Sequoia Capital

In honor of 50 years of Apple, we're sharing - for the first time ever - Don Valentine's original 1977 memo for Sequoia's investment into Apple Computer. #Apple50

Meet @CameronLMcCord. He's done a lot of hard things: paid his way through MIT with ROTC while double-majoring in nuclear engineering and physics. Spent ~5 years on a nuclear submarine for the Navy. He once steered that submarine through a Nordic fjord in a blizzard, in the middle of a clandestine mission, to save a crewmate's life. This photo was taken that day. Between watches, he was teaching himself AI on pre-downloaded Andrew Ng lectures - and noticing the cognitive dissonance of running 1970s software on a Cold War-era submarine. After the Navy, he served as a liaison to the House Armed Services Committee, where his name appears in the footnotes of some of the first government writing on AI. Then he went to @Anduril, watched the best-funded hardware company in the world try to test drones with SQL tools and MATLAB, and got obsessed with the problem nobody was solving: how do you actually know if the hardware works? Today, his company @nominal_io is helping power the hardware renaissance now underway, for everything from rockets and hypersonic planes to medical devices. We're proud to tell Cameron and the Nominal team's story in our new profile. Link below ↓

🚨NEW Long Strange Trip episode just dropped: Ivan Zhao, CEO of Notion @jack gave us the circular org chart. @brian_armstrong gave us player-coach. @ivanhzhao just added Jazz Mode. @NotionHQ is one of the clearest examples of a great SaaS company making the successful leap into becoming an AI company. That transition is much harder than it looks. @ivanhzhao is the definition of a Refounder, and has rebuilt his company nearly three times. Anyone who is looking to move into this new era, the “jazz era” should listen to this one 👇 Notes from our chat: 1. The Next Evolution to companies is structured freedom You need operators who can improvise and contribute creatively without waiting for orders. Think jazz band over marching band. Leaders must build teams that riff off each other dynamically rather than blindly following a rigid sheet of music. 2. Build a barbell engineering team Pair hyper senior architectural minds with junior talent. Senior leaders provide the taste and direction that language models lack, while junior engineers manage fleets of coding agents to execute the vision. 3. The best companies reinvent themselves When a startup stalls, incremental pivots rarely save it. Sometimes you must cleanly sever the past and start fresh. True technological shifts shouldn't feel like feature updates; they should feel existential. Interacting with frontier models should command a complete re-evaluation of your company's purpose. If a founder hasn't built with AI to feel this paradigm shift firsthand, they cannot find a new path forward. 4. Why Wartime is More Fun Peacetime in SaaS was comfortable, but wartime is where companies actually feel alive. When survival is on the line, the stakes are higher, and a shared, urgent purpose amplifies meaning for everyone. 5. Hire people who can blur traditional roles The best Notion hires have always blurred lines: designers who code, PMs who ship, engineers with taste. Baseline capability is no longer the bottleneck. The premium is now on a candidate's energy, optimism, and fundamental taste across multiple areas. 6. Acqui-hire founders aggressively As companies scale, they naturally calcify and slow down. The antidote is systematically acquiring early-stage startups just for the founders. Ex-founders act as aggressive machinery, breaking old patterns and forcing the organization to regenerate. 7. Financials March, Product Strategy Jazzes You cannot build a rigid product roadmap anymore because the underlying technology shifts too rapidly. Financial planning is the only system that still requires predictability; product strategy must be entirely fluid and improvisational. 8. Make compensation radically more meritocratic The SaaS era of "peanut buttering" compensation across the entire team is over. Companies must transition to extreme meritocracies to reward top performers. 9. Don’t reinvent the wheel unless you must Notion tried to first principle their way into sales. Eventually, they realized that was just plain wrong. Founders waste years trying to creatively invent a new sales system when the classic playbook works best. 10. Decentralizing the CMO Traditional marketing departments move too slowly to keep up with modern shipping cadences. The solution for Notion was to rip the CMO org apart and embed storytelling directly next to the product team. Demand generation now strictly serves the sales function. Lots lots more on this one. Ivan, as stylish as ever, was a blast. Enjoyed this one a lot. (links below) 👇👇 00:00 Introduction 02:22 From Founder Mode to AI Org 11:00 Hiring for Taste and Agency 24:28 Refounding Notion in Kyoto 30:27 Craft Versus Commerce 32:26 When to Refound 34:07 GPT-4 Refounding Shock 45:35 Leadership and Founder Energy 53:17 Sales Culture and Closing Thoughts

.@CameronLMcCord went from navigating nuclear submarines through Arctic fjords to founding @Nominal_io, a platform that's transforming how hardware engineers test physical systems. The best founders feel the problem firsthand, and Cameron lived the challenges of hardware testing both while serving and then later at Anduril. Here's him aboard the USS Helena naval submarine, where he spent 400+ days underwater over ~4 years. Read more in his story below.

The moment we've all been waiting for!!! 🚀

It is rare to see increasing product velocity at scale... but @harvey is just getting better and better thanks to @aniqued @sgurumur @gabepereyra @nikogrupen and all of their truly elite teammates

SendCutSend founder @jimbelosic just raised $110M from @patrickc and @collision, @andrew__reed, and @matthuang to do "the Amazon of manufacturing." The idea for the deal started after he got introduced to Patrick on 𝕏. "He was like, 'Oh yeah, I've heard about your company. You guys sound awesome. I'll invest.'" "I was like, 'That sounds amazing. Thank you. How does this work? I don't know how investment works.'" "It became this dream team, and I was like, 'If I don't do it now, I don't know if I'll ever be able to put this together again.'" Jim tells the story:

My second interview with @JimBelosic, Founder of @SendCutSend. 0:15 Beating China in manufacturing requires scale 1:10 Automation is not a magic bullet 2:12 Scaling profitably 4:31 Delivering a great customer experience 8:44 Why SCS raised $110M 11:20 Expectations are promises 15:33 Increasing speed and capacity 18:46 Focusing on customers 22:20 Frugality and generosity 25:06 Creating The Anything Factory 26:33 3pm is the new midnight 27:49 Figuring out the next bottleneck 30:37 Finding buildings with enough power 35:21 Lowering prices 37:36 Gambling to turn on factories faster 39:03 Aim for perfection and you’ll end up at excellence 40:04 Maintaining a maniacal sense of urgency through impatience 41:30 Seeding SCS DNA at new factories 43:08 Solving challenges 45:32 Finding great capital partners 48:40 Focus on customer pain 51:59 Learning from Home Depot 54:16 Bringing manufacturing back to America 55:11 Building capacity creates demand 57:01 Handling demand surges 58:21 Being default skeptical and sensing bullsh*t 1:00:27 Getting back to building

Empowering IT is the most elegant and scalable way to deliver horizontal enterprise automation. Listen to @jakeserval and @gradypb discuss the history of this market - from ServiceNow to @getserval.

Software is mostly just workflows on top of a database. This hasn't changed. What's changed is how those workflows are built. @jakeserval and @getserval saw the world changing and nailed it.

Alfred took a bet on us when we were 19yo kids, trying to apply AI in healthcare. He’s seen the grind through the good, bad, and ugly (including my toes in sandals). This next stage of @CommureOS is about ferocious execution, and we’re honored to have him and @sequoia as partners in today’s fundraise!

Honored to back one of the most impressive founders @jimbelosic and join the board of one of the coolest companies @sendcutsend The best founders love what they do, and deeply respect their customers. Jim really, really loves making parts, and embodies a customer-first mentality

BREAKING: Commure Hits a $7 Billion Valuation Announcing $70M in new funding led by General Catalyst, with Sequoia & Morgan Stanley Total funding to date: $750M Interview with CEO Tanay Tandon @CommureOS is becoming one of the largest AI infrastructure platforms in healthcare: → 500+ healthcare organizations → 3,000+ sites of care → 200M+ patient encounters annually → Tens of billions (!!) in annual claims processed → 85%+ of revenue cycle work completed autonomously → ARR doubled 3 years in a row → 1,200 employees globally Commure says its AI agents are automating documentation, coding, billing, denials, appeals, scheduling, & revenue cycle workflows across hospitals & physician groups. P.S. Tanay (@tanay_tandon) started the company at 18. “Point solutions are going to d*e.” @sequoia @Alfred_Lin @generalcatalyst @htaneja 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Tanay Tandon, Co-Founder & CEO, Commure (01:03) The $70M R&D Sprint (03:45) Rockefeller's funding playbook beats dilutive VC (05:42) Tokens killing SaaS margins (07:14) Going public is the plan (07:40) Automating healthcare’s back office (11:02) Scaling Commure’s engine (11:49) Partnering with Epic (13:06) Why healthcare point solutions will be d*ad in 3 years? (16:42) Learnings from the AWS-CIA deal (19:13) Going to zero rollouts overnight (22:23) Nuking malpractice premiums with AI (23:52) Winning HCA’s trust (26:27) Saving burned out doctors (28:24) Buying a bankrupt hospital (32:30) Ending healthcare interop (35:41) The viral hiring email ft. Alfred Lin (38:23) Acquiring for distribution (45:13) Free blood samples? (47:19) The Stanford hacker who became an enterprise sales rep (48:21) The cargo shorts fiasco (53:57) American healthcare isn't broken (55:28) The agentic healthcare takeover

SendCutSend is building one of the most fascinating companies we’ve partnered with at @sequoia. They are the best way to get high quality hardware components for everyone from casual hobbyist to America’s hardware royalty. @jimbelosic has scaled this complex, capital-intensive business to $200m of revenue (+100% y/y) without raising outside funding. Wild stuff! We’re so grateful for the trust to be their partner for the next phase of growth!

Two of my favorite companies are joining forces today, @StainlessAPI and @AnthropicAI. It’s been a joy to be a part of @RattrayAlex's journey from building our first startup together in college, to Stainless, and now building something even bigger inside Anthropic. 🧵👇

I had a chance to interview @jack on Long Strange Trip and then sit in on his Q&A with a bunch of Sequoia founders yesterday. Here's my take followed by my takeaways. Almost all of us are running a derivative of the playbook laid out in Andy Grove's "High Output Management" book that has been lightly edited down through the generations. Jack's set of ideas is a stark departure from that playbook. It reminds me of the shift I went through at the start of my career (pre web - yes, I'm that old!) to "digital transformation," but this is a much bigger, harder shift. Some of my CEO friends have pushed back on these ideas saying something to the effect that Jack isn't a great CEO so we shouldn't listen to him. First, I'm not sure if that is true, but even if it is true, he is an undeniable innovator and first principles thinker applying that thinking here to org design, not just product design. Second, @brian_armstrong, a consensus great CEO is running something that sounds VERY similar to this playbook as well as almost every startup created in the last 18 months. Third, the first quarter Jack printed after putting this in place was a banger. ...To that end, I think we should all call this new playbook, "Dorsey Mode" after the guy who stuck his neck out. If you want to run Dorsey Mode, a lot of things fall out of it that fall out of it: 1. Strategy - Planning cycles are out the window because the speed increases too much. All those 1 way doors you were procrastinating now look like 2 way doors. 2. Distribution - Given how much easier it is going to get to build products, competition and customer confusion will reign. In this new world, distribution is king. Companies with truly creative distribution strategies (rare!) will gain advantage. Also, long live ye olde enterprise sales. 3. Interviewing - All of the startups I work with have changed their interviewing process. Many have a case with a hard ai problem to solve embedded in it or at least have the prospective employee open their laptop and show them something interesting they built with ai. 4. Profile - There was a split in my group of CEOs at the Q&A -- some were learning hard into pilled jr engineers and some were leaning hard into very senior engineers. It roughly seems like the older companies with more code like Meta and HubSpot, are leaning harder into the very senior engineering types. ...Everyone seems keen to hire "curious" types not afraid to go very deep down rabbit holes. 5. Org shape - Triangle shaped org charts are like democracy, its the least bad system we've got. The biggest problem with triangles is that they get worse with size. The new org chart, in theory, is circular with the world model in the middle and very small teams surrounding it. Very few pure managers in the middle anymore. This seems "early," but directionally right to me. 6. Compensation - The difference between a middling employee and a top one is getting much wider which will necessitate a net new pay scale with a much higher standard deviation. 7. Titles - Jack got rid of them and is trying to focus everyone on the work as opposed to the level. As someone who tried this earlier in my career at HubSpot, I'm a little skeptical of this one, but the meta point of trying to focus people on what they "lead" versus who they "manage" is a good one that I hope sticks. 8 Decisions - Almost all decisions these days are made by carbon based life forms. Dorsey Mode turns an increasing amount of decisions over to the system. 9. IT - This is will totally change as their primary function will be to building the scaffolding for the world model and enable the company to keep feeding it the context and taste it will need to improve. EVERYTHING needs to be "legible" (I hate that I'm using that overused word, but it works) ...Btw, an early sign that a company is in Dorsey Mode is when they record every meeting, including the one on one's, cleverly stripping out some HR bits and centralizing them for use by the model. Btw, Ray Dalio had it right, but was just too early. 10. Slop - As more non-technical people build more things, there will be more slop. I didn't grok Jack's answer to this and I'm not sure the answer myself, but Dorsey Mode companies will need to figure out a system to reign in the badly designed systems. 11. Agency - This another word I cringe at using b/c it is so overused, but hiring folks with high agency that are self motivated will be key. The tricky part is that the beef with the current generation is that they are less like this than their predecessors. 12. CEO - This isn't something that will bubble up. The CEO needs to run hard at it and push it down hard and expect to get pushback from laggards. Jack spends 3 hours every morning building hard things with the new tools. ...AI isn't something that lends itself well to learning by reading or watching a video, so CEOs are running hackathons, show & tell's, building days, office hours, and token leader boards. ...Btw, lots of companies are doing the leader board thing (including mine) -- I think this works until it doesn't! 13. Budgets - Budgets in a lot of software orgs are basically enumerated in headcount. The denomination goes back to dollars. As Jack (and my cofounder @Dharmesh) likes to say, in some cases, it is a lot riskier not to take a risk and this is one of those cases.

Thrilled to announce a $12.5M strategic investment to meet accelerating demand for crypto wallets and verifiable computing. With participation from @circle_ventures, @archetypevc, and existing investors @BainCapCrypto, @FactionVC, @galaxyhq, @sequoia, and @variantfund.

Claude Code and @suno have more in common than you might think: "It's fun to build things, and it's fun to use what you build." AI lets people be creative in almost any domain, from coding to making music. Today on Training Data, @MikeyShulman shares his thesis for why generative AI is the newest form of active entertainment (the next 'gaming'), music as a cultural phenomenon vs creative expression platform, and more. My favorite part was Mikey's explanation of why Suno learns music theory implicitly vs explicitly: "In Western music, there are 12 tones. If you tell the model there are 12 tones, it will only ever produce those 12 tones. You will be forever limited. And if you tell the model there's 200 instruments, those are the only sounds that you'll ever be able to make." The more you constrain a model with what humans already know, the less capable it becomes. By treating everything as pure sound, Suno built what Mikey calls a totally generalized "music-making machine." Such is the power of neural nets.

When you're building a company, fires will always come. Your job isn’t racing between them, it’s mapping the territory, building firebreaks, and designing the whole system so one spark doesn’t burn everything down. "Your team kills today’s flames. You shape the forest that survives them." @dickc