Training Data

Sequoia Capital
  • 4.2 (36)
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

Join us as we train our neural nets on the theme of the century: AI. Sonya Huang, Pat Grady and more Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to ask critical questions and develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies—and their implications for technology, business and society. 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.

  1. Block CTO Dhanji Prasanna: Building the AI-First Enterprise with Goose, their Open Source Agent

    21H AGO

    Block CTO Dhanji Prasanna: Building the AI-First Enterprise with Goose, their Open Source Agent

    As CTO of Block, Dhanji Prasanna has overseen a dramatic enterprise AI transformation, with engineers saving 8-10 hours a week through AI automation. Block’s open-source agent goose connects to existing enterprise tools through MCP, enabling everyone from engineers to sales teams to build custom applications without coding. Dhanji shares how Block reorganized from business unit silos to functional teams to accelerate AI adoption, why they chose to open-source their most valuable AI tool and why he believes swarms of smaller AI models will outperform monolithic LLMs. Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Mentioned in the episode: goose: Block’s open-source, general-purpose AI agent used across the company to orchestrate workflows via tools and APIs.  Model Context Protocol (MCP): Open protocol (spearheaded by Anthropic) for connecting AI agents to tools; goose was an early adopter and helped shape. bitchat: Decentralized chat app written by Jack Dorsey Swarm intelligence: Research direction Dhanji highlights for AI’s future where many agents (geese) collaborate to build complex software beyond a single-agent copilot. Travelling Salesman Problem: Classic optimization problem cited by Dhanji in the context of a non-technical user of goose solving a practical optimization task. Amara’s Law: The idea, originated by futurist Roy Amara in 1978, that we overestimate tech impact short term and underestimate long term. 00:00 Introduction 01:48 AI: Friend or Foe? 03:13 Block's Journey with AI and Technology 04:47 Block's Diverse Product Range 07:04 Driving AI at Block 14:28 The Evolution of Goose 27:45 Integrating Goose with Existing Systems 28:23 Goose's Learning and Recipe Feature 29:41 Tool Use and LLM Providers 31:40 Impact of AI on Developer Productivity 34:37 Block's Commitment to Open Source 39:09 Future of AI and Swarm Intelligence 43:05 Remote Work at Block 45:15 Vibe Coding and AI in Development 48:43 Making Goose More Accessible 51:28 Generative AI in Customer-Facing Products 54:09 Design and Engineering at Block 55:38 Predictions for the Future of AI

    1 hr
  2. Why Businesses Are Rejecting the AI They’ve Asked For: Agency CEO Elias Torres

    SEP 23

    Why Businesses Are Rejecting the AI They’ve Asked For: Agency CEO Elias Torres

    Elias Torres has been building AI systems since 1999, from chatbots at IBM to co-founding Drift and now Agency. He believes businesses are caught in an expectation mismatch—demanding AI while rejecting it due to imperfection anxiety. Drawing from his experience scaling HubSpot, Elias explains why human-led customer experience doesn’t scale and how Agency is building AI-first solutions that work autonomously. His contrarian approach focuses on the back-end customer experience rather than front-end AI SDRs, aiming to “deprogram the entire business world” from inefficient human-dependent processes. Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital Mentioned in the episode: Lookery: David Cancel’s first startup that Elias joined after IBM; shut down in 2009 Performable: Elias and David’s second startup, acquired by HubSpot in 2011 Drift: Elias and David Cancel’s third startup, merged with Salesloft in 2024 Klaviyo: B2C CRM company started by Andrew Bialecki after working with Elias at HubSpot Secret: Short-lived anonymous messaging app that inspired one of Drift’s early iterations Tatajuba: Kitesurfing destination in Jericoacoara, Brazil where Elias (briefly) considered retirement 00:00 Introduction 01:50 AI and Customer Expectations 03:36 Managing Emails with AI 07:21 Elias' Personal Journey 11:27 Early Career 14:28 Joining HubSpot and Scaling Challenges 16:31 Hiring Exceptional Talent 18:53 Founding Drift 20:27 Pivoting to Success with Drift 21:41 Drift's Chatbot Innovation 22:09 Challenges and Limitations of Drift 22:37 The Struggle with Customer Knowledge 23:09 Scaling Challenges and Lessons Learned 25:58 Rediscovering Purpose Post-Drift 28:55 The Birth of Agency 29:42 AI's Role in Customer Experience 35:13 Building a Sustainable Business Model 37:06 The Vision for Agency 38:22 Challenges and Opportunities with AI 41:22 Deprogramming and Embracing Change 43:23 Optimism for the AI Future 44:15 Closing Thoughts

    45 min

  3. SEP 9

    Building the "App Store" for Robots: Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf on Physical AI

    Thomas Wolf, co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, explains how his company is applying the same community-driven approach that made transformers accessible to everyone to the emerging field of robotics. Thomas discusses LeRobot, Hugging Face's ambitious project to democratize robotics through open-source tools, datasets, and affordable hardware. He shares his vision for turning millions of software developers into roboticists, the challenges of data scarcity in robotics versus language models, and why he believes we're at the same inflection point for physical AI that we were for LLMs just a few years ago. Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

    43 min

  4. SEP 2

    Deal Velocity, Not Billable Hours: How Crosby Uses AI to Redefine Legal Contracting

    Ryan Daniels and John Sarihan are reimagining legal services by building Crosby, an AI-powered law firm that focuses on contract negotiations to start. Rather than building legal software, they've structured their company as an actual law firm with lawyers and AI engineers working side-by-side to automate human negotiations. They've eliminated billable hours in favor of per-document pricing, achieving contract turnaround times under an hour. Ryan and John explain why the law firm structure enables faster innovation cycles, how they're using AI to predict negotiation outcomes, and their vision for agents that can simulate entire contract negotiations between parties. Hosted by Josephine Chen, Sequoia Capital Mentioned in this episode: Data processing agreement (DPA): GDPR-mandated contract between controllers and processors. Crosby handles DPAs as part of B2B contracting. Credence good: Economic term for services whose quality is hard to judge even after consumption. Used to explain why legal buyers value lawyers-in-the-loop and malpractice coverage.

    50 min
  5. n8n CEO Jan Oberhauser on Building the Universal AI Automation Layer

    AUG 26

    n8n CEO Jan Oberhauser on Building the Universal AI Automation Layer

    When the AI wave hit, n8n founder Jan Oberhauser faced a critical choice: become irrelevant or become indispensable. He chose the latter, transforming n8n from a simple workflow tool into a comprehensive AI automation platform that lets users connect any LLM to any application. The result? Four times the revenue growth in eight months compared to the previous six years. Jan explains how n8n’s “connect everything to anything” philosophy, combined with a thriving open source community, positioned the company to ride the AI automation wave while avoiding vendor lock-in that plagues enterprise software. Hosted by George Robson and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital Mentioned in this episode: Model Context Protocol (MCP): Open protocol that lets AI models safely use external tools and data that is used extensively by n8n for orchestration. Vector database: A database optimized for storing and searching embeddings. These “vector stores” can pair with LLMs for retrieval-augmented workflows. Granola: AI productivity tool mentioned by Jan as a recent favorite.  Her: A film that Jan says, “a few years ago, it was sci fi, and it’s now suddenly this thing that is just around the corner.”

    36 min

  6. AUG 19

    Scaling the ‘Cursor for Slides’ to $50M ARR: Gamma founder Jon Noronha

    Before ChatGPT made AI mainstream, John Noronha was building Gamma with a simple insight: everyone hates making slides but needs visual communication for high-stakes ideas. His background at Optimizely proved crucial as Gamma became a testing laboratory for AI models, running hundreds of experiments to discover that Claude excels at creative taste, Gemini wins on cost efficiency, and reasoning models actually hurt creativity. John explains how solving their own blank page problem inadvertently solved it for millions of users, turning a near-failing startup into a cash flow positive platform with 250 million presentations created. He discusses competing with PowerPoint's 500 million users while expanding beyond slides into documents, websites and visual storytelling. Hosted by Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital

    30 min

  7. AUG 12

    Delphi’s Dara Ladjevardian: How AI Digital Minds Can Scale Human Connection

    Dara Ladjevardian, founder and CEO of Delphi, is creating digital minds that allow people to scale their thoughts and availability without replacing human connection. Inspired by Ray Kurzweil’s theory of mind as a hierarchy of pattern recognizers, Dara built an adaptive temporal knowledge graph that captures how people think and reason. From helping CEOs train new hires to enabling coaches to monetize their expertise 24/7, Delphi represents a new form of conversational media. Dara explains why authentic human representation matters, how digital minds actually increase desire for real human connection, and why he believes 2026 will be the tipping point for adoption for digital minds. Hosted by Sonya Huang and Jess Lee, Sequoia Capital Mentioned in this episode: How to Create a Mind: 2012 book by Ray Kurzweil that inspired Dara The Memoirs of Akbar Ladjevardian: 2008 book about Dara’s grandfather, an Iranian industrialist, that led him to create his first “digital mind” Build: 2022 book by Tony Fadell that refers to itself as “a mentor in a box”; another inspiration for Dara The 2 Sigma Problem: 1984 paper by Benjamin Bloom about how students that receive one-on-one tutoring perform two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment

    39 min

  8. AUG 5

    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

    1h 1m
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4.2
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Join us as we train our neural nets on the theme of the century: AI. Sonya Huang, Pat Grady and more Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to ask critical questions and develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies—and their implications for technology, business and society. 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.

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