The UK offers DeepMind talent, while Europe lacks growth capital

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 25:23

   because you can just distill uh catalyze seawater i'm not going to ask you to solve space don't worry then my question was on being in the uk yeah you're in london i'm in london i'm very proud to be in the UK. You have been, I'm sure, pushed to prod it at every turn to move to the US. Why have you stayed? Well, I should ask you that question too. But I think I saw in London when we started DeepMind as a place, and the UK in general, and Europe to some degree, there's incredible talent here. We've always had, I don't know what it is, three or four of the top 10 universities in the world with Cambridge and Oxford, Imperial, or UCL, these kind of universities.

2. 26:11

   So we're producing the envy of the world, really, these amazing graduates and PhD students. We have incredible scientists here. We've got rich heritage of that all the way from, you know, Turing and Hawking and Darwin, Newton. So, you know, we have this incredible history of scientific breakthroughs and having great thinkers. So I felt we had all the ingredients and the talent and great engineers here, but it just hadn't been galvanized into an ambitious startup idea deep tech startup idea and but i felt it was possible and i felt that there was actually less competition here for that sort of talent and we could even draw in the best talent from the top european universities and that's what it was like in the early days of deep mind so i think it was a huge structural advantage for us and then the

3. 26:57

   final thing is maybe being a bit away from the valley there is some disadvantage in that you're not plugged into the network and the gossip and the the latest trends and vibes and all these things. We're a little bit out of it here. But I think it's very conducive to thinking deeply about things, being more original about how you think. And I think that's great for things like deep tech, where, you know, you don't want to be distracted by the latest fad. You know, it's going to be a 20 year mission, which is what we knew at the beginning of DeepMind. So I think being a little bit away from that maelstrom is quite good. I mean, Palmer Lucky and Angel often talks about being 400 miles away from the valley it's core to his kind of innovative thinking yes so a few thousand miles away but yeah terrible

4. 27:43

   question will europe have a trillion dollar company you know you see the americans always bash us for our lack of large companies i ping daniel eric and be like come on dude yes exactly but we don't have a trillion dollar company not yet i mean daniel might well get there with one of his companies you know spotify helsing i think those are two good options i think there's no reason why we can't have that i'm i'm gonna try and do that with isomorphic which is headquartered here, and I think has the potential to be that. That's one of the disadvantages of Europe is obviously we're a combination of smaller markets. So that's one thing we have to kind of overcome.

5. 28:15

   Maybe this EU Inc. thing could be a good innovation. I'm pulling out the magic wand again. But this time applied to European technology. What would you do to implement a growth mindset, a ability to build that trillion dollar company that we don't have to say? I think in the UK, I mean, this may apply to other European countries too. I think unlocking what pension funds can invest in or just for the kind of growth stage. I think we're brilliant at doing the startup idea and getting it to a certain level like we did with DeepMind.

6. 28:44

   But then if you really want to cross that sort of chasm into the trillion dollar global player, then where are the billion dollar rounds going to come from where you can really take on the existing incumbents? And I think that certainly was missing 10 years ago when I was doing fundraising for DeepMind. And I think it's still kind of missing today. Just that kind of level of ambition and the amount the capital markets can support. I read about some of your early rounds raising in the Seb Maliby book. Yes, it was quite hard work. Pitching families, kids.