Evan Macmillan

Co-Founder and CEO, Gridspace · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutive

Evan Macmillan is the co-founder and CEO of Gridspace, a speech processing and conversational AI platform created in collaboration with SRI Speech Labs. Previously, he co-founded local commerce startup Zappedy and served as a Director of Product at Groupon.

6statements → 5claims → 2claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 1.67/5average debate potential →

2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

5 assertions · 1 insight · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Evan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Cisco and Avaya control the majority of enterprise voice data infrastructure
“So when we're talking about voice data, there's a few companies that control the pipes and those companies are Cisco and Viya, and they have a pretty large footprint in contact center, and then also in unified conferencing.”
Evan Macmillan Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 11:55 Evan Macmillan, Gridspace // How Machines Enter The Conversation (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
100% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

196 words/min while actually speaking · 96 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Evan Macmillan: only 1 usable question→answer exchange on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,594 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Evan Macmillan said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Supported
Cisco and Avaya control the majority of enterprise voice data infrastructure
“So when we're talking about voice data, there's a few companies that control the pipes and those companies are Cisco and Viya, and they have a pretty large footprint in contact center, and then also in unified conferencing.”
Evan Macmillan Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 11:55 Evan Macmillan, Gridspace // How Machines Enter The Conversation (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Most YouTube advertisers do not know what video content they target
“Most YouTube, I mean, advertisers don't really know what's going on in the YouTube videos they advertise against.”
Evan Macmillan Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 13:27 Evan Macmillan, Gridspace // How Machines Enter The Conversation (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
English speech recognition is harder than Romance languages due to orthography
“English was actually harder than many romantic languages because the orthography in English, it means it's like how, how words get written and then said are, there's a better connection in romantic languages than English.”
Evan Macmillan Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 17:35 Evan Macmillan, Gridspace // How Machines Enter The Conversation (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
People speak 100 times more words than they write in email
“So people speak about, ah, a hundred times more words, ah, than they write in email.”
Evan Macmillan Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 3:35 Evan Macmillan, Gridspace // How Machines Enter The Conversation (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Insight
Macmillan: The best interfaces for voice output are task-driven
“I think the best interfaces are task-driven.”
Evan Macmillan Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 8:18 Evan Macmillan, Gridspace // How Machines Enter The Conversation (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Supported
A 1952 Bell Labs voice system reached 97-99% accuracy
“Actually the, ah, the recognition rate of this machine was 97 to 99%.”
Evan Macmillan Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 10:08 Evan Macmillan, Gridspace // How Machines Enter The Conversation (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Evan Macmillan, Gridspace // How Machines Enter The Conversation (Hosted by FirstMark Capi Sep 14, 2015 15m
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