Taro Gold

Craig Taro Gold
Gold at the opening of Art Basel in Hong Kong, 2013
Born	Craig Taro Gold November 1969 (age 47) San Bernardino, California
Other names	KinTarō (金太郎?) (in Japan)
Occupation	Author, entrepreneur
Years active	1980–present
Notable work	Open Your Mind, Open Your Life: A Little Book of Eastern Wisdom
Home town	Del Mar, California
Website	tarogold.com

Craig Taro Gold (born November 1969), known as Taro Gold, is an American author and entrepreneur. He is the author of several New York Times best-selling books including Open Your Mind, Open Your Life and Living Wabi Sabi. He is the co-founder of eVoice and Teleo along with other business ventures.

Gold attended a Montessori education preparatory academy and Torrey Pines High School in his hometown of Del Mar, California, and also spent time as an AFS Intercultural Programs scholar in Brisbane, Australia. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Soka University of Japan, where he studied Economics, Psychology, and Philosophy, graduating Summa Cum Laude in 1994. Gold also earned the distinction of becoming the first American man to graduate from Soka University. Gold's postgraduate education included International Relations and Spanish at the University of Salamanca in Spain, and Computer Graphics and Graphic Design at UCLA.

Gold has been involved in many business ventures. His entrepreneurial career began in 2000 when he co-founded the telecommunications company eVoice, which provided the world's first large-scale, Internet-enabled voicemail system with products including voicemail-to-email, visual voicemail and enhanced caller ID innovations. These Voice over IP innovations were the foundation for future "apps" deployed by Google Voice and Apple. During this time, Gold helped innovate a voice recognition technology known as Vodex.eVoice was acquired by AOL in 2001 and became part of the AOL voice services group. The company was then purchased by j2 Global.

After AOL's acquisition of eVoice in 2001, Gold became the founding CEO of Call Forwarding Services (CFS), an internet startup that provided white label VoIP communications services to AT&T, MCI Inc. and Qwest. CFS was acquired by Qwest in 2002.