DeepMind Co-Founder Leaves Google for an AI VC Role

Mustafa Suleyman, Google’s VP of Product Management and Policy for Artificial Intelligence, has left the tech giant for a new role at venture capital firm Greylock Partners.

At Greylock, Suleyman will serve as a Venture Partner and leverage his AI expertise to advise early-stage companies and invest in promising AI space startups.

Suleyman departs Google seven years after the search titan acquired his artificial intelligence research lab, DeepMind, for $650 million. While at the Silicon Valley giant he helped develop and deploy AI systems to more accurately detect breast cancer, diagnose 50 different eye diseases in OCT scans and optimize energy consumption at Google data centers.

However, Suleyman also leaves behind a rocky tenure at Google that included complaints that he bullied his subordinates. The complaints led the company to eventually remove some of his management responsibilities.

“I was very demanding, and pretty relentless,” Suleyman admitted in a Q&A that was published alongside Greylock’s announcement. “I think that at times that created an environment where I basically had pretty unreasonable expectations of what people were to be delivering and when, and ended up being pretty hard charging, and that created a very rough environment for some people. I remain very sorry about the impact that that caused people and the hurt that people felt there.”

Suleyman further addressed his past saying “I really screwed up” and that he has been working with a coach for the last few years to improve himself.

Suleyman’s fresh start at Greylock will likely be a massive boost to the venture capital firm’s AI portfolio and could draw in new investment opportunities. However, there remains a chance that his reputation could backfire for the firm and make it harder to land deals with founders in the booming AI startup scene, which amassed more than $17.9 billion in funding across 841 deals in the third quarter of 2021.