The Ledger, every show

“I believe in God. Most people in Silicon Valley do not.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“The lesson that punches you in the stomach in venture is you can't make a company succeed.”

“The best trade of 2025 was the AI power trade.”

“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.”

“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…”

“And I think some of the best investments are those companies that don't want to raise capital.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“I think the two big talent consolidators right now in Israel are Kala and Descartes.”

“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…”

“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.”

“They launched this product, this AI voice product that you can talk to, got a million users in a few weeks, five million minutes, like just tremendous product market fit.”

“The entire SaaS economy is a two hundred and fifty billion dollar market, right?”

“Now, in order to be an AI cloud, you need to be willing to light a bunch of money on fire, right? And so I think that that is a pretty significant barrier to entry for new entrants.”

“I mean, labor is the single biggest cost in data centers.”

“I think the consumer killer use case hasn't emerged yet.”

“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…”

“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…”

“The price to performance ratio continues to improve. I don't see that stopping. NVIDIA is a fantastic company. They've, Have a track record of innovating. They have a track record of new products. You better believe Jensen's driving his team super hard on what…”

“NVIDIA earns a big gross margin. And when you, when anyone sees a fat gross margin in a big market, people come chasing.”

“The big tech companies actually do a very good job of this. And I think it's another advantage they have that's underestimated is kind of convincing the supply chain to change their behavior is something that those guys have a lot of practice doing.”

“KKR owns Cyrus one, Blackstone owns QTS, fantastic investments. There's gonna be huge money-making investments for those firms.”

“About half the cost of the data center is GPUs, half is everything else.”

“A lot of the capital going to fund data centers comes from real estate developers. Real estate investors”

“So I think prices will get bit like the spread between the risk-free You know, return and the sort of risk adjusted return will compress, which just means that it's going to be less of a good deal as more people do it.”

“And so you know, Blackstone did this core weave deal. They were one of the first and Blackstone are generally very good at structuring these type of creative deals. Good on them. And I think we'll see more of that type of deals going forward.”

“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…”

“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…”

“And so I think the right strategy is this barbell approach, right? Where you're doing early companies and you're also doing late companies.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“When Sequoia invested in Zoom, they didn't want to raise capital, right? They were profitable. They were doing really well.”

“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…”

“Amazon in the last six months has announced fifty billion dollars of new data centers, right?”

“DPR is the biggest general contractor in building data centers.”

“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…”