Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast

Meet Aaron Rosenberg: The man DeepMind researchers call before they quit

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0:00 | 48:22

With former DeepMind researchers raising record sums for their own startups, few investors are better placed than Aaron Rosenberg. Once Demis Hassabis’s deputy and later head of strategy and operations at Google DeepMind, he now leads Canadian firm Radical Ventures’ UK presence and runs a 70+-member London alumni group on WhatsApp for the lab’s former staff.

On this episode of the Sifted Podcast, Aaron tells host John Thornhill why he’s often among the first people DeepMind researchers call when they’re weighing whether to leave — and why his advice is sometimes to stay. He explains why London’s new crop of neolabs is breaking away from what he calls the “assembly line” of frontier model development, what could stop them from becoming global champions and why Hassabis remains his model of what a great CEO looks like.

The pair also discuss Radical’s new $1bn-plus growth fund, the firm’s investments in Inherent and Latent Labs and what the UK’s planned non-compete reforms could mean for founders leaving big labs.

Read Sifted's profile of Inherent: https://sifted.eu/articles/inside-londons-weirdest-neolab


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