Sequoia Capital

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Canal • 3 podcasts

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06/11/2025

Supercell ft Ilkka Paananen - How an Early Pivot Led to ‘Clash of Clans’ and ‘Brawl Stars’

Founder and CEO Ilkka Paananen set out to create a different kind of game company—one where the game development teams would have decision-making power, not upper management. Ilkka recalls the early decision to scrap their first game and the entire cross-platform strategy that had landed them a Series A financing in order to make a counterintuitive pivot and focus exclusively on mobile. The decision launched one of gaming's most remarkable success stories: By obsessing over quality and treating failures as learning opportunities, Supercell created enduring hits like “Clash of Clans,” “Hay Day,” and “Brawl Stars,” and defined a new standard for mobile gaming. But success brought new challenges. By 2023, Supercell had slipped from the top 10 mobile publishers for the first time in a decade. Ilkka reveals how the company reinvented itself yet again to set a record-breaking year in 2024, and discusses Supercell’s future in the AI era. Featuring: Ilkka Paananen, Maya Hoffree, Joost van Dreunen Hosted by: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

06/11/2025

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43min
10 DE MAR.

Physics Gets a Vote: Nominal Cofounders on Hardware Development in an AI World

Nominal’s cofounders (Cameron McCord, Jason Hoch and Bryce Strauss) realized that the new age of reindustrialization requires a new approach to hardware engineering and testing that’s closer to how software is developed. They founded Nominal with the insight that while SpaceX, Tesla, and Anduril built proprietary internal platforms for hardware testing, the thousands of new hardware entrants can't afford to replicate that work. Nominal serves as the system of record for hardware testing, helping companies move from PDF-based workflows to modern data infrastructure that catalogs telemetry from sensors producing millions of data points per second. The platform enables engineers to author validation logic that follows hardware systems from initial testing through manufacturing and field deployment. We discuss their belief that all hardware companies will become physical AI companies, and why they think Nominal's role as the verification layer will be critical - because unlike a video game, physical products require rigorous validation before they enter the real world. Hosted by: Alfred Lin and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital

10 de mar.

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41min
HÁ 5 DIAS

The Most Founder Mode CEO Working Today Isn’t the Founder: Opendoor’s Kaz Nejatian

Kaz Nejatian reveals how he left Shopify to pull off a highly unusual feat: refounding a struggling public company in just 16 days. From first attempting to take the company private and then becoming CEO with an unwavering commitment to prioritizing product, Kaz shares his unconventional playbook and approach to life. We go deep on why most enduring companies are built on "first derivatives" of their core business and not the obvious thing everyone focuses on. Kaz explains why he reads the Bible every day, how overriding life's defaults requires going full force (not halfway), and why founder mode means taking responsibility for outcomes, not processes. He breaks down the mechanics of the Opendoor turnaround, why he tethered his compensation to stock performance, and how he’s making the company AI-native. Essential listening for understanding true founder mode, or for anyone building something that matters.

há 5 dias

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1h3min
26 DE FEV.

Ben Horowitz On What Makes a Great Founder

A16z’s Ben Horowitz joins me for a raw, unfiltered conversation on what actually breaks founder CEOs, and what separates the great ones from the rest. We unpack founder mode, where it works and where people are taking it too far. Ben shares why overly deferring to experienced executives creates politics and fiefdoms, but avoiding senior talent altogether is just as risky. Founder mode is not about micromanaging. It’s really about taking responsibility for outcomes and having the confidence to manage people who may have more experience than you. Ben goes deep on “constructive confrontation” and why running away from the truth to preserve feelings is one of the most dangerous things you can do in a tech company. He explains why bad news has to travel fast, how decision debt paralyzes organizations, and why hesitation, not lack of intelligence, is what usually gets CEOs replaced. We also dive deep into hiring, especially the VP of Sales role founders mess up more than any other. Ben breaks down why great sales leaders qualify you in the interview, why references matter more than charisma, and why selling a hard product builds a different kind of operator. Along the way, we cover the psychology of being a first-time CEO, what Zuckerberg, Jensen, and Elon actually have in common, why culture is defined by behavior not values, and why feeling like you don’t know what you’re doing is more normal than most founders admit.

26 de fev.

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49min
16/12/2025

Why the Next AI Revolution Will Happen Off-Screen: Samsara CEO Sanjit Biswas

Sanjit Biswas is one of the rare founders who has scaled AI in the physical world – first with Meraki, and now with Samsara, a $20B+ public company with sensors deployed across millions of vehicles and job sites. Capturing 90 billion miles of driving data each year, Samsara operates at a scale matched only by a small handful of companies. Sanjit discusses why physical AI is fundamentally different from cloud-based AI, from running inference on two- to ten-watt edge devices to managing the messy diversity of real-world data—weather, road conditions, and the long tail of human behavior. He also shares how advances in foundation models unlock new capabilities like video reasoning, why distributed compute at the edge still beats centralized data centers for many autonomy workloads, and how AI is beginning to coach frontline workers—not just detect risk, but recognize good driving and improve fuel efficiency. Sanjit also explains why connectivity, sensors, and compute were the original “why now” for Samsara, and how those compounding curves will reshape logistics, field service, construction, and every asset-heavy industry. Hosted by Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

16/12/2025

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38min
21 DE JAN.

Context Engineering Our Way to Long-Horizon Agents: LangChain’s Harrison Chase

Harrison Chase, cofounder of LangChain and pioneer of AI agent frameworks, discusses the emergence of long-horizon agents that can work autonomously for extended periods. Harrison breaks down the evolution from early scaffolding approaches to today's harness-based architectures, explaining why context engineering - not just better models - has become fundamental to agent development. He shares insights on why coding agents are leading the way, the role of file systems in agent workflows, and how building agents differs from traditional software development - from the importance of traces as the new source of truth to memory systems that enable agents to improve themselves over time. Hosted by Sonya Huang and Pat Grady

21 de jan.

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40min
3 DE FEV.

What’s the Future of Vertical SaaS in an AGI World? Jamie Cuffe, CEO of Pace

Jamie Cuffe is solving one of AI's hardest problems: getting conservative, regulated industries to trust autonomous agents with mission-critical work. At Pace, he's building AI that replaces traditional BPOs in insurance, handling everything from email triage to claims processing with 50-75% cost savings. Drawing on his experience at Retool, Jamie emphasizes the importance of "closing the distance" with customers through forward-deployed engineering and being "the rock" that clients can rely on. He shares how focusing on top-tier insurance carriers and maintaining exceptionally high standards is enabling Pace to capture a meaningful share of the $400 billion BPO market while building a durable business model - at AI-native velocity. Hosted by Lauren Reeder and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

3 de fev.

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52min
27 DE JAN.

Making the Case for the Terminal as AI's Workbench: Warp’s Zach Lloyd

Zach Lloyd built Warp to modernize the terminal for professional developers, but the rise of coding agents transformed his company's trajectory. He discusses the convergence of IDEs and terminals into new workbenches built for prompting and agent orchestration, and why he thinks "coding will be solved" within a few years, making human expression of intent the ultimate bottleneck. Zach explains how Warp competes against subsidized tools from Anthropic and OpenAI, and why the terminal's time-based, text-oriented format makes it perfect for managing swarms of cloud agents. Hosted by Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital

27 de jan.

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48min
12 DE FEV.

Bayer’s Bill Anderson: Turning a 168 Year-Old Tanker Like a Speedboat

Bill Anderson runs Bayer, a 160-year-old pharmaceutical giant that had 100,000+ employees when Bill took the helm. In just two years after becoming CEO, he flattened 11 layers of management, expanded managers' direct reports from 6 to 90, and eliminated annual budgeting in favor of 90-day cycles. Bill offers up some gems on how to scale without becoming bureaucratic, explains why "professional managers" kill startups, why peer feedback beats manager reviews, and why bureaucracy isn’t a virus that infects healthy companies but rather something that grows from within the heart of your org chart. If you're scaling from 100 to 1,000 employees and want to avoid the death spiral that slows most growing companies, this is essential listening. Bill's created a playbook for organizational transformation that challenges what you think you know about building companies.

12 de fev.

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1h13min
10/12/2025

The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed

fal is building the infrastructure layer for the generative media boom. In this episode, founders Gorkem Yurtseven, Burkay Gur, and Head of Engineering Batuhan Taskaya explain why video models present a completely different optimization problem than LLMs, one that is compute-bound, architecturally volatile, and changing every 30 days. They discuss how fal's tracing compiler, custom kernels, and globally distributed GPU fleet enable them to run more than 600 image and video models simultaneously, often faster than the labs that trained them. The team also shares what they’re seeing from the demand side: AI-native studios, personalized education, programmatic advertising, and early engagement from Hollywood. They argue that generative video is following a trajectory similar to early CGI—initial skepticism giving way to a new medium with its own workflows, aesthetics, and economic models.Hosted by Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital

10/12/2025

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1h2min

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