Shawn Shen, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of the artificial intelligence (AI) startup Memories.ai, has made headlines for offering compensation packages worth up to $2 million to attract researchers from top technology companies. In a recent interview with Business Insider, Shen explained that many scientists are leaving Meta, the parent company of Facebook, due to constant reorganisations and shifting priorities.“Meta is constantly doing reorganizations. Your manager and your goals can change every few months. For some researchers, it can be really frustrating and feel like a waste of time,” Shen told Business Insider, adding that this is a key reason why researchers are seeking roles at startups. He also cited Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s philosophy that “the biggest risk is not taking any risks” as a motivation for his own move into entrepreneurship.With Memories.ai, a company developing AI capable of understanding and remembering visual data, Shen is aiming to build a niche team of elite researchers. His company has already recruited Chi-Hao Wu, a former Meta research scientist, as Chief AI Officer, and is in talks with other researchers from Meta’s Superintelligence Lab as well as Google DeepMind.

From full scholarships to Cambridge classrooms

Shen’s academic journey is rooted in engineering, supported consistently by merit-based scholarships. He studied at Dulwich College from 2013 to 2016 on a full scholarship, completing his A-Level qualifications.He then pursued higher education at the University of Cambridge, where he was awarded full scholarships throughout. Shen earned a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Engineering (2016–2019), followed by a Master of Engineering (MEng) at Trinity College (2019–2020). He later continued at Cambridge as a Meta PhD Fellow, completing his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Engineering between 2020 and 2023.

Early career: Internships in finance and research

Alongside his academic pursuits, Shen gained early experience through internships and analyst roles in finance. He worked as a Quantitative Research Summer Analyst at Killik & Co in London (2017) and as an Investment Banking Summer Analyst at Morgan Stanley in Shanghai (2018).Shen also interned as a Research Scientist at the Computational and Biological Learning Lab at the University of Cambridge (2019), building the foundations for his transition into advanced AI research.

From Meta’s Reality Labs to academia

After completing his PhD, Shen joined Meta (Reality Labs Research) in Redmond, Washington, as a Research Scientist (2022–2024). His time at Meta exposed him to cutting-edge work in generative AI, but also to the frustrations of frequent corporate restructuring. This experience eventually drove him toward building his own company.In April 2024, Shen began his academic career as an Assistant Professor at the University of Bristol, before launching Memories.ai in October 2024.

Betting on talent with $2M offers

Explaining his company’s aggressive hiring packages, Shen told Business Insider: “It’s because of the talent war that was started by Mark Zuckerberg. I used to work at Meta, and I speak with my former colleagues often about this. When I heard about their compensation packages, I was shocked — it’s really in the tens of millions range. But it shows that in this age, AI researchers who make the best models and stand at the frontier of technology are really worth this amount of money.”Shen noted that Memories.ai is looking to recruit three to five researchers in the next six months, followed by up to ten more within a year. The company is prioritising individuals willing to take a mix of equity and cash, with Shen emphasising that these recruits would be treated as founding members rather than employees.By betting heavily on talent, Shen believes Memories.ai will be in a strong position to secure additional funding and establish itself in the competitive AI landscape.His bold $2 million offers may raise eyebrows, but they also underline a larger truth: in today’s technology race, the fiercest competition is not for customers or capital, it’s for talent.