Public Biography
Brent Haskell is a general partner and co-founder of Fullspeed Capital, a venture firm on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, and one of the most consistent public advocates for the uninterrupted development of advanced artificial intelligence. He came to national attention in October 2026 when, asked about a revised expert forecast placing the probability of human extinction from advanced A.I. at roughly 10 percent, he described the figure as “the best deal in history.”
Mr. Haskell, 47, was born in Scottsdale, Arizona, and holds a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Purdue University and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He spent five years in product roles at a payments startup that was acquired in 2011, after which he invested as an angel in some forty companies, three of which he describes as “the ones that mattered” and the remainder of which he describes as “tuition.” He co-founded Fullspeed in 2016. He has served on the boards of eleven portfolio companies and reports that none of them has ever declined an opportunity he graded as an A.
He is the author of “The Case Against Brakes,” a 2023 memorandum to the firm’s limited partners that was subsequently leaked and widely circulated. The memo argues that every safety intervention in the history of transportation reduced speed before it improved survival, that the order of those two effects is not a coincidence, and that the correct response to a technology one does not fully understand is to reach the point at which one does “as fast as the hardware allows.” He has opposed every proposed pause, evaluation mandate and licensing regime for frontier A.I. systems since 2022, on the grounds that any delay risks allowing a rival to build the technology first. He has described the arguments for his position as having two components, national competitiveness and his own carried interest, and has said that he does not regard them as separable.
Mr. Haskell maintains a whiteboard in his office headed “Acceptable Probabilities,” on which he records, and updates quarterly, the likelihood of outcomes he has decided to accept. As of October 2026 the board listed the chance that a given seed investment returns the fund (3 percent), the chance that he dies in a car accident this year (about 0.01 percent), the chance that A.I. kills everyone (10 percent) and the chance that he finds a good parking spot at the Sharon Heights Safeway (40 percent). He has identified the parking spot as the long shot.
He lives in Menlo Park with his wife, Meredith Haskell, a former product counsel who sits on the parents’ advisory board of Alignment for Kids, and their daughter, who is 5 and is enrolled there. He has described the enrollment as “risk mitigation.” His family has been instructed that, in the event of what he calls “a 10 percent outcome,” they should try to enjoy the last few minutes and remember that the expected value was still positive.
Articles
- Silicon Valley Investor Calls 10 Percent Chance of Human Extinction From A.I. ’the Best Deal in History’ — subject of the profile; explained the arithmetic, the whiteboard, and the instructions to his family
Articles
- Silicon Valley Investor Calls 10 Percent Chance of Human Extinction From A.I. 'the Best Deal in History' — Mr. Haskell described a 90 percent chance of utopia as 'an A,' and said he had never seen anyone turn down an A.