We invested in the seed round of
@nvidia
in 1993, and have only deepened our investments in AI since then
@sequoia
.
This year alone we have partnered with ~5 Series A AI companies and ~15 preseed and seed AI companies. 🚀
Please reach out if you’re just starting out, ideating,
Today marks the one-year anniversary of our original essay on Generative AI. Nobody could have predicted the firestorm that ensued.
In this new essay, we discuss what we got right and wrong, where we stand, and where we go from here.
Major highlight hosting
@Sequoia
AI Ascent was chatting with my friend
@Karpathy
. We chat about his future predictions for the ecosystem (an LLM OS!), elephant in the room questions (Is scale all that matters? How to compete as a young startup against OpenAI and others?),
So grateful to be included on this list. 9 years in, investing is humbling & ever so challenging, but believing early in founders in ambitious dreams & building towards that is invigorating ✨I’m grateful to my incredible team at
@sequoia
, & most of all, the founders whom I’ve
1/ ⚡️Exciting news! ⚡️
After leading the
@linear_app
Seed last year, I’m excited to share that we are leading the Series A, and that I’ll be representing
@sequoia
on the board.
Here's the story behind our partnership with the team:
As evident in the product itself,
@linear
is masterful and thoughtful in everything it does — including company building.
4.5 years in,
@linear
is a rare gem — a profitable and growing business, with a world-class product and brand, powering the best companies of our
Today, I’m thrilled to announce our $35M Series B led by
@Accel
, along with
@sequoia
,
@01Advisors
and some incredible leaders and product folks.
@linear
has never been in a better position to help companies to build great software.
Excited to be leading our
@sequoia
LATAM efforts alongside my partner
@sonyatweetybird
, from Seed through Growth! 🌎
We have been lucky to partner with
@nubank
and
@rappi
over the last decade, and can’t wait to partner with many more defining companies over the next decade!
What a journey with
@velez_david
: from Sequoia partner to founder of
@nubank
, where we partnered at seed, to the world’s most valuable challenger bank. Sequoia helps the daring build legendary companies. We see that opportunity more than ever in LatAm.
Elon is one of the 🐐. This Q&A about how he builds high performance teams, was my favorite of the day: 1) small teams of highly technical, high performers, 2) teams of vibrant energy and good vibes, 3) a culture of intensity and dedication to your best work, 4) as CEO, stay
🚀 Rec Room raises at $3.5B! 🚀
Modern Roblox coming your way. Now a top free game across iOS, Android, Xbox, PS,
@recroom
is a digital third place for kids at heart!
Excited for us to continue to *quintuple* down
@sequoia
and welcome aboard
@Mazzeo
!
“
@linear
is for small companies” they said. 3 years in, we’re thrilled to prove them wrong 🙃
Introducing: built for scale. Now the gold standard for the highest performing teams: Square Cash, Retool, Ramp
Go team!
@karrisaarinen
@jorilallo
@artman
1/ When you're the World Chess Champion and you're called to play against 10
@sequoia
company founders... Challenge accepted!!! Thanks
@MagnusCarlsen
for joining us at
#basecamp2018
🔥🔥🔥
🌲Today we're launching Storytime with Stephanie
@sequoia
🌲
No frameworks, no how-to's.
Just real stories, from founders themselves, on how they found PMF in the early days of starting a company.
To start, the special journey from
@jthandy
of
@getdbt
!
1/ 🌱 New investment! 🌱
Today I'm thrilled to share our partnership with
@sundaygrow
, a new brand redefining the outdoor home.
We're excited to be leading the the Series B
@sequoia
and joining the board. Read more about our story here:
🚨New investment!🚨
After investing in the Seed, we
@sequoia
are leading the Series A
@MiddeskHQ
!
Small biz are the ❤️ of the 🇺🇸 economy.
@KyleTMack
@kurtruppel
empower them to succeed by building critical infrastructure for business trust & identity.
@Forbes
@KylieJenner
Thrilled to see
@kyliejenner
paving the way for future founders, transforming brand building via social distribution, mobile video, & online community. Excited to partner with the influencers of tomorrow
@sequoia
!
Putting our 💸 where our 😃 is in generative AI! Excited to share
@sequoia
's partnership w
@replicatehq
, bringing the ease, speed, quality of traditional dev tools to the world of ML.
Excited to have partnered w
@bfirsh
since their founding at the Seed.
This piece is everything... beautiful, heartfelt story that brought me to tears. Read it & you’ll understand the vision, passion, & grit behind everything
@100Thieves
. THIS is the type of founder we
@sequoia
love to work with.
@Nadeshot
you are an inspiration to us all.❤️
I get asked this Q the most, so here’s the mythbuster!
❤️ We have always loved Seed - Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, all started as seed investments for us
🌱 Today 9/10 companies I work with started at the Seed
🚀 Even better? We’ve invested in every round they’ve raised since
Today, we’re excited to announce our 5th dedicated seed fund to support the next generation of early-stage founders in the US & Europe.
From Apple and Airbnb to Nubank and Stripe, we've always partnered with outlier founders early & for the long term.
Excited for this next chapter at
@graphcoreai
! 🚀
One of the most fundamentally important and transformative technologies we need for an AI driven future.
Thrilled we at
@sequoia
have partnered with the team on this journey.
"Coaching is not the same as mentoring. A coach involves exposing oneself to observation. Good coaches are another level of awareness. They give you a more accurate picture of your reality." -
@Atul_Gawande
@sequoia
#basecamp2018
Our newest piece - autonomous agents! BabyAGI, AutoGPT…
The open ⁉️in our minds:
1) Are they here to stay? What’s next?
2) Good or bad?
Share your thoughts, comment below 👀
Cc
@laurenmhreeder
@cornelius_menke
@sequoia
We’ve
@Sequoia
been hearing a lot about autonomous agents, so
@cornelius_menke
@stephzhan
and I decided to take a 👀 for ourselves to separate the hype from reality and get a glimpse of what might come next:
Excited to work w
@_mayankkishore
,
@_amankishore
,
@SreeTrips
on
@mirage_ml
.
Leveraging gen AI for content creation unleashes creativity, but any good creator wants some control!
Whether creating in 2D / 3D,
@mirage_ml
brings back control over composition, perspective, & more.
Excited to do this
@saastr
with a few of my faves in the business
@briannekimmel
@jmj
@HarryStebbings
. Come join us! 👋🏻
We’re talking all things seed investing, company building for early stage founders, and category creation! 🚀
Excited to partner with
@evervault
to build simple developer tools for data privacy.
And especially thrilled to welcome
@arcurn
into the
@sequoia
family right at the Seed for the journey to come!
.
@whatdotcd
Forever grateful for your belief in me &
@sequoia
from day 1. Thank you for trusting me even when I was new to investing, and throughout our journey together. Your support means the world to me 🙏🏻❤️ & I am so excited for the future
@makebrud
&
@dapperlabs
will build!
Today RR is a vibrant community of 10M users who have created 4M creative, diverse worlds. We strive to be (1) cross-platform, (2) accessible to everyone to play, create, & earn 💸 and 🏆(no coding rqd), (3) safe & fun for all. Here's a sneak peek at one world, ^RecHolidayMarket:
We’re taking a trip down memory lane and breaking down the seed pitch by
@nickfajt
for
@recroom
5 yrs ago!
✅ Real deck
✅ Peek into how we came to our decision to partner together
@sequoia
Come listen in, thx
@TechCrunch
@jordanrcrook
for having us!
From afar, we had long admired
@cjc
... I distinctly remember
@karrisaarinen
and I talking about her as a dream hire even two years ago, based on her impact at Stripe and Notion. Today, we are so excited to welcome her officially to the team
@linear
!
This week, I’m joining the incredible team at
@linear
as Chief Operating Officer. In looking back on the startups I’ve joined in my career, they’ve all had a combination of extraordinary founders and customers who deeply love the product...
Excited to share
@bfirsh
&
@allnoteson
's story of founding
@replicate
, which we
@sequoia
originally seeded in Feb 2021, and has since enabled the current generative AI wave and in particular OSS model ecosystem! Read the full story below.
Excited to speak at the TechCrunch conference on AR/VR tomorrow in LA alongside
@bonatsos
,
@jacob
,
@kit_ulrich
! And feel free to use this discount code: . Come say hi 😊
So proud of this team. It's been an incredible journey
@Sequoia
partnering with the
@GetEthosLife
team from Seed to today’s Series C! 🚀
Excited for the journey ahead - creating modern, ethical life insurance to protect the life you're building and the people you love. ❤️
Really excited to share that we
@sequoia
have *tripled down* on our partnership with
@viseinc
– a true testament to
@samir_vasavada
&
@RunikM
’s leadership & the dream team they’ve built!
Thrilled that Linear is now open to all! Excited to also share the Linear Method, encapsulating the principles, practices, and habits that encourage us to build magical, quality software.
We are hiring - come join us!
@karrisaarinen
@jorilallo
@artman
The big golden question for Andrej... what gives you the most meaning in your next chapter? He envisions a world with a healthy, thriving AI ecosystem, one similar to coral reefs he dreams of (yes, as vibrant as the AI generated ones!). Andrej is one of very few who could
We're so excited to share our latest Sequoia Arc cohort.
Special people + small, intimate community + a focus on iterating on your early idea to get to PMF + getting the foundation right for the *long term* = 😍
1/ This week, Sequoia welcomes our Arc Spring ‘23 cohort with companies from health tech, fintech, crypto, AI, and more – including one second-time applicant.
Let’s learn more about the companies out of stealth 👇
Thrilled to partner with
@MiddeskHQ
, building modern infrastructure to help businesses establish trust through a suite of identity and risk APIs.
Excited to welcome
@KyleTMack
and
@Kurtruppel
into the
@Sequoia
family!
Excited to share our partnership with
@vallelungabrian
& the
@DopplerHQ
team on their Seed round! Doppler's robust secrets manager will help developers maximize security & improve productivity while building core applications.
@sequoia
🚨
@getEthosLife
raises $100M @ $2.7B!🚨
Peter, Lingke, & the
@getEthosLife
team are building a rocketship company to protect families.
The avg US life insurance co is tens of billions in market cap - this is just the beginning. Join us - we’re hiring!
Coming soon… 🎬 our new
@sequoia
AI podcast: Training Data! So excited to release our fun side project
“Knowledge distillation” from our incredible guests
Subscribe here:
New podcast alert!
Join us as we train our neural nets on the theme of the century: AI.
Hosted by me,
@gradypb
,
@stephzhan
,
@kostabuhler
and more of our
@Sequoia
partners.
Training Data is a passion project years in the making. The founders and researchers in our orbit are
Rec Room is live on the App store! (world wide)(iPhone and iPad) 🚀
Thank you so much for helping us get here! All iOS players who log in before Dec 4th will be gifted the new glowing neutron visor item to show our appreciation ♥️
Nothing like this warm of a welcome as I attempt to cross the street in Beijing... note the “don’t move, don’t move, or you’ll die!” from our
@sequoia
China colleagues. Ha 😅 I love this city!
What I love most about
@linear
’s culture and philosophy: “talk to your customers and keep building stuff!”
“The simplest way to figure out what to build is just to ask people what would help them." -
@karrisaarinen
via
@sequoia
's
#SevenQuestions
.
2/ 🚨 I'm excited about everything from 🚨
- infra tooling / developer tools to 1) help companies embrace AI and 2) support a burgeoning open source ecosystem
- technical advancements around/beyond generative models, diffusion models, the Transformer architecture
- new
Love fresh twists on the third place concept. Vertical communities, new platforms & form factors, mostly online (sometimes complemented with offline experiences), & active forms of entertainment. Many opportunities to build new communities & identities for younger generations!
“Where there is a lack of understanding [between people of different cultures]... that is where fear is bred.” -Malcolm Clarke, two-time Academy Award-winner, sharing the inspiration behind Better Angels, a new film exploring US & China relations from an anthropological lens 🇨🇳🇺🇸
New milestone✨
@linear
is becoming the de facto tool of choice for category leading, fast growing companies. Proud of this team and thrilled to see the likes of
@retool
and
@loom
growing on
@linear
!
Check out our new customers page
This year, we’ve been focusing on making
@linear
for fast growing startups. We believe in streamlining workflows, and it matters even more as companies grow. We’ve added new features to help them do that.
Our newest release featuring Triage and Timeline:
Defense tech is central to our national security.
Mach is a step-function advancement to the state of the industry, with its hypersonic defense technologies that leverage state of the art hydrogen creation & combustion techniques.
Learn more & join us:
Just read this piece & am reminded of a question
@apoorva_mehta
asked me recently: why is it that Chinese tech giants expand into *all* (including each other's) industries, whereas American giants stay for the most part within limits? Thoughts?
Proud of
@getEthosLife
, making life insurance easy & accessible to all.
✅There are 11 insurance cos in the Fortune 100.
✅We’re building a modern insuretech to join their ranks: protecting families for today’s generation.
✅Massive market, incredible mission. We’re hiring!
We’ve thrilled to announce we've raised $200M in Series D funding, allowing us to enhance our best-in-class user experience, and expand our offerings to provide life insurance for all. Come join us as we protect the next million families:
So proud of the Tesla Autopilot team and very excited to see the the veil lifted on some of their work earlier today 👏 A number of people got to experience this:
Congrats
@TeamLiquidLoL
& SO thrilled to see
@100Thieves
headed to
#Worlds2018
! 💯I have so much respect & admiration for the players, coaches, and folks behind the scenes who do everything to support their team & build an incredible brand & community for their fans ❤️🙌🏻🔥
Zoom's IPO wowed Wall Street yesterday. Behind the $16B market cap bonanza: new billionaire Eric Yuan, the immigrant founder whose video conference app just works better. Here's my exclusive deep dive into how he did it, in the next issue of
@Forbes
.
Scale is all you need! Right…? Mostly - scale sets the "speed limit". What also matters: 1) high quality data and 2) the right talent on the algorithms side, on the infrastructure side to train these models at scale, and on the data side. Gives hope that there is room for
👇🏻 That’s the smile from bringing comfort and peace of mind to families everywhere 🤗 Thrilled for this next chapter
@getEthoslife
! Welcome aboard
@Accel
&
@GVteam
.
We believe that getting life insurance should be simple - no hidden fees or fine print, or someone trying to sell you something you don’t want. And we’re just getting started 🙌🏽
Best recent surprise: reconnecting with college friend
@marcelpclash
and discovering he has become 🏆
#2
globally in
@ClashRoyale
and 💯 an incredible gaming content creator.
@Clash_with_Ash
I'm trying to convince him to "come out of semi-retirement" full time! Please help 😉
This was one of my favorite pro vs pros I've ever recorded.
@marcelpclash
comes out of semi-retirement to try to put an end to the
@Pompeyo4CR
win streak! Tune in tonight on CWA for the results :)
The perfect union… so excited for this next chapter with
@makebrud
and
@dapperlabs
. The best in the business in community building and social storytelling - bringing DAOs accessible to the mainstream consumer!
Not investor, just fan. Love products like
@hqtrivia
creating delightful live mobile video games / entertainment. Excited to see new wave of exp across other categories / shows too.
Latest milestone:
👯♀️1.2M peak active players
👀401K viewers thru Q12
💰$30K in prizes in wk
Thrilled to partner with
@getEthoslife
to build the future of life insurance - making it simple, fast, and convenient online to provide security and peace of mind for your family. Excited for the journey ahead!
@roelofbotha
@sequoia
We launched out of stealth today with great financing partners including
@sequoia
,
@RocNation
,
@TeamDowney1965
,
@KDTrey5
's The Durant Company and Will Smith’s Smith Family Circle. We're Ethos and we're excited to announce we're here for you
#GetEthos
:
Interesting data from the
@Okta
integration network: best of breed saas & office 365 suite go hand in hand
77% of Okta’s customers with Office 365 are also on Slack, Zoom, Box, AWS, Salesforce or G-Suite
@Zoom
&
@Slack
esp on 🔥, Box losing share, Salesforce stagnant
Patience is a virtue. We believe it’s also smart business.
The traditional 10-year VC fund cycle no longer makes sense for today’s world, or tomorrow’s founders.
Introducing The Sequoia Fund.
(1/2)
This week also marks an exciting milestone with
@recroom
as the
#1
free-to-play game on
@Xbox
, after our launch last week...Ahead of Rocket League, COD War Zone, Fortnite, and Roblox 😍
Excited to share that at
@linear_app
we are looking for great people to join the team and our mission to streamline the way software is built. We wrote about our philosophy and what are aiming for with Linear.
Let’s bring some magic back to software!
Autonomous agents have been the talk of the town the last month. AutoGPT was one of the fastest starred repos in Github history. But how far are we from AI agents taking over? To better understand, I dug into the code.
Here's what I found:
More below 👇