Friends of IHES is delighted to announce that Eugénie Rives, Managing Director at X, Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory, in Mountain View, California, has joined its Board of Directors.

Find out more about Eugénie and her relationship with IHES in the interview below.

Eugénie, you have an impressive career record in tech, and particularly at Google. Can you tell us a bit more about your background?

The unifying thread in my life and career is technology and entrepreneurship. As a matter of fact, I have been surrounded by technology all my life. I grew up in a household full of robots and was interested in tech from a very early age. My father, who helped Apple launch the Macintosh in France in the 1980s, was a huge inspiration for me. After working for Apple, he started several companies, notably working in robotics, electronic paper, and web design.

His entrepreneurial spirit and curiosity greatly stimulated me. I always wanted to work with him and see what was happening in the “real world.” I soon accompanied him to his client meetings, posing as his assistant. This quickly exposed me to the job market and, most importantly, made me realize the omnipresence of technology in our economy. It was evident to me that technology played, and would continue to play, a significant role in our society. So even as a child, I knew that I wanted to work in this field. More specifically, I wanted to help engineers communicate about their work and guide the use of technology to have as positive an impact on our lives as possible.

After high-school, I decided to pursue a degree in mathematics at Université Paris Dauphine. I also had a strong desire to travel and discover new cultures. At the time, I really wanted to learn English and Spanish. Although there was still no official framework for it, I took a gap year during my studies to work in the United States. I worked for a company called Callisma that provided network consulting for telecom operators. I didn’t have many technical skills, but I did everything I could to help, whether it be programming or marketing. The company grew from 3 to 300 employees in a year. Everything went well until the internet bubble burst, which was when I returned to finish my studies in France.

How did you finally end up working for Google, and what is it you are now doing at X, the Moonshot Factory?

I started in the advertisement department of Google France in 2005, back when the company only had a couple of dozen employees in the country. In a sense, I really started from the bottom, but rapidly got promoted to define Google’s overall strategy in France. Nowadays, Google France counts thousands of employees, and Paris is one of Google’s biggest offices in Europe.

In 2010, I got the opportunity to participate in Singularity University’s summer program on NASA’s campus in Mountain View, California. This program sought to launch large-scale projects using the most advanced technologies, helping me develop my entrepreneurial skills. We were a very diverse cohort, with participants of all ages and from very different backgrounds. Personalities from the Silicon Valley would come and tell us about their business creations and journeys. It was an ultra-stimulating microcosm, similar to what I find today at X.

After finishing the program, I returned to Google and coordinated its activities in Sub-Saharan Africa, where I notably opened two new sales offices in Nigeria and Kenya. I finally moved to the Google headquarters in Mountain View in 2012 and started working for X, the Moonshot Factory, in 2014.

The Moonshot Factory was created by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to discover the next frontiers and businesses for the company. Moonshots are far-out, science-fiction-sounding technologies that could have an outsized positive impact on our society. The first, and probably best-known project from X, was the self-driving cars that you now see – and ride! – all over San Francisco.

During my time at the Moonshot Factory, I particularly enjoyed reconnecting with the world of robotics as the General Manager of a robotics and logistics project. Then I was overseeing Moonshots in very diverse topics such as synthetic biology, renewable energies, chip design. Today, I am leading a project focusing on Large Language Models and their positive social applications.

How did you get to know about IHES, and what are your plans with Friends of IHES?

I first got to know about the Institute during its visit to California in the spring of 2023. As a foreign trade advisor to the French consulate in San Francisco (CCE), I was asked to show the Moonshot Factory to the IHES delegation that included Claire Lenz, Director of Development and Communications, and Emmanuel Ullmo, Director of IHES. They kindly invited me to their dinner at the Four Seasons, where I also met Friends of IHES co-Chairs Marilyn and Jim Simons. We immediately hit it off, and I instantly wanted to help with the Institute’s development.

I started by contributing to the organization of the IHES Gala in New York in November 2023 by suggesting an item for the Gala auction. Since the theme was jazz and mathematics, we enlisted one of our labs specializing in 3D printing to create an object representing music based on the sheet music of the piece in question.

My partner and I finally got the chance to visit IHES in April 2024. The Institute is a magical place, a true haven of peace that allows for plenty of reflection. It is the perfect place to break free from the hyperstimulation and intensity of modern life. We were also deeply impressed by the humility of its researchers, and particularly Emmanuel Ullmo.

At Friends of IHES, I wish to help make the Institute more widely known to the public, especially on the West Coast and in the Silicon Valley. With the development of artificial intelligence, I feel there is a renewed interest in the fundamental sciences, and I think it is important to make this research more accessible to the general public. In the near future, I hope to organize an event for IHES on exactly these topics in Silicon Valley.

I believe my community could really benefit from the insights of the Institute’s scientists as it seems that the time between fundamental research and its first concrete applications is now much shorter, and mathematics could play a huge role in understanding the black box of LLMs. Finally, I am also eager to exchange and learn from my colleagues on the Board of Friends of IHES, who are all very successful and inspiring personalities.

Photo credit: © Peter Prato