David Cahn
56 statements across 3 episodes · 18 bullish · 11 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Aug 5, 2024 by David Cahn · said 23 times in 14 episodes since 2024 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: David Cahn's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (16), Jeff Wang (4), Shaun Maguire (1), Julien Bek (1), Alex Schultz (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2025 4 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
- AI Fund’s GP, Andrew Ng: LLMs as the Next Geopolitical Weapon & Do Margins Still Matter in AI? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader
- Figma's 250% Pop - The Greatest IPO Mispricing Ever? Meta & Microsoft Blowout Quarters: Broken Down · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Why Apple Needs a Management Overhaul & Why Google is Catching Up with Hyperscalers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 16 mentions in 8 episodes 2 per episode
- Jeff Wang: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta|E1212 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Eiso Kant, CTO @Poolside: Raising $600M To Compete in the Race for AGI | E1211 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Mamoon Hamid: AI - Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws | E1217 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- David Frankel, MP @Founder Collective: Investing Lessons from Seeding Coupang, Pillpack & Suno|E1214 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Eric Vishria: Where is the Value in AI - Chips, Models or Apps? | E1206 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Arvind Narayanan: AI Scaling Myths, The Core Bottlenecks in AI Today & The Future of Models | E1195 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Imran Khan: Why the IPO Market is Not Closed & Lessons From Taking Snap & Alibaba Public | E1194 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Shaun Maguire: Why Iran is the World's Greatest Evil & Trump is the Only Hope for Peace | E1189 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
Everything said about David Cahn, oldest first
Aug 5, 2024 positive
Aug 5, 2024
Cahn Used Personalized Cameo Videos to Get Founders' Attention Early On
“One thing I used to do is I went through this phase where every time I met a founder that I really liked, I would go through their Twitter. I'd figure out something they really liked, let's say some TV show, and then I'd go in cameo and I would find the actres…”
Aug 5, 2024 neutral
Aug 5, 2024 positive
Cahn: Replicating 80% of 10 peers' distinct superpowers drives investor success
“I'm probably not gonna be as hundred percent as good as you if this is your superpower, but I'd like to be 80% as good at you at your superpower, and if I can be 80% as good as 10 people on each of their 10 superpowers, then I'll probably be pretty, pretty goo…”
Aug 5, 2024
Cahn: Focus on Software Customer Behavior Over Stated Churn Intentions
“So I think the lesson is you have to listen to what customers do. They continue to pay for the, especially expensive products. If people are paying for expensive products and telling you they're going to churn, you probably shouldn't listen to that. They're pa…”
Aug 5, 2024
Aug 5, 2024
Aug 5, 2024 neutral
Aug 5, 2024 neutral
Aug 5, 2024
Aug 5, 2024
Aug 5, 2024
Aug 5, 2024 bearish
Aug 5, 2024
Aug 5, 2024
Cahn: Tech Giants Will Avoid Full Acquisitions of Major AI Labs
“I think that will probably sustain because it's not really possible to acquire these businesses. Now you can acquire the smaller ones, and we've seen that with Inflection and Adept, you can acquire some of the teams, but it's going to be much more difficult to…”
Aug 5, 2024
Aug 5, 2024
David Cahn: Building a $10B+ company requires four distinct founder attributes
“I think if you have one of these, you can be very good. I think if you have two of these, you can be great. I think if you have three of these, you can build a billion dollar company. You need all four of these to build a ten billion dollar company, a hundred …”
Aug 5, 2024
Aug 5, 2024 bullish
Cahn: ChatGPT Is Now a $3.4 Billion Revenue Business
“Definitely OpenAI. I mean, OpenAI has a brand, it has consumer distribution, it has product market fit with ChatGBT, which is a 3.4 billion dollar revenue business now. I think ChatGBT will definitely be around. Yeah, I think a bunch of the others will too for…”
Aug 5, 2024 positive
Aug 5, 2024 positive
Cahn: Founders Should Offer Up to 5% Equity for Transformational Hires
“I tell founders all the time, if you find someone who's going to transform your business, give them five percent of the company. Now I say that it's an extreme statement. Maybe it's four percent, maybe it's three percent. But I think we get very married to lik…”
Aug 5, 2024
Cahn recorded one Loom video every day for over a year for founder outreach
“There was a phase that I went through for more than a year where I recorded a Loom video, one Loom video every single day. And it was just at seven PM. I would record a Loom video. That was what I needed to do. And I would find the coolest product I could find…”
Aug 5, 2024
Cahn: Generating $1B+ Gains Is the Only Definition of Success in VC
“There is a definition of success in this business. You're either a slugger or you are not. If you are generating billion dollar gains, you are a slugger. Doug Leone is a slugger. Pat Grady is a slugger. And Jurita is a slugger, right? So you either are sluggin…”
Aug 5, 2024 bearish
Aug 5, 2024 bullish
Aug 5, 2024
Cahn: Hardest part of VC is taking personal risk, not finding good deals
“And something I like to say to people is I don't think the hardest part of venture is figuring out what are the good companies. I think the hardest part of venture is figuring out when are you going to put your neck on the line for this company and all good pa…”
Aug 5, 2024 neutral
Aug 5, 2024
Cahn: Rational AI strategy is unclear for non-cloud giants like Salesforce
“I mean, I do think the like tier below those three big companies are scared right now. I think there's probably like those boardroom conversations are probably tense, right? I think on the one hand, huge opportunity, right? Make the product better. You already…”
Aug 5, 2024 negative
Cahn: Injecting AI for Marketing Adds Costs Without Pricing Power
“If you are simply injecting AI so that you can tell investors that you have AI and so that you can, you know, talk on your marketing page about how you have AI, then you're just injecting a new cost item with actually no benefit to the consumer. And if there's…”
Aug 12, 2024 positive
Maguire names Sequoia's top deal pickers by sector
“Like if it's a SAS company, Pat Grady, if it's, you have to read someone, you only get like 10 minutes to read the person, then it's Doug Leone. If it's a, like a biotech company, it's definitely Ruloff. If it's an operationally heavy company, it's Alfred. If …”
Oct 27, 2025 positive
Cahn: Low early gross margins do not prevent long-term software success
“Plenty of companies that get critiqued for having low gross margins end up being super healthy businesses in the long run. You know, Snowflake was one of the big indicts on Snowflake in the early days was that it had a low gross margin. Obviously it's a very g…”
Oct 27, 2025 bearish
Cahn: AI infrastructure investment requires $840B in end-user revenue
“If you invest one hundred fifty billion in NVIDIA chips, that's about three hundred billion of data center investments. And to pay that back, the person using the compute needs to earn a 50% gross margin. So there's about six hundred billion of revenue that ne…”
Oct 27, 2025 neutral
Oct 27, 2025 bullish
David Cahn: Physical data center construction capability will be a competitive moat
“One of my core perspectives that I've been developing over the last 18 months of writing about this is that construction itself is going to be a moat. The ability to build things is hard. And I think we underestimate that.”
Oct 27, 2025 negative
Cahn: Raising Seed through Series B in 12 months is a false narrative
“Most, there's this false narrative, I think, that, like, all the good companies, they, you know, they raise the seed, and then they raise the A, and then they raise the B, and it's all in 12 months, and it, Revenue, that's not really how most of these companie…”
Oct 27, 2025 bullish
Cahn: People will talk to and form relationships with AI within 10 years
“I think the idea that we're going to be sitting here in 10 years talking to our AI, having a relationship with our AI, I think that's very likely, and I think it's a little bit sci-fi right now and I think it's going to get less so in the coming years.”
Oct 27, 2025 positive
Cahn: Generative AI breaks traditional recursive career algorithms
“The recursive algorithm of, like, what did the guy a year above me and the person a year above me do is actually breaking because those people didn't have this information. They didn't know that AI was going to change the world. They didn't understand gen AI.”
Oct 27, 2025 bearish
Oct 27, 2025 bearish
Cahn: Any AI bubble unwind will hit household stock portfolios, not banks
“What I think is going to be interesting if to the extent that the bubble unwinds at some point, it's going to be an equity unwind. And what that looks like is 40% of the S&P 500 is basically a bet on AI. And so to the extent that the bet unwinds, stock prices …”
Oct 27, 2025 negative
Oct 27, 2025 neutral
Cahn: Sequoia will only invest in defense startups every couple years
“I mean, my objective, I probably invested in a dozen AI companies in my career. I hope to invest in 20 more. My objective is not to invest in 20 more defense companies throughout my career. I think it's going to be a very small handful of companies. Maybe we'l…”
Oct 27, 2025
Oct 27, 2025 negative
Oct 27, 2025 negative
David Cahn: AI industry is at the start of data center construction delays
“One of the predictions I made last year, in addition to saying it was going to be the year of the data center in 20, 25, I said, Hey, we're going to have these construction delays. We're going to have issues now in building out these data centers. And the info…”
Oct 27, 2025
Cahn: AI infrastructure build-out is mostly equity and cash funded
“I actually think that what's interesting about this AI build out is that for the most part, and let's put Oracle aside, which maybe has some debt, but for the most part, the AI build out today has been equity funded and cash funded.”
Oct 27, 2025 bullish
Oct 27, 2025
David Cahn: Missing Datadog deal to Dragoneer was major financial loss
“One big financial miss is Datadog, and I worked on this before joining Sequoia, but I remember, you know, Datadog was this amazing company. The numbers were incredible. It was proper. Like, it was one of these businesses where you just, like, your mouth waters…”
Oct 27, 2025 bullish
Cahn: AI gives junior startup hires near-parity with senior peers
“Maybe 10 years ago, if you joined a startup and people didn't join startups that often, 10 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, if you joined a startup, like there's this whole experience curve, you're the junior engineer. There's a lot of people who are smarter tha…”
Oct 27, 2025 positive
Oct 27, 2025 neutral
Cahn: Few concentrated defense tech winners will emerge per country
“And I guess my framework, and this is the thesis that I've been investing behind now for the last couple of years is my framework is there are going to be fewer companies that succeed in defense for this reason. Defense is consolidated for good reason. There's…”
Oct 27, 2025 bullish
Oct 27, 2025 bullish
Cahn: Led Sequoia's investment in Clay at $1B+ valuation after long pivot
“Sequoia invested at the Series A in, I think, 2019. The company spent three or four years in the wilderness really figuring it out. I look at Kareem, I think the man is, like, enlightened from this experience. Like, a super painful experience. Varun ended up j…”
Oct 27, 2025 positive
Oct 27, 2025 negative
Cahn: Investors overestimate how much individual researchers drive AI progress
“That said, I think we are psychologically biased to overestimate what that percent contribution is. And it may be the case that there's these broader macro variables, which we'll talk about, I'm sure later in this discussion, there's these broader macro variab…”
Oct 27, 2025 bullish
Cahn: AI will disrupt at least 5% of global GDP ($9T+)
“I actually agree with him fundamentally that AI is going to affect five percent of GDP. Probably where I disagree with Massa, so I think he used the nine trillion dollars. I think that's the number he used. It's going to Disrupt nine trillion of GDP. And then …”
Oct 27, 2025 neutral
Cahn: Top AI researchers command $50M to $1B compensation packages
“If you're a 25 year old recent grad from an elite university who is perceived to be an AI expert, you can get a fifty hundred million dollar pay package right now. And if you are a brand name that everyone recognizes your name, you can get a billion dollar pay…”