Clem Delangue: The Ultimate Guide to Investing in AI; Elon's Threat to Sue OpenAI | E1013

When you, like, an early stage founder struggling and you're like, "Oh, but that's gonna be good. I'm gonna struggle. It's gonna be really hard. But in one year, in two years when I'm gonna be bigger, it's gonna be easier," I'm sorry, but it, it won't be easier. Uh, the truth is that each stage has a lot of challenges. And so I think something important is for entrepreneurs to realize that and enjoy what they're doing now, and try to find and build a company that they enjoy building. Not the joy of, you know, getting to a series D, getting a series C, getting to IPO, but really the joy of, of building, right?

(instrumental music) Clem, I am very excited for this. As we just said, I've stalked the shit out of you from Lee Fix or Pat Grady, Ollie at Datadog, Dev at Mongo, Thibault Elzzier who told me about the very early days. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited about that.

This will be great. So I wanna start with, uh, a little bit of context. Hugging Face, where did the name come from and what's the origin of the company founding? In a short two to three minutes.

Yeah. When we started Hugging Face, we joked with my co-founders, Julien and Thomas, that we wanted to be the first company to go public with an emoji rather than the three-letter ticker, you know? We felt like the three-letter ticker, like, on the NASDAQ and, and all that is, is kind of boring. Felt like it was, was time for a refresh and to finally have emojis up there on the boards. So we absolutely wanted an emoji as a name, and the choice is the Hugging Face emoji, right? The one, the one with hands like that, was our favorite emoji, so we were like, "Okay, let's do that." We thought maybe we would keep it for a few weeks, you know, like for a few months at, at most. And then the community started to put it everywhere, you know, like on social media, on their clothes, like, literally everywhere. So we were like, "Oh, maybe we're gonna keep it." And now it's become kind of, like, such, such a brand, so popular that unfortunately it's gonna be hard for us to, to change it.

Listen, at least when you do go public, the ticker will be an emoji. So I mean, you know, uh, all you need to do is, you know, get to that stage. Uh, well, in terms of company founding, like, why did you decide this was the idea that you wanted to spend 10 years, 20 years of your life on?

We actually started with something completely different. Um, the reality is that the company was, was formed because of some sort of, you know, professional crush between me and my co-founders where we were like, "We absolutely wanna work together." Um, plus our excitement about AI, right? It was seven years ago, uh, so it was not of use as it is now. Um, not enough people were talking about it at the time, but we were super excited about it as kind of, like, a new paradigm to, to build technology, new opportunities and, and all of that. The first company, the first startup I worked for, like, 15 years ago was already doing AI. We w- weren't calling it AI at, at the time, so I had some sort of a glimpse of the, of the capabilities. And when we started Hugging Face, when we started the company, we were like, "Okay, uh, what can we work on that is going to be both scientifically challenging..." Because one of our co-founders, uh, Thomas, is, is a scientist, uh, and we, we all have a lot of interest in, in the science side of things. "... but at the same time entertaining?" So we actually started with some sort of a Tamagotchi AI or, like, AI friend, howev- however you call it, some sort of, like, a Siri, Alexa or, like, ChatGPT, uh, except just for, like, entertainment, not for, like, the boring, like, productivity aspect of it. Um, and we actually did that for, for almost three years. We raised our pre-seed and seed rounds on, on this idea. We got a product out with a couple of, uh, billion messages exchanged between users and, and this Tamagotchi AI. Uh, but as, you know, it sometimes, sometimes happens, um, when we started sharing a little bit of the underlying technology and the underlying platform that we were building to, to do that, we saw a lot of traction from the community, from the open source community, from companies using that. And so that basically made us pivot from this Tamagotchi AI to this AI platform that we are now.