William is an entrepreneur and investor with a focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI). He founded the AI start-up Evi which built a voice assistant with the same name. After seven years, it was acquired by Amazon (in 2012) to create Alexa. After acquisition, William was a leader in the team that defined, built and launched Alexa and Echo. His start-up is now a subsidiary of Amazon and Amazon Cambridge, employing many hundreds of scientists and engineers.
Since the difficult decision to leave Amazon in 2016, William has been involved with many 100s of other start-ups as a mentor and angel investor. He is a full member of Cambridge Angels and works as a fellow in the Creative Destruction Lab, a Toronto-based start-up incubator (shortly also coming to the UK). He is gently working on his next start-up too and recently launched a free smartphone app that can solve and explain cryptic crossword clues as a testbed for some of his new ideas in AI (www.crosswordgenius.com)
William also coded the AI software that Dan Brown used to create the anagrams that appeared in the Da Vinci Code novel and movie. His name appears in the credits of all 80 million copies sold. He also once got lots of press for calculating that April 11th 1954 was the most boring day in history.