Sequoia Capital

Today we're launching the Listen Future Founder Program. A cohort for exceptional engineers excited about becoming founders. Cohort members join Listen as engineers and gain firsthand experience building products, talking to customers, and operating inside a high-growth startup. The program includes mentorship from Listen's founders, workshops led by investors and operators from Sequoia, Conviction, Pear, and Ribbit, direct customer exposure, Listen credits for testing ideas, and ownership of real company initiatives. Applications for the founding cohort are now open. Apply today: https://lnkd.in/gqZ4EiK2

🚨 NEW Episode on Long Strange Trip: David Senra creator of Founders Podcast David has studied the minds of more generational company builders than anyone alive, from Jesus of Nazareth to Jensen Huang. I sat down with him to reverse engineer the psychological frameworks of history's greatest titans. ⚡ 6 Lessons that will stick with me from this convo: 1. Taste is real, and it starts with shutting up and actually listening. 2. On Negative Self-Talk: Many elite CEOs are fueled in their early days by a dark, chaotic mind and intense self-criticism. They categorically refuse to sleep on their wins, obsessing over everything that is currently broken. I was guilty of this too. To survive a multi-decade career without self-destructing, that initial fuel source must eventually convert from negative anxiety into a love for the craft. 3. We need to stop trying to heavily manage or over-advise elite entrepreneurial talent. The greatest founders are irrepressible forces of nature who will relentlessly hunt down the specific knowledge and frameworks they need to win. They are not passively discovered by the market or by venture capitalists; VCs can't help them out of a bad quarter, or year. They violently force the world to recognize their existence. 4. Small egos don't build big companies. Elite founders are driven by control, not money. Money is just a side effect. 5. Co-Founder Dynamics: Despite the modern dogma that you need a balanced co-founding team to succeed, historical precedent shows that a singular driving force almost always takes over. From Henry Ford operating as an autocrat to Steve Jobs refounding Apple alone, the equal partnership rarely stands the ultimate test of time. Even brilliant minds like Charlie Munger recognized they had to deliberately subjugate their own massive egos to support a singular talent like @WarrenBuffett 6. Focus is the whole game: "Mute the world and build your own" as he says. True focus is your willingness to say no to incredibly good ideas because they distract from the truly great ones. This episode has so many lessons, we could have talked for hours. Link to episode in comments 👇

Agents have reached hardware. We are launching Flow v3, the Agentic Platform for Physical Engineering. We've spent over a year building it in secret, alongside the best hardware companies and AI research labs. An agent can now do real engineering work: change a requirement, push the update into your CAD and simulation tools, and flag every test that needs to rerun. Iterations/learning cycles that took months are being reduced to days. Agents are the biggest shift in how we engineer hardware since CAD. The core innovation for the CAD era was the parametric model. The core innovation for the Agentic Era is Flow's Systems Graph. The systems graph is a living model of every requirement, design model, test, analysis and every connection between them. It gives every agent the full context of the system, so every change stays consistent across the whole design. Engineers and agents work side by side on the same system. Engineers get to focus on architecture - the decisions that matter -while thousands of agents churn through rewriting reports, rerunning analysis and simulation, and triggering tests. Reusable rockets, self-driving cars, small modular reactors, robots that make decisions, the most complex machines ever built, are defined by millions of interconnected requirements, far beyond what any human team can keep aligned on its own. Rivian, Joby, Astranis, Skydio, Radiant, and the most ambitious hardware programs already build on Flow. More on the launch in the comments.

AI is being heralded as an awesome panacea for human toil, with the potential to cure cancer and make life safer. It's also being feared as the source of anxiety, job loss and turmoil. In the end, history suggests that it will follow other technological paths and just be normalized into the mundane. When telecommunications was first introduced, the public reaction ranged form the “the end of war” to the core “source of anxiety” in one technological moment! Sound familiar? In this post I explore this reality and dive into what it feels like to live through the three stages of AI: Awe, Fear and Normalization.

I'm proud to share that Glean has surpassed $300M ARR, just five months after crossing $200M and growing ~3x over the past 15 months. This is an exciting milestone for Glean, and it's a signal about where the enterprise AI market is heading. We’ve long believed the real challenge in enterprise AI is not access to models. It is grounding AI in how a company actually works: its people, knowledge, workflows, permissions, and systems. That’s even clearer now. The companies creating real value with AI are not just adopting better models. They are building systems that understand their business well enough to deliver reliable outcomes at scale. That is the real moat, and it is what we’ve been building at Glean: an unrivaled context layer for enterprise AI. That context has to work across the business, not just inside a single team or use case. We see that in how customers adopt Glean: more than 85% use it across five or more job functions. It also has to meet the security and governance demands of complex enterprises. We see that in who is choosing Glean: our Fortune 500 customer count nearly doubled year over year, including eBay, Dell Technologies, Booking.com, WD, Dominion Energy, Nationwide, and Zillow. And it has to make economic sense as usage grows. In our recent benchmark with Claude Cowork, Glean was preferred roughly 2.5x as often as off-the-shelf MCP tools and used 30% fewer tokens on average. Better context improves both quality and efficiency. I enjoyed talking with CNBC's Deirdre Bosa about this broader shift. In enterprise AI, the winners will not be defined by better models alone. They will be defined by who builds the strongest foundation for enterprise context. Thank you to our customers, partners, and team for helping us build the future of enterprise AI. We're bringing together the enterprise AI community at Glean:GO. Hope to see you there. https://lnkd.in/gK4d_qQF

When Cresta crossed $100M ARR, our CEO, Ping Wu, sat down with our Chairman of the Board, Douglas Leone, and Cresta board member, Carl Eschenbach (the former CEO of Workday), for a conversation on the power of customer experience AI. From the transformation of customer relationships to new AI-powered experiences, the discussion dives into what this moment means for businesses everywhere ⬇️

We’ve raised $46 million in Series B funding, co-led by Thrive Capital and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Emergence Capital and Pruven Capital, to help our customers insure more of the world’s risk. Pace agents have completed more than 250,000 critical insurance workflows, growing 3x every quarter. The world’s leading insurers, like Prudential, WTW and Convex, trust Pace to scale back-office operations. 60% of the world's losses last year went uninsured. Closing this $9 trillion protection gap starts with AI-native operations. When you change the economics of operations, the new product that wasn't possible before can launch, the small business gets the same quality of service as a 10,000-life enterprise, and the claim is paid in hours instead of weeks. Thank you to our customers, some of the largest insurers in the world, who are partnering with us to build this future. Today’s announcement is grounded in the trust the industry has placed in Pace, and the responsibility we feel to keep earning it.