David Cahn
Partner, Sequoia Capital. On 2 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
David Cahn is a partner at Sequoia Capital, where he leads AI investments. Previously, he served as a general partner at Coatue, leading investments in Notion and Hugging Face.
2shows
3appearances
144statements
26resolved
20supported
2contradicted
77%fully supported
33said about them ↓ Everything David Cahn said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Cahn: Chip makers finance AI buildouts to book revenue circularly
“The chip companies are now stepping up and saying, okay, we'll absorb some of the risk. We'll put in the capital to finance this build out where the demand on the other side is not so clear because of course the chip companies also get to book this as revenue.”
Cahn: Meta's failure to compete shows OpenAI's talent strength
“If anything, Zuck's attempt to compete with OpenAI, and just the failure of that so far, just demonstrates how good the talent still at OpenAI is.”
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 …”
Cahn: Venture capital firms cannot 'king-make' startups with capital alone
“I don't believe in King making and that's maybe a controversial thing to say. I think one of the lessons, you know, you'd think like, oh, Sequoia should be able to King make companies and like, that's so great. And that would be, by the way, if that was true, …”
Cahn: AI startups will win by hiring 23-to-25-year-old AI generalists
“I think that the new playbook for these AI startups is actually going to be much more about hire the AI generalist, this 23, 24, 25 year old who's really native in AI, really passionate about it, and I think those are the sort of the front lines that are going…”
Cahn: Current AI Products Are Not Yet Showing Strong Value Creation
“The burden to deliver value is very, very high in business. And we're not seeing that so strongly in AI yet.”
Cahn: AGI Is Decades Away and Not Happening Anytime Soon
“It's like, we're probably gonna be fine. AI is probably gonna change our lives and make it better. It's gonna improve productivity. Maybe AGI is gonna happen when you and I are like, 90, but I don't think AGI is happening like tomorrow.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Cahn: AI infrastructure needs $3T in payback since ChatGPT launch
“You basically have about three trillion dollars that needs to get paid back just since chat GBT.”
Cahn: Humans will do only 1% of cognitive work in 50 years
“Today humans do 99% of cognitive work in
50 years, humans are going to do maybe one percent of cognitive work, right?”
Cahn: Anthropic is the fastest-growing company in history
“What has happened with Anthropic in the last year is nothing short of mind blowing to anyone who studied companies, right? It's the fastest growing company in history.”
Cahn: OpenAI and Anthropic generate over $100B in combined revenue
“Today it's a hundred billion plus across OpenAI and Anthropic. Now there's still two companies driving the vast, vast, vast majority of the revenue in AI.”
Cahn: The only way to repay massive AI CapEx is achieving AGI
“If you kind of think about those dollars of CapEx, the only possible way to pay those dollars back is going to be AGI.”
Cahn: Spending $200B a year on AI CapEx without new business lines is unsustainable
“The current status quo of we're spending two hundred billion dollars a year on CapEx. And, you know, yes, we're renting our GPUs, so revenue is accelerating, but fundamentally there's no There's not a new business line coming out of it. That is not sustainable…”
Cahn: Vertical integration has failed to produce superior AI models
“The reality is, when you look at the ecosystem today versus two years ago, the vertically integrated companies have not been able to leverage that vertical integration into some model advantage.”
Cahn: Meta and Google pursue AI because ad models face existential disruption
“Part of why I think Meta and Google are so all in AI is their businesses are the most at risk from AI. Like if we all move to ChatGPT, if we all move, if our time eyeballs move to these other interfaces, Then these ad driven businesses have a lot of questions.”
Cahn: Amazon faces a 'heads I lose, tails I lose' dilemma in AI
“In some ways I worry for Amazon, which is like, Heads I lose, tails I lose. It's like, if this all goes well and AGI happens, they're not well positioned for that. And then if it doesn't happen, they're kind of in the bath with everybody else on the capex that…”
Cahn: Apple could emerge as a genius if AI models commoditize
“Apple is the one, by the way, with the do nothing strategy. Like you gotta look at Apple and say, wow, like there's some chance that Apple just comes out looking like a genius on this. Like if it does commoditize, Apple's not spending money on CapEx.”
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…”
The other half of the tape: David Cahn's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 32 times in 17 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 16Alex Kantrowitz 6Jeff Wang 4Ranjan Roy 3Shaun Maguire 1Julien Bek 1Alex Schultz 1
Statements about David Cahn, by other people (1)
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 …”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 23
Big Technology 9
2026 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- DeepSeek Raises at $50B | The Rise of Open Source vs OpenAI & Anthropic | OpenAI Builds Own Chip · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Inside Sequoia's Investment Committee | How the SpaceX & Citadel Deals Went Down | Julien Bek
- Leopold Blows Up, OpenAI Drastically Cuts Prices, Microsoft’s Best Day
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 12 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- AGI or Bust, OpenAI’s $1 Trillion Gamble, Apple’s Next CEO?
- AI Fund’s GP, Andrew Ng: LLMs as the Next Geopolitical Weapon & Do Margins Still Matter in AI? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- OpenAI’s & NVIDIA's $100 Billion Marriage, Meta’s Sloppy Vibes, TikTok Deal Arrives?
- 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 →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens David's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Partner, Sequoia Capital | 2 | 122 | 74% 17/23 | full record on 20VC → |
| BIG TECHNOLOGYLEDGER | Partner, Sequoia Capital | 1 | 22 | 100% 3/3 | full record on Big Technology → |