Sequoia Capital

On the latest episode of Training Data Bill Coughran and I spoke with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott who has led their AI strategy for the past seven years. Kevin describes himself as a “short-term pessimist, long-term optimist” and he sees the scaling trend as durable for the industry and critical for the establishment of Microsoft’s AI platform. Kevin believes there will be a shift across the compute ecosystem from training to inference as the frontier models continue to improve, serving wider and more reliable use cases. He also discusses the coming business models for training data, and even what ad units might look like for autonomous agents.

Next post in the 200b / 600b series turns from the revenue side of the equation to the cost side. We look at the data center construction boom and make 5 predictions for how this will affect the energy sector and the economy more broadly. 1.    AI will catalyze an energy transformation. New solar construction, battery innovation, a resurgence in nuclear energy—these will be long-term effects of the AI wave 2.    Some hyperscalers will find that they are not nimble enough to address rapidly changing data center requirements—new industrial AI players will emerge to fill this gap 3.    Starting in the next 6 months, there will be a lot of headlines about delays in data center builds due to issues with liquid cooling, cluster size and power access 4.    The industrial capacity needed to build new AI data centers will serve as an economic stimulus and create jobs in the real economy: Steel, energy, trucking and construction 5.    When new data center capacity comes online, the cost of training and inference delivered by AWS, Azure and GCP will go down, to the benefit of startups https://lnkd.in/g7-6PrHJ

From the founding engineers of PayPal and YouTube to leading open source and AI builders from Google DeepMind, GitHub and Pydantic, Arc brings together a curated community of Sequoia Capital’s pre-seed and seed-stage founders. Lean on, learn from and connect with outlier peers on a similar journey. Applications are open now: https://lnkd.in/g8eke_mj

My mother once told me you know the measure of a man by what they do when there is nothing in it for them. I met Pat Grady when I was 19, I had done 15 eps of 20VC and had very few followers. Pat gave me his time, mentorship and friendship when there was nothing in it for him. He is the GOAT of growth but also one of the best people in this business. My 9 key takeaways 👇 1. The Sequoia Capital Investment Process and the Mistake Everyone Makes It’s as simple as crystalizing the thesis then stress-testing it to make sure it’s real. Common mistake is people launch into diligence before they figure out what they want. Your thesis doesn’t have to be complicated - it just has to be crystal clear. 2. You Will Never See Anyone at Sequoia Fired for a Bad Investment You will never see anyone at Sequoia applauded for a good investment. We’re in the risk taking business & one data point doesn’t make a trend. We look at the activities & behaviors because the feedback cycle is long. 3. Why the Founder Is More Important Than the Market The market determines how big a company can get. The founder determines how big the company will get. I will take a modest market with a spectacular founder over a gigantic market with a mediocre founder any day. 4. Framework for Analyzing Founders Two ways: - I assess the founder-market fit & the vectors describing them. - Founder-market fit: You need to have a problem & solution variable accounted for. Vector: Consistent track record & motivation; building a startup is hard AF. 5. The $BN Revolut Mistake Peter @ Segment and Nikolay @ Revolut both pitched their story within ten minutes. The ideas were so simple & I didn’t have any further questions for them. We ended up passing on both. 6. We Lost $29BN of ServiceNow by Selling too Soon    We distributed it a year after their IPO. It was the first $1BN gain we had in the growth business. If we held onto it, the gain would have been $30BN. 7. Do Sequoia Get Pricing Power? Most companies pay more for our “premium product” in Seed/Series A. The difference between starting a company with and without Sequoia can be pretty big. We don’t get massive discounts at a later stage because companies are more established. 8. Is VC a Young Person's Game Senior investors have experience which compounds over time. BUT we’re in the details business & younger investors are more detail-oriented. We look for mid-career investors who have a bit of both. 9. What is the Pre Mortem for Sequoia It won’t be the markets or platform shifts, but from losing our sense of desperation. We need to stay hungry & humble. If we don’t go out there and earn it, tomorrow we are irrelevant. (links in comments) #founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #seed #funding

There is a camp of people who believe that AGI is undefinable, mythical, scary…Zapier's Mike Knoop is not one of those people. François Chollet defines AGI as “the efficiency of acquiring new skills”. Together François and Mike co-founded the ARC Prize, a public competition offering more than $1M to take that definition and actually solve for it. Pat Grady and I spoke with Mike about the origins of the ARC Prize, the path to AGI, and more on the latest episode of Training Data from Sequoia Capital. Listen to the full ep on these platforms or wherever you listen to podcasts: YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gfvkp2hY Apple:  https://seq.vc/tde3a Amazon: https://seq.vc/tde3az Spotify: https://seq.vc/tde3s

Roon is thrilled to partner with Olympic Gold Medalist Tara Lipinski on Roon Fertility. After her own experience with infertility, she teamed up with Roon to make sure other individuals on the fertility journey have trusted answers to all of their questions. "Lipinski says Roon, a platform that contains expert answers to thousands of questions for those navigating fertility with short-form videos, is a resource she wishes was available to her during her own struggle...'It’s just a place that you can go so there's no more rabbit holes and searching on Google, and that's where I was for years.'" Check out the Exclusive in People here: https://lnkd.in/erJWgmgQ

✨ Today, we're thrilled to announce ✨ • $16M additional funding led by Sequoia Capital. • Passing $1M ARR with 70% WAU/MAU. • Accelerating fast-moving companies with teams of specialized AI assistants. We've worked hard to build a platform that lets teams design and deploy specialized AI assistants with context on their company's knowledge. Now used by hundreds of fast-moving customers. Key highlights: • 𝟳𝟬% 𝗼𝗳 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵𝗹𝘆 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗸𝗹𝘆 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲, on par with the great Slack. • 𝟴𝟬% 𝗼𝗳 𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗲𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗔𝗜 𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗸𝗹𝘆. • 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗺𝘀 𝘀𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝟭-𝟮 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀 𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗲𝗲 𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗸 on various tasks. Our additional funding will help us double down on product development. We're excited to keep working with the Sequoia team, along with our other incredible investors, XYZ, GG1, Connect Ventures, Seedcamp, and Motier Ventures. "Smart companies around the world are trying to integrate AI, yet they face real challenges... Dust solves all this." - Konstantine Buhler, partner at Sequoia Capital Dust enables teams to: • Create specialized AI assistants in minutes; • Use leading models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, or Mistral; • Securely connect to company data sources; • Collaborate effectively while managing costs and risks. Learn more about how Dust can help your team work better: https://lnkd.in/ePwN6nPh PS — We're hiring! Check out our open positions. https://lnkd.in/erfcbqZB

Excited to share three major Dust milestones: 1. Customers love the product. 70% weekly active over monthly active users. Strong retention. 100% NPS when Sequoia conducted our independent diligence calls with enterprise customers. Direct quotes from customers including “250 people use Dust daily, roughly 40% of our company already” and "There are not a lot of 'Must-Have' tools. Google, Slack, Salesforce. I think that Dust is probably within the few tools that will be absolutely must-have for many companies in the future."   2. We surpassed $1M of ARR in high-quality revenue. Dust isn't taking the easy path. These are enterprises who go through all the security hurdles to integrate Dust across their enterprise. They know boosts their team productivity in the age of AI and are not waiting. Those who don't harness AI will fall behind. Dust accessibly harnesses AI for every knowledge worker. 3. Sequoia Capital led our $16M Series A. Doubling-down on the business after leading the seed round (with just two founders and an idea) last year. Try out Dust.tt for your business and team. Dust future-proofs the productivity of your business in the era of AI. I'm a daily active user and so are some of the most productive AI-forward people I know.

We are excited to announce our $372MM Series D financing led by Andreessen Horowitz with major participation from Sanofi. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, Lachy Groom, and Emerson Collective also joined the round, along with new investors SV Angel and FPV Ventures. At Formation Bio, we believe that building a culture and team that continuously innovates across the intersection of AI, tech, and pharma is one of our biggest competitive advantages. We are grateful to be working with two organizations at the forefront of AI, tech, and pharma: Andreessen Horowitz and Sanofi. We are excited to welcome Scott Kupor, Managing Partner at a16z and Alfred Lin, Partner at Sequoia to our Board of Directors, alongside existing board director Michael Moritz, Sr. Advisor to Sequoia Heritage and board observer Kareem Zaki, Partner at Thrive Capital. I’m grateful to our team members, advisors, and partners for all of their efforts to get us to where we are today but even more excited to share the journey ahead to create this generation’s tech and AI-native Pharma company. https://lnkd.in/euhi37n7

Last week Factory announced a new record on the AI coding benchmark SWE-bench. This week, founders Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes talk about their vision for autonomous Droids, Archimedes' compound lever, and their latest SWE-bench results on our new Sequoia Capital AI podcast, Training Data with me and Pat Grady. New episodes weekly. Listen or watch, and subscribe! Available on these platforms and wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube: https://seq.vc/TDE2y Spotify: https://seq.vc/TDE2s Apple: https://seq.vc/TDE2a Amazon: https://seq.vc/TDE2am (01:36) Personal backgrounds (10:54) The compound lever (12:41) What is Factory? (16:29) Cognitive architectures (21:13) 800 engineers at OpenAI are working on my margins (24:00) Jeff Dean doesn't understand your code base (25:40) Individual dev productivity vs system-wide optimization (30:04) Results: Factory in action (32:54) Learnings along the way (35:36) Fully autonomous Jeff Deans (37:56) Beacons of the upcoming age (40:04) How far are we? (43:02) Competition (45:32) Lightning round (49:34) Bonus round: Factory's SWE-bench results