Siri creator Adam Cheyer talks about the long road to launching the virtual assistant, how to take an entrepreneurial idea from conception to impact and why he doesn't see anything as a failure.

"An entrepreneur and a magician are exactly the same," begins Cheyer, who also founded the startups Change.org, Viv Labs, Sentient and Bixby. "An entrepreneur needs to imagine an impossible future. Think about Siri: 20 years ago, if I told you that you could pull a device out of your pocket, it would know who you are and where you are and you could just talk to it using your words and it would not only talk back to you, but do things for you, book that reservation, buy a movie ticket, you would've thought that were magic.

"An entrepreneur has to imagine an impossible future that's desirable, that doesn't exist ... So, you have to reach far as an entrepreneur, dream big, dream magical. But you have to be very clear (and answer) 'Why would we want such a thing?'"

This Feb. 9, 2021, talk was part of UC Berkeley's Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology's 2021 Newton Lecture Series. 

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology.

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