What are the qualifications of an evangelist for a natural language processing technology startup?
One place to start would be to examine or “reverse engineer” Google’s choice of Ray Kurzweil for “Director of Engineering”. What are the qualities that Google saw in Ray Kurzweil? Just in the first sentence of his Wikipedia entry are listed:
- author
- computer scientist
- inventor
- futurist
Other things that come to mind….
- Ray Kurzweil is not young.
- Ray Kurzweil is accomplished.
- Ray Kurzweil doesn’t need money.
- Ray Kurzweil is high profile.
- Ray Kurzweil undoubtedly has an incredible network of connections.
- Ray Kurzweil is broadly visionary.
- Ray Kurzweil is just controversial enough to be titillatingly risky.
Edit:
- How is Ray Kurzweil an evangelist?
- How is Ray Kurzweil relevant to a question about startups hiring evangelists?
=> google.com/search?q=Ray-K
I think it’s fair to say that Google to a large degree is in the NLP business, and by all accounts hired Ray Kurzweil to move NLP into the robotics sphere, which basically includes “cognitive computing” (à la IBM) as middle ground. IMHO, I very seriously doubt that Ray Kurzweil is doing much “directing of engineering”….