Latest Interviews
Showing 16–30 of 105 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Sequoia Capital39 min
Simulating Humans at Scale: Simile's Joon Sung Park
Founded by Stanford alum Jun with co-founders Percy Liang and Michael Bernstein, Simile is an applied AI lab that has transitioned from the experimental "Smallville" project to a commercial platform capable of simulating complex human societies. By combining proprietary behavioral data with foundation models, the company validates its SaaS service with an 85% prediction accuracy against real-world self-reports, allowing enterprises like CVS to test strategic decisions without the cost of live field trials. This approach leverages specific statistical metrics and reinforcement learning to bridge the gap between attitudinal data and actual behavior, offering a scalable alternative to traditional polling for forecasting long-term market and societal impacts.
- Sequoia Capital51 min
Google DeepMind's Logan Kilpatrick: Why the Model Eats the Harness
Google has launched its "agentic era" centered on the Anti-Gravity harness and the new Omni unified model, enabling autonomous actions across its ecosystem rather than simple API interactions. Key shifts include the introduction of the 3.5 Flash coding model, the transition from maximizing user time to optimizing task completion, and the deployment of a single system for diverse generative media tasks. Led by leadership emphasizing scientific rigor under Demis Hassabis and Sundar Pichai, the initiative aims to replace specialized legacy tools with native, world-understanding agents that augment rather than cannibalize human activity.
- Sequoia Capital40 min
Knowing What Your Customers Want, All the Time: Listen Labs' Alfred Wahlforss
Listen Labs leverages its database of 30 million participants to transition from AI-conducted interviews to generative agent simulations that predict individual customer preferences with up to 95% accuracy. Founder Alfred Walforce directs the platform to serve Fortune 500 clients like Microsoft and Chubbies by identifying specific product friction points and integrating insights directly into autonomous coding workflows. This approach creates a proprietary feedback loop where behavioral data refines agent models, allowing businesses to validate product decisions without the churn and cost of traditional market research.
- Sequoia Capital25 min
Neuralink's DJ Seo: Inside the Race to Connect Brains and AI
DJ Seo, Shaun Maguire, Sean McGuire
Neuralink is advancing its brain-computer interface technology through the deployment of two therapeutic products, Telepathy and Blindsight, to restore motor function and vision for patients with conditions like ALS and total blindness. The company has implanted its devices in over 20 human participants and reports successful trials where users regained computer control or visual perception, supported by a strategy of vertical integration and an "all-green light" engineering framework. Founder J.D. McGuire envisions these medical breakthroughs as a precursor to creating an "exocortex" that merges human intent with AI, pending regulatory approval for broader non-medical augmentation.
- Sequoia Capital46 min
How Cursor Trained Composer on Fireworks: Distributed Infrastructure for High-Performance RL
Federico Cassano, Dmytro Dzhulgakov, Sonya Huang
Cursor has pivoted from a pure application company to a foundation model developer by training Composer 2, a specialized software engineering model built on a Kimi 2.5 base using a global, asynchronous pipeline to maximize compute efficiency. The team deployed a custom infrastructure that integrates Reinforcement Learning from real-time user feedback and simulated rollouts while overcoming synchronization challenges through lossless delta compression and custom GPU kernels. This strategic approach allows Cursor to saturate model capacity with high-value coding data, achieving competitive performance at a fraction of the cost of general-purpose models while moving the industry toward baked-in specialized behaviors rather than prompt engineering.
- Sequoia Capital1h 3m
Notion’s Ivan Zhao: The Refounder
Ivan Zhao, Jack Dorsey, Brian Armstrong, B Halligan
Notion CEO Ivan Jawan has steered the company through two strategic refoundings, most recently pivoting to an AI-native model that replaces traditional hierarchies with a fluid "jazz band" structure relying on self-managed teams and AI as the central information processor. This transformation involves restructuring hiring to prioritize individual agency over experience, merging product roles to leverage AI agents, and shifting compensation toward a high-meritocracy "wartime" model. By treating product development as non-deterministic experimentation rather than rigid planning, Notion aims to scale effectively while maintaining a culture that functions as a shared belief system among its fifty to sixty acquired founder-employees.
- Sequoia Capital35 min
Suno's Mikey Shulman: Everyone Can Make Music Now
Suno, founded by quantum computing PhD Mikey Shulman, has disrupted the music industry by modeling audio as continuous sound waves rather than discrete musical notes, enabling the generation of full songs with custom lyrics and vocals. The platform has achieved significant market traction by prioritizing user creativity over passive consumption, evidenced by a 90% creator user base, a landmark partnership with Warner Music, and chart-topping commercial successes. Future developments aim to deepen this position through social co-creation tools, voice cloning features, and interactive concert technologies designed to seamlessly integrate AI into professional music production.
- Sequoia Capital12 min
Starcloud's Philip Johnston: Why the Cheapest Compute Will Be in Space
StarCloud CEO Philip Johnston validated the technical feasibility of space-based high-performance computing through the successful "StarCloud 1" mission, which demonstrated thermal management and radiation tolerance while executing AI inference tasks. The company has filed an FCC application for an 88,000-satellite constellation capable of delivering 20 gigawatts of compute power with sub-50-millisecond latency, targeting a $100 billion capital expenditure that becomes economically viable once launch costs drop below $500 per kilogram. While current operations focus on inference workloads, the roadmap envisions future large-scale training structures that could catalyze a transition toward a Kardashev Type 2 civilization within decades.
- Sequoia Capital26 min
ElevenLabs' Mati Staniszewski: How Voice Becomes the Interface for AI
Mati Staniszewski, Andrew Reed, Alfred Fuller, Gabriel Sanchez, Konstantin
Established in 2022 by high-school friends Gabriel Sanchez and Piotr to address monotone localization in Poland, Eleven Labs has rapidly scaled to generate over $400 million in revenue with a flat, title-less organization of 400 remote employees. The company distinguishes itself by prioritizing immediate monetization and emotional nuance in audio synthesis, evolving its technology from text-to-speech to complex voice agents deployed by governments, enterprises, and educational platforms. With a roadmap focused on emotional intelligence and the integration of audio as the primary interface for robotics, the firm maintains defensibility through proprietary data and a vast ecosystem of user-contributed voices.
- Sequoia Capital27 min
Waymo's Dmitri Dolgov: 20 Million Rides and the Road to Full Autonomy
Dmitri Dolgov, Konstantine Buhler
Dmitry Dolgov, Waymo's co-founder, outlines a 21-year evolution from DARPA challenges to a sixth-generation autonomous fleet that has achieved 200 million fully autonomous miles and delivered over 20 million rides with a safety profile 13 times superior to human drivers. The company's architecture utilizes a multimodal "Foundation Model" integrating physics reasoning and spatial understanding to power a structured, end-to-end system across 11 cities, now accelerating toward global expansion in London and Tokyo through the newly launched Waymo Origin vehicle. This mission-driven approach bypasses incremental improvements to rapidly scale commercial deployment, treating full autonomy as an existential imperative to eliminate the 13 million annual road fatalities while transitioning the core technology into a primary family transportation tool.
- Sequoia Capital28 min
OpenAI's Greg Brockman: Why Human Attention Is the New Bottleneck
OpenAI executives estimate they are 80% toward achieving AGI, a milestone driven by aggressive compute acquisition strategies and architectural innovations that currently enable AI to autonomously engineer software kernels. The organization is pivoting toward an enterprise and consumer model where a single AGI entity handles complex goals, urging startups to leverage agentic coding tools for massive productivity gains while navigating a landscape where human attention has become the primary bottleneck. This shift is underpinned by anticipated scientific breakthroughs in physics and biology, alongside internal reforms designed to manage the risks of autonomous agents within a future where humans oversee teams of AI rather than writing code manually.
- Sequoia Capital27 min
Demis Hassabis: We're Three Quarters of the Way to AGI
Demis Hassabis, Konstantine Buhler, Dennis
Demis Hassabis founded DeepMind with the strategic intent of leveraging game development revenue to fund the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, a goal he predicts will be realized by 2030. Following a pivotal breakthrough with AlphaFold that solved the protein folding problem, the organization expanded into Isomorphic Labs to accelerate drug discovery and is now pioneering the application of AI for scientific simulation in fields like biology and economics. Hassabis maintains that classical neural networks are sufficient to model complex biological systems and views information as the fundamental building block of the universe, positioning AI as the ultimate tool for understanding reality.
- Sequoia Capital1h 4m
Jack Dorsey: Every Company Can Now Be a Mini-AGI
Jack Dorsey, Roelof Botha, Rula Fotha, Delaney, Brian
Block founder Jack Dorsey and Sequoia partner Rula Fotha discussed a radical restructuring of the company to eliminate traditional hierarchies in favor of an intelligence-first model driven by AI. This initiative involves flattening the organizational chart to two or three layers, redefining roles into builders, owners, and coaches, and replacing static roadmaps with a proactive system that anticipates customer needs. Supported by a recent reduction in workforce and a shift toward fluid leadership, the transformation aims to maximize decision speed and align the company's intelligence directly with customer outcomes.
- Sequoia Capital58 min
How Autonomous Labs Will Transform Scientific Research: Ginkgo Bioworks’ Jason Kelly
Jason Kelly, Sonya Huang, Pat Grady, Anya
Ginkgo Bioworks is executing a strategic pivot from traditional biological design to AI-driven autonomous laboratories, partnering with OpenAI to demonstrate that reasoning models can conduct high-volume experiments with 40% greater efficiency than current state-of-the-art benchmarks. Founder Jason Kelly argues that this shift addresses critical inefficiencies in global science by replacing costly human overhead with 24/7 robotic operations, a move he views as a national security imperative to compete with China's rapidly scaling biotech sector. By transitioning to a cloud-based, usage-pricing model and leveraging specialized robotics over humanoids, the company aims to democratize access to experimental science while fundamentally altering the economics of drug discovery and industrial biotechnology.
- Sequoia Capital44 min
Greetings, Earthlings: Philip Johnston of Starcloud on Data Centers in Space
Philip Johnston, Sonya Huang, Pat Grady
StarCloud founder Philip Johnson is deploying a Low Earth Orbit constellation designed to host data centers that will eventually outpace terrestrial alternatives in cost and scale, aiming for 50% of new AI compute capacity to be space-based within a decade. Leveraging SpaceX Starship launches, the company plans to deliver 10-megawatt satellite clusters by 2028 that prioritize thermal management over radiation shielding to support high-density inference workloads for hyperscalers and government clients. This infrastructure model targets critical market gaps in edge computing and downlink bandwidth while positioning space-based hardware as a neutral, scalable alternative to traditional cloud providers.