Talking up the Thames Valley

15 May 2008

Christina Domecq’s eureka moment came just outside Seville in southern Spain. Domecq, from the Spanish sherry dynasty, was listening to messages in her car, and found she had 14 voicemails to wade through. There had to be a simpler way to get the information, she reasoned – and that’s what prompted her to call on her friend Daniel Doulton, who she’d met on holiday in the Alps. The two started pulling together the technology and investment for a service that converts those voicemails into text and in 2003 SpinVox was born.

Four and a half years later, the company has just secured a whopping £50m in funding. But given the different international dimensions – Domecq previously ran a training business in New York and worked for a yachting brokerage in Spain – how did SpinVox end up in London?

Well, firstly, there’s the funding. Domecq has managed SpinVox’s fundraising herself with UK investors. The first £500,000 she raised from angel investors was the hardest she ever did, she says; by comparison, her recent £50m wasn’t exactly easy, but more manageable. Being in London with contacts to call on certainly helped her get the right access.

Then there were the partners. SpinVox worked closely with The Carphone Warehouse early on, and Domecq says the opportunity to experiment through its unique high-street retail model was an invaluable test bed. In the US, independent retail outlets for mobile phones simply don’t exist. Carphone Warehouse itself also had to be willing to try something new – but it’s a company that has always been keen to experiment, from its free broadband TalkTalk service to the recent billion-dollar deal with BestBuy.

London also provided a good launch pad for Europe – SpinVox has focused on the major territories where the tier one carriers operate, with French, Spanish, German and Italian language versions now released and around 20 English dialects (GB English, US English, Australian English and so on)

Finally, there’s the cachet of London. About 18 months ago, SpinVox recognised that in order to get its proposition to fly it needed to attract top talent – and compete with the likes of Microsoft and speech leader Nuance to bring senior telecoms and speech technology execs to London. So it hired executive search agency Russell Reynolds and embarked on what it calls a “landgrab strategy”. Looking down its senior management roster the results speak for themselves – recent hires previously held senior roles at Nuance and The Carphone Warehouse and leading speech expert Dr Tony Robinson was also appointed to head up an Advanced Speech Group in Cambridge.

The people factor clearly matters: when we talked for a recent In the Boardroom, Domecq insisted that we “should come to the office and get a sense of the culture we’re building here”.

The rivalry between London and New York remains intense. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to argue with what the capital offers.

By David Longworth, Webster Buchanan Research