Training Data

Nathan Sobo has spent nearly two decades pursuing one goal: building an IDE that combines the power of full-featured tools like JetBrains with the responsiveness of lightweight editors like Vim. After hitting the performance ceiling with web-based Atom, he founded Zed and rebuilt from scratch in Rust with GPU-accelerated rendering. Now with 170,000 active developers, Zed is positioned at the intersection of human and AI collaboration. Nathan discusses the Agent Client Protocol that makes Zed "Switzerland" for different AI coding agents, and his vision for fine-grained edit tracking that enables permanent, contextual conversations anchored directly to code—a collaborative layer th...

Alex Kendall founded Wayve in 2017 with a contrarian vision: replace the hand-engineered autonomous vehicle stack with end-to-end deep learning. While AV 1.0 companies relied on HD maps, LiDAR retrofits, and city-by-city deployments, Wayve built a generalization-first approach that can adapt to new vehicles and cities in weeks. Alex explains how world models enable reasoning in complex scenarios, why partnering with automotive OEMs creates a path to scale beyond robo-taxis, and how language integration opens up new product possibilities. From driving in 500 cities to deploying with manufacturers like Nissan, Wayve demonstrates how the same AI breakthroughs powering LLMs are transforming the...

When Google launched Nano Banana, it instantly became a global phenomenon, introducing an image model that finally made it possible for people to see themselves in AI-generated worlds. In this episode, Nicole Brichtova and Hansa Srinivasan, the product and engineering leads behind Nano Banana, share the story behind the model’s creation and what it means for the future of visual AI. Nicole and Hansa discuss how they achieved breakthrough character consistency, why human evaluation remains critical for models that aim to feel right, and how “fun” became a gateway to utility. They explain the craft behind Gemini...

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 AI-generated video, and why Sora 2 represents a leap for video. Thomas and Rohan share how they're intentionally designing the Sora product against mindless scrolling, optimizing for creative inspiration, and building the infrastructure for IP holders to participate in a new creator economy. The conversation goes beyond video generation into...

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 centers. He reveals why network performance—not just compute power—determines AI system efficiency. He discusses the shift from training to inference workloads, and his vision for AI as humanity's "spaceship of the mind," and why he thinks AI may help us discover laws of physics we haven’...

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 behaviors, from models socially engineering each other to outmaneuvering real-world defenses like Windows Defender, signal a coming paradigm shift. Dan explains why tomorrow’s threats will come from AI-on-AI interactions, why anomaly detection will soon break down, and how governments and enterprises alike must ret...

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 experiences like talking to airline apps or turning synchronous interactions asynchronous. Ping breaks down the technical challenges of deploying Contact Center AI at scale, from solving latency to orchestrating 20+ models in real-time. Sequoia’s Doug Leone shares his framework for building AI companies at speed and...

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 reorganized from business unit silos to functional teams to accelerate AI adoption, why they chose to open-source their most valuable AI tool and why he believes swarms of smaller AI models will outperform monolithic LLMs. Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital ...

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 Agency is building AI-first solutions that work autonomously. His contrarian approach focuses on the back-end customer experience rather than front-end AI SDRs, aiming to “deprogram the entire business world” from inefficient human-dependent processes. Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital Mentione...

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 affordable hardware. He shares his vision for turning millions of software developers into roboticists, the challenges of data scarcity in robotics versus language models, and why he believes we're at the same inflection point for physical AI that we were for LLMs just a few years ago. Hosted by: Sonya...

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 billable hours in favor of per-document pricing, achieving contract turnaround times under an hour. Ryan and John explain why the law firm structure enables faster innovation cycles, how they're using AI to predict negotiation outcomes, and their vision for agents that can simulate entire contract negotiations between parties. <...

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 the previous six years. Jan explains how n8n’s “connect everything to anything” philosophy, combined with a thriving open source community, positioned the company to ride the AI automation wave while avoiding vendor lock-in that plagues enterprise software. Hosted...

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, Gemini wins on cost efficiency, and reasoning models actually hurt creativity. John explains how solving their own blank page problem inadvertently solved it for millions of users, turning a near-failing startup into a cash flow positive platform with 250 million presentations created. He discusses competing with PowerPoint's 500 million...

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 helping CEOs train new hires to enabling coaches to monetize their expertise 24/7, Delphi represents a new form of conversational media. Dara explains why authentic human representation matters, how digital minds actually increase desire for real human connection, and why he believes 2026 will be the tipping point fo...

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 ChatGPT has become their fastest-growing customer acquisition channel, and how AI is enabling “virtual coworkers” across design, development, and marketing. He shares his contrarian view that the future belongs to ephemeral, generated-on-demand applications rather than traditional installed software, and why he believes we're on the cusp...

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 tasks rather than formal verification tools. The model showed surprising self-awareness by admitting it couldn’t solve problem six, and revealed the humbling gap between solving competition problems and genuine mathematical research breakthroughs. Hosted by Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital

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 with shared state—they've created what may be the first truly embodied AI assistant. The team discusses their reinforcement learning approach, safety mitigations for real-world actions, and how small teams can build transformative AI products through close research-applied collaboration. Hosted by S...

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 scheduling, AlphaEvolve represents a new paradigm where LLMs coupled with evolutionary search can outperform human experts. Pushmeet explains the technical architecture behind these breakthroughs and shares insights from collaborations with mathematicians like Terence Tao, while discussing how AI is accelerating scientific discovery across domains from chip design to materials science. <...

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 editing demonstrations and real-world applications in genomics with Arc Institute's DNA foundation models. He argues that interpretability will be critical as AI systems become more powerful and take on mission-critical roles in society. Hosted by Sonya Huang and Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Mentioned in this epis...

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 with contextual understanding and emotional delivery. He discusses the company's viral moments (from Harry Potter by Balenciaga to powering Darth Vader in Fortnite), and explains how ElevenLabs is creating the infrastructure for voice agents and real-time translation that could eliminate language barriers worldwide. Hosted by: Pat Grady, Sequoia...