I sold my AI research company while I was qualifying as a lawyer in the U.K. I built Safe Sign Technologies with researchers from Cambridge, DeepMind, Harvard and MIT who believed in the mission enough to trust a 21-year-old law student to lead the ship. Getting there was painful, though. Our published papers put the model among the best in the world at legal reasoning, and we trained it for a fraction of what the large labs were spending. We had been a quieter version of 'the DeepSeek story,' developing very capable models using novel algorithms with huge capital efficiency. None of that counted for much in the rooms I walked into. Investors always asked about the product and the traction. U.K. investors passed, and I ended up raising most of our funding in the United States. I back founders now, and the things I weigh have stayed consistent. As a founder, I was told again and again that science meant little until it was bolted onto a product. That test was wrong then and I believe...
learn more
