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: I Believe in God, While Most in Silicon Valley Do Not
“I believe in God. Most people in Silicon Valley do not.”
Cahn: AI competition is fundamentally a resource allocation game for Big Tech
“Starcraft is a resource allocation game and AI is a resource allocation game. And so I think as we get into it, what are your resources and how do you allocate those resources? That's the most important question facing every big tech company.”
Cahn: OpenAI's strategy is to be the most aggressive risk-taker
“I think open AI strategy is everybody underestimates AGI all in AGI and we're going to be the most aggressive and everybody else is going to take fewer risks than we do.”
Cahn: Google's biggest AI advantages are search cash and TPUs
“Google has two big advantages, right? It has a cache machine from search that can fund a lot of things. And then number two, it has TPU. And I cannot overstate what an advantage it is to have TPU. They've been building this chip for a long time. It's a really …”
Cahn: Hock Tan is one of the greatest CEOs in business history
“Hocktan is one of the all-time great CEOs in business history. Broadcom's is a premier brand. It's the number one design firm in semiconductors.”
Cahn: Nvidia has avoided aggressive price hikes despite high market leverage
“Nvidia stocks barely moved this year, even though these high-flying beta companies are going crazy because they're raising price. Jensen isn't being insane on price. He probably could have been. He hasn't been crazy on price.”
Cahn: Venture investors cannot force a startup to succeed
“The lesson that punches you in the stomach in venture is you can't make a company succeed.”
Cahn: AI power infrastructure was the best trade of 2025
“The best trade of 2025 was the AI power trade.”
Cahn: Sequoia Targets Only One or Two AI Investments Per Year
“I don't need to find 10 investment opportunities this year. I'd like to find one or two investment opportunities a year that I really love.”
David Cahn: Seven Tech Companies Account for 40% of S&P 500
“We're living in an anomalous monopoly era. And it's funny because there's so many comparisons to industrial revolution, and in some ways we're living in this new gilded age. And we have these seven companies, and they represent 40% of the S&P 500, which is jus…”
Cahn: The best venture investments are companies that don't want capital
“And I think some of the best investments are those companies that don't want to raise capital.”
Cahn: AI market consists of roughly 10 recursive major players
“There's like 10 players around this big chessboard, and they're extremely powerful, and each of their moves affects the other people's moves, so it's kind of recursive.”
Cahn: Sequoia's primary value to portfolio startups is talent recruiting
“I think that's the number one way that companies do benefit from having Sequoia on the cap table, is that, is talent and recruiting, and we can talk more about that, and I'm fascinated by recruiting, and recruiting dynamics, so I do think Sequoia helps with th…”
Cahn: Scaling $0 to $100M ARR signals true product-market fit in AI
“Everybody's on the internet and everybody wants to buy AI. So if you have something really good, it's going to get adopted really fast. And so I do think to the point of playing the game on the ground and adapting to what you see in the market, the biggest thi…”
Cahn: Growth speed from $1M to $50M ARR accurately predicts company valuation
“There's a lot of data that indicates that that is a very good leading indicator of what it's worth. The data I've looked at suggests that that is a historically good algorithm.”
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…”
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…”
Cahn: Long-term market volatility is irrelevant unless overextension causes bankruptcy
“Anything multiplied by zero is zero. And I think that's one of the really tricky things in investing, which is just to say that market volatility doesn't matter in the long run if you have a great business. But if you overextend yourself and then some crash ha…”
Cahn: Founders should be maximally aggressive while investors provide perspective
“Your job as a founder is to be maximally aggressive. And you should do that. And then the investor should hopefully be giving some advice, helping think these things through, giving some perspectives you know, understanding the, a broader time horizon perspect…”
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.”
Cahn: Kela and Descartes are Israel's top talent consolidators
“I think the two big talent consolidators right now in Israel are Kala and Descartes.”
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…”
Sequoia Capital invested in AI voice startup Sesame
“We just, I think today right before this podcast, we announced our investment in a company called Sesame, which is an AI voice company, an AI conversation company.”
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 → |