Upfront Ventures

In an AI world where software creation accelerates dramatically, distribution and network effects matter even more. At @Upfrontvc Summit, @mercor_ai co-founder Brendan Foody joined @speechu to talk about what happens when the biggest bottleneck in tech — building and shipping software — suddenly disappears.

"Saying you aren't an AI maximalist will get you kicked out of the room." @sacca came to this year's #UpfrontSummit with one ask: can we start being honest? AI will cure diseases. It will also eliminate jobs for people who did everything right. Both things are true. Watch the full session: youtu.be/0yfD7bxUxXU

Amazing time at @daytonaio Compute Conference. Very privileged to chat with two technical leaders I really admire: @EnoReyes and @a85. Amazing job @ivanburazin!

Board decks are a high-fidelity data set on AI adoption. Right now, the pattern is consistent: companies aren’t spending enough and they know it. Coatue's Thomas Laffont (@coatue_thomas) with @MollySOShea at @upfrontvc summit.

Fast facts about @sandbar⚡️ ▪️Founded by neural interface vets @minafahmi and Kirak Hong 🧠 ▪️ 15 person team in NYC with $36M total raised 💸 ▪️ Backed by investors including @stevejang of @KindredVentures, @tonidotorg of @trueventures, @upfrontvc, @betaworks 💸 ▪️Early power use cases: updating a lesson plan while driving, or an investor personal CRM ✍ ▪️ Where this goes: a voice interface for managing agents that supporters argue is more efficient and polite to use than your phone 🤖 “When agents actually hit primetime for mainstream consumers, what is the right computing device?” asks Jang. “Instead of a human computer interface, I want a human agent interface.”

Our journey wouldn’t be possible without support from @adjacent , @KindredVentures , our existing investors @trueventures , @upfrontvc , and @betaworks , and many others who believe in our mission. Thank you for the journey

Thank you to @veelarco for hosting this discussion with our CEO, @BaijuBhatt , at last week's @upfrontvc summit. In her recent post, Vanessa details how her perspective on space technology has evolved, highlighting three primary tailwinds currently accelerating the industry: • Commercial Stability • A New Wave of Talent • Massive Market Opportunities Watch the full conversation below! youtube.com/watch?v=hbLbTv…

Why Big F***ing Ideas Matter in Investing Thomas Laffont, Co-Founder of Coatue Exhibit A: "Size of TAM is irrelevant" Great companies don’t capture TAM — they expand it. 1) $UBER: Grew the taxi market 5–10x → then expanded with food + grocery 2) $AAPL: Grew the phone market while raising prices → then added services The biggest winners think beyond their initial markets & create entirely new ones. @coatuemgmt @coatue_thomas @upfrontvc . . . "I love big idea investing. I think we have a moniker internally, which is BFI, which you might guess stands for big f*cking idea. And the reason that we keep the swear word in the middle is when you hear BFI and you hear “big f*cking idea,” it's jolting for a little bit, right? And it's like, “What? Hold on.” And that's what a big idea should do. You know, I personally have a view that a lot of entrepreneurs, when they pitch you an idea, will come and pitch you a TAM. And it's usually big and it's hundreds of billions or whatever. I have a personal view that I've developed, which is actually the size of the TAM is irrelevant. So I never listen to whenever an entrepreneur will pitch me a TAM. I really don't think about the TAM. I think about two things. I think about: 1.) whatever number you want to give me for a TAM—$100 billion, $7 trillion—it doesn't matter to me. But what I do think is: is that TAM going to grow between now and, let's say, the next five or ten years? So pick whatever baseline you want. Is the TAM going to be two or three times larger over that timeframe? So that's number one. UBER: A canonical example is the taxi TAM. It didn't really matter what the taxi TAM was. What mattered was that it actually ended up growing 5-10x because Uber created less friction and grew the entire market. So I care a lot about TAM growth over time. That's point number one. 2.) And then I care a lot about additional TAMs. So you had one TAM initially, and now you've added another TAM. Continuing the Uber example, now you've added grocery and you've added food. So to finish that example, what that means to me is essentially the TAM that Uber had initially wasn't super compelling. What was compelling is the fact that, number one, the TAM grew significantly because of its product, and they added additional TAMs over the course of their life. APPLE: And to me the best companies—Apple and iPhone is another phenomenal example. I was very lucky to be the analyst on iPhone and Apple basically starting in 2003 and for almost the next 20 years. And it's kind of hard to imagine, but one of the bear cases as the iPhone was getting started and building momentum was that there just wasn't enough TAM for the handset manufacturers. They already represented like 150% of the gross profit of the handset industry—meaning they were making money and all the others were losing. Well, what ended up happening? That TAM grew massively. And in fact the number one thing that we got wrong in our analysis of Apple in the early days is we had the price of the phone declining 5% in five years. Because that's kind of what you did as an analyst—you had to put declining ASPs. And in fact the opposite happened. The price increased, the TAM for phones increased massively, and then guess what? They added additional TAMs through services and other things like that."

"The size of the TAM is irrelevant." Coatue's @coatue_thomas Laffont with @MollySOShea at @upfrontvc Summit on why market growth and "additional TAMs" are the critical metrics for success.

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

Symposium weekend lineup keeps getting better. Who else is getting hyped? Next up 👇 luma.com/heq67l07 @upfrontvc 🤝 Waterloo builders Pre-Socratica Builders Night | Mar 21 · 4-6 PM Meet cool people in AI + hard tech Relaxed, thoughtful conversation Cocktails + apps

Peter Zakin (@pzakin) is speaking at Compute Conference. Partner at @UpfrontVC, focused on developer tools and infrastructure. Previously co-founded Macro and Hyper Travel (acquired by Tradeshift). Started his career as a software engineer and PM at Venmo. Join us March 8-9 at Chase Center, SF. Get tickets here: go.daytona.io/9DmGPuN

The next Mag 7 may still be private: "All of us in this room would probably think of.. SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Revolut, Databricks.” “If you're going to outperform the index over a long period of time, you're going to need exposure to these companies.” Thomas Laffont, Coatue @coatuemgmt @coatue_thomas @upfrontvc "Regardless, if you think about the innovation of these late-stage private companies—or one thing we kind of look at is the Mag 7, which has been a significant driver of returns in the public market over the past few years—has essentially kind of been flat over the past year-ish. And that's because Microsoft, as an example, I think has lost almost a trillion dollars of value over that timeframe as people are questioning their positioning kind of in AI. So then that leads you to think, “Well, what would the next Mag 7 look like?” Or who would be other candidates to kind of fit into the index of the future? And I think the names that all of us in this room would probably think of are names like SpaceX, or names like OpenAI, Anthropic, Revolut, Databricks. So I do think it's a really important class of companies. I do think if you're going to want to outperform the index over a long period of time, you're going to need exposure to these companies. Some of them will probably go public in the next 12 to 24 months, so that'll be kind of one impact of it. But it is unbelievable the amount of innovation that is now coming from this group of companies."

"Not a single one of the companies we're involved with is saying they want to cut engineering staff in half." @coatue_thomas and @MollySOShea at @upfrontvc summit on why AI productivity drives market expansion, not displacement.

BREAKING: Thomas Laffont, Co-Founder of Coatue "The next Mag 7 may still be private" With $70B AUM including $30B on the private side, Thomas & I discuss Anthropic, Private/Public Markets, AI Volatility, Citrini Paper, & more. Highlights: • Anthropic: Coatue leads $30B Series G at $380B → ~$19B ARR • AI coding tools spreading across enterprises • SaaS multiples being repriced • What happens to software engineers? • Managing a mega fund with autonomous agents? • Interpreting Citrini AI “Global Intelligence Crisis” paper • Where is Thomas' French accent? Live from Upfront Summit 2026. @coatue_thomas @coatuemgmt @upfrontvc 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Thomas Laffont, Co-Founder Coatue Management (01:18) The rapid rise of Claude Code (04:15) Anthropic’s revenue growth and trajectory (05:25) Where capital is flowing: private vs public markets (08:10) The Citrini paper and AI market volatility (10:15) Are new Claude releases hurting SaaS companies? (17:22) Will AI reduce the number of engineers? (19:38) The ATM analogy for AI and jobs (21:02) Could autonomous agents automate investing? (23:18) How Coatue got conviction on Nvidia (24:18) Why TAM does not matter? (26:43) Running Coatue with his brother Philippe

.@coatue_thomas sits down with @MollySOShea from @upfrontvc Summit to discuss where capital is flowing, AI's impact on software, and why the next Mag 7 may still be private. Full recap below 👇

Last week at #UpfrontSummit, had a great discussion with Clay Bavor at @SierraPlatform, @lsturdy1 at @CapitalG, and @shiringhaffary at @business talking about the next era of AI agents. This moment in time feels a lot like early mobile. Here's what I mean →

Fun week at @upfrontvc - loved seeing @CathieDWood, @nikitabier, #chrissacca so many more. Interesting POVs on AI + messaging

At the 2026 @upfrontvc Summit, Coatue Co-Founder @coatue_thomas joined @MollySOShea on navigating markets and the AI boom. "The ability to endure and compound is what defines generational investing." And on today's market sentiment: "By definition, if everyone thinks we're in a bubble, we're not in a bubble."

Last week, ARK CEO/CIO @CathieDWood took the stage at @upfrontvc's #UpfrontSummit for a conversation with @coatuemgmt's co-founder Thomas Laffont on market cycles, AI, and the future of innovation investing. From “a wall of worry” to one of the most powerful AI cycles in history, Cathie emphasized why long-term thinking matters, especially now. Touching on public vs. private markets, the future of IPOs, and why retail investors deserve access to innovation, her message was clear: INNOVATION WINS.