Join us as we train our neural nets on the theme of the century: AI. Sonya Huang, Pat Grady and more Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI...
Databricks Founder Ion Stoica: Turning Academic Open Source into Startup Success
Berkeley professor Ion Stoica, co-founder of Databricks and Anyscale, transformed the open source projects Spark and Ray into successful AI infrastructure companies. He talks about what mattered most for Databricks' success -- the focus on making Spark win and making Databricks the best place to run Spark. He highlights the importance of striking key partnerships -- the Microsoft partnership in particular that accelerated Databricks' growth and contributed to Spark's dominance among data scientists and AI engineers. He also shares his perspective on finding new problems to work on, which holds lessons for aspiring founders and builders: 1) building systems in new areas that, if widely adopted, put you in the best position to understand the new problem space, and 2) focusing on a problem that is more important tomorrow than today.
Hosted by: Stephanie Zhan and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital
Mentioned in this episode:
Spark: The open source platform for data engineering that Databricks was originally based on.
Ray: Open source framework to manage, executes and optimizes compute needs across AI workloads, now productized through Anyscale
MosaicML: Generative AI startups founded by Naveen Rao that Databricks acquired in 2023.
Unity Catalog: Data and AI governance solution from Databricks.
CIB Berkeley: Multi-strategy hedge fund at UC Berkeley that commercializes research in the UC system.
Hadoop: A long-time leading platform for large scale distributed computing.
VLLM and Chatbot Arena: Two of Ion’s students’ projects that he wanted to highlight.
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1:00:05
XBOW CEO and GitHub Copilot Creator Oege de Moor: Cracking the Code on Offensive Security With AI
Oege de Moor, the creator of GitHub Copilot, discusses how XBOW’s AI offensive security system matches and even outperforms top human penetration testers, completing security assessments in minutes instead of days. The team’s speed and focus is transforming the niche market of pen testing with an always-on service-as-a-software platform. Oege describes how he is building a large and sustainable business while also creating a product that will “protect all the software in the free world.” XBOW shows how AI is essential for protecting software systems as the amount of AI-generated code increases along with the scale and sophistication of cyber threats.
Hosted by: Konstantine Buhler and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital
Mentioned in this episode:
Semmle: Oege’s previous startup, a code analysis tool to secure software, acquired in 2019 by GitHub
Nico Waisman: Head of security at XBOW, previously a researcher at Semmle
The Bitter Lesson: Highly influential post by Richard Sutton
HackerOne: Cybersecurity company that runs one of the largest bug bounty programs
Suno: AI songwriting app that Oege loves
Machines of Loving Grace: Essay by Anthropic founder, Dario Amodei
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51:37
Ramp CEO Eric Glyman: Using AI to Build “Self-Driving Money”
When ChatGPT ushered in a new paradigm of AI in everyday use, many companies attempted to adapt to the new paradigm by rushing to add chat interfaces to their products. Eric has a different take—he doesn’t think chatbots are the right form factor for everything. He thinks “zero-touch” automation that works invisibly in the background can be more valuable in many cases. He cites self-driving cars as an analogy—or in this case, “self-driving money.” Ramp is a new kind of finance management company for businesses, offering AI-powered financial tools to help companies handle spending and expense processes. We’ll hear why Eric thinks AI that you never see is one of the most powerful instruments for reducing time spent on drudgery and unlocking more time for meaningful work.
Hosted by: Ravi Gupta and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital
Mentioned in this episode:
Paribus: Glyman’s previous company, acquired by Capital One in 2016
Karim Atiyeh: Cofounder and CTO at Ramp and Glyman’s cofounder at Paribus
Devin: AI agent product from Cognition Labs and Glyman’s favorite AI app
Hit Refresh: Book by Satya Nadella
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38:48
Dust’s Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu: Getting the Most From AI With Multiple Custom Agents
Founded in early 2023 after spending years at Stripe and OpenAI, Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu started Dust with the view that one model will not rule them all, and that multi-model integration will be key to getting the most value out of AI assistants. In this episode we’ll hear why they believe the proprietary data you have in silos will be key to unlocking the full power of AI, get their perspective on the evolving model landscape, and how AI can augment rather than replace human capabilities.
Hosted by: Konstantine Buhler and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital
00:00 - Introduction
02:16 - One model will not rule them all
07:15 - Reasoning breakthroughs
11:15 - Trends in AI models
13:32 - The future of the open source ecosystem
16:16 - Model quality and performance
21:44 - “No GPUs before PMF”
27:24 - Dust in action
37:40 - How do you find “the makers”
42:36 - The beliefs Dust lives by
50:03 - Keeping the human in the loop
52:33 - Second time founders
56:15 - Lightning round
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1:03:07
Clay’s Kareem Amin on Building the Sales ‘System of Action’ with AI
Clay is leveraging AI to help go-to-market teams unleash creativity and be more effective in their work, powering custom workflows for everything from targeted outreach to personalized landing pages. It’s one of the fastest growing AI-native applications, with over 4,500 customers and 100,000 users. Founder and CEO Kareem Amin describes Clay’s technology, and its approach to balancing imagination and automation in order to help its customers achieve new levels of go-to-market success.
Hosted by: Alfred Lin, Sequoia Capital
Join us as we train our neural nets on the theme of the century: AI. Sonya Huang, Pat Grady and more Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to ask critical questions and develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies—and their implications for technology, business and society.
The content of this podcast does not constitute investment advice, an offer to provide investment advisory services, or an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund.
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