Angus Davis

Angus co-founded Tellme, a prominent Silicon Valley technology firm that grew a profitable business to more than $100 million in sales and over 300 employees with $238 million in backing from Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark Capital, among other investors.
In 2007, Microsoft acquired Tellme in its largest-ever acquisition of a private company. Angus subsequently guided speech recognition product strategy across Microsoft for two years before leaving in 2009 to explore new opportunities. Prior to Tellme, Angus joined Netscape Communications in 1996, bypassing college to become the company's youngest employee at age 18. At Netscape, Angus worked in the office of the CTO and later he was product manager for the flagship Web browser and the Web rendering engine known as “Gecko.” In an ironic twist, he played a key role in the anti-trust suit against Microsoft. He participated in the AOL/Netscape merger and in establishing Mozilla.org, one of the first commercial forays into open source software. Angus has addressed numerous industry conferences on technology and business. He has spoken on entrepreneurship at Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley and Brown University, among others, and he has appeared in every major US business and technology media outlet, including CNBC, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, BusinessWeek, C|Net and others. In 2006 BusinessWeek named him one of the top ten entrepreneurs under age 30.
A New England native, Angus visits Silicon Valley often but now calls Providence, RI home. Outside business, his passion is improving K-12 public education. In 2007, Rhode Island’s Governor appointed Angus to the Board of Regents, the state’s chief education policy body. In just two years, Angus led a major expansion of the charter school law and passed regulations to allow new teacher programs like Teach for America.
Angus recruited a nationally acclaimed leader to become Rhode Island’s Commissioner of Education, replacing a 17-year incumbent. Motivating this work is Angus’ goal to close the achievement gap, as Rhode Island’s Latino-White gap is the largest in the nation and not a single urban district middle school in the state has even half its students performing at grade level in any subject measured (reading, writing or mathematics).