Sequoia Capital

About a year ago, I did something I’d never done in my entire career: I joined a company building program. After building multiple companies, I’d never once done one. But I’m still pulling up things we worked on at Sequoia Capital Arc program almost a year later. Arc was about one thing: storytelling. Your product story. Your company story. Your founder story. Your customer story. And they were right—if you don’t have a story, you’re dead. Too many founders obsess over features and forget the narrative. Truth is, people don’t buy products. They buy stories. They buy the vision of what’s possible. Sequoia brought in the masters—designers, storytellers, graphics people—and treated storytelling like engineering. Same rigor. Same resources. A few weeks after Arc, I was on a plane thinking about how to pitch my seed round to the press. I texted James Buckhouse from the team: “Need help with this story. I land in a few hours.” It was in my inbox before we hit the gate. Great team. Great program. Great fund. Time is running out to become a founder, apply to this cohort before August 17th. And yes, they paid me $12 million (seed round) to say this. 😉

We’ve all seen humanoid robots doing backflips and dance routines for years. But if you ask them to climb a few stairs in the real world, they stumble! We took our robot on a walk around town to environments that it hadn’t seen before. 🚀 ⬇️ While dancing and flips in free space can be done blind, climbing stairs requires tight coordination of vision and action to adapt in real time to step height, shape, and geometry -- a more challenging problem in robotics. This is classic Moravec’s Paradox at play -- things that are easy for humans are often difficult for robots and vice versa! For instance, do you know how many steps are between the street and your apartment? Humans, unlike today's robots, do not build 3D terrain maps first but instead navigate effortlessly by seeing & reacting in the moment. Skild Brain operates directly from vision! From camera images and joint feedback, Skild Brain directly commands robot actions, seamlessly adjusting robot behavior. It requires no hardcoding. This is the first portion (low-level, high-frequency) of the Skild Brain, our robotics foundation model. Check out our blog for more details: https://lnkd.in/ee5AXRY9 The Skild Brain can generalize to quadrupeds 🐶, wheeled robots 🚗, or any kind of robot that you can imagine. Stay tuned, more coming soon!

Today on Training Data, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch shares the backstory of NextJS/Vercel's success story as the leading web development framework, how v0 is the next chapter of that journey for AI (cc Zeb Hermann!), and how he sees the internet evolving as AI eats up internet traffic. YouTube: https://seq.vc/sqc Apple: https://seq.vc/z7z Spotify: https://seq.vc/zlb

Arc is another pathway for early-stage founders to connect with Sequoia. If you’re a pre-seed or seed-stage founder building the next generational company, we’d love to hear from you: https://lnkd.in/g8eke_mj 

Figma has always done things differently. 🐪 Early skeptics dismissed the idea of collaborative design as chaos: One of Dylan Field's favorite early comments: 'A camel is a horse designed by committee.' 🎯 Most startups launch fast and iterate, but Figma toiled for 2.5 years first to perfect the product. 🚀 Despite entering an acquisition agreement, they kept product velocity faster than ever. They stuck to their vision, and transformed how beautiful design comes together. ✨ Changing something as entrenched as how design happens takes unwavering conviction. Congratulations to Dylan and the Figma team on today's milestone!

Modern AI is confined to the digital world. At Skild AI, we are building towards AGI for the real world, unconstrained by robot type or task — a single, omni-bodied brain. Today, we are sharing our journey, starting with early milestones, with more to come in the weeks ahead. Our Mission: Artificial General Intelligence grounded in the physical world. We believe AGI that can truly understand and reason in the real world can only be built through grounding in the physical world. Our Vision: Any robot, Any task, One brain. We tackle robotics in its full generality – building a continually improving, omni-bodied brain that can control any hardware for any task. Who are we? A passionate group of scientists & engineers driven by our shared vision. We have been researching AI and robotics for more than a decade. Our team includes pioneers of self-supervised learning, curiosity-driven exploration, end-to-end sim2real for visual locomotion, dexterous manipulation, learning from human videos, robot parkour, and many more. Many of these works have won awards at top-tier AI and Robotics conferences. Our team has also built production-ready systems at Anduril, Tesla, Nvidia, Meta, Kitty Hawk, Google, Everyday Robotics, and Amazon. Join us in our mission to build the robot brains of tomorrow. More details at: https://lnkd.in/eRJYsJVw

I’m excited to share that I’ve joined Stairwell as CEO. I’ve worked with a lot of companies over the past years, and Stairwell stood out immediately - deeply technical, mission-driven, and solving a real pain for security teams. Stairwell has built some of the most powerful detection and threat analysis tech I’ve seen - combining deep expertise in threat intelligence, reverse engineering, and AI. Grateful to partner with Mike Wiacek, Stairwell founder and CTO, who continues to lead on the technical front, and to work alongside such a smart and committed team. We have an exciting journey ahead that will sharpen our focus, drive execution, and help more organizations make sense of what’s happening in their environments. Read the full announcement here: https://lnkd.in/edDhSFjt Let's build what's next!

🚀Just the *beginning* of the Skild AI story... We are defining the *frontier* of general-purpose intelligence capabilities in robotics This is Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta's life’s work. One of the greatest missions of our generation: building superintelligence in our physical world The ambition, potential, trajectory of our progress... once-in-a-lifetime scale and velocity!

We found Google through an angel investor. We reached out to ServiceNow cold. Linear caught our attention with a thoughtful tweet. Your Sequoia Capital story could begin with Arc, our bi-annual open call for outlier early-stage founders. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gEBsH_qJ