Raza Habib: evaluation

Transcript context

…totally. And then one local specific question before we go to the, the takeaway questions. You went through IC. Yeah, and you are very very familiar with the American tech scene, but also you built your company here in London What should and I'm very US focused most of our audience is very US centric. What should People know about the European tech scene. Yes, I think that London's one of the best places in the world, and Paris, for AI focused folks. With the Hugging Face, I don't know Hugging Face in Paris, where we're sitting right now. We're probably less than 200 meters from the offices of DeepMind. Facebook AI Research is here as well. UCL's AI center is here, which is where, you know, Geoff Hinton was and where a lot of great research is, where DeepMind spun out of, actually. So Shane Legg and Demis met at UCL. So there's an amazing, and there's many more, you know, I can't list everything that's, that's great. But there's many great AI institutions. What I would say is that I think that Europe is being amazing on research and continues to be like a fantastic place for researchers, but has been less good in my experience on productizing and trying to productize AI. And so the difference that I feel being here versus being in the U S I think a good example of this is just the number of, like, if I go to San Francisco, the density of people who are trying to build useful things with large language models or with AI and butting their head up against it and discovering what works and what doesn't work and trying great ideas or trying stupid ideas and just learning together, is much richer than what we have here. I think the pure like research labs. Very competitive, you know, Anthropics just opened an office here, OpenAI is opening an office here. When you're hiring for talent, you'll find as many or better people, you know, like equal quality people in both places. But less so once you move towards productization. And I suspect it's also to do with the investor ecosystem. So we're sitting in the offices of LocalGlobe. LocalGlobe and Index were our first investors, and they're both great. But the number of investors that you have of that quality in Europe is not the same as the U. S., and the type of people you interact with are very different. When I speak to VCs in the U. S., there's way more former founders, there's way more people who have done DevTools before. And there's way more support from the founders towards the ecosystem than there is in Europe. People are trying, but the culture is not quite the same. And, and that's why we're moving to SF, right? We want to be, every time I've been to SF, good things have happened to humans. Whether it's like bumping into you, or we get an introduction to an interesting investor or a customer, you know, or we just speak to someone who's been trying really hard to build something. And, you know, we share an office here in London with Bloop that does, you know, Bloop ai does code search with LLMs and we've tried our, you know, our very best to kind of aggregate a few other companies to us and we're doing AI tinkerers, you know, tomorrow. So there is some of it here, but you have to work so much harder. Resources, SIS, you can't move for hitting some AI. We had a Thursday recently with 10 AI meetups in one night. Yeah. It's almost too much. It is too much! I'll go there and say it, it is too much. You need some…

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