Good morning. Thank you so much for coming in. It's good to see you.
Thank you. My name is Henrik Johansson, and this is Due Diligence. Due Diligence is a wonderful show, and we have with us Thomas Wolfe today, and we're very proud to have you. Tell me something. Who are you? And tell me a little bit about your origins. You are French, yes?
I am French, yeah. Grew up in France. I worked a little bit in the US. I then did a PhD in Paris. After that, I worked in many fields. I was a physicist first, the PhD and beginning of a postdoc, and then I switched to become a lawyer.
Yes, so you're both a doctor physicist and a lawyer.
Would you represent yourself if you had a lawsuit?
In my venture capital work, I like to be a good guidance person, be on their board, help them see first, and importantly, you mentioned the importance of the government.
And also importantly compliance, a compliance officer, and having at least what I would consider to be a high percentage of the race being focused on compliance. You are a doctor, yes? You are a doctor.
I mean, I'm a doctor in the physics PhD type of doctor. So if something happened to you right now, I'm not sure I can help.
I was going to ask, because I had, you may notice, I had a situation come up today. I was trying to pay, well, anyway, so you can't help me with that.
I can help you with the physics behind it, but I'm not sure a lot with the medicine and the chemistry that's happening in your body right now.
Let me close that off the list.
Have to call the American hospital system. Oh well. It seems interesting now, the SOC 2. It's like a type 2 is a software company audited certified terminal. That to me is the same as being a doctor, and you will always be a doctor. May I call you Dr. Wolf?
You can. I think in Germany, where you're from, I could add the name doctor on my passport.
Yes, I'm not from Germany.
The lawyer is. Interesting. We touched on this a little bit ago. What motivated you, having achieved what you had achieved at that point, to do that? Because to me, a law degree, it takes time, yes?
Why? Why did you do that?
Why? Mhm. I think the common pattern of this part of my life was that I wanted to understand how the world works. And what are the rules that govern the world. So, physics has rules that govern the world.
But they're not the rules of society. The rules of society are made by law. So, I wanted to understand what is law. How does this thing work?
You seem to be very successful. The question, somebody I interviewed sometime in the past, I can't remember which individual, had to do with the horse being out of the barn. If I were conducting this interview, I would say the sheep, but to be fair to you, let's call it the wolf out of the barn.
What do we do to capture? How do we stop it from becoming misused? We create the technology, but we do it without compliance necessarily because so quickly, particularly in the United States.
Yes. It's good that you do. Have to find some commonality. Hugging Face. Oh my goodness.
You became, how did you come up with that name? 2016, yes?
Tell me about that. That's fascinating.
I mean, we also did something not very compliant, is we pivoted. We started as a game company.
And then we decided that it was more interesting to do something else.
So the game company was, which was a fun, like little kind of Tamagotchi, you remember the days of the Tamagotchi? So you have this digital creature that you could talk to, that you could interact with.
And we wanted it to be used by, like, millennials, like people our age, 20, 30. So we aimed for a fun name. We thought an emoji would be fun. And our favorite emoji was the hugging face emoji.
So we went for that. And then when at some point we decided to pivot to doing an open source company, we thought we could rename that, I don't know, the serious open source company, but we decided to keep Hugging Face as a name.
I think it actually speaks well because it makes people ask, 'What is that really about?'
Yes. Yeah. I actually applaud that. But the switch to open sourcing.
We had to go back to our early VC and convince them. Luckily they were quite open-minded.
Did it take a lot of convincing?
As a VC, how would you pitch me on that? Pretend that I am there now. I have to support that.
Mhm. As a European VC, well, we don't have so many European VCs, so I don't have a lot of...
Pretend I'm American. It's hard to believe.
I would say there is a great opportunity in open source in AI right now. It's the time to seize it. And we think we have the unique starting point to be the leaders in open source AI.
Do you have proof of concept?
You couldn't prove this to me?
Yeah. We had some strong traction at this time.
So you had that. And how much money were you trying to raise at that point?
It's a historical question.
Yeah, this one was, I think, a series A probably, so like 20 million.
20 million, because you have 250 million in a more recent raise for something.
Interested to talk about that. Okay, that is fascinating. You have a long reach.
You're smart. It seems like you're able to attract a lot of prospective investors. Am I correct?
And you are also an angel investor yourself.
Do you like doing it, or do you prefer having other people give you the money? There's an accountability with that I think is a little different, yes?
I mean, both are very different. I do enjoy investing because first we had great angel investors ourselves, and I think it's great to give back.
Yeah, and generally I think I can very easily relate to young entrepreneurs. And I feel like helping them is one of the best things I can do as a person who's slightly further along the path.
Walk me through the moment, then we are going to shift gears in reference to your time at the university. When you understood, the moment that you understood what you had built.
I think the moment started in Brussels. It was in November, so it was also pretty cold in Brussels.
