How Did Demis Hassabis Hook Peter Thiel on DeepMind?

David Senra, reading Sebastian Mallaby, says Demis Hassabis needed money for DeepMind and hooked Peter Thiel with chess at a crowded conference party instead of pitching yet another startup story.

Hassabis knew Thiel was obsessed with chess, so the conversation started there. Thiel invited Hassabis and his co-founder to the house the next day to explain the ambitious venture. Thiel began to think DeepMind was an A-plus on the science and maybe an F on the business model. He also judged Hassabis an extreme case of an authentic entrepreneur: a missionary who feels compelled to work on a particular challenge and starts a company as a way of tackling it, rather than a mercenary who starts with a desire to get rich and then casts around for a plausible idea.

The good thing about missionaries is that they never quit. Even if they have to work around the clock and pay themselves nothing, they keep obsessing about the problem. People are not really entrepreneurs in the abstract, and there is maybe one great company somebody has in them. It was Hassabis's destiny to build DeepMind, and he was raising money from Thiel.