. She said, "I want to do that." He taught her one card trick. The following season she beat out 850 professional magicians for a spot on the show.

Ask him how the two halves fit together and he doesn't hedge:
"Entrepreneurs and magicians are exactly the same. They imagine a desirable, impossible future that doesn't exist, and then they work backward from that vision to figure out the math and science to make it come true."

Imagine five days on one campus with 150 people who have built things. Weak signal, on purpose. Minimal stage. He walks you through how Siri actually got built. Later he does close-up card magic six inches from your face and you still don't catch it. At some point in the evening you're at the firepit next to him, and the conversation isn't about AI at all.

What would you ask him?

Source: http://adam.cheyer.com/site/home
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Cheyer