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: OpenAI and Anthropic are vertically integrating into physical infrastructure
“Well, I think the simple version would be OpenAI and Anthropic are now steel servers and power companies. And that's like a big change that's happened in the last 12 months. And so I actually think we're, you know, in many ways, OpenAI and Anthropic are becomi…”
Cahn: Building out one gigawatt of AI power costs $40B to $60B
“A gigawatt is forty billion dollars to build out. Jensen says it's 50 or 60 if you use the next generation Vero Rubin chips. So let's say it's somewhere between 40 and sixty billion.”
Cahn: Market concentration in 'Mag Seven' leaves stocks vulnerable to AI narrative shifts
“And so I think you have a similar dynamic here where the mag seven are just a humongous portion of the market. Now these companies are great. They have cash machines, like they're going to do fine, but I do think we should be concerned that these companies rep…”
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 …”
Cahn: Monopolistic dominance is not the steady state of business
“People over estimate the monopolistic nature of businesses, and that we're living in this sort of unique Gilded Age monopolistic era, and that that Is, is not the steady state of business.”
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…”
Cahn: Harvey, Open Evidence, Clay, and Juicebox are reaching $100M ARR rapidly
“Companies that are on that trajectory or have crossed that trajectory are companies like Harvey and Open Evidence and I think, and Clay and Juicebox.”
Cahn: Sequoia Capital was late to investing in defense tech
“So I do think, look, there's no way around it. Skoya was late to defense.”
Cahn: Sequoia has invested in defense startups Kela and Stark
“So the other two national champions that I've invested in, one is a company called Kella, which we think is going to be a national champion. It's based in Israel. The thesis is that Israel has the best people in the world for this, and they can help defend the…”
Cahn: Voice as an interface for AI is wildly underestimated
“I think that people are underestimating voice as an interface for AI.”
Cahn: Data Centers Are the Most Important Asset in AI
“The bigger these models get, the more that scaling laws become the dominant thing, and so I think there's a really good argument to be made that basically the data center is the most important asset.”
Cahn: The $250B Cloud Infrastructure Market Equals the Entire SaaS Sector
“This cloud business today is a two hundred and fifty billion dollar business. So the cloud business today is the same size as the SaaS sector. That's the business that Azure, Google and AWS control is the same size as the entire SaaS sector.”
Cahn: AI Data Centers Take Two Years and $2 Billion to Build
“Data centers take about two years to build. You are going to build, and it costs about two billion dollars per data center.”
David Cahn: Current AI evidence favors scaling laws over algorithmic breakthroughs
“The evidence today, I think, is more strongly in favor of scaling laws, and I hope to see more evidence of the, of these other breakthroughs being able to drive progress”
Cahn: Low-barrier AI sectors will see margins bid down to zero
“There will be some sectors where you're right, things get commoditized, and they just basically get bid down to zero percent gross margin.”
Cahn: Cloud Providers Are Trapped in an AI Capex Prisoner's Dilemma
“The cloud guys are stuck in more of a prisoner's dilemma. They have to keep investing. If they do not invest, they risk losing market share in one of the greatest businesses of all time.”
Cahn: Coatue-Backed Battery Startup Built a $1B Factory in 12 Months
“I visited this company that's building long duration batteries that I had invested in at KOTU. They literally built a billion dollar factory in the last 12 months.”
Cahn: US power supply is insufficient for AI compute demands
“We don't, and I, you know, there's sort of an interesting phenomenon here, which is, you know, the Biden administration passed the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, and this was this huge stimulus bill that basically incentivized everyone to build solar and bu…”
Cahn: AI will cause gradual energy grid expansion, not an acute crisis
“And so I don't know that it's going to be this like loud crisis that people anticipate. I think it's going to be a slow track for more renewable energy, more power on the grid. And we're just going to, we're going to plot our way there.”
David Cahn predicts China will catch up in AI development
“I think that China is going to catch up.”
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…”
Cahn: Sequoia Defines Success as Backing a Top 50 Global Company
“The bar for success is so, so, so high. Unless this company is one of the 50 most important companies in the world. You haven't done your job well.”
Cahn: Deal selection is more critical than winning or sourcing in VC
“Selection is the most important and I think, and then I think winning comes behind that and sourcing probably is actually, maybe it's tied, but I think it's probably third.”
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 → |