Sequoia Capital

Excited to share our partnership at Sequoia Capital with Fil Twarowski and Edvard Eriksson, building rift: an all-in-one tool for salespeople to simplify the entire process of running sequences, sending emails, making calls, and booking meetings (rift.com). Fil & Eddie are some of the most talented GTM folks we know who exude domain expertise, hustle, a grounded perspective to see reality clearly, and pure focus on execution. We're so excited to be in business together!

Can you use AI to make the work environment better? Sebastian Siemiatkowski has done so at Klarna.

“Participating in Arc was a transformative experience that perfectly aligned with our process of exploring what to build. We discovered how to be practical about finding product-market fit—removing the emotion and celebrating learning from failures to quickly move on.” Apply to Arc and join Sequoia’s community to learn from, lean on, and connect with founders like Pydantic’s Samuel Colvin. Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/g8eke_mj

“Arc redefined how we think about company building. My co-founders and I have lots of insights from building PayPal, YouTube and more, but Arc helped us intentionally lay the right foundation. We learned how to be more empathetic about the people we’re serving, which informed our company culture, our product and how we go-to-market.” Join Sequoia Capital’s community of world class founders like Mindy’s Yu Pan to grow with, learn from, and lean on to accelerate your company building journey. Apply to Arc here: https://lnkd.in/g8eke_mj

Imagine you knew for certain that AI was going to be as transformational as the internet, and that you control the only AI company in the world. How fast would you build CapEx? I believe the answer is: You would take your time. You’d wait to digest some AI revenues. You’d see how liquid cooling systems perform and alter your data center designs as needed. You’d build new power assets in the right locations, and then build your data centers near fiber optic cables. You wouldn’t pull forward all your CapEx because you’d know that data centers and models will need to evolve in tandem. Many market participants today would have you believe that there is a choice between being an “AI bull” and an “AI bear.” This is a false dichotomy. The CapEx debate is a debate about speed, not about magnitude. In fact, the more you believe in AI, the more you might be concerned that AI model progress will outpace physical infrastructure. For example, once everyone has 100k clusters, big tech companies will need to figure out what to do with their 50k and 25k clusters. We’ve heard a few industry experts make comments along the lines of: No one will ever train a frontier model on the same data center twice—by the time the model has been trained, the GPUs will have become outdated, and frontier cluster sizes will have grown. The key to understanding the pace of today’s infrastructure buildout is to recognize that while AI optimism is certainly a driver of AI CapEx, it is not the only one. The cloud players exist in a ruthless oligopoly with intense competition. Competitive dynamics within this oligopoly are a major driver of CapEx speed. The cloud business today is a $250B market –roughly the same size as the entire SaaS sector, combined. The cloud giants are collectively worth more than $7T – this is one of the most powerful oligopolies in the history of business. From the perspective of defending their oligopoly, big tech’s overbuilding may be perfectly rational. No matter what you believe, all of this building will be fantastic for startups. Infrastructure providers are bearing most of the risk in AI. This is effectively going to be a subsidy for startups building on top of them. Also, with all this investment and competition, training & inference costs will keep coming down. When the history of this AI wave is written, the awesome scale of Microsoft, Amazon, and Google will be a big part of it. Without these companies – and their ability to make big bold bets using their fortress balance sheets – we would be significantly farther behind than we are today. https://lnkd.in/eYh58DVG

“The characteristics we look for in founders have been the same for 50 years: the quality of the idea and the unique insight the founder has.” Roelof Botha speaks with Alyson Shontell at Fortune #BrainstormTech about AI and building for the long term. https://lnkd.in/gtjYm-6Q

Listen to a new episode of Training Data ft Misha Laskin, hosted by Stephanie Zhan Sonya Huang Available on these platforms or wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube: https://seq.vc/c6h Spotify: https://seq.vc/5kw Apple Podcasts: https://seq.vc/n81

Why haven't LLMs solved the ARC Prize benchmark? It suggests there are non-linguistic aspects to thinking and reasoning that need to be represented in ways other than language. Solving ARC may require new tokens learned in a different way from GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet. “Scale is not all you need," ARC co-founder Mike Knoop told us. "New ideas are needed.” Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/ecPFdWy6

This month’s Ask Zoe reader question addresses a career transition that I've seen many times: the shift from startup founder to CEO. This journey is tough and demanding, as founders of fast-growing companies often lack the luxury of experience and time. Those who successfully make the transition are highly self-aware AND capable of converting introspection into action, by building effective habits and systems. In my latest Sifted column I share advice for making the transition, including: 🎾 Hone essential CEO skills like prioritisation and delegation through deliberate practice.  💥 Recognise the flip sides to your strengths - your "dark side" traits or derailers that could hinder your progress, and focus on mitigating the most limiting ones.  👥 Build an army of supportive people around you, including experienced CEOs for mentorship, a coach for accountability, and a high-performing team. The founder with the fewest blind spots wins! https://lnkd.in/d94EARvc

We’re striving to build the most scalable, robust, and generalizable robotics foundation model. Thank you to our team for all their hard work so far & our investors for believing in our mission. Follow along with us @SkildAI for the latest. If you’re interested, we’d love to talk. Please apply. Blog: https://lnkd.in/erHQ385Z