I can’t tell you how excited I am that tomorrow will be my first day working at SRI International as an Entrepreneur in Residence.  It does mean that Tim and I have stopped working on Zenlike.  That sucks.  We worked long and hard at it.  But working with SRI represents an incredibly unique opportunity to build a *cliche alert* game changing business by partnering with some of the worlds best researchers and technologists.  In particular experts in the field of artificial intelligence – speech recognition, natural language processing and virtual personal assistant technology.

What I’ll be doing as an EIR is 3 sided.

• I’ll be working with SRI researchers and executives like Norman Winarsky (founder of Apple’s Siri and current VP Ventures at SRI)  to understand the research and assets SRI owns, and lessons they’ve learned about commercialization.
• I’ll be studying and iterating with the market to identify its needs.
• And finally I’ll be iterating with investors and other industry thought leaders to help identify patterns and opportunities within the market.

Combined, the goal is to find opportunities to massage SRI technology and research into a company that can build products servicing this market need using SRI technology as a starting point.

SRI is one of, if not THE most successful research and development centers in the world.  Originally “Stanford Research Institute”, they invented, among other things, the MRI, HDTV, Siri, ultrasound imaging,  stealth technology, remote surgery, and much more.  A good list of some of their inventions is here: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/06/coolest-tech-tour-sri-human-condition/

They’re amazing at building and researching this technology, but what they often ask for help with, is how to turn these core technologies into extremely profitable ventures.  That’s essentially my job.  A big challenge, but given my passion as a computer scientist for building amazing technology products and my passion understand what the market really want to pay for, is something I’m stoked to do.

From a logistics standpoint, I’ll be splitting my time between Menlo Park in California, and Edmonton Alberta where my family resides.