Sequoia helps daring founders build legendary companies from idea to IPO and beyond. We aim to be the first true believers in tomorrow’s most consequential companies. We partner with a few outliers each year and go all-in, providing them with the hands-on help required at every stage of the company building journey. Our expertise comes from nearly 50 years of working with legendary founders like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Jan Koum, Brian Chesky, Tony Xu, Lin Qiao, Eric Yuan, Christina Cacioppo, and Patrick Collison. In aggregate, Sequoia-backed companies account for more than 30% of NASDAQ's total value. The vast majority of the money we invest has been on behalf of nonprofits and schools like the Ford Foundation, Mayo Clinic and MIT, which means most of the returns we generate benefit these great causes.
Agentic AI is fundamentally transforming Google’s product ecosystem, moving from simple language models to autonomous agents that execute complex tasks on behalf of users. This shift, exemplified by the "agentic Gemini era," establishes a new through line across Google’s product suite, prioritizing user outcomes over t...
The AI revolution represents a fundamental shift from retrieval-based computing to generative intelligence, establishing a new industrial infrastructure comparable to the Industrial Revolution. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang characterizes this transformation through the "AI factory," a system that processes energy into tokens...
Great founders distinguish themselves through singular focus and obsession, often functioning as missionaries rather than mere managers. This drive frequently stems from formative life experiences, such as complex relationships with fathers, which fuel a relentless work ethic. While modern tech culture highlights found...
Composer 2, an agentic coding model developed by Cursor, demonstrates the strategic shift of application companies toward building specialized foundation models. By allocating model weights exclusively to software engineering tasks, Cursor achieves higher performance and lower costs compared to general-purpose models. ...
Notion CEO Ivan Zhao details the "jazz band" organizational philosophy, which prioritizes agility and improvisation over rigid, marching-band-style management. This approach, often termed "jazz mode," leverages AI to streamline information flow and decision-making within a flat, hierarchical structure. Zhao emphasizes ...
Neural networks are revolutionizing semiconductor design by achieving superhuman performance in layout optimization, a process previously reliant on thousands of human experts. Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, co-creators of Google’s AlphaChip, are leveraging this technology through their new venture, Recursive Intel...
The current paradigm of computing, rooted in 80-year-old von Neumann architecture, faces a critical energy wall as AI demand outpaces physical efficiency limits. While biological brains achieve complex intelligence at approximately 20 watts, modern digital systems consume gigawatts, necessitating a shift toward more ef...
ElevenLabs addresses the audio domain by building frontier models that capture human emotion and intonation, born from the founders' desire to solve the monotone dubbing prevalent in Polish media. The company maintains a competitive edge by prioritizing high-quality research, rapid monetization, and small, flat-structu...
Software development is undergoing a fundamental transformation as AI agents shift from simple code completion to autonomous, end-to-end project management. Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, notes that for many modern codebases, AI now handles 100% of development, allowing engineers to focus on higher-level product...
Waymo’s evolution from a 2009 Google project to a leader in autonomous transportation centers on a commitment to safety and long-term technical persistence. Dmitri Dolgov, a key figure in the company’s development, highlights the "Waymo Foundation Model"—a multimodal, end-to-end architecture integrating driver, simulat...
The rapid evolution of AI capabilities is fundamentally reshaping software development, organizational structures, and the nature of human productivity. Compute demand remains insatiable, necessitating aggressive infrastructure scaling to meet the unlimited demand for intelligence. Modern models have transcended simple...
The AI revolution represents a fundamental shift in computation, moving beyond simple information distribution to autonomous processing. This era is defined by the transition from incremental productivity gains to transformative capabilities, where long-horizon agents perceive environments, execute complex tasks, and p...
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