Alfred Lin
@Alfred_Lin
Partner @sequoia. Working w/ founders from idea to IPO & beyond: @airbnb @doordash @citsecurities @kalshi @clay @foundforbiz @Nominal_io @zipline
370 Following 151.4K Followers
.@SahilBloom's The Locksmith Paradox hit my inbox through multiple sources over the weekend. It is definitely worth reading and worth considering how it applies to our work in the world of AI. The punchline, though you should read the entire article:
"AI is increasingly enabling effort, expertise, and mastery to hide in the background. It's shifting the visible effort out of view.
The masterpiece is a masterpiece, whether it took 30 seconds or 30 years."
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The best founders and builders:
1. Dream about the dent they will put in the universe
2. Stay grounded in their reality
3. Build a plan that connects these two worlds
Though this is broadly applicable to anyone.
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Don't confuse motion with progress. Many startups are very busy, but they aren't actually moving the needle. Velocity is speed with a specific direction.
Just like data has fueled the initial AI revolution, data is going to fuel the physical AI revolution. We're excited to partner with @MeckaAI on their new round.
We're excited to partner with Josiah, @jemima_meyer, and the Healthleap team. Their platform identifies patients who would have otherwise missed critical treatment, and ensures they get it. They're screening 600,000+ patients a year across 50+ hospitals, focusing first on malnutrition but with a platform that will extend to other use cases in the future.
Patients get care earlier. Providers know how to prioritize better. Payers pay for fewer readmissions and post-discharge costs. Everyone wins.
Looking forward to watching them help people get the critical care they need.
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Announcing $38M Seed & Series A from Sequoia, First Round, and Hummingbird.
Healthleap's mission is to improve the health outcomes of as many people as possible.
Results so far:
• faster healing resulting in 1.6 shorter hospital stays per patient flagged as at risk by HealthLeap (Penn)
• 39% more appropriate diagnoses, same staff (Cedars-Sinai)
• 3 → 50+ hospitals in the past year
We're hiring across all roles.
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In the early days of company formation, friends and family are encouraging. Everyone you meet has only constructive advice for you as you start your journey. Other companies in your industry, big or small, cheer you on as you get started because you validate the industry. Everyone smiles at a baby or a young child.
When a company joins the realm of awkward adolescence, in some ways, it becomes most vulnerable. You are not young, cute, and beloved anymore. Yet, you aren't a fully mature business with the heft to defend against a full-scale assault on your business.
Awkward adolescence carries a negative connotation, but remember the many challenges you face during your teenage years contributed to personal growth, resilience, and a stronger sense of self. In the same way, embrace the awkward adolescence of your company.
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You will likely find that the crucible or refounding moments during these periods will define your company for decades.
Thanks to Stanford and SAIC for having me last night. Great to talk to the group and all who came up to speak post-event. Video coming soon.
Thank you everyone for attending the @Alfred_Lin (@Sequoia) event! We will be editing & uploading the talk to our Youtube channel shortly.
You will likely find that the crucible or refounding moments during these periods will define your company for decades.
First model release from Reflection is out, and quite impressive. America can and should push the frontier on both closed and open models, it's not an either/or.
Introducing Beam: a highly efficient agentic open model with 501B total parameters and 23B active.
- Frontier reasoning efficiency
- Advances the Western open frontier on coding & agentic tasks
- Trained end-to-end from scratch
Full weights release this month.
Learn more about Beam:
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I'm starting a podcast, "Confession," where I invite tech veterans to share their painful lessons.
We all connect through shared pain. Hear founders & CEOs like Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber), Luana Lopes Lara (Kalshi), and others share their stories and lessons learned.
Subscribe to Confession on...
✅ Spotify:
✅ Youtube:
✅ Apple:
@SatyaNadella @Dkhos @luanalopeslara
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Every new technology comes with a scare factor. Trust has always been the biggest issue to solve in technology revolutions. As always, companies must treat trust as a core design problem.
Sage advice from @dittycheria
.@dittycheria says the most mature founders know when they're no longer the best person to be CEO.
"There are many founders who decide they're not the best person to be CEO."
"Or they say, 'I'll be CEO, but I need a strong number two to run a certain part of the business that I'm not good at.'"
"To me, those are the founders that are more mature."
"I have to remind founders that no investor wants to go and replace them. There's no incentive for them to do so."
"Only if things are really going poorly will they ever contemplate such an action."
"If you're worried about the people who are giving you money taking you out, then you've got the wrong partners."
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Many are familiar with the Stockdale Paradox from Good to Great, which combines unwavering faith that you will prevail (fire) with the discipline to confront the brutal facts of present reality (ice).
Admiral Jim Stockdale was imprisoned for eight years, without any rights or promise of when or if he may ever leave. He is famous for saying those that didn’t make it out were “the optimists” because they weren’t able to confront the brutal truth of their reality.
Viktor Frankl had a similar analogue in Man’s Search for Meaning, where he said “The prisoner who had lost faith in the future–his future–was doomed.”
Our day to day experiences are far less severe than anything Admiral Stockdale or Viktor Frankl experienced, but we should heed the lessons well.
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As a founder, you want both superpowers in your company: the fiery spirit of entrepreneurship and the icy discipline of management.
Great to see yet another partner bringing Kalshi's real time forecasts on as a data source. They're among good company with CNN, Fox, and CNBC. Everyone benefits from the information coming from an open market, even if they aren't trading themselves.
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We’re partnering with CBS News to bring prediction market data to their midterm elections coverage.
I typically give two examples when people ask me which founders embody both fire and ice:
@t_xu of DoorDash can manage at both the strategic and execution level flawlessly. He often describes the need for conviction accompanied by evidence, so that conviction does not become delusion. DoorDash’s mission to empower and grow local economies is bold and ambitious, but they’ve paired it with relentless attention to unit economics, delivery times, and defects.
Tony Hsieh is another. At Zappos, I liked to say that Tony was the fire and I was the ice. We attacked problems from different vantage points, but generally reached the same conclusion. Tony was highly creative and entrepreneurial. I was more oriented toward numbers and operating detail. The result was a strong balance, though our running joke was that I would create operational efficiency and Tony spent it on new ideas.
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As a founder, you want both superpowers in your company: the fiery spirit of entrepreneurship and the icy discipline of management.
Congrats to @itsalfredw, @florian_jue, and the entire @listenlabs team.
We first met them at a hackathon in 2023, where they were working on what was then called Merlin AI. They stood out as the strongest founders there, so @jesskah invited them to work from a shared space used by Sequoia Arc companies. They quickly became the people to call late at night for office access because they were still working, which is just one example of their commitment to bringing Listen Labs' mission to life.
Excited to see what they and @salesforce accomplish together in this next phase.
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Listen Labs is joining @Salesforce!
A year and a half ago we launched Listen, an AI platform for understanding customers, and it’s been a crazy ride ever since.
Today, we work with some of the largest companies in the world, including Microsoft, Anthropic, and Sweetgreen.
What started as an AI interviewer is now a full platform for understanding customers. Listen finds the right people, interviews them, analyzes what they say, and even simulates how they'll behave.
Listen’s growth quickly accelerated and while we were raising our next round, we met @Benioff.
Marc is a hero of mine. I've taken countless ideas from Behind the Cloud and watched him framemog every AI CEO on the planet. We're honored to get framemogged next.
With Salesforce, we can bring Listen to every company in the world, much faster.
To our customers, our mission remains the same.I stay CEO, @Florian stays CTO and the same team will keep building the product you rely on, now inside Salesforce AI Labs. Thank you for believing in us early.
To our team, families, and everyone who believed in us before there was much to believe in, thank you.
These years have been the most fun years of my life, and it’s still only just the beginning for Listen.
Now back to work. 🚀
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As a founder, you want both superpowers in your company: the fiery spirit of entrepreneurship and the icy discipline of management.
Big news for @MongoDB and one of the best, @dittycheria.
No company has meant more to me professionally than MongoDB. I spent more than 11 years as CEO, and even after stepping down last year, I never really left. Serving on the board kept me close to our people, our customers and the business, and only strengthened my conviction in MongoDB’s future.
Today, I’m returning as interim CEO. I’m grateful for the trust of our board and our team, and I’m ready to get to work.
I also return with a different perspective. As a Partner and Senior Advisor at Sequoia Capital, I have a front-row seat to the founders, technologies and companies shaping the AI era. I see firsthand how AI is not only changing how software is built and businesses operate, but expanding technology’s role from helping people manage work to increasingly helping perform the work itself. I look forward to bringing those insights back to MongoDB as we help our customers capitalize on what may be the most consequential platform shift of our generation.
And we’re getting started immediately. Tomorrow at 11 AM ET, we’ll host Investor Day and share our long-term strategy, market opportunity and the product innovation driving MongoDB forward.
On Wednesday, our sold-out .local NYC event will bring together developers and business leaders focused on putting AI into production and moving from generating answers to taking action at scale. We’ll have exciting announcements at both events.
What has always made MongoDB special is the ambition of our people, the importance of what our customers build with our technology, and the size of the opportunity ahead.
I’m proud to lead this team again. There is a lot to do, and I couldn’t be more excited to get back to work.
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everybody talks about the economics of the ai data center build, the biggest capex buildout in human history
not nearly enough people are stepping back to just marvel at the technology itself
i just met amin vahdat, leader of google’s ai data center buildout, whose team delivered this beautiful cluster. it is insane the elite level of technology and engineering excellence that goes into every component of the modern data center, from the accelerators to the model codesign to the racks to the networking to the manufacturing and assembly. the chips are the most insane feat of all, but every component of the whole system is a beast.
goosebumps. we didn’t get to see the great pyramids get built, but this is even better.
amin also predicted for me what this photo might look like for frontier clusters a decade from now…. training data episode drops soon :)
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The @BostonCollege Investment Committee (an LP and my beloved alma mater) asked for a few thoughts on what's happening in AI. I recorded a test run yesterday morning and then shared it with my partners, who encouraged me to share it more broadly... so here you go!
This is not a sales pitch, it's just a reflection on what we're seeing. And it wasn't intended to be shared, so please pardon the rough edges.
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