A few months ago, Nathalie Criou joined Vapi as VP of Product. Her path here runs through nearly every seat in a technology company: software engineer, marketer, seller, product manager at Google, founder, and product and general management leader at VMware, Amazon, Twilio, and Docker. She's built at every scale, from a startup she founded and sold to leading teams and functions at some of the largest tech companies in the world.
She came to Vapi because she believes voice is the channel that many businesses gave up on, and that with AI, there is an opportunity to transform the way people interact with it. A few months in, we sat down with her to talk about her career, why she picked Vapi, her product philosophy, and what keeps her motivated.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your career path leading up to Vapi.
I started as a software engineer working in signal processing. I liked the work, but I realized I was too far from customers. I wanted to get closer to people actually using what I built. I wanted to understand their problems and build platforms to drive solutions. So I moved through technical marketing, then product marketing, then spent a year in technical sales. None of it was quite the right fit, so I went to business school to figure it out.
That's where I found product management. After my MBA, I joined Google, where I was part of the team integrating DoubleClick after the acquisition. I also worked at AdMob, another startup Google later acquired. Then I founded my own company, RidePal, and sold it roughly four years later. From there I kept going: Apteligent, which was acquired by VMware, then VMware itself, Amazon, Twilio, and Docker. Engineering, go-to-market, founding, general management, at companies of every size. That's the arc that led me here.
What made Vapi stand out when you were deciding on your next move?
Three reasons.
First, the opportunity in the industry is enormous. Your upside is proportional to the size of the market you're in, and the chance to have meaningful impact here is real.
Second, the channel itself matters to me. Voice is inclusive, low-friction, and highly effective. But businesses created such terrible experiences around it that humans abandoned it. Now the technology exists to fix that, and being part of that reversal is compelling.
Third, the founders. They have a rare combination of genuine empathy and sheer ambition. Deeply human and intensely driven at the same time. You don't find that pairing often.
What excites you most about joining a company at this stage? Where do you see voice AI heading?
Voice AI is one of the few AI applications with demonstrated, repeatable ROI, and it can only improve from here.
Here's the thing most people miss: current call volumes are artificially low. Companies minimize them to cut costs and reduce friction. Remove that constraint and the number of conversations should explode. Anyone who wants to talk to a company should simply be able to pick up the phone.
One of our customers, Kavak, is a case study in what that transformation looks like. They started by using voice AI to augment one existing use case and got immediate ROI. Then they followed the business logic and customer demand, and within six months the entire company had reorganized around voice as a primary channel. I expect that pattern to repeat at any company where voice can play a central role in how they serve customers. The companies that lean in early will find voice becoming a core channel, not a supplementary one.
How do you approach setting product priorities when different types of customers need different things from the platform?
Being a platform is an advantage here. Every improvement benefits all users, and there's a natural feedback loop built in. In a market this large, even missteps can turn into learnings. There's no wrong answer.
Vapi historically focused on developer experience, and that drove our early growth. But developers represent roughly 1% of the workforce. The addressable audience is much larger than what we've served so far.
What's changing is that AI is removing the friction that used to force non-technical teams to route through marketing, email, or other filters to reach their customers. Those teams can now engage customers directly and trust the platform to protect the customer experience. That means non-technical users increasingly need to interact with the platform, which requires a higher level of abstraction.
The interesting part is that less technical users vary in sophistication, but they have the same clarity about outcomes and success metrics as developers do. The product challenge is meeting them where they are without compromising what makes the platform powerful for technical users.
The AI space moves fast. How do you build a roadmap when the underlying technology keeps shifting?
Start with what won't change. AI will continue to grow; the train doesn't stop, and use cases will compound. What I call market physics stays constant no matter how fast AI moves. Companies still need to grow revenue or cut costs, and AI helps with both, sometimes simultaneously. As a PM, you stay anchored to customer problems: what's the single biggest growth opportunity, what's the single biggest cost to eliminate, and what's getting in the way of either.
The danger is treating AI as the end goal rather than the means. The goal of technology should be to solve a customer pain point. The discipline is to stay focused on the problem and let AI be the tool to help solve it, rather than the goal in itself.
Near term, the economics favor fine-tuning for specific, narrow applications. Current models are still expensive and inefficient. I expect more integration between AI systems, and likely a unified data plane for shared context across models.
What's one belief you hold about building products that most PMs would disagree with?
Some product leaders might actually agree, but for many it is counterintuitive: Product management is not about managing a product. It's about managing an opportunity.
Organizing teams around existing products or features is a mistake, because it shifts the incentive from the problem to the solution. A team anchored to a product is incentivized to maintain and defend it, not to question whether it's still the best answer.
Organize around problems instead, and teams stay relevant. They can discover bigger opportunities customers didn't know they had, and they can find better ways to solve existing problems without being constrained by what already ships. Ownership of what exists still matters, but it shouldn't be the organizing principle.
What do you do outside of work that keeps you grounded?
Anyone who knows me, or has talked to me for even a few minutes, will know the answer pretty quickly: sailing and cats. No hesitation on either.
