American businessman; Patterson is the handsome young CEO of SpeechWorks, a company that has managed to thrive despite the economic downturn of the early 21st century. Since joining the company in 1996, SpeechWorks has grown from 40 people to 400 people in seven offices around the world with speech recognition as its product focus. He grew up in affluent Wellesley, MA and then moved around a lot before going to Harvard. After graduation, he continued to be peripatetic, spending two years in Washington, DC, two years in Connecticut and the Yale School of Management, and, led by his work at Yale on telecommunications, spent nearly four years in Europe, working for France Telecom, starting out as an intern. He then joined Hewlett-Packard as a software product manager, and moved on to Vicorp in West Germany as Worldwide Marketing Manager. When he returned to the US in 1987, he launched Vicorp USA, but, realizing that its core business of “information services gateways” was not going far, he and his partner repositioned the company to center around telephone-based platforms for automated services. The company became quite successful, and, when Vicorp’s owners decided to sell, Patterson jumped to a then-hot start-up known as Voxware, which he took public six months later in 1996. Shortly after the initial public offering (IPO), he moved on to SpeechWorks.
He and his wife have three children: a daughter and fraternal twins, and, he says, “Children’s are God’s blessing.” He adds that he enjoys work, but when he has a little time to spare away from his work or family, he reads, watches some basketball, plays golf, or attends a museum or symphony. Although he has musical ability (he sang and played musical instruments when he was younger), his singing these days is restricted to lullabies, he notes with a grin.