Sequoia Capital

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Canale • 3 podcast

Tecnologia

Tecnologia

Ogni settimana
Economia

Economia

Ogni 2 settimane
Imprenditorialità

Imprenditorialità

Ogni 2 settimane

20/11/2025

Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi’s Grown-Up CEO Playbook

When Intuit was born, the world ran on DOS. Forty years later it is a $180 billion powerhouse serving millions of small businesses, and Sasan Goodarzi has led its evolution from boxed software to an AI-driven platform. I’ve always admired Intuit’s track record with SMBs. I even had the chance to shadow one of its former CEOs, the legendary Brad Smith.In this episode, Sasan and I talk about what it takes to reinvent a legacy company, what he learned shadowing Amazon’s Andy Jassy, and why curiosity and grit matter more than raw talent. We talk about how to run a grown-up company without losing speed, from the mechanisms Intuit uses to challenge its own assumptions to the ways he stays close to customers through “follow-me-homes.” Sasan also shares his approach to winning in the SMB market, building effective channel partnerships, and creating second acts that actually succeed. He even tells the story of how Intuit was four years late to SaaS and still managed to come out stronger. Sasan shows that if you love the customer problem and keep disrupting yourself, you can stay young even after 40 years in business.

20/11/2025

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49 min
11/12/2025

Scaling AI Rocketships: ElevenLabs’ Mati Staniszewski & Lovable’s Anton Osika

This one’s a treat: two AI-native CEOs building some of the world’s fastest-growing startups from outside of Silicon Valley. Mati and Anton are navigating a world that’s moving 10X faster than it was when I was CEO of HubSpot. We dig into the realities of what it’s like scaling today: managing co-founder relationships when you're the only person you can complain to, delegating while staying in founder mode, building exec teams that blend experience with homegrown talent, and why lightweight planning rhythms are key when the AI tech stack changes every six months. Both share tactical advice on managing chaos, from email triage systems to no-meeting days. They open up on Europe's advantages (hungry talent, less competition) and disadvantages (thinner executive bench), the 9-9-6 work culture debate, and why the next generation of European founders could finally build trillion-dollar companies. I thought these guys shared an honest look at what it really takes to lead through hypergrowth these days.

11/12/2025

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57 min
04/12/2025

Palo Alto Networks ft Nir Zuk & Nikesh Arora - The Grudge That Transformed Cybersecurity

In the early 2000s, the cybersecurity industry was dominated by incumbents focused on high margins, not innovation. Nir Zuk tells the story of how, frustrated by this stagnant culture, he set out on his own with a radical idea: the Next-Generation Firewall. His vision was to unify dozens of security functions into a single, intelligent platform delivered via cloud—an approach everyone thought was crazy. Palo Alto Networks started as a disruptive startup with Nir sporting a "Check Point Killer" vanity license plate, and grew to dominate cybersecurity. We explore the crucible moments that defined its path: the controversial decision to insist on being a new kind of "firewall" vs. a “firewall helper,” the challenge of scaling a hyper-growth company, and the critical pivot from building everything in-house to current CEO Nikesh Arora’s aggressive acquisition strategy that remade the company for the cloud era. Nir, Nikesh, and the core leadership team offer a masterclass in product conviction, strategic transformation, and the courage to disrupt yourself before the market does it for you. Featuring: Nir Zuk, Nikesh Arora, Lee Klarich, Rajiv Batra, Mark McLaughlin, Jim Goetz, Asheem Chandra Hosted by: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

04/12/2025

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47 min
18/11/2025

How End-to-End Learning Created Autonomous Driving 2.0: Wayve CEO Alex Kendall

Alex Kendall founded Wayve in 2017 with a contrarian vision: replace the hand-engineered autonomous vehicle stack with end-to-end deep learning. While AV 1.0 companies relied on HD maps, LiDAR retrofits, and city-by-city deployments, Wayve built a generalization-first approach that can adapt to new vehicles and cities in weeks. Alex explains how world models enable reasoning in complex scenarios, why partnering with automotive OEMs creates a path to scale beyond robo-taxis, and how language integration opens up new product possibilities. From driving in 500 cities to deploying with manufacturers like Nissan, Wayve demonstrates how the same AI breakthroughs powering LLMs are transforming the physical economy. Hosted by: Pat Grady and Sonya Huang

18/11/2025

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42 min
12 FEB

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 feb

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1h 13m
23/01/2025

Nubank ft. David Vélez - An Outsider Upends the Brazilian Banking System

When Nubank started 10 years ago, a few big banks in Brazil had a stranglehold on the largest economy in Latin America: they controlled nearly all the market share, and imposed some of the highest fees and worst banking terms in the world. David Vélez was an unlikely character to challenge the system: an outsider from Colombia and Costa Rica with a Stanford MBA, David was working at Sequoia with the goal of investing in Latin American companies. When the realization struck that they couldn’t find any companies they wanted to invest in, David set out to start one himself. What followed is a literal David vs. Goliath story of epic proportions. David and co-founders Cristina Junqueira and Edward Wible explain how Nubank survived competitors' attempts to crush them, and became the largest Latin American neobank, with over 100 million customers across three countries. Host: Roelof Botha Featuring: David Vélez, Cristina Junqueira, Edward Wible, Doug Leone

23/01/2025

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50 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
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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43 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
6 GEN

Training General Robots for Any Task: Physical Intelligence’s Karol Hausman and Tobi Springenberg

Physical Intelligence’s Karol Hausman and Tobi Springenberg believe that robotics has been held back not by hardware limitations, but by an intelligence bottleneck that foundation models can solve. Their end-to-end learning approach combines vision, language, and action into models like π0 and π*0.6, enabling robots to learn generalizable behaviors rather than task-specific programs. The team prioritizes real-world deployment and uses RL from experience to push beyond what imitation learning alone can achieve. Their philosophy—that a single general-purpose model can handle diverse physical tasks across different robot embodiments—represents a fundamental shift in how we think about building intelligent machines for the physical world. Hosted by Alfred Lin and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital

6 gen

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1h 2m

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