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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CEO Amit Bendov shares how Gong evolved from a meeting transcription tool to an AI-powered revenue platform that's increasing sales capacity by up to 60%. He explains why task-specific AI agents are the key to enterprise adoption, and why human accountability will remain crucial even as AI takes over routine sales tasks. Amit also reveals how Gong survived recent market headwinds by expanding their product suite while maintaining their customer-first approach. Hosted by Sonya Huang and Pat Grady...
At AI Ascent 2025, Jeff Dean makes bold predictions. Discover how the pioneer behind Google's TPUs and foundational AI research sees the technology evolving, from specialized hardware to more organic systems, and future engineering capabilities.
Recorded live at Sequoia’s AI Ascent 2025: LangChain CEO Harrison Chase introduces the concept of ambient agents, AI systems that operate continuously in the background responding to events rather than direct human prompts. Learn how these agents differ from traditional chatbots, why human oversight remains essential and how this approach could dramatically scale our ability to leverage AI.
Recorded live at Sequoia’s AI Ascent 2025: Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor discusses why AI is driving a fundamental shift from subscription-based pricing to outcomes-based models. Learn why this transition is harder for incumbents than startups, why applied AI and vertical specialization represent the biggest opportunities for entrepreneurs and how to position your AI company for success in this new paradigm.
Recorded live at Sequoia’s AI Ascent 2025: Sam reflects on OpenAI’s evolution from a 14-person research lab to a dominant AI platform. He envisions transforming ChatGPT into a deeply personal AI service that remembers your entire life's context—from conversations to emails—while working seamlessly across all services. Sam describes the generation gap in how users engage with ChatGPT, and makes surprisingly specific predictions for the next 2-3 years of AI evolution.
Workday CEO and Sequoia partner Carl Eschenbach explains how the company is evolving its platform to handle both human and AI workers. He shares Workday’s three-pronged approach to monetizing AI through seat-based pricing, role-based agents and consumption-based API access. Eschenbach discusses why domain-specific agents with curated data will be more valuable than general-purpose models in the enterprise, and how Workday is helping enterprises navigate the transition to an AI-powered workplace ...
After pioneering reinforcement learning breakthroughs at DeepMind with Capture the Flag and AlphaStar, Max Jaderberg aims to revolutionize drug discovery with AI as Chief AI Officer of Isomorphic Labs, which was spun out of DeepMind. He discusses how AlphaFold 3's diffusion-based architecture enables unprecedented understanding of molecular interactions, and why we're approaching a "Move 37 moment" in AI-powered drug design where models will surpass human intuition. Max shares his vision for gen...
Former Outreach CEO Manny Medina discusses his new company Paid, which provides billing, pricing and margin management tools for AI companies. He explains why traditional SaaS pricing models don’t work for AI businesses, and breaks down emerging approaches like outcome-based and agent-based pricing. Manny shares why he believes focused AI applications targeting specific workflows will win over broad platforms, while emphasizing that AI companies need better tools to understand their unit economi...
Patrick Hsu, co-founder of Arc Institute, discusses the opportunities for AI in biology beyond just drug development, and how Evo 2, their new biology foundation model, is enabling a broad ecosystem of applications. Evo 2 was trained on a vast dataset of genomic data to learn evolutionary patterns that would have taken years to find; as a result, the model can be used for applications from identifying mutations that cause disease to designing new molecular and even genome scale biological system...
Amjad Masad set out more than a decade ago to pursue the dream of unleashing 1B software creators around the world. With millions of Replit users pre-ChatGPT, that vision was already becoming a reality. Turbocharged by LLMs, the vision of enabling anyone to code—from 12-year-olds in India to knowledge workers in the U.S.—seems less and less radical. In this episode, Amjad explains how an explosion in the developer population could change the economy, society and more. He also discusses his early...
Christopher O’Donnell believes the fundamental problems with CRM—incomplete data, complex workflows, siloed work products and the fear of leads falling through the cracks—can finally be solved through AI. Founder of Day.ai and former Chief Product Officer of HubSpot, Christopher explains how his team is building a system that automatically captures the full context of customer relationships while giving users transparency and control. He shares lessons from building HubSpot’s CRM and why he’s ta...
Filip Kozera sees parallels between Excel’s democratization of data analytics and Wordware’s mission to put AI development in the hands of knowledge workers. Drawing inspiration from Excel’s 750 million users (compared to 30 million software developers), Wordware is creating tools that balance the rigid structure of programming with the fuzziness of natural language. Filip explains why effective AI development requires working across multiple abstraction layers—from high-level concepts to detail...
As VP of Google Labs, Josh Woodward leads teams exploring the frontiers of AI applications. He shares insights on their rapid development process, why today’s written prompts will become outdated and how AI is transforming everything from video generation to computer control. He reveals that 25% of Google’s code is now written by AI and explains why coding could see major leaps forward this year. He emphasizes the importance of taste, design and human values in building AI tools that will shape ...
Winston Weinberg, CEO of Harvey, shares insights into building an application layer AI company that revolutionizes the legal industry. He explains how Harvey gained trust from prestigious law firms through hyper-personalized demos and deep industry expertise, tackling complex legal work that requires process data not found online. The discussion delves into Harvey's product strategy of "expanding" specialized AI capabilities and then "collapsing" them into unified workflows, evolving their business model from software to revenue-split agreements to increase access to justice and reshape the future of legal services.
OpenEvidence is transforming how doctors access medical knowledge at the point of care, from the biggest medical establishments to small practices serving rural communities. Founder Daniel Nadler explains his team’s insight that training smaller, specialized AI models on peer-reviewed literature outperforms large general models for medical applications. He discusses how making the platform freely available to all physicians led to widespread organic adoption and strategic partnerships with publi...
OpenAI’s Isa Fulford and Josh Tobin discuss how the company’s newest agent, Deep Research, represents a breakthrough in AI research capabilities by training models end-to-end rather than using hand-coded operational graphs. The product leads explain how high-quality training data and the o3 model’s reasoning abilities enable adaptable research strategies, and why OpenAI thinks Deep Research will capture a meaningful percentage of knowledge work. Key product decisions that build transparency and ...
Palo Alto Networks’s CEO Nikesh Arora dispels DeepSeek hype by detailing all of the guardrails enterprises need to have in place to give AI agents “arms and legs.” No matter the model, deploying applications for precision-use cases means superimposing better controls. Arora emphasizes that the real challenge isn’t just blocking threats but matching the accelerated pace of AI-powered attacks, requiring a fundamental shift from prevention-focused to real-time detection and response systems. CISOs ...
MongoDB product leader Sahir Azam explains how vector databases have evolved from semantic search to become the essential memory and state layer for AI applications. He describes his view of how AI is transforming software development generally, and how combining vectors, graphs and traditional data structures enables high-quality retrieval needed for mission-critical enterprise AI use cases. Drawing from MongoDB's successful cloud transformation, Azam shares his vision for democratizing AI deve...
Stef Corazza leads generative AI development at Roblox after previously building Adobe’s 3D and AR platforms. His technical expertise, combined with Roblox’s unique relationship with its users, has led to the infusion of AI into its creation tools. Roblox has assembled the world’s largest multimodal dataset. Stef previews the Roblox Assistant and the company’s new 3D foundation model, while emphasizing the importance of maintaining positive experiences and civility on the platform. Mentioned in ...
Ioannis Antonoglou, founding engineer at DeepMind and co-founder of ReflectionAI, has seen the triumphs of reinforcement learning firsthand. From AlphaGo to AlphaZero and MuZero, Ioannis has built the most powerful agents in the world. Ioannis breaks down key moments in AlphaGo's game against Lee Sodol (Moves 37 and 78), the importance of self-play and the impact of scale, reliability, planning and in-context learning as core factors that will unlock the next level of progress in AI. Hosted by: ...
Hema Raghavan is co-founder of Kumo, a company that makes graph neural networks accessible to enterprises by connecting to their relational data stored in Snowflake and Databricks. Hema talks about how running GNNs on GPUs has led to breakthroughs in performance as well as the query language Kumo developed to help companies predict future data points. Although approachable for non-technical users, the product provides full control for data scientists who use Kumo to automate time-consuming featu...
Berkeley professor Ion Stoica, co-founder of Databricks and Anyscale, transformed the open source projects Spark and Ray into successful AI infrastructure companies. He talks about what mattered most for Databricks' success -- the focus on making Spark win and making Databricks the best place to run Spark. He highlights the importance of striking key partnerships -- the Microsoft partnership in particular that accelerated Databricks' growth and contributed to Spark's dominance among data scienti...
Oege de Moor, the creator of GitHub Copilot, discusses how XBOW’s AI offensive security system matches and even outperforms top human penetration testers, completing security assessments in minutes instead of days. The team’s speed and focus is transforming the niche market of pen testing with an always-on service-as-a-software platform. Oege describes how he is building a large and sustainable business while also creating a product that will “protect all the software in the free world.” XBOW sh...
When ChatGPT ushered in a new paradigm of AI in everyday use, many companies attempted to adapt to the new paradigm by rushing to add chat interfaces to their products. Eric has a different take—he doesn’t think chatbots are the right form factor for everything. He thinks “zero-touch” automation that works invisibly in the background can be more valuable in many cases. He cites self-driving cars as an analogy—or in this case, “self-driving money.” Ramp is a new kind of finance management company...
Founded in early 2023 after spending years at Stripe and OpenAI, Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu started Dust with the view that one model will not rule them all, and that multi-model integration will be key to getting the most value out of AI assistants. In this episode we’ll hear why they believe the proprietary data you have in silos will be key to unlocking the full power of AI, get their perspective on the evolving model landscape, and how AI can augment rather than replace human capabili...
Clay is leveraging AI to help go-to-market teams unleash creativity and be more effective in their work, powering custom workflows for everything from targeted outreach to personalized landing pages. It’s one of the fastest growing AI-native applications, with over 4,500 customers and 100,000 users. Founder and CEO Kareem Amin describes Clay’s technology, and its approach to balancing imagination and automation in order to help its customers achieve new levels of go-to-market success. Hosted by:...
Can GenAI allow us to connect our imagination to what we see on our screens? Decart’s Dean Leitersdorf believes it can. In this episode, Dean Leitersdorf breaks down how Decart is pushing the boundaries of compute in order to create AI-generated consumer experiences, from fully playable video games to immersive worlds. From achieving real-time video inference on existing hardware to building a fully vertically integrated stack, Dean explains why solving fundamental limitations rather than specif...
Years before co-founding Glean, Arvind was an early Google employee who helped design the search algorithm. Today, Glean is building search and work assistants inside the enterprise, which is arguably an even harder problem. One of the reasons enterprise search is so difficult is that each individual at the company has different permissions and access to different documents and information, meaning that every search needs to be fully personalized. Solving this difficult ingestion and ranking pro...
In recent years there’s been an influx of theoretical physicists into the leading AI labs. Do they have unique capabilities suited to studying large models or is it just herd behavior? To find out, we talked to our former AI Fellow (and now OpenAI researcher) Dan Roberts. Roberts, co-author of The Principles of Deep Learning Theory , is at the forefront of research that applies the tools of theoretical physics to another type of large complex system, deep neural networks. Dan believes that DLLs,...
NotebookLM from Google Labs has become the breakout viral AI product of the year. The feature that catapulted it to viral fame is Audio Overview, which generates eerily realistic two-host podcast audio from any input you upload—written doc, audio or video file, or even a PDF. But to describe NotebookLM as a “podcast generator” is to vastly undersell it. The real magic of the product is in offering multi-modal dimensions to explore your own content in new ways—with context that’s surprisingly add...
