Simon Levene’s perspective is shaped by having lived through earlier tech shifts firsthand: he and Toby Coppel worked together at Excite@Home and Yahoo! in the early days of the web, started watching AI cycles as far back as 1996, and in 2007 was a founding director at Knewton, an early attempt at personalized learning, giving him a longer view than most on how these trends actually play out. That history shows up in how he invests today, backing teams that mix different fields to tackle big real-world problems, like Manas AI, founded by oncologist and author Siddhartha Mukherjee with Reid Hoffman, and by taking part in public conversations on hard tech topics like energy, AI governance, and synthetic life alongside people like Sam Altman.