Sequoia Capital

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

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

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