 Hi, Lila. Hello. Nice to see you here at Slush, your first Slush, right? It is, and my first time to Finland. Is that right? Yes. Double whammy. Country 102. First trip since the pandemic has started. Oh, wow. Well, we're delighted to have you here. And thank you for agreeing to have this conversation. I'd love to sort of like dig in as a first question. Obviously you've been a deep mind since 2018. That's correct. The fascinating career in the valley encompassed a really broad array of different organisations, different experiences, different kind of roles. So I think it would be really interesting for the audience here today just to sort of like begin the conversation with, if you can just talk a little bit about your career history and your experience up to now. Great. Thank you. Hello, everyone. I started my career in tech about 30 years ago, and I could have never predicted the journey that I've had. So I started off as an engineer. I was an electrical engineer on a product called the Pentium processor, which was very revolutionary at the time in personal computing. And I ended up spending 18 years at Intel. And during that time, I worked in the United States, and I spent six years in Asia. I had a variety of roles that spanned technology and product, and then moved into marketing and management. My last few jobs were quite interesting because I became chief of staff to the CEO and chairman, and then went to run our education product group. And when you look back at my career at Intel, it was really starting to show the intersection of technology and social impact. And also a phrase I learned, which was called entrepreneur, like how do you be an entrepreneur in a large organisation? And so when an opportunity came to go to venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Buyers, I took the chance and went and did this several years in Silicon Valley venture capital firm, where one of the investments I helped make was a company called Coursera, which I went into as the first business executive when the company was about 40 people, no revenue, and the company just went public earlier this year, which is quite exciting. But I kind of helped to stand it up, get it on a path towards revenue and profitability, and then decided I was going to take a year off to decide what was next in my life when a company called DeepMind came calling, and I had to make the tough decision whether I wanted to move the family to London to be to take this opportunity, which I did, and it's been three amazing years. In the process of all that, I also have a ed tech non-profit and joined a public company board. So I've had quite a variety of experience, which in some ways, like I said, was not predictable 30 years ago, and yet at the same time, it's prepared me extraordinarily well for the role that I have now at DeepMind. So a really kind of diverse sort of series of experiences in senior leadership roles. Can you maybe just pick out a couple of experiences that you can share with the founders here that really sort of like shape your leadership style, so like maybe instances, things that have occurred and have really kind of educated you and made you think about how best to lead? Yeah. You know, the first one maybe that I'll answer is when I didn't even know I was a leader, so I was in university and I was working on one of my engineering projects with some of the smartest folks in my year group, and at the very end, we were each individually asked who led the group. And to my shock, everyone said me, and it was kind of a journey in self-awareness of being a leader and what a leader meant, and that I actually could be a leader of people that I felt were much more technically competent at that time than I was. And it reminded me, I use that as an example because later in my career, a very famous Silicon Valley coach named Bill Campbell had a saying which was, you're a manager by title, but your people make you a leader. And so that was the lesson that I had very early in my career. But then there were two other quotes, if I may, from mentors along the way that I think really kind of punctuated what it meant to be a leader. The first was I was Chief of Staff to the CEO and Chairman at Intel, and we were pioneering a lot of new areas, which I would think many of the entrepreneurs here are doing the same. And when you're doing profound work like that, you tend to take a lot of doubters and people who say, oh, you can't do it this way. And but when you're leading teams, you have to be the one to be that human shield and push things through. So he sat me down and he said, Lila, listen, pioneers end up with more arrows in their back because you're forging a new way. He said, just stop occasionally. Let me take those arrows out so you can run further faster. Right, right. And to me, that really showed what a leader was. And the last thing I'll just add was I think another saying that I heard along the way that I really believe in is leadership roles are about finding good people with good ideas and creating the environment for them to succeed. And this is perhaps one of my most important leadership lessons in defining moments in my career. So when I was at Intel in that Chief of Staff role, there was a moment when the company was not executing and there was a lot of infighting and pointing fingers at the time and the CEO said, this is ridiculous. We have really important work to do. I'm going to write a note to the company and let's just expect that it will be leaked. And he said, I'm going to take responsibility and then we can just get on with the work. And that's exactly what happened. So I went to him and I said, hey, all this negative press, isn't it? How are you not taking this personally? And he said, it's my responsibility as a leader to be accountable and to get people focused on where they can add the most value. Now, if you fast forward much later in my career, I faced the same issue where someone in my organization was made a very, they had good intent and they changed a policy on the organization without anybody knowing or communicating. But it came from a good place of good intent. And I think these days there's a lot of, can be a lot of anxiety around these types of topics when things happen to employees unexpectedly. So within hours I stood up in front of the entire company. I had to take responsibility so that everyone else could move forward. And so this person, this other leader in the company could get on and not be marred, not be impacted negatively by trying to take a risk but rather can learn from it and move forward. And that's exactly what happened. So I think it's at the time I felt like the most hated person in the organization. But it was really important for me as a leader to role model the accountability and responsibility that I wanted to see as well as to provide the air cover for that risk taking which I think is the only way that organizations can succeed is not being complacent but by taking calculated risks. So I was watching the session earlier on with Sonali and Sejata and they were talking about the COO role specifically. And it's clear that there's different kinds of ways of interpreting that role and executing that role. How do you think about it? Like what's your style as a COO? Yeah, it's a great question because I do think COO roles are very different depending on the CEO and the founder and where the organization is at this time. When I've done this role, COO role a couple of times now and one of the things I've learned is how important it is to really click with the founder. So I spent 50 hours interviewing at DeepMind with Demis and I went into it saying I don't want to move to London in the winter time with my family. So I'm not sure I'm ready for this role. So let me really test him. And through that I found very clear values alignment. And I think it's very when you go into a new role you always think about what could be possible and all the great things. But I actually like to challenge in the worst of times will this be someone that I can stand behind or in front of and really be a partner with. So I would say that my style of COO is very much of being kind of a servant leader to the organization, to the mission and to the founder. Now that means sometimes I have to step up and take responsibility. And it means sometimes I have to be the partner and think about how do I take the vision of the CEO, make it happen in a way that's aligned with the values and to bring the organization along in a way where they feel empowered. You talk about values. I'm interested to know how COO you kind of codify that. How do you put that into practice in the real world, in the nitty gritty of a complex organization? Yeah, values are to me one of those things that it's not just a checklist of like okay because when I've been in two other organizations where I had to help us codify the values and it was a lengthy process to make sure that they're very much part of the DNA of the organization and not something that's aspirational and inauthentic. Because I think to codify values they need to be really part of how you want to run the organization. So the question about operationalizing them, maybe I can give you an example. At DeepMind, the week that I started the company had just codified its values which are pioneering, mission-driven, collaboration, responsible and kind. Which by the way, I was like surprised to see kind on a tech company but I think it really did reflect in the organization. Now when I got stopped and people questioned me about where, how can you have responsible and pioneering? Like don't those clash, isn't that contradictory? So we had to really figure out quickly how we were going to operationalize those two values to make it stick. So I think part of it as a leader is creating, building this into the fabric of the day-to-day operations. So for example, when you're hiring, how are you hiring with questions around the values? How are you onboarding? Are you as a leader giving the space for these types of conversations to happen? So for example, we started a meeting, a working group, about how we were going to pioneer responsibly with our very complicated advanced AI research. You can't predict the downstream impact but we got everyone around a table and we had a meeting that I refused to give it a name because I didn't want people to feel pressure but rather like let's talk about our responsibility here. Do we have the right people in the room? How do we bring the outside voices in so that we're not anchored on our insider bias? So me spending my time and focus and giving the air cover to the organization was really important early on and so was Demis, the CEO and founder, doing the same. But then we did other things. So we decided to focus some of our research in this space. So around decolonial AI, around queer fairness, we started up a socio-technical research community inside the organization with outside speakers. We took over three quarters of the company through ethics training, like within a very short amount of time. And all of this was really about giving, not just saying it but giving people in the organization the responsibility and the air cover to do this and show that it was a critical part of the way that we are going to operate the company and that they will be rewarded and supported for doing that. And you mentioned one of the roles of the COO or the principal role of the COO was to support the founder. Founders set the tone of the organization. How do you both support Demis or any founder? While also kind of bringing in outside voices, bringing in kind of like external influences it were that might actually sort of have a positive impact on the org. Yeah, I think this is why some of the hiring to me is like one of the most important things that any leader can do. And once you do that first hiring and make sure that there's value alignment, so one of the mistakes I've often seen in hiring senior people, especially from a founder perspective from when I was in venture capital, is people wanted just somebody who had that experience and they didn't really necessarily interview for in tough times will this be a good fit and are they values aligned. When you come on board, I think it's really important that the founder, the CEO spends the time to not just make decisions, but to help people understand why they got to that decision. And so Demis and I spent a lot of time upfront where he would give me the context or he would say something and I would be like, okay, tell me why do you think that? How did you get to this answer? So I almost feel like my first year was very much of having an ethnographer hat on and sitting back and observing and learning and respecting everything that had been built. It's pretty amazing what founders can do with just their passion and energy and vision. And I think in a COO role, you really are trying to build upon that and so it's not trying to change anything. It's rather trying to understand where do we need to go? Fantastic what's been built, where do we wanna go? And how can we get there in a way that feels authentic while building capabilities for where we want to go? And so I think as a COO, showing respect for the founder and showing that values alignment, showing respect for the organization and appreciation is really important. And one of the, I think the concerns is people come in and they feel like they need to do something right away. So timing gets to be very important. And when you have to make decisions quickly, when I had to do that, at least saying here's why I'm doing this, not just that I'm coming in and trying to change everything. So I'm interested to sort of like, just maybe get your sense of what makes great founders. You know, a lot of good founders out there, but obviously you've worked in venture capital, you've obviously had senior leadership roles in very significant companies. When you think about the founders you've interacted with, what separates those really great founders from the ones who are good? There's an element of self-awareness, I think with great founders, where they understand themselves and are trying to just be the best of themselves rather than trying to be someone they're not. I think sometimes whether it's a founder or any leader, any person, you say, okay, I'm now in this position, I now have people working for me, I've got to be this other person that they expect. And I think that's really where you end up having some clashes. Instead, if you can understand who you are and just own it and build off of your strengths. So surround yourself with people. I think great founders surround themselves with people who can compliment them and have different skills, but maybe this is where the different skills but shared values I think are very important. And so having that diversity of thought where they can get to the mission in a better, more responsible way. I think founders who spend time investing in the organization, now there's a lot of things that only a founder can do an early stage startup, but you have to be external, you have to be internal, and yet you can't just hand things over and completely let go of your responsibility. So figuring out how do you scale yourself and how do you be clear about what you really care about and want to be involved in, because that will set the entire organization up for success from an early stage. What I found often happens is with founders is you get an entire company considered around a table and you're making decisions really fast and everyone has that same shared context. But then all of a sudden you can't fit a company in a meeting room, let alone one floor, let alone one building. And so what great founders have done is they've really built the right size of the process, integrated the values, enabled the teams, are clear about where they want to be involved and don't try to have their arms on everything, but try to have their focus on the things where they can really drive things forward. Right, and when you get to that point where the org's grown, you're no longer able to fit in the meeting room, maybe you've moved out of one floor of the building, you've grown into a larger organization. How as COO do you go about thinking how often people are competing for resources, they're competing for your time, for Demis's time, how do you bring people together and facilitate a really kind of constructive dialogue so that the company can move forward? How do you kind of get that consensus? Yeah, it's different in every organization. I think one underlying similarity is to really introduce a concept of that we're a learning organization, and we have the benefit at DeepMind, at Coursera with education and learning, so we were always learning, and at DeepMind we're training our artificial intelligence to learn, so we should be an organization that learns and evolves as well. So I think if you can do that from the beginning and really build that in, so this week we're trying this, and next year this is what's changed in the global context, this is where we're at, so we're going to have to make some adaptations to how we organize. Now I think what happens is some people are used to, you get people used to certain levels of information, so how you scale that is really, I think it depends a lot on the culture. What we've found is trying to enable employee groups to form and communities to form around topics that they care about, like security, et cetera, and then have an executive sponsor so that even, I have quite a large organization that covers everything from engineering to program management to our governance and external relationships, so I can't be in everything even though I care about it, but finding ways where there's information flow and getting them to communicate with each other because then what comes to me is more coordinated. So you've been in Europe three years now? Yeah, three and a half. Okay, so this is one of the leading European tech events. So you've kind of got a really interesting sort of like window into obviously the valley work there many years, but also into the Europe tech scene. I know you've not been able to travel much, but I'd love to get your impressions of what can Europe learn from the valley, but also maybe what can the valley learn from Europe? There's a lot of very kind of like interesting businesses coming out of Europe, meet deep mind being one of them. Like what can we maybe teach the Bay Area? It's been an interesting learning journey for me in that respect. Having spent six years in Asia and the rest of my career in the Silicon Valley, when I moved to London and started experiencing deep mind and the tech scene there in general, I started reflecting what would have happened if deep mind had picked up and moved to the Bay Area. And one of the things that really struck me was how I think European companies tend to bring humanity into the work every day. I think here in this environment, everyone is surrounded by arts and culture in a very different way than Silicon Valley. I used to commute to my, the multiple roles I had in Silicon Valley and you're passing billboards of tech companies and if you come from an engineering background like me, you think it's the coolest thing ever, but then after a while you just realize you're kind of caught up in that little bubble. Whereas I feel like my commute now, I'm passing an art school, I'm walking by, I'm taking the two past stations where the theater district is. My colleagues come from so many different nationalities and speak so many languages and you just bring some of that world and that global perspective into your work, which means you feel a lot more responsibility for what you're developing. And then the second thing I was at a dinner last night with some of the attendees here and I was really struck by the successful entrepreneurs and how they're pulling up the current community and really investing and giving back and enabling the earlier, the younger generation to build from their experience, whether it's investments or events like this. And I think there's something that's quite exciting about that because it's not about one sector of investment, like proving out an investment thesis and it's not about one geography. I'm only investing in this city, but rather taking a perspective of like, who are great founders? What do they need? Where are they? What are they working? What are the tough problems for the world that they're working on? So that social impact I think shows up here too. So it's interesting you talk about social impact and you talk about kind of like the humanity of Europe because when we first talked, I think it was fairly soon after you'd taken on the role, you describe your decision to join DeepMind as a moral calling, which I thought was a really interesting sort of like phrase to use. Can you just dig into that a little bit? Yeah, so when I was interviewing with DeepMind, I thought if I wanted to do artificial intelligence, I can stay in Silicon Valley, all my friends, all these investments that are being made in new startups. And the more I learned about DeepMind, I was really intrigued. So the mission is solve intelligence to advance science and benefit humanity. And I thought, okay, this is pretty audacious. And so the conversations I had with Demos, the founder CEO and Shane, the chief scientist and co-founder were pretty awe-inspiring of what can an artificial general intelligence do with humanity and with humans involved and how can we use this technology as a tool. And I asked a simple question of like, okay, well, how do you know if it's doing the right thing? Can't you just program in the ethics? And then we got into a very deep conversation about responsibility and accountability, which they had been thinking about since even before DeepMind was founded. And I went home that evening and I thought, I have twin daughters. And I'm like, can they know that mommy worked on this technology and how will I feel about that later? And I thought, well, I'm not an AI expert. I don't know ML. And yet I think my very diverse background and experience that I can bring some of that into work. And I'm far enough along in my career, I'm not proving anything. I'm here to try to help organizations achieve their mission. And so I actually sat down with my husband and we had the conversation. And I said, I think my weird career, this very circuitous route has trained me to take on this role. And I feel like it is a moral calling if I can do something for the world that's bigger than me. It's helping these incredible entrepreneurs achieve their mission and pioneer responsibly. So we're up against time, but I'm really fascinated. Just as a final question, we've got many founders in the room. You've had this really sort of like remarkable career. You've obviously sort of like experienced many kind of different founders. What kind of like piece of advice would you give founders who are maybe starting their journey? Maybe they're a very early stage and they're trying to cobble things together. Like what advice would you give them in order for them to sort of like really stay through the journey and enjoy it frankly. Enjoy the experience of growing an amazing team and a great growing and amazing business. Oh, I'm sure you have a lot of good advice for them too. I'm interested in getting your answer sometime on that, Greg. I think from my experience in venture capital and having worked with founders over decades, I would say be really honest with yourself of where you can add value and what gives you energy and excitement. And then be very thoughtful about who you're bringing around you, even if it's a co-founder, even if it's senior hires with experience or someone earlier in their career who doesn't have experience, but you wanna take a bet on. They are joining because of you and because of what your vision for what you're building. And it's very important that you create the time and the space for them to understand how expectations that you may have around what you want to build and how you want to build it and why the things are important. And I think sometimes founders can be so focused, which is amazing, that's absolutely a strength, but you have to be careful that it's not to the detriment of your health and of creating an organization that is completely dependent on you because in that way, I've seen founders get in the way of achieving their mission. So the final piece of advice I would have is look outside the organization and think about who your personal board of advisors are and I'm not talking about your investors and your board. I'm talking about the people that will help you on your journey as a leader and who will give you the tough advice and feedback or be a sounding board when you need it the most. And sometimes the people who are closest to you are trying to protect you and instead you need someone who can really be honest, you can have that candid feedback with and investing in that relationship early is important because if you wait until you have problems, then it's almost too late. And then finally, I would just say I've been blown away by entrepreneurs throughout my career. I'm a COO because I like working with people who have that type of vision where I know I can help operationalize it and make it happen. But I think the talent that you all have, it's something that I don't know that people are necessarily born with. So I think it is really special and just remember that, that you are in a very privileged position and really looking forward to seeing what everyone here builds. That's a great note to finish on. Lila, thank you so much for braving London winters and for coming here to Europe. Pleasure to be here. Yeah, thank you for sharing your thoughts on leadership. It was a great pleasure. Thank you for joining us here at Slush. Thank you.