Demis Hassabis
speaker
3,420 appearances
27 recordings
18 series
first heard Feb 2024
last heard 7 Jul
Demis Hassabis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 16.
Appearances
There was a painfully large gap between the grand science of the DeepMind business plan and an invitation to chat with a middle schooler.
That is just flat out bizarre.
So eventually, Demis raises money from Peter Thiel.
There's some interesting background here that I think you'd be interested in.
As a general matter, Peter Thiel doubted that going on boards was a good use of his partner's time.
Startups should be left to sink or swim.
The art of venture capital, he liked to say, was to back contrarian ideas, not coach company founders.
Thiel had taken the unusual position that collective decision making should be avoided.
The way he saw things, if investments were chosen based on voting, the Founders Fund portfolio would consist of middle-of-the-road startups to which nobody objected.
Given that all the profits in venture come from a few improbable moonshots, this sort of consensus portfolio would deliver mediocre performance.
Founders Fund wired $2.3 million.
This gives you an idea of just how hard it was to raise money for his idea, for Demis' idea.
Founders Fund wired $2.3 million to DeepMind, and they assumed ownership of a bit less than half the company.
There was no other capital available.
This is December 2010.
Peter Thiel reappears over and over again in the story.
He actually has one of my all-time favorite quotes.
It's in his book, Zero to One.
It says, And they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.
That is exactly what my partner, Apple Oven, has done with their new advertising platform, Axon.
Showing 881–900 of 3,420 · page 45 of 171
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