Imperial College London

University of Oxford

crypto for rational people

Four in five European startups fail to graduate from seed stage to series A. I triple the odds of success—focusing specifically on deep tech. I do this by helping founders address key risks systematically: technical, customer, market, competition, and timing risk.

Deep Tech

Advisor

Big Tech is eating the software that is eating our world.

Whether it is the money we hold at the bank, or the shares we hold through our broker, or the information we consume, or the way we interact with others, or the purchases we make, software is increasingly mediating our experience of the world. 

Apple, Meta and Google are increasingly the demand-side gatekeepers of this change, especially in the age of mobile. And the problem is worse on the supply side. In 2006, Amazon's leadership prophesied that if they built a compelling "operating system" for the world’s internet services (AWS), "then the operating system became the internet.” Eighteen years later, Amazon, Microsoft and Google own the internet. This was made dramatically clear when they shut down Parler—for as much as we may disagree with the politics of Parler, we should not accept Big Tech as judge and jury.

I co-founded an investment firm (backed by AlphaLab Capital) to challenge this monopolising of our life experience. We aimed to foster permissionless/gatekeeperless innovation. We dreamed of a future where anyone can add new features to their favourite digital services (search engines and social media services included). Indeed, our dreams were bigger than this. We dreamed of a future where everyone is incentivised to make this happen. 

The following is the story of our journey.

Co-Founding CEO of Programmable Ventures

Wannabe Big-Tech Killer

Cancer continues to be the killer coin toss. In the developed world, half of us will get cancer. When we are diagnosed with cancer, half of us will survive. For those who die, half will die within the year. And this is not just a matter for the elderly. In the UK, cancer is the biggest killer of children aged 1–14 (23% of deaths); and breast cancer on its own is the biggest killer of women aged 35–49. 

I tried to make a dent in killer cancers. I first joined the Tessa Jowell Brain Cancer Mission as its Data and Technology Lead. This is the UK's moonshot initiative targetting the hardest-to-treat cancer, glioblastoma. 

Supported by the Under Secretary of State for Health, an inspiring medical futurist, and two former Google colleagues, I then co-founded a startup to scale the number of life-giving insights that might be drawn from our cancer journeys. We aimed to do this by giving researchers the ability to generate life-giving insights from patient data that they cannot see or infer. More specifically, we aimed to build tools that would turn a new privacy-preserving computation platform from Oasis Labs into something that is healthcare-grade. 

The following is the story of our journey.

Co-Founding CEO of human.ai

Wannabe Cancer Killer

Fraudsters have twice attacked Google’s ad revenue at scale. First they attacked with click farms. This ultimately led to a $90m class-action settlement in 2006. Then they attacked with malware. This was in 2011 when they started to use hijacked computers, tablets and mobiles to generate fake ad impressions that they then sold to advertisers.

I founded and led a startup that solved this second problem. We developed reverse Turing tests that allowed web servers to distinguish human users from bots.

We exposed the Chameleon botnet, showing for the first time that advertisers were unwittingly paying cybercriminals to hijack personal computers with malware (TDL-4). The Chameleon botnet included over 120,000 hijacked machines, and it cost advertisers at least $6.2 million per month. The story broke on the front page of the Financial Times, print edition. The security disclosure was independently verified by Google, ultimately leading to acquisition.

At Google, I led the company’s war against ad-fraud malware. I was also responsible for defending DoubleClick Bid Manger (Google’s fastest-growing billion-dollar business) against all types of invalid and fraudulent traffic.

Founding CEO of spider.io (acquired by Google)

Malware Killer

As Google's reach accelerated, so too did the demand from other large companies to leverage Google-like technologies in niche verticals: travel, jobs, homes, cars, and more. BytePlay provided scraping as a service.

I jointly led BytePlay through venture funding, the dark days after the financial crash, through profitability, and then to acquisition by Zoopla.

Douglas de Jager