6 days ago
What Happens to AI Startups When Their Founders Jump Ship for Big Tech
Dominic Perella was prepared to be yelled at when he addressed about 100 employees gathered at the posh Silverado Resort in Napa, California, for a staff retreat last August. Days earlier, Perella had become interim chief executive officer when the company announced that Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, the renowned artificial intelligence researchers who founded the startup three years earlier, had exited for Google as part of a $2.7 billion licensing deal with the search giant.
During a no-holds-barred Q&A, Perella's employees—who'd previously known him only as general counsel—grilled the new boss about Character's future. 'What are we going to keep doing? What are we going to stop doing? How are we going to shift our resources?' Perella recalls them asking. 'Having your founder leave is a big change,' he says. Still, he insists the company is doing well by the standards of startups that have gone through a novel form of transaction known as a reverse acquihire. 'We were left much better positioned than some of the other folks.'
