Being a founder is one of the loneliest roles there is. Everyone's livelihood rides on your decisions, but no one else carries the same weight of responsibility. The hardest calls are made in isolation, and you own the outcome either way. The job is only getting harder. AI is changing what companies build, what small teams can do, how they reach customers, and the capital required to scale. The rate of change is accelerating, so the advantage goes to whoever learns and adapts fastest. Yet the decisions that determine whether a company lives or dies haven't changed. Nailing product-market fit. Constructing an effective go-to-market engine. Building a cohesive leadership team that can scale. Knowing when to raise, and how to allocate capital you may never get a second chance to deploy. Get these wrong, and no technology saves you. Few firms have helped founders answer those questions longer, or better, than Sequoia. For over fifty years, it has backed founders early and stayed with them as they built enduring companies. What's struck me most, though, isn't the track record. It's the institution. Sequoia has treated the firm as something to be perpetuated, not a vehicle for individual partners. It approached succession with unusual care and reinvented itself as markets shifted. That mindset is why it endured while firms that once stood beside it disappeared. I've seen how they operate up close. My relationship with Sequoia goes back 16 years. I met Doug Leone in 2010, and for over 11 years I worked closely with Roelof Botha at MongoDB, where Sequoia was our largest investor. I saw firsthand how they behaved when we were winning and when we faced our hardest calls. The advice was thoughtful, the feedback direct, the support consistent. They understood that being a good partner doesn't mean always agreeing with you. It means being honest, staying engaged, and prioritizing the company's long-term interests. After nearly three decades of building, leading, and investing in technology companies, I'm joining Sequoia as a Senior Advisor. As both an operator and an investor, I've lived through the questions founders face. Helping the next generation answer them is exactly where I want to spend my next chapter. sequoiacap.com/people/dev-it…

We’re proud to announce Swish III, a $250M early fund, bringing Swish Ventures to $800M in total AUM. I started this firm to spend my career supporting the artists who build and shape the future. The technology shift underway is unlike anything we’ve seen. We plan to stay true to our colors: few investments a year, real concentration and partnership. Grateful to the founders we get to work with, who inspire so much of how we work, and to our LPs for walking this path with us. We are more locked in than ever. Omri

WE'RE ON AIR! 𝗔𝗜𝗥 𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵 - 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 $𝟱𝟬𝗠 𝗶𝗻 𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 @sequoia , and @Greenoaks . We started AIR with a simple belief: as AI agents become more capable, the security model around them has to evolve. Agents are no longer just generating answers. They’re connecting to tools, skills, MCPs, plugins, websites, and internal data - and taking real actions across the enterprise. Today, we’re introducing the 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗲𝘄𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗔𝗜 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀: a new security layer built to continuously analyze what enters an agent’s context, control what can run, and stop threats in real time before they turn into action. We’re incredibly grateful to our investors, partners, customers, and everyone who believed in us early. This is a huge milestone for our team, and an even bigger beginning ❤️ Read our full story in the first comment 👇

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗻𝗱-𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗙𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗰𝘆: 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗜𝘀 𝗔𝗜 𝗦𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗚𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴? Frontier AI models had a giant performance gain in coding in the Fall of 2025 Then with cybersecurity in April This is now happening with open-weight models We are optimistic about the long-term But outside of a few players, we believe the world is not ready in the short-term

We got the inside scoop on Sequoia's @Alfred_Lin & @gradypb era for Bloomberg Businessweek. Bigger checks. Evolving fund structures. New pools of capital. And an intense focus on speed and rigor across the partnership as the next wave of tech becomes decidedly more physical. Latest w/ @RebeccaTorrenc5 & @EdLudlow bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

In a review of our cybersecurity evaluations, we found three incidents in which a Claude model reached the internet from within or while interacting with a third-party evaluation environment, and then gained unauthorized access to the real systems of three different organizations. Our post describes what happened, how it happened, and what we’re changing. We encourage other AI developers to perform similar reviews. We conducted this review together with @Irregular, one of our evaluation partners, and thank them for the joint investigation and their collaboration on this post. This type of collaboration is increasingly critical to safe, rigorous evaluation of models, and we look forward to continuing to work together on security. anthropic.com/news/investiga…

New blog post on what would be true about the world if trendline continues and leading lab hits $1T in revenue by the end of next year. In other words, why compute might get 10x+ more expensive in coming years dwarkesh.com/p/why-compute-m…

When I was a lawyer at Gibson Dunn in D.C., we took our summer associates to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. A survivor spoke to us and said something that stuck with me: Lawyers need to know the holocaust did not begin with camps. It began when Jews were removed from institutions - above all, legal institutions. Judges stripped of their robes. Lawyers disbarred. Then, when law-groups were Judenrein, they codified laws that made discrimination systematic and "legal." First, you remove the Jews from the institutions. Then, Jews can be discriminated against without representation. On Monday, Mayor Mamdani announced his 18-member Advisory Committee on the Judiciary. The Committee was promised to be "truly reflective of New York City." Not one of the 18 is Jewish. Not one Jewish attorney, former judge, or law professor - in a city where one in eight residents is Jewish and even Justice John Leventhal, recommended by the State's Chief Judge, was rejected. It is estimated that over 50% of the New York bar is Jewish. That means there is a 0.0004% chance of no Jews being selected to the Committee. Mamdani’s marginalization of Jews has been ongoing, and few voices on the Left have spoken up. On Day 1, Mamdani revoked the IHRA antisemitism definition (top priority); he changed the NYPD guidance protecting houses of worship, eliminated Jews from the City's immigrant-heritage map, called for the arrest of the prime minister of the only Jewish state, and now created a Judenrein Judiciary Committee. My grandmother, Leah, survived Nazi Germany. Before the laws, before the violence, she told me how she was pushed out of her high school groups. Then, once excluded from all activities, she was bullied and marginalized. We are already seeing Step 2 in NYC. Two weeks ago, on a Jewish Holiday, two men were stabbed outside Upper West Side synagogues - one wearing a kippah- and yesterday, Jewish students were attacked. Every 26 hours, there is a hate crime against Jews in NYC. In NYC, there is a concerted effort to disappear Jews from public life and leadership. No one on the Left is speaking out. If this discrimination was happening to any other group, the chorus would be deafening. To be clear, Jews will find a way. Many are already taking their talents elsewhere. When white-shoe firms shut Jewish lawyers out, they built firms that now dominate. Cardozo, Louis Marshall, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg all found a way despite discrimination. But NYC will be worse off without us. A city government that is judenrein - cleansed of Jews – does not just hurt the Jews, but hurts the city. The tragedy is not just that Jews were left out of the institutions. It is that the institutions were left without the Jews. If you see this and have not yet spoken out, I encourage you to do so.

Sequoia Partner @DeanMeyerrr says there are two major risks to relying on a Chinese open-source ecosystem: dependency and security. "The first risk is dependency. The framing we have at Sequoia is we're only as good as our next investment. In some sense, the analogy is you're only as good as your next model. So as long as you're dependent on the Chinese to give you the next model, you're in a weird position where you have this dependency." "The other thing is just the risk of backdoors. It's an NP-hard problem to know if there is a backdoor in a model that we know. So it's impossible to verify." "The state of AI security today is very similar to the early days of the Internet when Wi-Fi encryption was publicly broken and no one did anything. I don't even think we're at that moment yet." "It's going to get really bad if we don't better understand how to secure these things and build our own independent ecosystem."