Sequoia Capital

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Kanal • Broj emisija: 3

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14. TRA

From SEO to Agent-Led Growth: Profound’s James Cadwallader

James Cadwallader, co-founder and CEO of Profound, makes the case that we are living through the biggest platform shift in marketing history. The front door of the internet hasn't changed, but the visitor walking through it has. Where consumers once clicked blue links, AI agents now crawl the web on their behalf, synthesizing answers and steering purchase decisions at scale. James explains why Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude all recommend brands differently, why mapping AI visibility onto traditional SEO is the wrong instinct, and why the real imperative is to equip a superintelligent agent with original insight it couldn't find anywhere else. He also digs into the dead internet theory – the possibility that human browsing could largely cease within three years – how AI advertising may become the most effective form the world has ever seen, and why agent-led marketing isn't just automation of the old work, but an entirely new capability. Hosted by Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital

14. tra

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31 min
2. TRA

Jack Dorsey: Every Company Can Now Be a Mini-AGI

Jack Dorsey (Block CEO) and Roelof Botha (Sequoia partner and Block board member) join to discuss a bold claim they wrote about recently: the traditional corporate hierarchy isn't just inefficient — it's obsolete. Jack made one of the toughest calls in recent business history: cutting 40% of his workforce and rebuilding the company from the ground up around what he calls an AI "intelligence layer." We get into how that conversation went down, the math they used to land on a number, and why he's convinced that acting from a position of strength beats reacting from one of weakness. Jack breaks down his vision for simplifying into just three roles, and what it means to replace a pyramid org chart with a circle — AI at the center, and people at the edge. Roelof, who helped think through the restructuring, shares his perspective on how AI-native startups are building differently, and what CEO qualities are timeless. I've eliminated org charts before. I know how hard this is. But Jack is doing something I never had the tools to pull off. If you're a founder wondering whether your hierarchy is working for you or against you, this one will make you uncomfortable in the best way.

2. tra

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1 h 4 min
26. VELJ

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. velj

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49 min
13. 11. 2025.

Parker Conrad’s Revenge Fantasy

I didn’t think Parker Conrad would get up off the mat when he got ousted from his previous startup, Zenefits. No one in Silicon Valley did. Instead, Parker let his rage propel him into an all-consuming mission to prove the haters wrong and build Rippling, a $17 billion juggernaut that blows his prior success out of the water. Parker has advice for founders: from productively harnessing the chip on your shoulder, to maintaining fast operational velocity to why you need founder-minded people on your team instead of manager-minded people—even among your managers. And yes, he spills the dirt on Deel. Parker is one of the new greats who is tearing up the old CEO rulebook and writing his own. - Brian Halligan, Sequoia Capital

13. 11. 2025.

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1 h 17 min
NAJAVA

Introducing "Crucible Moments"

A podcast about the inflection points that shaped some of the most important companies of our time. Crucible moments are pivotal decisions that determine your trajectory. Hear from founders like Jack Dorsey of Block, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, and Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe about how they navigated the challenges and opportunities that defined their stories. Hosted by Roelof Botha, Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital, who has spent over 20 years building companies such as Youtube, Square, and Instagram. The content of this podcast does not constitute investment advice, an offer to provide investment advisory services, or an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund.

Najava

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4 min
10. 10. 2024.

UiPath ft. Daniel Dines - From Bootstrapping in Bucharest to One of Software’s Biggest IPOs

The biggest enterprise software company to come out of Europe in the last decade didn’t come from London, Paris, Berlin or Stockholm—but Bucharest, Romania. UiPath, founded in 2005 and originally called DeskOver, was a scrappy handful of engineers bootstrapping out of an apartment in Bucharest for about a decade, seeking in vain for product-market fit. When they stumbled upon an opportunity in the nascent enterprise software category of Robotic Process Automation, the company did a hard pivot, changed their name to UiPath, and rocketed from obscurity to the fastest-growing SaaS company ever at the time. After a successful IPO, today they are the global category leader in RPA. The unlikely rise of UiPath is an inspiration and a reminder that you can build something great from anywhere. Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Daniel Dines, Andra Ciorici-Chelmus, Brandon Deer, Luciana Lixandru

10. 10. 2024.

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42 min
05. 12. 2024.

YouTube ft. Steve Chen - 18 Months That Changed the Internet

This episode takes us back to the earliest days of YouTube, as the founders explain why it was a longshot that succeeded against all odds. When cofounders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim left PayPal to start YouTube, it wasn’t even clear that the nascent broadband infrastructure could support playing video in a browser. In a brief period until its acquisition by Google—from its first incarnation as a video dating site to confronting daunting technical and legal challenges—the early story of YouTube is an underdog tale of scrappy upstarts who ended up changing the world. Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Steve Chen, Jawed Karim, Zahavah Levine, Colin Corbett, Yu Pan

05. 12. 2024.

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49 min
21. 11. 2024.

Natera ft. Matthew Rabinowitz - A Personal Mission That Led to a Biotech Revolution

Founder Matthew Rabinowitz opens up about the intensely personal journey that set him on a course to revolutionizing healthcare. A PhD in electrical engineering, he had no background in genetics or biology, but after his sister had a baby with Down syndrome that hadn’t been detected and tragically died after 6 days, Matthew dedicated himself to solving this problem. After overcoming seemingly impossible obstacles, today Natera leverages molecular biology and novel bioinformatics technology to provide prenatal screening in nearly half of U.S. pregnancies, as well as transforming oncology and organ transplants. Hear about Matthew’s vision for the future of computational biology and its profound impact on human health. Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Matthew Rabinowitz, Jonathan Sheena, Steve Chapman, Chitra Kotwaliwale, Sarah Elliot

21. 11. 2024.

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53 min
05. 08. 2025.

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch: Building the Generative Web with AI

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch has spent years obsessing over reducing the friction between having an idea and getting it online. Now with AI, he's achieving something even more ambitious: making software creation accessible to anyone with a keyboard. Guillermo explains how v0 has grown to 3 million users by focusing on reliability and quality, why ChatGPT has become their fastest-growing customer acquisition channel, and how AI is enabling “virtual coworkers” across design, development, and marketing. He shares his contrarian view that the future belongs to ephemeral, generated-on-demand applications rather than traditional installed software, and why he believes we're on the cusp of the biggest transformation to the web in its history. Hosted by Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

05. 08. 2025.

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1 h 1 min
12. 09. 2024.

MongoDB ft Dev Ittycheria - How an Early Pivot Catalyzed an Open Source Movement

MongoDB, founded in 2007, originally aimed to create a platform-as-a-service system with a new database layer. Facing competition from Google, the founders pivoted to focus solely on their database product, MongoDB—a new kind of database built for the scale of the internet era. Founder Dwight Merriman built a product that developers loved, but scaling the company proved challenging until Dev Ittycheria took the reins as CEO in 2014. As cloud computing grew, MongoDB transitioned from on-premise software to Atlas, a fully-managed cloud service. Despite initial skepticism, Atlas now represents 70% of MongoDB's revenue. As Atlas scaled, MongoDB faced another controversial decision: whether to change its open source license model to maintain its commercial moat. These pivotal decisions transformed MongoDB from a niche database to nearly $2 billion in annual revenue. Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Dwight Merriman, Dev Ittycheria and Tom Killalea Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/crucible-moments-mongodb/ 00:00 - Cold Open 00:19 - Introduction 05:30 - The NoSQL movement 09:52 - Scrapping the platform for the database 14:57 - Launching as MongoDB 19:52 - Moving to the cloud with Atlas 24:52 - Assigning a directly responsible individual 30:15 - How Atlas changed MongoDB 35:03 - Updating the licensing model to avoid “strip mining” 39:50 - Evolving back into a platform 41:26 - Executing on points of leverage

12. 09. 2024.

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44 min

We help the daring build legendary companies – from idea to IPO and beyond.