Alexander De Ville
Former No. 10 Innovation Fellow, product and operations leader, and lead author of the Incubator practitioner playbook. A fellow fellow and a good friend.
PersonSources & confidence: Qualified confidence
Checked 3 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Career, education and authorship of the Incubator playbook.
- IGC — publication page
Title, publication date and five named authors.
- Practitioner playbook — cover and relevant chapters
Lead-author credit, incubation methods and discussion-paper status.
- Alexander De Ville — LinkedIn profile
Fellowship dates, roles at QuantumBlack and Recursive, advisory work in Ethiopia, and education.
What this check doesn’t establish
- Career and education details reflect Alex’s own professional biography.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
Alex is a good friend and a fellow fellow: we both came into government through the No. 10 Innovation Fellowship. He served as a fellow from February 2024 to May 2026.
His experience spans product development, public administration and economic development. Before Number 10, he worked in analytics and product management at QuantumBlack, alongside a career at McKinsey. He also advised Ethiopia’s revenue and customs authority on data and IT within its tax transformation office. He studied economics at Cambridge and completed Harvard Kennedy School’s Master of Public Administration in International Development.
Alex joined Recursive as Chief of Staff in May 2026, working on AI for automated scientific discovery and experiments in safe self-improvement.
Alex led the writing of How to build a high-impact AI team inside the state?, with Alex Jones, me, Sharif Kazemi and Shahrukh Wani. The playbook captures the larger system behind the projects: how to bring people together, find worthwhile problems, test ideas and learn from what happens. It is part of the experience I reflect on in Your Country Needs Builders.
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/people/alexander-de-ville.md
Generated by codex/gpt-6 on 2026-10-03