Jacob Tsimerman, David Vélez, and 35+ leaders making interesting talent moves in tech / AI

PS - Submit a talent move here to be featured in the next newsletter.

• Jacob Tsimerman, a Fields Medalist, is joining OpenAI - on leave from the University of Toronto.

• Francis deSouza just announced he’ll be the new CEO of Scale AI, starting August 10th (prev Google Cloud COO, CEO Illumina).

• Bianca Pinasco just joined Google DeepMind’s product team to help build the future of Gemini (prev McKinsey, Stanford GSB).

• Evan Bacon just joined SpaceXAI’s engineering team (prev Head of AI at Expo for almost 9 years).

• Dean Ball just joined OpenAI as Head of Strategic Futures, after advising the White House on AI policy.

• Chris Williams just joined Google as Director, GTM AI Tech (prev Head of FDE at Vercel).

• Yesterday was Matt Palmer’s first day at Cursor on the Developer Experience team, after two years at Replit.

• Cooper Saye just joined OpenAI on RSI evals (prev Ramp, Jane Street).

• Uday Ruddarraju just became the new CTO of Compute at OpenAI (prev Head of Infrastructure Engineering at xAI).

• David Vélez (founder/CEO of Nubank) and Robin Vince (CEO of BNY) just joined OpenAI’s board.

• John Sorenson just joined Decagon as the VP of Legal, after almost 6 years at Grafana Labs.

• Yesterday was Daniel Sternberg’s first day at Town (prev VP of Engineering at Raspberry AI, Head of Data & AI at Notion, and Head of Data at Gusto).

• Joel Ostdiek just joined ElevenLabs to work on growth for ElevenCreative, after almost 4 years at YouTube.

• Teri Hatfield just joined Iterable as Chief Revenue Officer, after 14 years at Salesforce - and 10 years before that at Verizon.

• James Hamilton just stepped into a GTM leadership role at Harvey, leading a new Mid-Market AE team.

• Avi Upreti just stepped up as the new MD of Investment Banking at Hebbia.

• Ami Bhatt, MD just joined WHOOP as Chief Medical Officer (prev Chief Innovation Officer at the American College of Cardiology).

• Guifré Ballester just joined Hilbert as a Product Team Lead (prev SE Ranking, Eventbrite).

• Jared Palmer just joined Cognition as VP of Engineering (prev VP of Engineering at Xbox; VP of AI at Vercel).

• Rayan Dabbagh just left AWS to start his own company.

• Sonia Joseph just left Meta to co-found a stealth physical AI lab.

• Garrett Hughes just joined Phantom, an AI-native engineering startup (prev Director of Eng at Dune).

• Cecilia Zhao just joined Sunday Robotics as Head of Business (prev Partner at General Catalyst).

• Jeff Chou just joined Databricks to help build the next generation of data + AI products (prev VP of AI / Head of Product at Capital One).

• Brian Manning just joined Nabla as CEO (prev Bamboo Health).

• Andrew Ho just left OpenAI to start his own company.

• Dwarak Rajagopal just joined Fireworks AI (prev VP/Head of AI Eng at Snowflake; also prev Google, Meta, Uber, Apple).

• Scott Johnston just joined Fly.io as CEO (prev CEO of Docker for 11 years).

• Kaitlyn Ladewig just joined Harvey as their first-ever Global Events hire (prev NVIDIA).

• Vaman Kamath just joined Factory to lead GTM Enablement (prev 6 years at Moveworks).

• Amos Sha just joined Mercor as a Strategic Project Lead, right after graduating Stanford MS&E.

• Karen Jiang just joined Generalist as an Applied AI & Partnerships Lead, right after her Stanford MBA.

• Nando de Freitas just left Microsoft AI (where he was the CVP of AI) and is heading into his next AI venture (TBD) after a family break.

• Bonnie Li just left Google DeepMind after almost 4 years in research science & engineering.

• Sanja Fidler just left NVIDIA after 8 years, where she was VP of AI Research.

• Carmen Maierean is leaving Pinterest, where she was VP of TPM/Strategy & Ops (prev Google Android TPM Director).

• Andi Peng just left humans& (one of the founders).

• Jessica Chew just left JP Morgan Chase after 7 years (most recent role was VP of Startup Banking).

• Isaac Kim just left Cognition, where he was the VP, Majors for 2.5 years (and before that, Regional Director at Windsurf).

• Gbemi Giwa just left Google after 10 years and is open to new opportunities.

Are you making a move? Submit your move here to be featured in the next newsletter.

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