Best Sequoia Thomas Podcasts (2025)

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OpenAI Sora 2 Team: How Generative Video Will Unlock Creativity and World Models 1:00:25

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1h ago1:00:25

1:00:25

The OpenAI Sora 2 team (Bill Peebles, Thomas Dimson, Rohan Sahai) discuss how they compressed filmmaking from months to days, enabling anyone to create compelling video. Bill, who invented the diffusion transformer that powers Sora and most video generation models, explains how space-time tokens enable object permanence and physics understanding in…

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Uncapped #31 | Dylan Field from Figma 56:39

1d ago56:39

56:39

Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, a design software company that went public in July 2025. Founded in 2012, Figma transformed how people design, prototype, and build products together. After a $20 billion acquisition attempt by Adobe collapsed in 2022 because of regulators, Dylan helped Figma rebound stronger than ever. Just three yea…

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Uncapped #30 | Alex Pall from The Chainsmokers 1:05:52

8d ago1:05:52

1:05:52

Alex Pall is half of the Grammy Award-winning duo The Chainsmokers. Beyond music, Alex is entrepreneur and co-founder of Mantis VC, a venture firm that invests opportunistically in early stage tech-enabled startups. Some of their investments include Alchemy, Chainguard, Kalshi, Roblox, and Rogo. We had a wide ranging conversation that broke down th…

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Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan: Scaling Beyond Moore's Law to Million-GPU Clusters 41:31

9d ago41:31

41:31

Recorded live at Sequoia’s Europe100 event: Michael Kagan, co-founder of Mellanox and CTO of Nvidia, explains how the $7 billion Mellanox acquisition helped transform Nvidia from a chip company into the architect of AI infrastructure. Kagan breaks down the technical challenges of scaling from single GPUs to 100K and eventually million-GPU data cent…

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Uncapped #29 | Thomas Laffont from Coatue 1:02:43

15d ago1:02:43

1:02:43

Thomas Laffont is the co-founder of Coatue, one of the world’s largest technology investment platforms active in both the public and private markets. Thomas leads the firm’s private investment platforms across early-stage and growth, and oversees their software investments across private and public markets. Coatue has partnered with some of the mos…

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Securing the AI Frontier: Irregular Co-founder Dan Lahav 44:09

16d ago44:09

44:09

Irregular co-founder Dan Lahav is redefining what cybersecurity means in the age of autonomous AI. Working closely with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, Dan, co-founder Omer Nevo and team are pioneering “frontier AI security”—a proactive approach to safeguarding systems where AI models act as independent agents. Dan shares how emergent behav…

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Uncapped #28 | Roelof Botha from Sequoia 1:03:00

22d ago1:03:00

1:03:00

Roelof Botha joined Sequoia in 2003 and serves as the managing partner and steward. Roelof led early investments in YouTube, Instagram, Natera, and MongoDB among others. He currently sits on the board of Natera, Unity, Block (fka Square), MongoDB, Ethos, Pendulum, Airtime, and Flow Engineering. Roelof also co-led Sequoia’s backing of Elon Musk’s ac…

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Why AI Will Transform Customer Experience: Cresta CEO Ping Wu and Sequoia’s Doug Leone 44:46

28d ago44:46

44:46

Ping Wu built Google's contact center business before becoming CEO of Cresta, where he's pioneering a unique approach to contact center transformation. Rather than full automation Ping advocates a dual approach, automating what's ready while using AI to assist humans with the rest. He makes the case for an abundance mindset—imagining new customer e…

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Uncapped #27 | Vince Hankes from Thrive Capital 57:34

29d ago57:34

57:34

Vince Hankes is a Partner at Thrive Capital where he’s worked on investments in OpenAI, SpaceX, Databricks, and Stripe among others. Vince invests across all stages and currently sits on the board of Airtable, Benchling, Console, Isomorphic, Lattice and Rogo. Prior to joining Thrive, Vince was an investor at Tiger Global. We covered: Non-consensus …

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Uncapped #26 | Ali Rowghani 41:10

1M ago41:10

41:10

Ali Rowghani is the founder of First Harmonic, a go-to-market program purpose-built for seed stage founders. Ali has had a long, distinguished career in tech. He worked with Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull at Pixar for nine years holding various roles including CFO and SVP of Strategic Planning, took Twitter from $0 in revenue through IPO as the CFO and …

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Block CTO Dhanji Prasanna: Building the AI-First Enterprise with Goose, their Open Source Agent 59:43

1M ago59:43

59:43

As CTO of Block, Dhanji Prasanna has overseen a dramatic enterprise AI transformation, with engineers saving 8-10 hours a week through AI automation. Block’s open-source agent goose connects to existing enterprise tools through MCP, enabling everyone from engineers to sales teams to build custom applications without coding. Dhanji shares how Block …

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Uncapped #25 | Lulu Cheng Meservey 50:18

1M ago50:18

50:18

Lulu Cheng Meservey is the leading voice in the new age of PR and comms and is the founder of Rostra, an advisory firm helping founders go direct. Lulu has been a trusted voice for founders like Palmer Luckey at Anduril, Eric Glyman at Ramp, and Brian Armstrong at Coinbase. She previously ran corporate affairs and communications for Activision Bliz…

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Why Businesses Are Rejecting the AI They’ve Asked For: Agency CEO Elias Torres 44:49

2M ago44:49

44:49

Elias Torres has been building AI systems since 1999, from chatbots at IBM to co-founding Drift and now Agency. He believes businesses are caught in an expectation mismatch—demanding AI while rejecting it due to imperfection anxiety. Drawing from his experience scaling HubSpot, Elias explains why human-led customer experience doesn’t scale and how …

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Uncapped #24 | Balaji Srinivasan 50:53

2M ago50:53

50:53

Balaji Srinivasan is an angel investor, tech founder, and WSJ bestselling author of The Network State. He is currently the founder of The Network School, a frontier community for techno-optimists. Formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he is an early investor in many successful tech companies, including Anduril, Pe…

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Building the "App Store" for Robots: Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf on Physical AI 43:08

2M ago43:08

43:08

Thomas Wolf, co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, explains how his company is applying the same community-driven approach that made transformers accessible to everyone to the emerging field of robotics. Thomas discusses LeRobot, Hugging Face's ambitious project to democratize robotics through open-source tools, datasets, and afford…

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Uncapped #23 | Martin Casado from a16z 52:10

2M ago52:10

52:10

Martin Casado is a general partner at a16z, where he leads the firm’s $1.25 billion infrastructure practice. Martin has led investments in Cursor, dbt Labs, and Fivetran to name a few. Prior to joining a16z in 2016, he was the co-founder and CTO of Nicira, which was acquired by VMware for $1.26B. While at VMware, Martin was the SVP and GM of networ…

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Deal Velocity, Not Billable Hours: How Crosby Uses AI to Redefine Legal Contracting 49:59

2M ago49:59

49:59

Ryan Daniels and John Sarihan are reimagining legal services by building Crosby, an AI-powered law firm that focuses on contract negotiations to start. Rather than building legal software, they've structured their company as an actual law firm with lawyers and AI engineers working side-by-side to automate human negotiations. They've eliminated bill…

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n8n CEO Jan Oberhauser on Building the Universal AI Automation Layer 35:44

2M ago35:44

35:44

When the AI wave hit, n8n founder Jan Oberhauser faced a critical choice: become irrelevant or become indispensable. He chose the latter, transforming n8n from a simple workflow tool into a comprehensive AI automation platform that lets users connect any LLM to any application. The result? Four times the revenue growth in eight months compared to t…

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Uncapped #22 | Greg Rosen from BoxGroup 45:28

3M ago45:28

45:28

Greg Rosen is a Partner at BoxGroup. Greg was the first hire at BoxGroup outside of the founders, David Tisch and Adam Rothenberg. After moving to the West Coast to work with Benchmark and Bedrock, Greg rejoined BoxGroup and currently invests out of their San Francisco office. An engineer by training, Greg built iOS games in high school before drop…

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Scaling the ‘Cursor for Slides’ to $50M ARR: Gamma founder Jon Noronha 30:05

3M ago30:05

30:05

Before ChatGPT made AI mainstream, John Noronha was building Gamma with a simple insight: everyone hates making slides but needs visual communication for high-stakes ideas. His background at Optimizely proved crucial as Gamma became a testing laboratory for AI models, running hundreds of experiments to discover that Claude excels at creative taste,…

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Uncapped #21 | Brian Armstrong from Coinbase 46:35

3M ago46:35

46:35

Brian Armstrong is the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, a leading cryptocurrency company that provides exchange, brokerage, and custody services to 100M+ verified users in over 100 countries. Founded in 2012, Coinbase went public in 2021 on the NASDAQ under the ticker COIN and as of August 2025 has a market cap of $83 billion. Brian is also the co-f…

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Delphi’s Dara Ladjevardian: How AI Digital Minds Can Scale Human Connection 39:05

3M ago39:05

39:05

Dara Ladjevardian, founder and CEO of Delphi, is creating digital minds that allow people to scale their thoughts and availability without replacing human connection. Inspired by Ray Kurzweil’s theory of mind as a hierarchy of pattern recognizers, Dara built an adaptive temporal knowledge graph that captures how people think and reason. From helpin…

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Uncapped #20 | Guillermo Rauch from Vercel 1:01:05

3M ago1:01:05

1:01:05

Guillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 which is one of the most popular AI app building tools that’s helping power the online presence of companies like Porsche, Under Armour and Nintendo. In May 2024, Vercel completed a $250M Series E at a $3.25B valuation and was recently named to the Forbes Cloud 100. Originally from Ar…

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Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch: Building the Generative Web with AI 1:00:59

3M ago1:00:59

1:00:59

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch has spent years obsessing over reducing the friction between having an idea and getting it online. Now with AI, he's achieving something even more ambitious: making software creation accessible to anyone with a keyboard. Guillermo explains how v0 has grown to 3 million users by focusing on reliability and quality, why Cha…

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Uncapped #19 | Dwarkesh Patel 52:13

3M ago52:13

52:13

In his early twenties, Dwarkesh Patel has become one of the leading podcasters with nearly 1 million YouTube subscribers excited to consume his deeply-researched interviews. Dwarkesh has caught the attention of influential figures such as Jeff Bezos, Noah Smith, Nat Friedman, and Tyler Cohen, who have all praised his interviews – the latter describ…

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OpenAI’s IMO Team on Why Models Are Finally Solving Elite-Level Math 30:10

3M ago30:10

30:10

In just two months, a scrappy three-person team at OpenAI sprinted to fulfill what the entire AI field has been chasing for years—gold-level performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad problems. Alex Wei, Sheryl Hsu and Noam Brown discuss their unique approach using general-purpose reinforcement learning techniques on hard-to-verify task…

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Uncapped #18 | Peter Fenton from Benchmark 1:17:30

4M ago1:17:30

1:17:30

Peter Fenton is the longest-serving full-time partner at Benchmark, a renowned venture firm known for its artisanal approach and deep alignment with founders. Over the last two decades, Peter led investments in Twitter, Yelp, Elastic, Docker, Zuora, and many others. He also achieved one of the rarest feats in venture history in 2014 when two of his…

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OpenAI Just Released ChatGPT Agent, Its Most Powerful Agent Yet 37:36

4M ago37:36

37:36

Isa Fulford, Casey Chu, and Edward Sun from OpenAI's ChatGPT agent team reveal how they combined Deep Research and Operator into a single, powerful AI agent that can perform complex, multi-step tasks lasting up to an hour. By giving the model access to a virtual computer with text browsing, visual browsing, terminal access, and API integrations—all…

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Uncapped #17 | Christina Cacioppo from Vanta 42:39

4M ago42:39

42:39

Christina Cacioppo is cofounder and CEO of Vanta, which is on a mission to secure the internet and protect consumer data. The trust management platform was valued at $2.5 billion in 2024 after a Series C investment led by Sequoia. Vanta went from $10M in annual recurring revenue in 2021 to $100M in 2024, while also giving us one of the best tech bi…

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DeepMind's Pushmeet Kohli on AI's Scientific Revolution 41:13

4M ago41:13

41:13

Pushmeet Kohli leads AI for Science at DeepMind, where his team has created AlphaEvolve, an AI system that discovers entirely new algorithms and proves mathematical results that have eluded researchers for decades. From improving 50-year-old matrix multiplication algorithms to generating interpretable code for complex problems like data center sche…

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Uncapped #16 | Mamoon Hamid from Kleiner Perkins 1:03:22

4M ago1:03:22

1:03:22

Mamoon Hamid is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins. He has been an early investor in and served on the boards of some of the most innovative software companies of recent times including Slack, Figma, Rippling, Glean and Box. Prior to joining Kleiner Perkins, Mamoon was a Co-founder and General Partner at Social Capital. He started his venture career in 2…

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Mapping the Mind of a Neural Net: Goodfire’s Eric Ho on the Future of Interpretability 47:07

4M ago47:07

47:07

Eric Ho is building Goodfire to solve one of AI’s most critical challenges: understanding what’s actually happening inside neural networks. His team is developing techniques to understand, audit and edit neural networks at the feature level. Eric discusses breakthrough results in resolving superposition through sparse autoencoders, successful model…

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ElevenLabs’ Mati Staniszewski: Why Voice Will Be the Fundamental Interface for Tech 59:53

4M ago59:53

59:53

Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, explains how staying laser-focused on audio innovation has allowed his company to thrive despite the push into multimodality from foundation models. From a high school friendship in Poland to building one of the fastest-growing AI companies, Mati shares how ElevenLabs transformed text-to-speech w…

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Uncapped #15 | Vinod Khosla from Khosla Ventures 1:19:55

4M ago1:19:55

1:19:55

Vinod Khosla is an entrepreneur, investor and technologist. In 2004, Vinod formed Khosla Ventures to focus on both for-profit and social impact investments that have included OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Commonwealth Fusion Systems and many more. After graduating college, Vinod co-founded Daisy Systems, the first significant computer-aided design syst…

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From DevOps ‘Heart Attacks’ to AI-Powered Diagnostics With Traversal’s AI Agents 40:32

5M ago40:32

40:32

Anish Agarwal and Raj Agrawal, co-founders of Traversal, are transforming how enterprises handle critical system failures. Their AI agents can perform root cause analysis in 2-4 minutes instead of the hours typically spent by teams of engineers scrambling in Slack channels. Drawing from their academic research in causal inference and gene regulator…

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Uncapped #14 | Dan Feder from the University of Michigan 48:24

5M ago48:24

48:24

It was a pleasure to sit down with Dan Feder, Senior Managing Director with the University of Michigan Investment Office who leads the endowment’s investments in venture capital and private equity. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, Dan was the Managing Director of Private Markets at the Washington University Investment Management Company…

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Uncapped #13 | Sam Altman from OpenAI 37:09

5M ago37:09

37:09

This was a fun one! Sam is my brother and the CEO of a small company in SF called OpenAI. I’m glad he was able to take time out of his busy schedule to give me a hard time and share his thoughts on the future of AI. We covered: AI discovering new science The risk of superintelligence What’s after reasoning Humans needing humans The latest with Open…

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The Breakthroughs Needed for AGI Have Already Been Made: OpenAI Former Research Head Bob McGrew 48:51

5M ago48:51

48:51

As OpenAI's former Head of Research, Bob McGrew witnessed the company's evolution from GPT-3’s breakthrough to today's reasoning models. He argues that there are three legs of the stool for AGI—Transformers, scaled pre-training, and reasoning—and that the fundamentals that will shape the next decade-plus are already in place. He thinks 2025 will be…

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Uncapped #12 | Marc Andreessen from a16z 1:39:33

5M ago1:39:33

1:39:33

Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm that manages $45 billion in assets under management. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar compa…

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OpenAI Codex Team: From Coding Autocomplete to Asynchronous Autonomous Agents 37:44

5M ago37:44

37:44

Hanson Wang and Alexander Embiricos from OpenAI's Codex team discuss their latest AI coding agent that works independently in its own environment for up to 30 minutes, generating full pull requests from simple task descriptions. They explain how they trained the model beyond competitive programming to match real-world software engineering needs, th…

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Google I/O Afterparty: The Future of Human-AI Collaboration, From Veo to Mariner 53:51

5M ago53:51

53:51

Fresh off impressive releases at Google’s I/O event, three Google Labs leaders explain how they’re reimagining creative tools and productivity workflows. Thomas Iljic details how video generation is merging filmmaking with gaming through generative AI cameras and world-building interfaces in Whisk and Veo. Jaclyn Konzelmann demonstrates how Project…

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Uncapped #11 | Jordan Bramble from Antares 45:58

6M ago45:58

45:58

Jordan Bramble is the CEO of Antares, a nuclear energy company that has raised over $50M to become America’s industrial base partner for special-purpose microreactors. Antares focuses on high-value use cases in power-constrained environments that wouldn’t be possible without nuclear power. They are developing resilient fission-based power systems f…

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From Data Centers to Dyson Spheres: P-1 AI's Path to Hardware Engineering AGI 38:25

6M ago38:25

38:25

Former Airbus CTO Paul Eremenko shares his vision for bringing AI to physical engineering, starting with Archie—an AI agent that works alongside human engineers. P-1 AI is tackling the challenge of generating synthetic training data to teach AI systems about complex physical systems, from data center cooling to aircraft design and beyond. Eremenko …

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Uncapped #10 | David Tisch from BoxGroup 59:55

6M ago59:55

59:55

This week I enjoyed riffing with David Tisch, Managing Partner of BoxGroup. BoxGroup is an NYC-based seed stage venture capital firm that has invested in over 500 seed-stage startups over the last 15 years, including Plaid, Ro, Ramp, Clay, Scopely, Warp, Cursor, PillPack, Amplitude, Flatiron Health, Stripe, Warby Parker, Harry’s, Oscar, Flexport, C…

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Gong’s Amit Bendov: From Meeting Recordings to Revenue AI 42:05

6M ago42:05

42:05

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 …

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LIVE: Google's Jeff Dean on the Coming Transformations in AI 30:59

6M ago30:59

30:59

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.By Sequoia Capital

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LIVE: Ambient Agents and the New Agent Inbox ft. Harrison Chase of LangChain 8:28

6M ago8:28

8:28

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 dra…

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Uncapped #9 | Qasar Younis from Applied Intuition 51:17

6M ago51:17

51:17

I had a blast sitting down with Qasar Younis, Co-Founder and CEO of Applied Intuition, a company that’s on a mission to accelerate the world’s adoption of safe and intelligent machines. The company builds software that makes it faster, safer, and easier to bring autonomous systems to market. Last valued at $6B, Applied Intuition has raised a total …

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LIVE: How AI is Reinventing Software Business Models ft. Bret Taylor of Sierra 34:30

6M ago34:30

34:30

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 …

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LIVE: Sam Altman of OpenAI on Building the ‘Core AI Subscription’ for Your Life 32:27

6M ago32:27

32:27

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 g…