Howard Lee, Chief Executive Officer
Howard Lee is a customer service industry expert and Spoken’s relentless customer ambassador. He applies his nearly 25 years of experience to releasing call centers from the grips of current industry limitations while positioning them to reap the benefits of call center technology innovations.
Prior to joining Spoken, Lee was the founder of HyperQuality, an independent call center QA firm that allowed him to develop tremendous insights into the customer service business. His audits and recommendations covered phone calls, email, and chat communications of contact center professionals representing organizations, customers and prospective customers.
Lee gained additional insight into call center profitability as the CEO of PhotoWorks, a NASDAQ traded company, and before that as the Senior Vice President of Disney Direct, where he was responsible for profit and loss, branding operations and marketing of the direct division. The 1,800-person team included two call centers and a large warehouse operating team. Lee also has worked at an India CRM outsource provider as the SVP of Sales and Marketing. He attended the University of Washington.
Gilad Odinak, Chief Technology Officer
Odinak is an inventor and computer industry innovator with over 50 issued and pending patents to his name. The founder of Spoken Communications, Odinak is Spoken’s driving force to solve complex operational problems, diligently and comprehensively. He has 20 years of experience in computer software and hardware research and development.
Prior to Spoken, Odinak led the development group at Wingcast, a joint telematics venture of Ford Motor Co and QUALCOMM to provide advanced services and applications incorporating state-of-the-art wireless communication, GPS, voice processing and embedded hardware and software. Prior to joining Wingcast, Odinak spent 12 years at
Microsoft Corporation developing systems software for new products, including Smart Card security, GSM wireless communication and multimedia operating systems. Odinak holds a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and a degree in computer science from Tel-Aviv University.
David Milstein, VP Engineering
Milstein, Spoken’s solution architect, brings over 15 years of software development expertise and problem-solving to Spoken. His extensive experience ensures that software and program management at Spoken are exceptional and that uptime is at the maximum. Prior to joining Spoken, Milstein spent nearly 10 years at Microsoft Corporation in software development and management positions, working on emerging technology including cryptography, GSM, Smartcard, mobile services and mobile devices technologies.
Prior to Microsoft, David was the head of software development at Fortress U&T, an Israeli startup that was sold to M-Systems in the year 2000. David holds 43 issued and pending patents and has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer and Electronics Engineering from Ben-Gurion University.
Robin Kreuger, CFO
Robin Kreuger is Spoken's part-time CFO and is a Partner in the Seattle practice of Tatum, LLC, where she specializes in financial leadership, merger and acquisitions, raising capital, CFO mentoroing, controllership and public and emerging growth companies. Kreuger holds a post-MBA certificate in Accounting from The Seattle University, and MBA International Business from George Washington University and a B.A. of Business Administration from the University of Washington. She was the Vice President of Finance at Alaska Airlines and the CFO of Intelligent Results, a startup that was recently sold to FirstData.
Jonathan Roberts, Ignition Partners
Board Member
Jonathan Roberts is a founder and a partner at Ignition investing in business application and services. Prior to Ignition, Jonathan spent 13 years at Microsoft, most recently as General Manager of the Windows CE Intelligent Appliance Division, where he was responsible for developing new WinCE products, product marketing, business development and long-term planning for the Windows CE solution, as well as the retargeting of the Microsoft’s PocketPC effort. Jonathan led the marketing and business efforts for Windows 3.1, 3.11, Windows NT 3.51, NT 4.0, BackOffice 1.0, Windows 98 and NT 4.0 on the Desktop, and finally all of Windows CE including embedded, Pocket PC, Auto, Phones, Set-top, Games, etc. Jon received his B.A. in history from the University of Washington.