my first week at sequoia many years ago: i go to the kitchen to grab coffee. sir @michael_jmoritz is there pulling an espresso shot. i ask him about the machine and he teaches me how to pull my own. he then leaves the kitchen. craft is everything. a minute later, @dougleone walks in. he sees me steaming milk on my own and goes, "kais, we didn’t hire you to make friggin cappuccinos in the middle of the day. go call companies." hustle is everything. both were right! sequoia is a beautiful firm full of beautiful contradictions.

Today, we are announcing our Series A and a new product: @raindrop_ai Simulations. We've now raised $50m from @CRV and @lightspeedvp to protect the world from agent failures, big and small.

Thiel Fellowship is in a league of its own. Peter Thiel is pretty hard to replicate as an eval / verifier, and these programs really are only as good as their verifiers (and the positive selection effects they confer).

My conversation with Michael Moritz, one of the great venture investors of the last 40 years. Michael joined Sequoia in 1986 and co-led the firm with Doug Leone (@dougleone) from 1995 to 2012. His investments include Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and Stripe. His new book, Ausländer, traces his parents' escape from Nazi Germany and helps explain his lifelong interest in what shapes exceptional people. We discuss: - The infamous Steve Jobs profile - Why Don Valentine hired him - The question he finds most revealing when interviewing people - Monomania and the cost of greatness - Why he has never felt good at anything - Writing, journalism and AI - What he learned about himself writing Ausländer I'd recommend watching this one if you can. Michael was incredibly thoughtful and reflective throughout, particularly when talking about his parents, childhood, and the more difficult parts of his personal story. Enjoy! TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 0:53 Family History & Identity 7:03 Survival & Outsider Instinct 18:53 Studying Exceptional People 33:50 Self-Doubt & Success 41:17 Steve Jobs & Obsession 52:50 Joining Sequoia 1:03:22 Leadership & Alex Ferguson 1:08:25 Elon Musk & AI 1:17:12 Becoming Who You Are

Some news: 5 months ago I joined @coreauto, a small research lab focused on new ways for models to learn. I’m also hiring four interns to do something my younger self would've loved. It started with a pretty unusual project. We set up a handful of small online businesses, and put an agent in charge. We gave each business some initial funding and a seed idea, and off they went, trying to sell real things to real customers while we watched. It’s about as open-ended and unforgiving a task as you can probably give to an agent, with countless decisions to make and effects that take time to become clear. Each business got its own bank account, a debit card to pay suppliers, a web browser, an email inbox, a domain name, cloud infrastructure and a schedule. Every few hours, the agent woke up and decided what to do. It might update a landing page, adjust an ad campaign, reply to a customer, and then go back to sleep. The agents built actual storefronts and apps. They bought ads, attracted visitors, and even made some sales. The agents acted as operators that kept a business moving, but we noticed they never really stepped back to strategize about what might move the needle. If people weren’t buying, why? Was the landing page unappealing? Or maybe the offer itself was the problem? One amusing example was the very first order a customer placed. Our supplier had run out of stock. But it’s a dropshipping business, and thankfully tens of other suppliers carried the same product. Instead of trying another supplier, the agent almost immediately sent the customer a polite apology and attempted to issue a refund. Gah! So close! The agents could handle much of the work of getting a business up and running. What they struggled with was deciding what to change when it wasn’t working. That’s what we want to understand. We also want to see what changes when people take the lead. What does a business operator actually do all day when agents can do so much? What new work does this allow them to do? Which decisions can’t be delegated? — So this winter we're hiring 4 interns as Associate General Managers. Associate Product Manager internships are programs that give early career generalists a product to own. We want to try something similar, but with entire businesses. You’ll create and grow businesses, with agents handling the routine work so you can focus on figuring out what matters. Each AGM gets a budget and our agent infrastructure that’s designed for this. Which ideas to try is up to you. Put more money behind what finds customers and keep refining. Where you step in tells us what agents can't do yet. You'll be in our SF office with me and people I’m so fortunate to work with, like @_arohan_, @joannejang, @MillionInt, @marksaroufim and @juliacvillagra We don't care much where you went to school or what your resume looks like. We’re looking for enterprising people with a drive to create, who’ve made money on the internet before and already use AI extensively to enable their ideas. If that sounds like you:

I’ve said before that the concept of “optimal grip” has changed my life and this is why. I have a propensity to clench and it can hold me back more than it helps This is a good exploration of the topic and how to chill out in the right ways.

After months of writing, 'How to Unclench' is finally live! It's an interactive essay packed with stories, science & guided practices to help you unclench. →

Mark, by @colossusjeremy. This is a story about the head of history's largest nonterritorial empire, who nonetheless remains a prisoner of his rivals. Has he finally found a way out? The profile has been nearly a year in the making. Stern interviewed three dozen people, including Zuckerberg, his MMA coach, and his critics and competitors at the frontier AI labs. He spoke with his parents, Karen and Ed, and watched their son get punched in the face. The story spans Meta HQ in Menlo Park, the Zuckerbergs' homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe, and a party in a Manhattan warehouse with Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet. There is also a sneak peek of Aaron Sorkin's forthcoming sequel about Zuckerberg, sourced via a Hollywood fixer Stern first encountered in Russia. The result is a profile unlike one you've read before.