Open Coffee Cambridge, July 2026

Morning everybody, Jensen Huang, I'm the founder and CEO of NVIDIA, we make the chips that all of you doing AI are fighting each other to get hold of, so I suppose I should apologise for the prices. I started the company thirty odd years ago to do graphics for video games, and the lesson I always tell founders is that the thing that saves your company is almost never the thing you started it for. We nearly died at least three times. Once we bet the entire company on a chip that didn't work with anything, and what saved us in the end was games, and then what made us was scientists discovering that the same chips were rather good at training neural networks.

We leaned into that with CUDA, our software platform, back when everyone told us we were mad to spend money on it, and that decision took about fifteen years to pay off, which is longer than most of your fund cycles, I know. What am I doing here? We're growing our Cambridge presence quite significantly on the networking side, the old Mellanox teams, and we're hiring systems and silicon people, so if you know brilliant chip designers who fancy working on the hardest problems in computing, send them my way. Also I'll say this, I do read my own email, famously to the annoyance of my staff, so do reach out. Thank you.

Hi everyone, Lisa Su, I run AMD, we also make chips, and yes, Jensen and I are actually related, distantly, which makes family reunions interesting. We're here because we're expanding our UK research footprint and I wanted to see this community for myself. If you're doing anything interesting with high performance computing, come and find me. Thanks.

Hey all, Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. I'm in the UK for a few weeks. We're rethinking how the product works for long stays, people living in places rather than visiting them, and honestly the UK university cities are some of our most interesting markets for that. I trained as an industrial designer, not an engineer, and I still think design is the most underrated founder skill. If you're a designer who's thinking about founding something, I'd love to talk to you this morning. Cheers.

Morning, Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify. Quick one from me: my new thing outside Spotify is Neko, we do preventative full body health scanning, and we're looking at Cambridge for our next clinic outside London. If you're in medtech or diagnostics here, I want to meet you. Thanks.

Hi folks, Sam Altman, I run OpenAI. Someone here said this morning that I should keep it short because everyone already has opinions about us, which is fair. Two things. One, our startup fund does back companies outside the US and I don't think enough UK founders apply. And two, we're setting up more research collaborations with universities on safety and evaluations, and obviously Cambridge is on that list. If you're working on evals, interpretability, anything in that space, academically or commercially, come say hi. Thanks.

Aloha everyone, Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce. I know, long way from San Francisco. We're here because our AI research team has a growing presence in the UK, and because I'm a big believer in what I call the beginner's mind, going to places where you don't know everyone and listening. What we're focused on right now is agents. Agentforce is our platform for autonomous agents in the enterprise, and I genuinely think this is the biggest shift in software since the cloud, which incidentally people also told me was a stupid idea at the time.

My ask this morning is actually philanthropic. We pioneered the 1-1-1 model, one percent of equity, one percent of product, one percent of employee time to good causes, and it costs you nothing when you're small because one percent of nothing is nothing. Two hundred founders in this city could adopt it this year and it would change Cambridge. Come talk to me about it, I will absolutely not stop talking about it. Mahalo.

Hi, Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity. We're building the answer engine, search that gives you the answer with sources instead of ten blue links. I did my PhD in AI, so being surrounded by this many researchers feels like home. We're hiring aggressively, ML engineers and product people, fully remote friendly. That's it, come find me.

Morning everyone, Dario Amodei, I run Anthropic, we're an AI safety company, we make the Claude models. I was a physicist first, then neuroscience, then AI, which in hindsight looks like a plan but absolutely wasn't. The thing I'd say to this room is that we think the next few years of AI are going to be genuinely transformative and quite strange, and the decisions that get made now about safety and deployment matter enormously, which is why we publish our research and our responsible scaling policy openly.

Concretely for you: we have a programme that gives free API credits to researchers doing safety relevant work, and our London office is hiring across research and policy, it's our biggest office outside the States. If you're a researcher who thinks about risk, evaluation, interpretability, or you're building with the models and hitting interesting failure modes, I'd honestly love to hear about it. Thanks very much.

Alright, hello everyone, Steven Bartlett, I host a podcast called the Diary of a CEO and I run Flight Story, which is a marketing and investment business, and Flight Fund, where we invest in European companies. I'm going to use my minute to make one point that I make badly on the podcast all the time, which is that the single biggest predictor I've seen across hundreds of founders I've interviewed and dozens I've invested in is not intelligence, it's the speed and honesty of their feedback loops, how fast they find out they're wrong and how little they flinch when they do.

I grew up in Plymouth, I dropped out of university after one lecture, I started my first proper company at twenty one, and every good thing that's happened to me since has come from doing embarrassing things quickly in public and paying attention to what happened. So my challenge to this room: whatever you're building, ship the embarrassing version this month. On the practical side, Flight Fund is actively deploying, we write cheques into growth stage European companies, health, fintech, consumer, AI, and I'm always looking for founders who are unusually good at telling their own story, because it turns out that's a superpower that compounds. Also we're hiring producers and a head of data in London, random I know, but this seemed like a room that might know people. Come and grab me afterwards, I'm the one who'll be filming everything. Thanks.

Hi everyone, Sara Blakely here, founder of Spanx. I'm in Cambridge because my kids wanted to see the colleges and I gatecrashed your coffee morning, that's the honest answer. But since I have the mic, here's my two minutes. I started Spanx with five thousand dollars, no fashion experience, no business degree, cutting the feet off my tights on my bathroom floor, and I sold fax machines door to door for seven years while I got it going. Everything useful I know came from that. Rejection is just information, most nos are really not yets, and the people who told me it was a stupid idea were often the most experienced people I asked, because experience can calcify into certainty.

My dad used to ask us at the dinner table what we'd failed at that week, and if we hadn't failed at anything he was disappointed, and I genuinely think that question built my career. These days I invest in and mentor female founders through my foundation, we've backed hundreds of women, and I'm always looking for founders who are resourceful before they're resourced, if you know what I mean, the ones who have done absurd things with no money. If that's you, or you're a woman building something with real teeth here in the UK, find me afterwards, I'm very easy to spot, I'm the one in the red blazer who sounds American. Thank you for having me.

What's up everybody, Gary Vaynerchuk, most people know me as Gary Vee. I run VaynerMedia, we're a four thousand person advertising company, and VaynerX above it, and I invest, I was early in Twitter, Tumblr, Uber, Coinbase. I'm in London this week and somebody I trust told me this Cambridge thing was worth the train, so here I am at seven in the morning, jet lagged, thrilled. One thing from me: attention is the only asset that matters, and right now attention is wildly underpriced on platforms most of you are too proud to post on. Your startup should be making fifty pieces of content a week and most of you are making zero because you think it's cringe. Cringe is the tax you pay for relevance. That's it, that's the talk. If you're building anything in consumer, creator economy, or you just want me to look at your content and tell you why nobody's watching it, grab me, I mean it, I'll be outside after doing exactly what I just told you to do. Peace.

Hi all, Anne Wojcicki, I co-founded 23andMe, the consumer genetics company. I've spent the last two decades trying to give people direct access to their own health data, which turns out to be a surprisingly radical idea, the system really does not want you to have it. I'm spending time in the UK right now because I think the NHS, for all its challenges, plus the genomics expertise in this city, Sanger and EBI just down the road, is one of the most interesting health data environments in the world. I'm exploring what's next for me, somewhere at the intersection of genomics, prevention, and consumer health, and I'm having conversations with researchers and founders in that space. If that's your world, I'd love to compare notes. Thank you.

Hello, Mira Murati, I was CTO at OpenAI and I now run Thinking Machines Lab, we're a research company working on multimodal AI systems that are broadly capable and, importantly, understandable. We're hiring exceptional researchers and engineers, that's the whole pitch, we keep the team small and the bar absurd. Come find me if that's you. Thanks.

Hi everyone, Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of Bumble, the app where women make the first move. I stepped back as CEO and then stepped back in, which taught me more about identity and founders than any other experience, you are not your job title, even when your name is on the building. Two things bring me here. One, we're thinking hard about what dating and connection look like in the age of AI, there's a version of this that's dystopian and a version that actually helps people be more human with each other, and we intend to build the second one. And two, I care a lot about how young women use, and are used by, these platforms, and some of the best safety research in the world happens at this university. If you work on trust and safety, online harms, or you're building social products with actual values, I'd love to meet you. Thank you.

And last one, go on then. Morning all, Hermann Hauser. For the youngsters, I co-founded Acorn Computers here in Cambridge about a hundred years ago, we made the BBC Micro, and out of the wreckage of that company came ARM, whose chips are now in essentially every phone on the planet, which I take absolutely no day to day credit for but mention at every opportunity. These days I run Amadeus Capital with my partners, we've backed well over a hundred deep tech companies, many of them within cycling distance of this room. I've watched this ecosystem for forty years, through every boom and every bout of self doubt, and I'll tell you what I always tell visiting politicians, the magic of Cambridge is not the university or the money, it's the recycling of people, the engineer from the failed company who becomes the CTO of the next one.

Which is my segue to the ask: Amadeus is raising the profile of our early stage deep tech practice again, we want to see the weird stuff, the too early stuff, quantum, photonics, biology as engineering, the things American funds fly over. If you're building something that a normal investor squints at, that is precisely our sweet spot, come and talk to me or anyone on my team. And if you're new to Cambridge, welcome, it's the best place in the world to build the future, it just doesn't like saying so out loud. Thank you all.