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Boy Wonder

He’s a tech whiz, the anti-CEO and, at thirty-two, a self-made millionaire many times over. Now, Angus Davis aims to use his golden touch to revolutionize the way we shop, make Providence the Silicon Valley of the east and — in his spare time — fix the mess that is Rhode Island’s public school system.

Photography by Pat O'Connor

In the early nineties, Angus Davis was one of the lucky kids with an Internet connection. “I was at his house with Jonathan DiOrio,” says Seth Fandetti, who attended Providence’s Moses Brown School with Davis. “Being two fourteen-year-old boys in a room with a computer, we tried to look up some questionable material. Angus walked in, saw us and said, ‘This is the most powerful tool of the twentieth century, and this is how you two choose to utilize it?’ He was so disgusted that he walked out and sat in the other room.”

At thirty-two,  Davis still reveres technology. It’s the medium for his success, but not the secret. The hidden ingredients are part genius, part mad scientist, and — as the saying goes — 99 percent perspiration. Wearing khakis and a boyish smile, he’s not typecast for a CEO and you won’t find him in a corner office. His desk is one of thirteen in a room where engineers tap code, black blinds cursing the sun’s glare. The Providence-based Swipely, a tech-based social shopping service, is his company, but being isolated or too boss-man is not Davis’s way. With his dressed-down style, sandy hair and apple-pie good looks, he’s more collegiate than corporate. Staff missives begin, “To the merry band,” and he endorses their ideas with “Sweet!” He’s often found pacing the hall in his Chuck Taylors or crouched on the fire escape, speaking staccato into his iPhone.

Davis talks at the pace his mind downloads, which is gigabytes faster than most mortals. The garage ambience of a startup feels like home: before hatching Swipely, Davis co-founded Tellme, a software and network company that is the speech recognition platform for the automated assistance you hear when dialing companies from American Airlines to Verizon and 411. (“We revolutionized those annoying touchtone systems,” he says.) He logged zombie hours, crashing in a bunk bed he built above his desk at Tellme’s headquarters, a 3,000-square-foot former auto body shop in Palo Alto, California. He was twenty-nine when Microsoft acquired the company in 2007 for what is whispered to be $900 million, give or take a million (a Forbes article during Tellme’s infancy said the tightlipped organization was known as “Don’t ask, Don’t Tellme”). After he cashed the check, Davis splurged on a used Jeep. The climax was telling his employees, the majority of whom were shareholders, that they now had global opportunities with Microsoft.

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