Episode #40 - David Gurle, Symphony

David is the Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Symphony, the secure collaboration platform focused on global markets. David’s ideas have influenced the major trends in consumer and enterprise communications and most recently secure collaboration technologies over the past two decades. He founded and ran Microsoft’s unified communications products (Skype for Business) and as Global Head of Collaboration Services at Thomson Reuters, introduced the first consumer-to-business federated communications to the financial services industry. After the sale of Skype to Microsoft where he was the GM of Skype’s Enterprise Business, David founded and sold Perzo before founding Symphony.

We had the honor to welcome David for a surprise visit at the Tokyo FinTech Meetup in August 2018, so in this conversation, we embarking on the Symphony journey since then. We discuss Symphony's differentiation as a network across companies, rather than inside a company (where Microsoft Teams and Slack might be extensively used), the importance of synchronization of information in a decentralized environment, the differences in integrating with WeChat and WhatsApp and why localization in Japanese language was so difficult (that's the geeky part of the conversation). From there, we are looking into the future of workflow productivity using Symphony, and the emergence of an enterprise intelligence platform. David concludes with his personal advice to entrepreneurs, and those who want to become one. 

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