D. Scott Phoenix

My goal is to accelerate a positive singularity by:

Founding, partnering with, encouraging others to join companies that push humanity's frontiers.
Sharing my experiences so that other ambitious projects are more likely to succeed.
Helping startups and established players leverage the astonishing rate of AI progress.

About me:

I am a Partner at Fifty Years, a deep tech pre-seed and seed stage VC firm. We back founders and scientists working on the world's biggest problems, like Solugen, Astranis, Athelas, BillionToOne, Opentrons, Substack, and more.

Before that, I was cofounder and CEO of Vicarious, an AGI and robotics startup backed by ~$250M from Dustin Moskovitz, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, DCVC, 8VC, and many others. At Vicarious, I worked with my cofounder Dileep George and our talented research team to publish peer-reviewed research in Science, NeurIPS, ICML, and more.

Vicarious was acquired by Alphabet in 2022. After the acquisition, I spent a year as the Chief Product & Revenue Officer of Intrinsic, Alphabet’s “other bet” focused on robotics and AI.

Before Vicarious, I was an entrepreneur in residence at Founders Fund, started a company in the Y Combinator 2008 batch, and built an open source game. I also invest in hard tech startups like Sila Nano, Psi Quantum, Verge Genomics, and Science, and advised venture funds like Felicis Ventures, Base10, and 8VC.