Google’s former Andys—Conrad and Harrison—reunited at VC firm S32, talk AI

When I sat down with Dr. Andy Conrad and Andy Harrison via Zoom, we all had an immediate logistical problem to solve—that they’re both, well, named Andy.

We’re talking because Conrad just joined Harrison at VC firm S32, but never fear, the two have faced this problem before. The Andys, as they kindly let me term them, know each other from Google, and they ask me to call them AH and AC.

I start with Conrad, who’s known for starting Alphabet’s life sciences organization Verily. Why the job switch? Verily had grown “to the level where it needs a different type of intention than the entrepreneurial bent I sort of have…It was time for me to go back to my roots,” Conrad said.

It also didn’t hurt that Harrison, S32 CEO and general partner, and Conrad went way back.

“Don, Andy’s brother, was a senior executive [at Google], so I met him,” Conrad explains. “Then I met Andy and realized he was the smartest of the Harrison brothers!”

Conrad would go on to recruit Harrison to Verily, then Harrison recruited Conrad to S32 in 2024. (S32 was also founded by Bill Maris, who also launched Google’s GV.) The Andys’ Google backstory—and nope, they can’t talk about Google—means they’re operating with a distinct point-of-view on AI.

Harrison describes AI as emerging in a four-phase process, starting with finding the best AI researchers and models, followed by a phase characterized by proofs of concept. We’re now, Harrison says, in the product phase, building out expertise, and solving for regulatory and customer concerns. Then, there’s the hoped-for next phase:

“We’re still in phase three,” said Harrison. “Our sincere hope is that phase four will be scale and impact, where stuff is understood. It’s viable. It has a strong ROI argument, and there will be massive scale and impact for the companies doing it correctly.”

An increasingly AI-ified world will still be very human, Harrison believes.

“It's a little bit paradoxical, but the path to getting AI to the scale phase is by bringing the right humans together to actually advance it,” he said. “You need the modelers, you need the business development people, you need the product people, and you need people who’ve been down the entrepreneurial road a few times before.”

S32’s portfolio already includes a number of AI-focused companies, including Cohere, Scale AI, Inworld AI, and Phaidra.

“It’s a great time, if you have the right set of tools to get AI right,” said Conrad. “It’ll take a marriage of a little bit of wisdom and a little bit of humility—and a lot of technical know-how.”

Elsewhere…Lindsay LoBue, who worked at Goldman Sachs for over 20 years before joining Carlyle Group in October, will become the firm’s COO in July. LoBue is the fifth woman in Harvey Schwartz’s C-suite. Chris Finn, who has worked at Carlyle for 28 years, is retiring as CFO. Fortune has the exclusive. –Luisa Beltran

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com