Robyn Curnow
6.3K posts
@RobynCurnow
Host of Searching for America podcast /Recovering CNN anchor and foreign correspondent / @Cambridge_uni alum / South African / repped by CAA /
Well, I did a thing. I hope it's useful. I mapped every four-year college in the U.S. higher education along two dimensions — institutional resilience & post-college market position — using eight indicators from federal data along with a new measure of institutional AI exposure.
BREAKING: The Future According to Sequoia $10 Trillion Companies Are Coming.. Alfred Lin, Partner & new Co-Steward of Sequoia (#1 investor on the Midas List) “When I joined Sequoia the largest market cap company was probably $300B or $400B dollars. Today we have companies that are worth $4-5T.” “If you give it another 5-10 years… those companies continue to compound, it’ll be worth $10 trillion or more.” For more than 5 decades, @sequoia has backed many of the most consequential companies in technology, from Apple, Nvidia, Airbnb, DoorDash, Stripe, & more. But as @Alfred_Lin explains in this conversation, Sequoia does not think about the 54-year-old firm the way many others do. Rather than optimizing around AUM, Sequoia focuses on DPI & being a net liquidity provider to LPs. Since 2020, the firm has distributed more than $43 billion back to investors (as of Oct 27, 2025). In this conversation, Alfred breaks down: - Why AI is accelerating startup growth and product velocity - Why “AI kills SaaS” is the wrong framework - How moats change during paradigm shifts - What Alfred is hearing in boardrooms right now - Which companies are most vulnerable in the AI era - Founder-market fit & the importance of “spikes” - Why the next generation of companies could be much bigger than today’s giants - How Sequoia identifies outlier founders across companies like Airbnb, DoorDash, Kalshi, Zipline, Clay, Commure, Nominal, Physical Intelligence, Crosby, OpenAI, and Citadel Securities. Recorded live Feb 26th at the @upfrontvc Summit 2026 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Alfred Lin, Partner & Co-Steward at Sequoia Capital (01:00) The metric Sequoia actually cares about (02:54) $43B distributed since 2020 (05:41) The biggest wave Alfred has seen in his career (08:19) Amazon did not k*ll Walmart (10:09) Paradigm shifts and changing moats (14:38) Boardroom conversations about the future (17:11) Companies that fail to adapt fall behind (19:31) From waterfall development to agile teams (23:06) Sequoia’s AI investment strategy (24:48) Managing context switching between portfolio companies (26:00) Becoming Co-Steward of Sequoia Capital (29:31) How to navigate the AI wave
Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael on being the CTO of the Department of War, applying lessons from Silicon Valley at the Pentagon, and his "holy cow" moment with AI vendors. 00:00 Silicon Valley to DC 02:03 Why the DoW cannot operate at "peacetime speed" 04:33 Making applied AI the top priority 09:04 "Holy cow" 13:52 On democratic oversight 16:19 The state of AI 18:42 Structural changes to the DoW 21:20 Startups & innovation 23:53 Patriotism & working for the government @emilmichael @USWREMichael @DoWCTO @davidu
Some personal news! I’m joining @CBSNews and @TheFP, and @schoolofwarpod is moving to a new home at The Free Press. Check out a live-streamed episode of School of War at noon ET today with former CENTCOM commander General Frank McKenzie, where we’ll unpack the war in Iran.
EXC: The US first asked about the use of UK bases to attack Iran on February 11, SIXTEEN days before the first missiles flew. The first warship HMS Dragon will not sail until next week, by which point at least 26 days will have passed spectator.com/article/whose-…
It’s real! ...so I’ll probably be tweeting on it somewhat regularly starting in a few weeks for a bit. It was ~150% as much work as the sports gene and I’m proud of the effort. I’ll aim to be mostly interesting and only a little annoying, but feel free to tell me how I’m doing!
