Launch Pad

If you’re at work right now, chances are you’ve got a phone on your desk that came with the job. If not, you’re one of the lucky few: according to Craig Walker, founder of Dialpad, there are about 190 million desk phones in the U.S.

Dialpad is aiming to change all that, by bringing down the desk phone, and bringing your business communications into the cloud so they can integrate with all your devices.

Here’s Craig’s elevator pitch: “We are all about business enterprise communications, and we believe that your personal communications are pretty good. You have chosen whether you use an iPhone or an Android, and what apps and tools you want to use. And then you get to work and a lot of times you are faced with this technology that was made for your parents, like a desk phone with a bunch of lights and blinking things on it. What we do is we built a business phone system fully in the cloud that uses your own mobile phone or your own laptop or your own tablet, or your desk phone if you want to have a desk phone as well, but basically moves all of that infrastructure into the cloud, makes you—for a modern mobile worker, being able to use the tools that you actually want to use for your business communications.”

Listen to Karl Ulrich, Wharton’s Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship & Innovation, talk with Craig about how why he and his team are the best possible people to execute on this vision. (Hint: he and his two cofounders ran the engineering for Google Voice.) Plus much more about starting, funding, and growing this startup.