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Someone asked me today what's the most motivating thing I've ever read. It's this quote: "The definition of hell--on your last day on earth, the person you became met the person you could have become."
The most profound regret is not about things you did but about the things you didn’t do—the missed opportunities, the untapped talents, the unlived dreams. It serves as a powerful reminder to live fully and intentionally and to be the version you could have been if you had not been held back by fear, doubt, shame or complacency.
The most profound regret is not about things you did but about the things you didn’t do—the missed opportunities, the untapped talents, the unlived dreams. It serves as a powerful reminder to live fully and intentionally and to be the version you could have been if you had not been held back by fear, doubt, shame or complacency.
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Dev Ittycheria retweeted
Announcing No Limit: a bot building tournament hosted by @sequoia, @citsecurities and @OpenAI.
Teams of 1 or 2 get 60 minutes to build a pokerbot from scratch.
Agents play thousands of games across six scored rounds.
Open to university students and recent grads (‘25 or ‘26).
ittsburgh and the Bay Area in early November. Top five teams from each fly to the Finals. $100K grand prize.
Teams of 1 or 2 get 60 minutes to build a pokerbot from scratch.
Agents play thousands of games across six scored rounds.
Open to university students and recent grads (‘25 or ‘26).
ittsburgh and the Bay Area in early November. Top five teams from each fly to the Finals. $100K grand prize.
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What’s the fastest anyone has been able to cut over from an old iPhone to a new iPhone?
Time is defined by when you initiate the set up of a new phone to never again touching the old phone.
No matter the automations built in to migrate, it’s still a headache.
Time is defined by when you initiate the set up of a new phone to never again touching the old phone.
No matter the automations built in to migrate, it’s still a headache.
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Everything about how we build and scale businesses seems to be changing at an unprecedented pace. Long-held assumptions are being challenged, and many of the old playbooks are being thrown out. But the more things change, the more they stay the same. Technology changes, business models evolve, but the fundamentals of great leadership don't.
I shared this advice with our company's senior leaders today.
Three of the worst things a leader can do are refuse to hear bad news, avoid conflict, and try to please everyone. Why is this the case?
If you don’t want to hear bad news, you can’t solve problems. And solving problems is one of a leader’s most important responsibilities. Ignoring problems doesn’t make them go away.
Avoiding conflict only creates more conflict. Unresolved issues fester, frustrations build, and relationships deteriorate.
Trying to please everyone ultimately pleases no one. People quickly recognize when you say different things to different people, creating a false sense of alignment that erodes trust.
The litmus test of any team, especially a leadership team, is its ability to have hard conversations about real problems and come together to resolve them. That requires trust, candor, humility, and above all, courage.
The courage to hear uncomfortable truths, confront difficult issues, put the team’s success ahead of individual egos, and tell people what they need to hear, not just what they want to hear.
This sounds like common sense, but as we know, common sense isn't very common because it requires emotional fortitude. Looking back on my career, the toughest leadership decisions never tested my intelligence. They tested my courage.
I shared this advice with our company's senior leaders today.
Three of the worst things a leader can do are refuse to hear bad news, avoid conflict, and try to please everyone. Why is this the case?
If you don’t want to hear bad news, you can’t solve problems. And solving problems is one of a leader’s most important responsibilities. Ignoring problems doesn’t make them go away.
Avoiding conflict only creates more conflict. Unresolved issues fester, frustrations build, and relationships deteriorate.
Trying to please everyone ultimately pleases no one. People quickly recognize when you say different things to different people, creating a false sense of alignment that erodes trust.
The litmus test of any team, especially a leadership team, is its ability to have hard conversations about real problems and come together to resolve them. That requires trust, candor, humility, and above all, courage.
The courage to hear uncomfortable truths, confront difficult issues, put the team’s success ahead of individual egos, and tell people what they need to hear, not just what they want to hear.
This sounds like common sense, but as we know, common sense isn't very common because it requires emotional fortitude. Looking back on my career, the toughest leadership decisions never tested my intelligence. They tested my courage.
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This👇
The smartest Indians continue to come to build in the US for the simple reason that the economic incentives are far far better.
Perplexity ($20B), Skild ($14B+), Baseten ($13B), Together ($8B), Glean ($8B), Modal ($5B), Rubrik ($25B), Harness ($5B), Blacksmith, Parallel, Greptile, CodeRabbit, Composio, Distyl ($2B), Resolve, Luma, Cartesia, Wispr, dMatrix, Arize and many more - all started by at least one Indian-born founder.
The US is a far easier to raise capital in with far less dilution. Most Indian companies are switching where they're domiciled to get access to the US capital markets. Every single Indian venture firm is trying very hard to invest in the US or risk not participating in the AI race (ironically, the management fees of venture firms are so high in India relatively that this is the one group that net of carry actually has incentive to be in India because they take home well north of a living wage whether or not funds perform do)
While Zomato ($35B now, $8B at IPO) might be the biggest outcome in Indian venture, Cursor ($60B), Reflection (potentially $20B+), World Labs ($8B), OpenRouter ($8B), HuggingFace ($12B) and of course the $1T+ big labs quickly make those outcomes seem small and happen on a much smaller time scale, with much higher IRR.
Engineers at these startups regularly get paid $1M/yr, and make $10M+ on exit. Even in BigTech, it is trivial to pull up levels fyi and see that if you're L6/L7+ with ~10 years of experience, you're making $1M/yr there too. And of course, we all know the slew of Indian CEOs of companies here, not to mention a huge bench of lesser known executives across the board in public and private companies.
I say all this because every time there is a slight immigration hiccup in the US, I hear the online pleas to "build in India", I struggle to understand why most engineers, academics or founders would do that net of desire to be close to family, failure to obtain visa and devout patriotism.
This is not a superiority thing or a US v India thing. The economic incentives at least for technologists to being in the US outweigh India by at least an order of magnitude.
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Agree that product quality will matter more than distribution or inertia once agents are doing the research.
A lot of database choices are still shaped by priors and conventional wisdom rather than a clear look at the tech available today.
When agents evaluate options in an unbiased, unemotional way, MongoDB looks a lot more compelling than those priors suggest, especially against relational systems that are bolting on solutions and trying to adapt their architectures for scale and elasticity required in the AI era.
A lot of database choices are still shaped by priors and conventional wisdom rather than a clear look at the tech available today.
When agents evaluate options in an unbiased, unemotional way, MongoDB looks a lot more compelling than those priors suggest, especially against relational systems that are bolting on solutions and trying to adapt their architectures for scale and elasticity required in the AI era.
Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy:
• Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies.
• How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be.
• In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good!
• It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.)
• A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to).
• Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big.
• Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions.
Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.
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Dev Ittycheria retweeted
What makes a durable company in 2026?
“The companies that are more durable are the ones that are creating a data loop where usage creates data that no one else has.
The data makes the product better, the product attracts more usage, and you create that virtuous cycle.
Someone but they do not have all the interactions that you have.” @dittycheria
Love to hear your thoughts @sarahtavel @JamesCurrier @onecaseman @auren
“The companies that are more durable are the ones that are creating a data loop where usage creates data that no one else has.
The data makes the product better, the product attracts more usage, and you create that virtuous cycle.
Someone but they do not have all the interactions that you have.” @dittycheria
Love to hear your thoughts @sarahtavel @JamesCurrier @onecaseman @auren
What a nuts week it has been in tech!
- Factory vs Cognition: The Battle Continues
- Vinod Khosla Tweets a Storm
- OpenAI Hits $70BN Run Rate
- Salesforce Buys Listen Labs for $2B
More heat in this than a Sequoia tranched round!!! 😉
My notes below with @jasonlk, @rodriscoll, and @dittycheria
1. Why Is It Wrong for CROs to Jump Jobs So Easily?
CROs recruit their teams by selling them on the company, the vision and how the role could transform their families' finances. A CRO who leaves for a direct competitor burns their reputation with everyone they recruited. Moving to a company in a different space for a better opportunity is common, but flipping straight to a direct rival is far rarer.
2. CROs Are Promiscuous and This Is How They Find Jobs
The CRO role carries high risk and heavy turnover, and when a hot job opens up, CROs tend to move very quickly. Roughly 95% of CROs would likely see a jump to a competitor as normal, since that is how many of them found their last job. For CEOs, watching an advisor leave to join a competitor is still profoundly frustrating.
3. What Are You Doing Vinod Khosla?
Vinod Khosla's tweet handed every firm competing with Khosla Ventures a weapon on deals. Rival investors can now ask founders, "Is this the partner you want when things go bad?" The reaction was shocking, given that Khosla Ventures has a great team.
4. Should We Invest in ElevenLabs at 22 Billion?
At a $22B valuation, ElevenLabs merits up to 10% of the fund. Its lead keeps widening despite intense competition, backed by strong growth, surprisingly impressive margins and sub-millisecond voice response times. Voice is one of the 10 most important underpinnings of agentic applications, and ElevenLabs could soon be approaching $1B in revenue.
5. What Makes a Durable Company in 2026?
Durable companies create a data loop where users generate data no one else has, that data improves the product, and a better product attracts more usage. Competitors can copy the features, but they cannot copy the user interactions behind them.
6. When Agents Pick You, It's a Force of Nature
Vercel has reached $600M in ARR, with agents now driving 50% of its new business, up from 3% at the start of the year. Agents form strong opinions about which vendors to use, and those choices are hard to argue with. Companies now need agents to find them and understand what they sell, because missing from an AI-generated answer is like being invisible on Google.
(links in comments)
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Even though it was a busy week, it was great to discuss what's happening in tech with this amazing trio and share my perspective. Thanks for having me.
What a nuts week it has been in tech!
- Factory vs Cognition: The Battle Continues
- Vinod Khosla Tweets a Storm
- OpenAI Hits $70BN Run Rate
- Salesforce Buys Listen Labs for $2B
More heat in this than a Sequoia tranched round!!! 😉
My notes below with @jasonlk, @rodriscoll, and @dittycheria
1. Why Is It Wrong for CROs to Jump Jobs So Easily?
CROs recruit their teams by selling them on the company, the vision and how the role could transform their families' finances. A CRO who leaves for a direct competitor burns their reputation with everyone they recruited. Moving to a company in a different space for a better opportunity is common, but flipping straight to a direct rival is far rarer.
2. CROs Are Promiscuous and This Is How They Find Jobs
The CRO role carries high risk and heavy turnover, and when a hot job opens up, CROs tend to move very quickly. Roughly 95% of CROs would likely see a jump to a competitor as normal, since that is how many of them found their last job. For CEOs, watching an advisor leave to join a competitor is still profoundly frustrating.
3. What Are You Doing Vinod Khosla?
Vinod Khosla's tweet handed every firm competing with Khosla Ventures a weapon on deals. Rival investors can now ask founders, "Is this the partner you want when things go bad?" The reaction was shocking, given that Khosla Ventures has a great team.
4. Should We Invest in ElevenLabs at 22 Billion?
At a $22B valuation, ElevenLabs merits up to 10% of the fund. Its lead keeps widening despite intense competition, backed by strong growth, surprisingly impressive margins and sub-millisecond voice response times. Voice is one of the 10 most important underpinnings of agentic applications, and ElevenLabs could soon be approaching $1B in revenue.
5. What Makes a Durable Company in 2026?
Durable companies create a data loop where users generate data no one else has, that data improves the product, and a better product attracts more usage. Competitors can copy the features, but they cannot copy the user interactions behind them.
6. When Agents Pick You, It's a Force of Nature
Vercel has reached $600M in ARR, with agents now driving 50% of its new business, up from 3% at the start of the year. Agents form strong opinions about which vendors to use, and those choices are hard to argue with. Companies now need agents to find them and understand what they sell, because missing from an AI-generated answer is like being invisible on Google.
(links in comments)
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Enterprises can finally have their cake and eat it too. They get a leading US open source model with near frontier-level intelligence that’s 3-4x more efficient (less costly) for important use cases like coding and agentic workloads.
Artificial Analysis has been given access by Reflection and is independently benchmarking Beam
Early indicators suggest Beam will be one of the most token-efficient open models we've seen for its level of intelligence.
Congratulations @reflection_ai on the announcement!
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🚨Breaking. There's been a pneumonic plague outbreak at a BSL-3 lab in Siberia, Russia.🚨
"Nearly 200 People Under Observation After Irkutsk Lab Worker Dies From Plague" - Moscow Times
This is fact, and also the inciting incident in my book BIOLOGICAL WAR: A SCENARIO, which is unnerving.
Will post more as I learn more, including from Russian speaking sources🧵
shorturl.at/De4kW
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Pure gold.
My fav — People become what the room expects of them. If the room lets a standard slide, it slides.
If the room corrects the small thing every single day, people stop believing small things are small.
My goal is to build an environment where success is inevitable.
My fav — People become what the room expects of them. If the room lets a standard slide, it slides.
If the room corrects the small thing every single day, people stop believing small things are small.
My goal is to build an environment where success is inevitable.
I've coached over 30 Olympic gold medals.
I've worked with some of the greatest athletes in history.
Here are the lessons I wish more people understood:🧵
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So good.
I’ve always believed the best founders (& leaders) can balance two ways of thinking simultaneously. One part of their mind sees what’s possible and believes they can build it, even when the odds are against them. Without that belief they would never start a company.
The other part sees things as they are. It recognizes what’s working and what isn’t and addresses problems head on. Without that intellectual honesty they would never get through the hard times.
I’ve always believed the best founders (& leaders) can balance two ways of thinking simultaneously. One part of their mind sees what’s possible and believes they can build it, even when the odds are against them. Without that belief they would never start a company.
The other part sees things as they are. It recognizes what’s working and what isn’t and addresses problems head on. Without that intellectual honesty they would never get through the hard times.
As a founder, you want both superpowers in your company: the fiery spirit of entrepreneurship and the icy discipline of management. x.com/i/article/2104…
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What a hero!!
My salute to the Indian pilot Captain Smit Machchhar for his extraordinary bravery.
Despite being stabbed and seriously injured, he fought back, resisted, opened the cockpit door, and enabled passengers and crew to overpower the attacker — preventing a catastrophic mid-air disaster.
He saved the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals.
I wish Captain Machchhar a speedy and full recovery.
He is a true hero.
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AI is moving from generating answers to taking action. That changes what we need from the data layer.
An agent can reason perfectly and still make the wrong decision if it’s working with stale data. And as agents become more autonomous, those mistakes can happen at machine speed.
That’s why operational data becomes even more important in the AI era. As software increasingly takes action on its own, the data layer becomes part of the control plane for the business.
Today we announced the biggest expansion of @MongoDB's platform yet, with MongoDB 9.0, Atlas Infinite and Atlas Agent Engine, built for this new world.
More on why we believe the data layer has to change for the agentic era:
mongodb.com/company/blog/p…
See you tomorrow at #MongoDBLocal NYC.
An agent can reason perfectly and still make the wrong decision if it’s working with stale data. And as agents become more autonomous, those mistakes can happen at machine speed.
That’s why operational data becomes even more important in the AI era. As software increasingly takes action on its own, the data layer becomes part of the control plane for the business.
Today we announced the biggest expansion of @MongoDB's platform yet, with MongoDB 9.0, Atlas Infinite and Atlas Agent Engine, built for this new world.
More on why we believe the data layer has to change for the agentic era:
mongodb.com/company/blog/p…
See you tomorrow at #MongoDBLocal NYC.
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Dev Ittycheria retweeted
Back at @Nasdaq! MongoDB's @dittycheria rang the opening bell in celebration of our latest announcements and tomorrow's MongoDB.local NYC. 🎉
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No company has meant more to me professionally than MongoDB. I spent more than 11 years as CEO, and even after stepping down last year, I never really left. Serving on the board kept me close to our people, our customers and the business, and only strengthened my conviction in MongoDB’s future.
Today, I’m returning as interim CEO. I’m grateful for the trust of our board and our team, and I’m ready to get to work.
I also return with a different perspective. As a Partner and Senior Advisor at Sequoia Capital, I have a front-row seat to the founders, technologies and companies shaping the AI era. I see firsthand how AI is not only changing how software is built and businesses operate, but expanding technology’s role from helping people manage work to increasingly helping perform the work itself. I look forward to bringing those insights back to MongoDB as we help our customers capitalize on what may be the most consequential platform shift of our generation.
And we’re getting started immediately. Tomorrow at 11 AM ET, we’ll host Investor Day and share our long-term strategy, market opportunity and the product innovation driving MongoDB forward.
On Wednesday, our sold-out .local NYC event will bring together developers and business leaders focused on putting AI into production and moving from generating answers to taking action at scale. We’ll have exciting announcements at both events.
What has always made MongoDB special is the ambition of our people, the importance of what our customers build with our technology, and the size of the opportunity ahead.
I’m proud to lead this team again. There is a lot to do, and I couldn’t be more excited to get back to work.
mongodb.com/company/newsro…
Today, I’m returning as interim CEO. I’m grateful for the trust of our board and our team, and I’m ready to get to work.
I also return with a different perspective. As a Partner and Senior Advisor at Sequoia Capital, I have a front-row seat to the founders, technologies and companies shaping the AI era. I see firsthand how AI is not only changing how software is built and businesses operate, but expanding technology’s role from helping people manage work to increasingly helping perform the work itself. I look forward to bringing those insights back to MongoDB as we help our customers capitalize on what may be the most consequential platform shift of our generation.
And we’re getting started immediately. Tomorrow at 11 AM ET, we’ll host Investor Day and share our long-term strategy, market opportunity and the product innovation driving MongoDB forward.
On Wednesday, our sold-out .local NYC event will bring together developers and business leaders focused on putting AI into production and moving from generating answers to taking action at scale. We’ll have exciting announcements at both events.
What has always made MongoDB special is the ambition of our people, the importance of what our customers build with our technology, and the size of the opportunity ahead.
I’m proud to lead this team again. There is a lot to do, and I couldn’t be more excited to get back to work.
mongodb.com/company/newsro…
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The people I have seen grow the fastest continually ask for feedback, both good and bad. They assess it based on the credibility of the source and the persuasiveness of the logic, then act on it when appropriate. The goal isn’t to accept every piece of feedback. It’s to have the humility to change when the feedback has merit.
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Dev Ittycheria retweeted
We have raised $200M at a $5B valuation to scale self-improving software development in the enterprise.
@FactoryAI has grown to serve hundreds of thousands of developers at companies including RBC, Adobe, Nvidia, T-Mobile, and Palo Alto Networks.
We will use this capital to nts in research, product, and global go-to-market.
@FactoryAI has grown to serve hundreds of thousands of developers at companies including RBC, Adobe, Nvidia, T-Mobile, and Palo Alto Networks.
We will use this capital to nts in research, product, and global go-to-market.
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Dev Ittycheria retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
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Dev Ittycheria retweeted
If you are a startup founder wanting to be a scaleup CEO, I think Sequoia is a particularly good partner. In addition to myself, we have @dittycheria & @carl_eschenbach to help on the journey.
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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.
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