Today, Sierra’s launching Voice Personas, which enable you to give your agent not just a voice, but a personality. Voice AIs shouldn't sound the same. It's time to empower every company to define their own brand voice. And we had a ton of fun messing around, as you’ll see in the video.

I’m incredibly excited to share that Sierra is acquiring TakeOff, the leader in long-horizon AI agents. @claybavor and I couldn't be more excited to welcome @letsleverup and the entire TakeOff team. In less than a year, they've built something truly special: an agent platform that delivers real business outcomes, is beloved by customers, and is growing incredibly quickly. Their maniacal focus on revenue driving, long-horizon agents has taken them from 0 to near 8 figures in revenue across several 7 figure contracts since the start of this year. As we got to know the team, it became clear we were making the same bet: that fully autonomous agents would perform human-level work at software scale and that the largest businesses in AI would be built around outcomes, not inference. Takeoff has built an exceptional platform and team to make that real, and together we’re excited to build the leading company in long-horizon AI agents. Welcome, Aakash and the Takeoff team.

As our kids have gotten a little bit older, I've been trying to find ways to talk to them about what it takes to be successful in any discipline - arts, academics, athletics, whatever... Here's where I'm at: You have to work really hard, work smart, and stick with it for a long time to give luck the best chance to find you. I think it captures all the core elements, and interestingly sparked reflections of the talented classmate that didn't apply themselves or the person who grinded but didn't work smart. Also the person who just got really lucky. Welcome feedback!

It took us two years to grow from $10 mm to $100 mm in Annual Recurring Revenue and 15 months to reach $200 mm. Nine months later, we crossed $300 mm. Vanta’s growth rate increased each of the past four quarters – compounding really is the eighth wonder of the world! “But wait,” you might be thinking. “How does a software company founded before 2022 *increase* its growth rate?” Narrative violation!

Today, Sierra is releasing Ghostwriter, our agent for building agents. With Ghostwriter, you can create an AI agent for your customer experience — one that can chat, pick up the phone, speak dozens of languages, take action on your systems of record, and be protected with industry-leading guardrails — simply by having a conversation. No clicking, no forms, no menus. Codex and Claude Code have transformed how we build software, making it possible for software engineers to orchestrate and review the work rather than doing all the work themselves. We think the same transformation will happen for all software. Rather than every enterprise app having a web app for humans and an API for automation, every software platform’s UI will be an agent that can do the work on your behalf. I recorded a demo of my building and optimizing an agent with Ghostwriter so you can see how powerful and easy it is to use. It’s completely changed the way our early adopters build agents, and it’s changed the way I think about the software industry. Let me know what you think, and, if you’re interested in trying it out at your business, please reach out directly.

It’s time to return to the place where I know I can have the most impact. I am beyond excited to be rejoining @sequoia as a Partner. Here is what I shared with @gradypb @alfred_lin on how I am approaching my next chapter.

If you’ve ever seen a tweet of mine and thought “I wanna hear 2 hours of this guy” today is your lucky day We talked about investing, Sequoia lore, and I shared some of my favorite stories about my partners and founders. First podcast, enjoy!

AI is your ghostwriter, but you are the author. I was speaking with my friend Arya about the complex dynamics software teams face now that most code is being generated by AI agents. There are very few natural bottlenecks to code “slop” - features over quality, and functionality over polish. I have made a point of banning speaking about AI as the author of code. Codex/Claude didn’t write that code, just like your table saw didn’t cut the wood - you did, with the help of AI. If we start speaking about AI that way, we remove the accountability of the engineer for the quality of the system they are producing. Arya put it succinctly in a way that I hadn’t heard before: AI is your ghostwriter, but you are the author. It’s your name on the cover of the book. I think the next year of software engineering will be building out the tools that enable all of us to be proud to sign our name to and take accountability for the increasingly complex systems we produce with our agents.

After Sierra reached $100M in ARR in seven quarters, we followed with our first-ever $50M quarter — kicking off our third year with over $150M in ARR. @claybavor and I so grateful to every customer who partnered with us this year

A win would’ve been nice, but it was still the greatest night of my football life. It’s the moment that I will always remember when the real reason for football clicked in. Football isn’t just a game played with a ball on a field. It’s not just 3-D chess with men colliding. It’s human connection. It’s family genetics. It’s an allegiance passed from generation to generation. I witnessed my son standing in the same place that I stand, screaming at a black square with color pixels for an orange and blue team as if somehow his cries could affect the outcome of the game. Last night was the night that I knew I had done my real job as a Bears fan. I pass the game to the next generation. I shared a forever loyalty. He is fully on his way on a life time journey or highs and lows, love and loss, passion and grit, strategy and might, joy and disappointment. And when the day comes where my son and I are at an impasse. We can always talk about the Bears.