“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
Sequoia Capital
Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
Menlo Park, CA 688,285 followers
From idea to IPO and beyond, Sequoia helps the daring build legendary companies.
About us
Sequoia helps daring founders build legendary companies from idea to IPO and beyond. We aim to be the first true believers in tomorrow’s most valuable and enduring businesses. We partner with a few outliers each year and go all-in, providing them with the hands-on help required at every stage of the company building journey. Our expertise comes from 50 years of working with legendary founders like Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Jan Koum, Adi Tatarko, Brian Chesky, Jensen Huang, Anne Wojcicki, Eric Yuan, Patrick Collison, Julia Hartz, and Sebastian Siemiatkowski. In aggregate, Sequoia-backed companies account for more than 25% of NASDAQ's total value. Since our inception, the vast majority of the money we invest has been on behalf of nonprofits and schools like the Ford Foundation, Mayo Clinic and MIT, which means most of the returns we generate benefit these great causes.
- Website
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http://www.sequoiacap.com/
External link for Sequoia Capital
- Industry
- Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
- Company size
- 51-200 employees
- Headquarters
- Menlo Park, CA
- Type
- Privately Held
- Founded
- 1972
- Specialties
- Seed Stage, Early Stage, and Growth Stage
Locations
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Primary
2800 Sand Hill Road
Menlo Park, CA 94025, US
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2800 Sand Hill Rd
Menlo Park, CA 94025, US
Employees at Sequoia Capital
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Alfred Lin
Seed/Early partner at Sequoia working with founders from idea to IPO and beyond. Formerly an operator at Zappos, Tellme, and LinkExchange
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Bogomil Balkansky
Partner at Sequoia Capital
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David Cancel
Executive Chairman of Drift - 🇺🇸🇵🇷🇪🇨
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Michael Moritz
Michael Moritz is an Influencer Chairman at Crankstart
Updates
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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
🤖 New Sequoia Capital Training Data episode! Featuring Misha Laskin, former research scientist at Google DeepMind and co-founder/CEO of Reflection.ai. Sonya Huang and I chat with Misha about 1) why we’re still far from the promise of AI agents even with best-in-class models today, 2) what we need to unlock agentic capabilities for LLMs (hint: lessons learned from AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and Gemini)! 00:00 Introduction 01:11 Leaving Russia, discovering science 10:01 Getting into AI with Ioannis Antonoglou 15:54 Reflection AI and agents 25:41 The current state of AI agents 29:17 AlphaGo, AlphaZero and Gemini 32:58 LLMs don’t have a ground truth reward 37:53 The importance of post-training 44:12 Task categories for agents 45:54 Attracting talent 50:52 How far away are capable agents? 56:01 Lightning round Full ep: https://lnkd.in/gM46_Jiu
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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
The New Ideas Needed for AGI
https://www.sequoiacap.com
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Sequoia Capital reposted this
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
How can I scale up as a startup CEO?
sifted.eu
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Sequoia Capital reposted this
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
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Sequoia Capital reposted this
Thrilled to announce Skild AI! Over the past year, Abhinav Gupta and I have been working with our top-tier team to build an AI foundation model grounded in the physical world. Today, we’re taking Skild AI out of stealth with $300M in Series A funding, led by Lightspeed, Coatue, SoftBank Group Corp., and Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), with participation from Sequoia Capital Felicis Menlo Ventures General Catalyst SV Angel CRV Amazon Carnegie Mellon University. Excited to be working with our wonderful investors: Ravi Mhatre Raviraj Jain Sri Viswanath Stephanie Zhan Vibhor Khanna Aydin Senkut Deep Nishar Matt Murphy Steven Lee Ashvin Bachireddy Murat Bicer Brian Zhan Charles Kennedy Miles Dieffenbach Michael Feinstein Hanns Anders Brock Hayes Special thanks to Rashi Shrivastava for covering our journey. Blog Post: https://lnkd.in/eGnUFcgx News Article: https://lnkd.in/eEtHu7XP
This $1.5 Billion AI Company Is Building A ‘General Purpose Brain’ For Robots
social-www.forbes.com
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Sequoia Capital reposted this
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.
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Sequoia Capital reposted this
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
AI is Now Shovel Ready
https://www.sequoiacap.com
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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
Sequoia Arc: Company Building Immersion
sequoiacap.com
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Sequoia Capital reposted this
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
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