Kevin Surace pioneered voice AI at General Magic, technology that later became Siri and Alexa. He argues startups die for one reason: they run out of money. Repeated pivots driven by bad customer feedback and pricing mistakes drain cash until funding stops.
I'm known as the father of the AI assistant and voice AI to some people. So everything that later became Siri, Alexa, everything else, Google Voice, really came out of technology worked on at General Magic and got licensed to all those other companies.
And every one of your companies just went straight up, right?
No, many times it's straight down. Look, I like to say this about startups: they only die because they eventually run out of money. Otherwise, you'd keep trying. We are doing companies where you've changed the business model 5 or 10 times before you sort of nailed it, right? And part of that is customer feedback. Of it is that your original vision doesn't align with market needs. Part of it's pricing, whatever it is, right? And what happens is on that journey, the second plan, the third plan, the fourth turn, the fifth turn, the sixth turn, you run out of money at some point. People get tired, you run out of money, then it's over. If you didn't run out of money, you'd still be there.
