GV's Tom Hulme: 35% of the world's AI researchers are in Europe, and 80-90% of GV's deals are AI

Netflix has been increasing prices and when they're at $9.99 a month or something, it's very normal and then when you go up it's start everyone, oh you raise the price but you just raise it every couple months. Anyway, we're good.

Third time.

Third time's the charm. How you doing?

I'm very good. Can you hear me guys?

Fantastic. Introduce yourself.

Who are you? Tom Hume. I'm one of GV or Google Ventures's managing partners. I'm based in London. I'm going to hope I'm going to bring as much energy as Carl. I love it. I love it.

It's a tough fact to follow, but it's a good start.

AI, good or bad? What's your strategy? What are you investing in? What are you seeing?

As you can imagine, 80 or 90% of what we're doing is AI. In truth, it's hard to imagine a credible founder that isn't leading with it at the moment. And so, we're viewing everything. I mean, in your email that you sent out today about Samsung, about um some of the effects of the uh what's going on in the Middle East, we're even looking at that through the lens of AI and how it should affect our investing strategy.

Sure. And then in terms of the portfolio founders that you're talking to, uh how interesting is the sovereign AI efforts? How interesting is just finding amazing entrepreneurs that are going to run through walls all over the globe and they just happen to be there, so you're the first point of contact. you meet them early versus maybe going to an American entrepreneur that has some traction, you're going to help them uh you know, if you join the board, you're going to help them go global. What are you thinking?

Yeah, absolutely. So, one of the things we're really proud of is that we actually are sort of a global firm, primarily the US and Europe. And so, we offer founders soft landings in Europe if they're American companies and vice versa. So, that's something that works well, but in truth, we're finding we're meeting more and more technical founders and Europe has an edge on that. To give you an idea, I think 35% of the world's AI researchers or masters programs are actually in Europe.

We've got four of the top uh technical universities globally in Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, ETH, Zurich. And so there is this incredible sort of talent building up. So historically, I think Europe's bottleneck was probably human capital and financial capital. The financial capital is now global. Your guys shows global. Now the human capital is really growing and we're seeing a real multiplier effect in two ways. So the first is the very best founders are starting companies over and over again. So we have investments in for example Sneak's founder Guy Pjani uh who has now done Tessle. Most of our European founders are actually repeat founders. And the second thing is we have an equivalent of the sort of PayPal mafia happening. So we were early investors in go cardless. We've now seen uh other companies coming through as a result of that like Monzo and I think I just keep seeing that effect. Got it. Yeah. Does uh does Europe broadly give uh give England enough credit for Deep Mind because it got rolled into Google so quickly, but I feel like like the UK punches way above its weight in terms of AI research with DeepMind. And maybe that's under discussed.

Oh, I think it's under discussed. And I think it's easy. People will often post rrationalize it and say uh how great it would have been if it had stayed independent. But we've got to remember when Deep Mind was really going in 2012.

It was really hard for people to see. The 2017 Transformer paper had not been written for five, you know, years. It's early days. And so it's easy to look back and say it was obvious. It wasn't at the time. But I think the person that single-handedly has done as much for tech in the UK as anyone else is Demis the founder. He insisted on keeping a base here because he knew the technical talent was here. And now we're seeing that kind of multiplier effect. So there's great Neolabs being funded right now. You've got reinforcement learning companies like Recursive Super Intelligence

like Tim Rock Tasho is based here. Richard Sasha and team over on the west coast. Uh you've got Ineffable, Dave Silver's new company. You've got World Model Companies and these are all coming out of GDM. So you're getting this multiplier effect. Uh they deserve huge credit for that for every one. Sorry, after you.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When when when you look at a Neol, it feels like there's a thesis where it's just okay, you have a brilliant technical mind, they're going to go explore. Uh yeah, the price might be high, but you're underwriting it as uh you know, a venture style bet. There's a chance that something great comes. But do you have at least from conversations, do you have an idea of how the Neols might plug into the broader uh AI ecosystem either through partnerships with big labs or are are you talking to Neolabs that are saying we can leapfrog on certain vectors or maybe we can launch our own consumer product that's happened before? What how do you think about where the Neolabs fit in post the research phase? Yeah, one of the questions we've been asking ourselves is the current scurve of technology that we're on perhaps the third phase of large language models and diffusion models like the existing companies are doing very well and they're often chasing benchmarks you become what you measure and so they're really driving fantastically into that the question is what are the other scurves of technology that could be explored and the two that I think are really interesting are world model companies at the moment so Ammy Labs just got funded our portfolio company Odyssey is going in that direction from diffusion and then reinforcement learning. We think there's huge work can be be done. So if novel breakthroughs can be made on either of those, we think that they actually can be complementing to the existing companies and they could work in addition. So very rarely they may go full stack and create their own product. Uh often they will actually service their unique intelligence through API.

Yeah, that makes sense. uh predictions around the next breakout proumer product from Europe. We've seen the the lovables, the granas, anything that is like very on the radar in London, everybody's talking about, but hasn't necessarily broken containment and gone super global yet.

I mean, one that everyone's really excited about, but it's partly we just exited the business to uh Apple is people keep asking me what Q is. So Q is a uh Israel company second biggest acquisition it the the it was in stealth until the acquisition right

correct so I was on the board for the whole of that period we did the we led the seed and did the series A with our friends at Kleiner uh ALF and Spark and that company's going to do something very special a few years ago we had a thesis that actually voice is really interesting because you can communicate in voice about 150 words per minute. It's high input information because of intonation etc. versus typing which might be 90 words a minute. We invested in Neurolink which is like the very invasive version of high throughput and then we started exploring what are private ways to communicate by voice and Q is that company. So I'm asked about that a lot at the moment. The other one I'm excited about from a consumer perspective investment in nothing.

Any any ideas or guesses? It's it's probably not your information to share, but like time, you know, Apple is making, you know, huge push and effort right now. They need to show the world that they still got it on the on the software side. Is Q something that, you know, Apple, uh, you know, iPhone users will get to experience in 2027? Is it the longer term? Will they ever kind of like will do you think there'll be like a moment where they're like, "Wow, this is, you know, a huge

I Yeah, I think it's going to be a wow moment." And I think it'll be in 2028.

Okay.

And and you know our belief is actually that if you believe the software the models actually kind of open overshoot requirements then a lot of the value will actually acrue to the physical devices because it'll be the distribution point. So we we for example invested in nothing. They just sent me their new product which I'm going to unbox after this. But they incredible smartphones. We believe that actually the value accrrs to the distribution and so whoever owns those smartphones.

Yeah. Carl being in the Carl being in the position of you know they've proven they can make beautiful products but then also being able to be really flexible and quick around implementing AI all the way down to the hardware level is very cool position to be in. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a fun time. Well, thank you so much for taking

You brought the energy. You brought the energy.

My apologies for I also brought the technical issues. Apologies. Next time

it happens. Well, thank you so much.

No, it was great to meet you, Tom. Come back on.

Good to see you guys. Take care. Have a great day. Thanks.

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Let's play if we have time before the cubinator joins. We're we're working on some

we're working on it. I don't think we have time. I'll try to

Let's rotate that screen and I think we're almost ready. Uh the the the the one small news article here that we can talk about is that Meta has signed a 10-year lease for a fi 15,000 foot townhouse on 690 uh 6975th Avenue to open Metal Lab, New York, its first Manhattan flagship retail location. They painted it completely blue. Apparently, the store will focus on hands-on demos of Meta AI glasses and VR headsets. So, they're getting into the retail space. Well, um, let's figure out

still working on it. I can tell you about Wayshirt Capital. Tell me

they invested in SpaceX at apparently 200.

Okay, it's fake news.

Brutal.

That was quick.

Brutal. I was like, "This seems too good to be true." Pitchbook is u uh but we can tell you about Riven robo taxis.

Oh yes.

Uh Uber and Riven have announced deal. Uber is going to invest 1 point one and a quarter billion in Riven and deploy up to 50,000 R2

robo taxis. I'm so interested to see what Rivian can actually do on the robo taxi side. I I have friends that have owned Rivians have said that the uh autonomous driving is fantastic.

It just feels like this um

I I I will be very interested to see if more than you know a couple companies can really crack it quickly,