Cade has written what we think is one of the seminal books in AI called The Genius Makers, which is the story of the emergence of AI, from the 1950s to today. In the process of writing this book, he had conversations with some of the brightest and most capable people in the world of AI. He's joining us to share some of the narrative and what he’s learned through the process of writing.

Adam Wenchel is the CEO at Arthur. He started his career at Darpa and worked at a number of tech companies. His last startup was acquired by Capital One where he built and led the AI team. This put him on a path to founding Arthur, which is a company that is a platform for monitoring AI performance. 

Forbes Technology writer Jonathan Vanian leads Mehran & Adam through a fascinating discussion about AI & Ethics.

Hear about the latest advances in robotics from those working in the forefront of the field.

Daniela Rus is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Her research spans across all of robotics, everything from soft surface robotics, to human robot interactions, to autonomous driving. 

Pieter Abeel is the Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and Co-director of the Berkeley AI Research Lab at the University of California. Pieter is also the co-founder of Covariant.ai, which looks to bring some of the research that he's been doing with his group at Berkeley to real world applications in fulfillment centers and beyond. He's also the host of the Robot Brains podcast.

Daniela & Pieter are interviewed by Index’s Bryan Offutt.

“In academia, robotics is about emphasizing novelty. It’s about going places we’ve never been before….. But for companies that bring robotics into the real world, the real challenge is about achieving really high reliability.” - Pieter Abeel

“I’m excited to see 2022 become the year where NLP goes from being this incredibly promising glimpse of the future to a technology which we depend on for lots of things.” - Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI

Learn about current advances and limitations of natural language processing from those working at the edge of the field today. Bryan Walsh, The editor of Future Perfect at Vox.com interviews Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which brought the world the GPT-3 Model and Kevin Scott, the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft. 

1:30 - What are Sam & Kevin expecting in NLP from 2022?

4:00 - In which areas will AI tooling become an integral part of workflows? How are people using it today for search, copy generation, automated A/B testing, classification and more.

7:00 - Why coding was a great place to start with NLP and which areas it will go to next including graphic design & historical research.

9:30 - How do we go beyond text towards multi-modal models?

12:00 - How much specialisation is needed?

16:00 - Democratising AI technology and why OpenAI partnered with Microsoft.

18:50 - Preventing technology from being misused.

23:00 - What will change as we move closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)?

26:00 - How do we get stakeholders across the board to participate in the conversation?

29:00 - What will it be like to interact with these models in a decade's time?

“In 2032 It will feel not that you are talking to your smartest friend- but rather that you are talking to thousands of smart friends that are domain experts, working at superhuman speed.” - Sam  Altman

“People want some version of the Star Trek computer.” - Sam Altman

Farfetch is the world’s biggest online marketplace for independent fashion boutiques. Jose founded Farfetch in Porto and London in 2007 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2018.

Danny & Jose discuss Farfetch and its global journey, what Formula 1 has in common with entrepreneurship, entering the US via a partnership and much more.

Thank you for listening to DestinationUSA from Index Ventures. This is the last episode in our series that explored how Europe's leading entrepreneurs and operators expanded their businesses to the US. If you missed any of the episodes you can go back and listen to the stories of Spotify, Adyen, Nexthink, Collibra, Codat, ComplyAdvantage, Peanut, Wise & more.

For more about how to expand your tech startup to the US, you can check out our handbook here.

Peter founded Trustpilot in Denmark in 2007 with a vision to create an independent currency of trust. Trustpilot hosts over 120 million consumer reviews and has 700 employees (23% of whom are in the US). 

Over the last thirteen years, Peter has led Trustpilot from a small Danish startup to an international, multi million-dollar company which just listed on the London Stock Exchange in March 2021.

 Peter shares how Trustpilot got started in Denmark and his approach of expanding across Europe before taking on the US. The conversation covers the dynamics of raising money, distributed leadership, cultural differences between the US and Denmark and much more.

Pedro founded Nexthink in 2004 in Lausanne (Switzerland) which is still the main engineering and product hub. He relocated to Boston in March 2020. Here's a case study of Nexthink's US expansion. 

Pete founded Codat in  2017 in London to connect the internal systems of small businesses to banks, fintechs and other financial institutions. He relocated to New York in 2020 to lead the company's US expansion.

Michelle is the founder of Peanut, which is the first social network for women to build strong ties from the moment they consider motherhood - enabling women at similar life stages to connect.

Christian is the founder of Pitch, a software technology company started in January 2018 in Berlin, which is building a new platform for presentations and content collaboration for individuals and teams.

Joe is the former GM US of Wise and was also the Global Head of Marketing and Comms. Wise was launched in 2011 with the vision of making international money transfers cheap, fair, and simple.

Today we have two guests with two different perspectives; one a founder of a European startup who relocated to Silicon Valley, the other, a corporate executive who joined a European startup post Series B.

Nicolas Dessaigne is co-founder and former CEO of Algolia, a Y-Combinator backed, AI search and discovery platform founded in Paris.

Elizabeth Bramlage is an American executive who led US marketing for Swedish startup Klarna and is now Chief Marketing Officer of ComplyAdvantage, a British born anti financial crime AI platform.

Journalist Soheb Panja leads us through the conversation where Nicolas and Elizabeth discuss hiring wrong, builders vs scalers, why a US A-player would join a European startup, Y Combinator, evaluating candidates, cultural differences, giving feedback and much more.

To learn more about how European companies approach US expansion, you can read our guide here.

Adyen is a payments company that allows merchants to accept e-commerce, mobile, and point-of-sale payments. Pieter founded Adyen in 2006 and it listed on Euronext in 2018.

Jan and Pieter talk about how being a second time founder nuanced Pieter’s approach, the journey from Boston to San Francisco to New York, Adyen's approach to culture and how Pieter thinks about building a company for the long term.

Collibra builds data intelligence cloud products and was founded in Brussels in 2008 by Felix and his co-founders. It has now become one of Europe's most successful software companies with over 700 employees globally.  Half the workforce, and almost all the leadership is now in the US. Engineering, however, remains almost entirely in Europe

Dominic & Felix cover the end-to-end story of how Collibra succeeded in the US, talking about risk taking, finding and following your first customers and the importance of leading with a mixture of humility and high conviction.

To read more, check out Collibra's case study in our Expanding to the US handbook.

Today, Index's Danny Rimer speaks with Daniel Ek, the CEO and founder of Spotify. Spotify is the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service with more than 350 million users and 155 million subscribers.

Danny and Daniel talk about their 16-year history, the contrasting cultures of the US and Sweden, Spotify's delayed entry to the US, and Daniel's mindset and personal growth journey, alongside Spotify's US expansion. They also talk about Daniel's investments with Prima Materia and his vision for Europe.

If you want to read more about Spotify's US expansion, check out the case study in our Expanding to the US handbook. 

In the meanwhile, to learn more about US expansion, check out our guide. It's the most extensive research conducted on this topic and includes analysis of 353 VC-backed startups that have expanded into the US over the last 10 years.