# Clement Delangue Clément Delangue (everyone calls him **Clem**) is the co-founder and CEO of [[HuggingFace]], the platform that became the default home for open AI. He's French, originally from La Bassée. He was one of eBay's top sellers in France at 17, turned down a job at Google after business school (ESCP), and spent his early career shipping products at startups that kept getting acquired. One of them, Moodstocks (computer vision), went to Google in 2016. That same year, he started Hugging Face in New York with Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. The funny part: it began as a teenage chatbot app. The real product turned out to be the tools underneath it. Today Hugging Face hosts millions of open models, datasets, and apps, serves 5M+ builders, and was valued at $4.5B after its 2023 Series D led by Salesforce. Here's why I keep an eye on Clem. He bet the whole company on open-source and open-science while most of the field was racing to lock everything behind closed APIs. He's testified before the US Congress on AI, and he keeps turning down acquisition offers to protect that bet. If you care about AI that builders can actually inspect, run, and own, [[HuggingFace]] is the clearest example out there, and Clem is a big reason it stayed open. ## Quotes <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/quote AND [[Clement Delangue]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Books <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/book AND [[Clement Delangue]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Related - [[HuggingFace]] ## References - [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/clementdelangue/) - [X / Twitter](https://x.com/ClementDelangue) - [Hugging Face profile](https://huggingface.co/clem) - [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bRMboT8AAAAJ&hl=en) - [Medium](https://medium.com/@clementdelangue)