Julien Bek retweeted
💥 Today @tavus introduced Griffin: the first Human Interaction Model
It doesn’t just talk. It sees, listens, speaks and reacts simultaneously, in real time
It can watch your hands and coach you through solving a Rubik’s cube. Notice an object you hold up and incorporate it into the conversation. Wait while you think. Laugh and interject while you’re still speaking
In live tests, 48% of people thought Griffin was a real person, vs. <3% for previous systems
The future of AI interfaces won’t feel like prompting a machine. It’ll feel like interacting with a real person ❤️
It doesn’t just talk. It sees, listens, speaks and reacts simultaneously, in real time
It can watch your hands and coach you through solving a Rubik’s cube. Notice an object you hold up and incorporate it into the conversation. Wait while you think. Laugh and interject while you’re still speaking
In live tests, 48% of people thought Griffin was a real person, vs. <3% for previous systems
The future of AI interfaces won’t feel like prompting a machine. It’ll feel like interacting with a real person ❤️
Introducing Griffin, the first model to pass the video Turing test.
48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%. It is #1 on NVIDIA's benchmark for full-duplex AI video.
It’s the first Human Interaction Model (HIM).Community noteThe 48% figure and "video Turing test" claim are from Tavus's own study of 54 one-minute calls, not independently verified or using a standard protocol. Griffin-Lite leads NVIDIA's VideoFDB benchmark on their public leaderboard.
cellcog.ai/blog/tavus-gri…
research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/proj…
tech-ish.com/2026/10/02/tav…
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Julien Bek retweeted
Flow has raised a $50M Series B at a $750M valuation, co-led by Antonio Gracias (Valor) and Gavin Baker (Atreides) with Sequoia Capital, Roelof Botha (SpaceX, Block), and more.
When I became a mechanical engineer, I wanted to invent. In reality, 90% of the day to day execution was digital manual labour. That’s about to flip. The engineer’s role will change more profoundly than at any point since the invention of CAD, with humans focusing on invention, architecture, tradeoffs and judgement calls, and agents taking the grunt work.
Anduril, Joby, Stoke Space, Rivian & many more - Flow is now the default platform for requirements and verification for frontier hardware teams. But it’s not just next-gen anymore. Industry giants including General Motors PPU and Volkswagen & Rivian’s joint venture (RV Tech) are reshaping their core development practices with Flow’s AI.
The revolution is just starting. Models are getting better quickly at CAD, analysis, simulation, and tool use. In the next year, AI will move from integrating the work to doing the work.
One day, this shift won't just enable us to iterate faster, it will enable us to design a class of products that we could not have dreamt of before.
We’re hiring.
When I became a mechanical engineer, I wanted to invent. In reality, 90% of the day to day execution was digital manual labour. That’s about to flip. The engineer’s role will change more profoundly than at any point since the invention of CAD, with humans focusing on invention, architecture, tradeoffs and judgement calls, and agents taking the grunt work.
Anduril, Joby, Stoke Space, Rivian & many more - Flow is now the default platform for requirements and verification for frontier hardware teams. But it’s not just next-gen anymore. Industry giants including General Motors PPU and Volkswagen & Rivian’s joint venture (RV Tech) are reshaping their core development practices with Flow’s AI.
The revolution is just starting. Models are getting better quickly at CAD, analysis, simulation, and tool use. In the next year, AI will move from integrating the work to doing the work.
One day, this shift won't just enable us to iterate faster, it will enable us to design a class of products that we could not have dreamt of before.
We’re hiring.
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Congrats team @ListenLabs 💚
Listen Labs is joining @salesforce!
A year and a half ago we launched Listen, an AI platform for understanding customers, and it’s been a crazy ride ever since.
Today, we work with some of the largest companies in the world, including Microsoft, Anthropic, and Sweetgreen.
What iewer is now a full platform for understanding customers. Listen finds the right people, interviews them, analyzes what they say, and even simulates how they'll behave.
Listen’s growth quickly accelerated and while we were raising our next round, we met @Benioff.
Marc is a hero of mine. I've taken countless ideas from Behind the Cloud and watched him framemog every AI CEO on the planet. We're honored to get framemogged next.
With Salesforce, we can bring Listen to every company in the world, much faster.
To our customers, our mission remains the same.I stay CEO, @Florian stays CTO and the same team will keep building the product you rely on, now inside Salesforce AI Labs. Thank you for believing in us early.
To our team, families, and everyone who believed in us before there was much to believe in, thank you.
These years have been the most fun years of my life, and it’s still only just the beginning for Listen.
Now back to work. 🚀
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Julien Bek retweeted
Listen Labs is joining @salesforce!
A year and a half ago we launched Listen, an AI platform for understanding customers, and it’s been a crazy ride ever since.
Today, we work with some of the largest companies in the world, including Microsoft, Anthropic, and Sweetgreen.
What iewer is now a full platform for understanding customers. Listen finds the right people, interviews them, analyzes what they say, and even simulates how they'll behave.
Listen’s growth quickly accelerated and while we were raising our next round, we met @Benioff.
Marc is a hero of mine. I've taken countless ideas from Behind the Cloud and watched him framemog every AI CEO on the planet. We're honored to get framemogged next.
With Salesforce, we can bring Listen to every company in the world, much faster.
To our customers, our mission remains the same.I stay CEO, @Florian stays CTO and the same team will keep building the product you rely on, now inside Salesforce AI Labs. Thank you for believing in us early.
To our team, families, and everyone who believed in us before there was much to believe in, thank you.
These years have been the most fun years of my life, and it’s still only just the beginning for Listen.
Now back to work. 🚀
A year and a half ago we launched Listen, an AI platform for understanding customers, and it’s been a crazy ride ever since.
Today, we work with some of the largest companies in the world, including Microsoft, Anthropic, and Sweetgreen.
What iewer is now a full platform for understanding customers. Listen finds the right people, interviews them, analyzes what they say, and even simulates how they'll behave.
Listen’s growth quickly accelerated and while we were raising our next round, we met @Benioff.
Marc is a hero of mine. I've taken countless ideas from Behind the Cloud and watched him framemog every AI CEO on the planet. We're honored to get framemogged next.
With Salesforce, we can bring Listen to every company in the world, much faster.
To our customers, our mission remains the same.I stay CEO, @Florian stays CTO and the same team will keep building the product you rely on, now inside Salesforce AI Labs. Thank you for believing in us early.
To our team, families, and everyone who believed in us before there was much to believe in, thank you.
These years have been the most fun years of my life, and it’s still only just the beginning for Listen.
Now back to work. 🚀
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Julien Bek retweeted
Yannis and I led forward deployed AI engineering at Palantir.
Much of today’s boom is not true FDE work.
Companies are filling a product gap with engineering headcount. What comes after that? x.com/i/article/2104…
Much of today’s boom is not true FDE work.
Companies are filling a product gap with engineering headcount. What comes after that? x.com/i/article/2104…
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Julien Bek retweeted
Being a founder is one of the loneliest roles there is. Everyone's livelihood rides on your decisions, but no one else carries the same weight of responsibility. The hardest calls are made in isolation, and you own the outcome either way. The job is only getting harder. AI is changing what companies build, what small teams can do, how they reach customers, and the capital required to scale. The rate of change is accelerating, so the advantage goes to whoever learns and adapts fastest.
Yet the decisions that determine whether a company lives or dies haven't changed. Nailing product-market fit. Constructing an effective go-to-market engine. Building a cohesive leadership team that can scale. Knowing when to raise, and how to allocate capital you may never get a second chance to deploy. Get these wrong, and no technology saves you.
Few firms have helped founders answer those questions longer, or better, than Sequoia. For over fifty years, it has backed founders early and stayed with them as they built enduring companies. What's struck me most, though, isn't the track record. It's the institution. Sequoia has treated the firm as something to be perpetuated, not a vehicle for individual partners. It approached succession with unusual care and reinvented itself as markets shifted. That mindset is why it endured while firms that once stood beside it disappeared.
I've seen how they operate up close. My relationship with Sequoia goes back 16 years. I met Doug Leone in 2010, and for over 11 years I worked closely with Roelof Botha at MongoDB, where Sequoia was our largest investor. I saw firsthand how they behaved when we were winning and when we faced our hardest calls. The advice was thoughtful, the feedback direct, the support consistent. They understood that being a good partner doesn't mean always agreeing with you. It means being honest, staying engaged, and prioritizing the company's long-term interests.
After nearly three decades of building, leading, and investing in technology companies, I'm joining Sequoia as a Senior Advisor. As both an operator and an investor, I've lived through the questions founders face. Helping the next generation answer them is exactly where I want to spend my next chapter.
sequoiacap.com/people/dev-itt…
Yet the decisions that determine whether a company lives or dies haven't changed. Nailing product-market fit. Constructing an effective go-to-market engine. Building a cohesive leadership team that can scale. Knowing when to raise, and how to allocate capital you may never get a second chance to deploy. Get these wrong, and no technology saves you.
Few firms have helped founders answer those questions longer, or better, than Sequoia. For over fifty years, it has backed founders early and stayed with them as they built enduring companies. What's struck me most, though, isn't the track record. It's the institution. Sequoia has treated the firm as something to be perpetuated, not a vehicle for individual partners. It approached succession with unusual care and reinvented itself as markets shifted. That mindset is why it endured while firms that once stood beside it disappeared.
I've seen how they operate up close. My relationship with Sequoia goes back 16 years. I met Doug Leone in 2010, and for over 11 years I worked closely with Roelof Botha at MongoDB, where Sequoia was our largest investor. I saw firsthand how they behaved when we were winning and when we faced our hardest calls. The advice was thoughtful, the feedback direct, the support consistent. They understood that being a good partner doesn't mean always agreeing with you. It means being honest, staying engaged, and prioritizing the company's long-term interests.
After nearly three decades of building, leading, and investing in technology companies, I'm joining Sequoia as a Senior Advisor. As both an operator and an investor, I've lived through the questions founders face. Helping the next generation answer them is exactly where I want to spend my next chapter.
sequoiacap.com/people/dev-itt…
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Julien Bek retweeted
Super happy to share our intention to join forces with NVIDIA in a $12,930,300,000 acquisition 💛💚
10 years after starting Hugging Face, open-source AI is at an inflection point. Thanks to the community, we’ve shown that it can be a complement, and even an alternative, to for it to happen at larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility. That’s why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us.
In addition to doubling down on NVIDIA’s massive contributions to open-source AI (I called them the “King of American open-source AI” earlier this year), they’ve committed to strongly supporting Hugging Face and our mission while keeping the platform open, independent and compute agnostic. The founders and the team are all staying to keep pushing this mission forward.
Together, we think we can make open source the default way to build AI, with the goal of empowering 100 million AI builders to own their intelligence rather than rent it.
Excited about the next 10 years! 🤗🤗🤗
10 years after starting Hugging Face, open-source AI is at an inflection point. Thanks to the community, we’ve shown that it can be a complement, and even an alternative, to for it to happen at larger scale, it needs more compute, more support, more collaboration and more visibility. That’s why we went to talk to Jensen, who offered to do exactly that with us.
In addition to doubling down on NVIDIA’s massive contributions to open-source AI (I called them the “King of American open-source AI” earlier this year), they’ve committed to strongly supporting Hugging Face and our mission while keeping the platform open, independent and compute agnostic. The founders and the team are all staying to keep pushing this mission forward.
Together, we think we can make open source the default way to build AI, with the goal of empowering 100 million AI builders to own their intelligence rather than rent it.
Excited about the next 10 years! 🤗🤗🤗
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Julien Bek retweeted
My first day at Sequoia and a lesson from Doug Leone
"I show up to the office at maybe 4:30 AM. I felt very happy about myself hustling to the office that day.
As I'm about to push the door, I see a man on the other side, and he looks at me and goes, 'What are you doing here so 'm here to take my first call. What are you doing here so early?' And he says, 'I've already taken my first call.'" @JulienBek
One thing, single biggest lesson from Doug, what would it be @shaunmmaguire @giliraanan @DavidCahn6
"I show up to the office at maybe 4:30 AM. I felt very happy about myself hustling to the office that day.
As I'm about to push the door, I see a man on the other side, and he looks at me and goes, 'What are you doing here so 'm here to take my first call. What are you doing here so early?' And he says, 'I've already taken my first call.'" @JulienBek
One thing, single biggest lesson from Doug, what would it be @shaunmmaguire @giliraanan @DavidCahn6
Warning: this is a slightly soppy post!
I first met Julien Bek 8 years ago.
It was my first week at Atomico and his first week at Accel.
We instantly became friends. We both have parents with chronic illnesses and I think that bonded us early on. I saw what a truly good human he is. That was very clear.
Over the next 8 years, he has become one of the best investors in Europe. He is a Partner at Sequoia. He has led early rounds in bangers like Rillet and Tacto.
Despite all the success, he is one of the kindest people I know. He is an incredible son, and it makes me so proud and happy to see him become a Dad.
This was one of the most special shows I have done, uncovering the magic behind what makes Sequoia one of the best firms in the world.
Huge thanks to @DeanMeyerrr, @gradypb, @Konstantine, @shaunmmaguire, @dougleone, @nataliemiyake, @Bryce_Keane, @LucianaLix, @_georgerobson for helping to make this such a special one.
My notes below with @JulienBek.
1. What Everyone Thinks They Know About Sequoia but Actually Gets Wrong
Outsiders assume Sequoia sits back and waits for the hottest deals to come to them. In reality, every partner operates as a relentless hunter. Each person is expected to perform individually while working as a team to win the most competitive deals.
2. How Sequoia Came to Be the First Ambassador in Citadel
Sequoia won Citadel Securities’ first outside capital round because partner Constantine built a relationship with Ken Griffin that began when Constantine was a student. Years of persistence, mentorship, and trust ultimately beat transactional dealmaking.
3. The Biggest Takeaway From Every Sequoia Offsite
Decades of legendary returns show that financial engineering and ownership tweaks do not drive top-tier performance. The common thread behind Sequoia’s greatest investments is much simpler: a sponsoring partner with extraordinary conviction.
4. Why Sequoia Is Experimenting With Different Types of Decision-Making
Live IC meetings are great for fast debate, but Sequoia is incorporating asynchronous written memos to encourage slower, more deliberate thinking. Combining documented reflection with live discussion helps expose blind spots and improve investment decisions.
5. Why Sequoia Is Not Less Ownership-Centric Than Ever
Targeting high ownership reflects the scarcity of a partner’s time. An investor can realistically serve on only around 20 boards over a career. Deep, hands-on company building becomes impossible when attention is diluted across hundreds of tiny 2% positions.
6. Lesson From Don Valentine on Founder Selection
Don Valentine’s matrix of “founders you like” versus “founders who make money” shows that likability does not determine returns. Even arrogance can be the byproduct of an exceptional strength. Investors should focus on whether that defining spike creates a genuine competitive advantage.
7. The Biggest Lesson From Doug Leone
To uncover the truth in reference checks, use Doug Leone’s technique: ask for a founder’s best reference, then immediately ask, “Who would be your worst reference, and why?” Watching how their composure shifts can reveal far more about self-awareness and operating style.
(links in comments)
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Julien Bek retweeted
A GPT-3 moment for robotics⚡️
The first time it hit me was watching a Skild robot make pancakes, after seeing it done just once. It had never been trained on pancakes before.
One Skild Brain:
- doing tasks far OUTSIDE its training distribution from a single video prompt, with no task-specific fine-tuning
- executing 10+ min long-horizon tasks
- capable of instruction following
They have cracked in-context learning💥 The era of general-purpose robot intelligence is just beginning
The first time it hit me was watching a Skild robot make pancakes, after seeing it done just once. It had never been trained on pancakes before.
One Skild Brain:
- doing tasks far OUTSIDE its training distribution from a single video prompt, with no task-specific fine-tuning
- executing 10+ min long-horizon tasks
- capable of instruction following
They have cracked in-context learning💥 The era of general-purpose robot intelligence is just beginning
Introducing S1, our new foundation model that learns from one example.
It can be taught 10-minute long tasks that it has never seen before, from one video prompt without any fine-tuning.
Watch S1 operate in real-time via in-context learning:
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Harry Stebbings and I have known each other for almost ten years. I learned so much from the show when I was getting started in venture. True honour to be your guest. Couple of hot takes 💚
Warning: this is a slightly soppy post!
I first met Julien Bek 8 years ago.
It was my first week at Atomico and his first week at Accel.
We instantly became friends. We both have parents with chronic illnesses and I think that bonded us early on. I saw what a truly good human he is. That was very clear.
Over the next 8 years, he has become one of the best investors in Europe. He is a Partner at Sequoia. He has led early rounds in bangers like Rillet and Tacto.
Despite all the success, he is one of the kindest people I know. He is an incredible son, and it makes me so proud and happy to see him become a Dad.
This was one of the most special shows I have done, uncovering the magic behind what makes Sequoia one of the best firms in the world.
Huge thanks to @DeanMeyerrr, @gradypb, @Konstantine, @shaunmmaguire, @dougleone, @nataliemiyake, @Bryce_Keane, @LucianaLix, @_georgerobson for helping to make this such a special one.
My notes below with @JulienBek.
1. What Everyone Thinks They Know About Sequoia but Actually Gets Wrong
Outsiders assume Sequoia sits back and waits for the hottest deals to come to them. In reality, every partner operates as a relentless hunter. Each person is expected to perform individually while working as a team to win the most competitive deals.
2. How Sequoia Came to Be the First Ambassador in Citadel
Sequoia won Citadel Securities’ first outside capital round because partner Constantine built a relationship with Ken Griffin that began when Constantine was a student. Years of persistence, mentorship, and trust ultimately beat transactional dealmaking.
3. The Biggest Takeaway From Every Sequoia Offsite
Decades of legendary returns show that financial engineering and ownership tweaks do not drive top-tier performance. The common thread behind Sequoia’s greatest investments is much simpler: a sponsoring partner with extraordinary conviction.
4. Why Sequoia Is Experimenting With Different Types of Decision-Making
Live IC meetings are great for fast debate, but Sequoia is incorporating asynchronous written memos to encourage slower, more deliberate thinking. Combining documented reflection with live discussion helps expose blind spots and improve investment decisions.
5. Why Sequoia Is Not Less Ownership-Centric Than Ever
Targeting high ownership reflects the scarcity of a partner’s time. An investor can realistically serve on only around 20 boards over a career. Deep, hands-on company building becomes impossible when attention is diluted across hundreds of tiny 2% positions.
6. Lesson From Don Valentine on Founder Selection
Don Valentine’s matrix of “founders you like” versus “founders who make money” shows that likability does not determine returns. Even arrogance can be the byproduct of an exceptional strength. Investors should focus on whether that defining spike creates a genuine competitive advantage.
7. The Biggest Lesson From Doug Leone
To uncover the truth in reference checks, use Doug Leone’s technique: ask for a founder’s best reference, then immediately ask, “Who would be your worst reference, and why?” Watching how their composure shifts can reveal far more about self-awareness and operating style.
(links in comments)
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Agents will become the biggest customers on the internet, but most websites aren’t ready for them.
Excited to collab with vercel on this! Check it out here: is-agentic.com
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Congrats to @nicckopp and the @RilletHQ team on their $100M round at a $1B valuation, led by @ICONIQCapital
At @sequoia we’re excited to write our third check to Nic.
Rillet is redefining what the finance function should look like 🚀
At @sequoia we’re excited to write our third check to Nic.
Rillet is redefining what the finance function should look like 🚀
Today we're announcing our $100M Series C at a $1B valuation, led by @ICONIQCapital. It's our third round in 14 months and brings our total funding to over $200m
The round came together in less than 48 hours.
We weren't planning to raise. Then new ARR doubled last quarter and rs including public companies and enterprises with $2B in revenue. Rillet AI agent usage is growing 70% each month and CFOs are replacing Oracle Fusion, SAP and Workday to run their companies on Rillet.
We also announced our alliance with EY and officially partnered with more than half of the top 20 CPA firms.
@RilletHQ is creating an entirely new category of finance infrastructure. With Rillet, the ERP becomes the harness for the modern finance organization, where people and agents share the same financial data, apply the same accounting policies and controls, and work from a single, continuously updated view of the business. Agents perform increasingly complex financial work, while finance teams retain visibility, approval authority and a complete audit trail.
Thank you to our customers for believing in the mission and building the future of finance with us. We could not do this without you.
Thank you to the Rillet team. As I say often, building Rillet is our own version of sending rockets to Mars. It is incredibly difficult. You make it look easy.
Finally, thank you to our investors. To ICONIQ for leading the round and to our existing and new investors for building with us. @sequoia , @a16z, Sequoia Global Equities, @BainCapVC, @oakhcft, @BatteryVentures, @FirstMarkCap, @scalevp, and @creandum.
Back to work :)
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Probably one of the most important reads in AI right now
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗻𝗱-𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗙𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗰𝘆: 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗜𝘀 𝗔𝗜 𝗦𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗚𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴?
Frontier AI models had a giant performance gain in coding in the Fall of 2025
Then with cybersecurity in April
This is now happening with open-weight models
We are optimistic about the of a few players, we believe the world is not ready in the short-term
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Julien Bek retweeted
Open Evidence is a truly exceptional company
Most doctors in America now use the product
The founders are AI native, having previously founded Kensho
They are hiring an elite+++ young engineer to work with the founders on special projects
DM me or apply online
@OpenEvidence
Most doctors in America now use the product
The founders are AI native, having previously founded Kensho
They are hiring an elite+++ young engineer to work with the founders on special projects
DM me or apply online
@OpenEvidence
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