Sequoia Capital

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チャンネル • 3個の番組

テクノロジー

テクノロジー

アップデート：毎週
ビジネス

ビジネス

アップデート：隔週
起業

起業

アップデート：隔週

5月26日

How Cursor Trained Composer on Fireworks: Distributed Infrastructure for High-Performance RL

Cursor's Federico Cassano and Fireworks' Dmytro Dzhulgakov explain how they collaborated to build Composer as a specialized foundation model. The core insight: models have finite capacity in their weights, and allocating all those bits to the singular task of software engineering in Cursor frees the model to be both better at the task and far more efficient at inference. Rather than start from pre-training and work up, they took an unconventional top-down approach — mid-training and RL on top of an open-source base to get a useful model into users' hands fast, then specializing the model around real Cursor usage. With Fireworks providing distributed infrastructure, Composer delivers frontier-class coding performance with the speed of a much smaller model. Hosted by Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital

5月26日

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46分
5月21日

Notion’s Ivan Zhao: The Refounder

Ivan Zhao, founder and CEO of Notion, joins me to introduce a new contender in the founder mode debate: jazz mode. Ivan has a different take than Jack Dorsey's circular org chart or Brian Armstrong's player-coach approach. He thinks hierarchy is human nature, and that you can't flatten it away but you can build a company that improvises like a jazz band instead of marching in formation. Notion has roughly 60 ex-founders on staff and a deliberately decentralized structure to make that work. We get into why Ivan rebuilt his engineering org around a barbell — super junior ICs paired with very senior architects — which is the opposite of what most AI-pilled CEOs are doing right now. He explains why building with language models is "more like brewing beer than engineering a bridge," and how Notion's first candidate interview no longer involves a resume. Ivan is the king of refoundings. He's done it twice, once from a small apartment in Kyoto with five employees left, once from Cancun the day he got early access to GPT-4. When I was running HubSpot, I described our scale-up years as boring compared to what's happening now. Ivan's advice for any CEO who's calcified and wondering if it's time to blow it up: feel the AGI first, then trust your body when it tells you to move. 00:00 Introduction 02:22 From Founder Mode to AI Org 11:00 Hiring for Taste and Agency 24:28 Refounding Notion in Kyoto 30:27 Craft Versus Commerce 32:26 When to Refound 34:07 GPT-4 Refounding Shock 45:35 Leadership and Founder Energy 53:17 Sales Culture and Closing Thoughts

5月21日

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1時間3分
5月8日

ElevenLabs' Mati Staniszewski: How Voice Becomes the Interface for Everything

Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, joins Sequoia partner Andrew Reed at AI Ascent 2026 to talk about how a four-year-old company built a frontier audio AI business with just over 400 people and over $400M in revenue. He explains why audio was overlooked in 2022 when the rest of AI was chasing text and images, why ElevenLabs chose to monetize from day one rather than raise indefinitely, and why he believes voice will be the primary interface for agents, robots, and the next generation of computing. Also: why emotional intelligence is the next frontier in voice, and what happens when one voice agent realizes it's talking to another.

5月8日

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27分
2月26日

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.

2月26日

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49分
5月1日

OpenAI's Greg Brockman: Why Human Attention Is the New Bottleneck

Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, joins Sequoia partner Alfred Lin at AI Ascent 2026 for a conversation that spans the full OpenAI stack. He explains why the company will never have enough compute, why he believes we're 80% of the way to AGI, and why the agentic coding tools that wrote 20% of your code last December are now writing 80% of it. Also: why human attention is becoming the scarcest resource in AI-augmented work, and what it might be like to one day run an organization of 100,000 agents.

5月1日

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28分
1月21日

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

1月21日

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40分
4月30日

Demis Hassabis on Building DeepMind, AlphaFold, and the Final Stretch to AGI

Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and 2024 Nobel laureate in chemistry for AlphaFold, joins Sequoia partner Konstantine Buhler at AI Ascent 2026 for a wide-ranging conversation about the path to AGI and what comes after. He explains why he believes AGI is achievable by 2030, why drug discovery could collapse from ten years to days, and why we should think of information, not matter or energy, as the most fundamental substance in the universe. Also: what Einstein would tell us about the limits of today's models, and why the next year or two will be critical for humanity.

4月30日

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27分
3月12日

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.

3月12日

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1時間3分
5月19日

Rebuilding IT From the Ground Up for the AI Age: Serval's Jake Stauch

Jake Stauch, founder and CEO of Serval, is building a ServiceNow for the AI era. His most contrarian bet is that the product should look like boring old enterprise software, but with unlimited intelligence. Serval's architecture splits work between two agents: an admin agent that uses code generation to spin up workflows from natural language, and a help desk agent that can only act through the tools admins explicitly approve. Jake explains why his team uses OpenAI models for end-user interaction and Anthropic models for code generation, why new model releases sometimes have to be rolled back when prompt tuning breaks, and why he's not worried the foundation labs will come downmarket. He also makes the case for "fewer, better" hiring as the only durable moat in a world where products may need to be rebuilt every six months. Hosted by Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

5月19日

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38分
4月30日

Andrej Karpathy: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering

Andrej Karpathy (co-founder of OpenAI, former head of AI at Tesla, and now founder of Eureka Labs) talks with Sequoia partner Stephanie Zhan at AI Ascent 2026 about what's changed in the year since he coined "vibe coding." He explains why he's never felt more behind as a programmer, why agentic engineering is the more serious discipline taking shape on top of vibe coding, and why we should think of LLMs not as animals but as ghosts: jagged, statistical, summoned entities that require a new kind of taste and judgment to direct. He also touches on Software 3.0, the limits of verifiability, and why you can outsource your thinking but never your understanding.

4月30日

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30分

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