Building a Financial Communications Unicorn - David Gurle, Founder and CEO of Symphony
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In today's episode of the Wharton FinTech podcast, Miguel Armaza is joined by David Gurle, Founder and CEO of Symphony, a financial services communications company that's helping individuals, teams and organizations of all sizes improve productivity, while meeting security and compliance needs.

David Gurle is an author, inventor and visionary. David's ideas have influenced the major trends in consumer and enterprise communications and most recently secure collaboration technologies over the past two decades. He founded and ran Microsoft's unified communications products (Skype for Business) and as Global head of collaboration services at Thomson Reuters, introduced the first consumer-to-business federated communications to the financial services industry. After the sale of Skype to Microsoft where he was the GM of Skype's Enterprise Business, David founded and sold Perzo before founding Symphony. David sits on the Monetary Authority of Singapore's International Technology Advisory Panel, is regularly featured on global broadcast (CNBC, BFM, Fox News) and print media (TechCrunch, Le Monde, Wall Street Journal) and is a sought-after keynote speaker on the future of the digital workplace, collaboration technologies, workplace diversity and all matters related to privacy and information security. In January 2020, he received the Légion d'Honneur, the highest French order of merit for military and civil service.

Symphony transforms the way users communicate effectively and securely with a single workflow application. Forging a new path in the financial services industry, Symphony is designed to help individuals, teams and organizations of all sizes improve productivity, while meeting complex data security and regulatory compliance needs. Symphony was founded in October 2014 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, with offices in New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Stockholm, Sophia-Antipolis and London.

In this episode, David shares:

-The powerful influence of his international upbringing and how it influenced him to pursue a career in telecom at ETSI, France Telecom, Microsoft, and Skype.

-How being an intrapreneur earned him the title of "great, but unmanageable" by his first supervisor.

-The key role he played in Microsoft's surprising acquisition of Skype.

-The thought process that helped him identify a problem in secure persistent communications and how he devised a winning strategy for Symphony.

-Challenges and anecdotes of Symphony's early days.

-The importance of building a no-trust, end-to-end encrypted system, and why that has made a big difference between Symphony and other similar solutions.

-Why it's critical to give users control of their data and the reason he thinks Apple has taken the wrong approach.

-Symphony's recent explosive growth of 300%-400% in light of COVID-19 and how they have quickly become one of the top mission critical applications for their customers.

-His vision of a post-COVID world and the steps Symphony is taking to implement a flexible work policy.

-Valuable entrepreneurial advice and achieving childhood dreams.