Partner @Sequoia. Investing in AI, from company formation. 1st partner to @linear @mach_industries @middeskhq @reflection_ai @ricursiveai @skildai @tavus
szhan@sequoiacap.com
Joined March 2013
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I’m starting a new early-stage AI fund, doing what I love: partnering with founders from company formation on bold bets, long before consensus.
The fund’s LPs will include Sequoia, Jeff Dean, Sachin Katti, Philip Wong (my Stanford professor and Chief Scientist adviser to TSMC), and others whose work has shaped our industry and how I think about AI’s future.
I’ll remain a partner at Sequoia and keep serving on my boards on Sequoia’s behalf.
Sequoia has been my home for the past 11 years. I joined as the youngest investor the firm had ever hired. I grew up here. Through years of intense debate and shared work, I found lifelong mentors and friends who took me under their wing and taught me this craft. They taught me to aim high and take big swings. I’ll carry that into what I build: outsized ambition, relentless truth-seeking and curiosity, and a refusal to become complacent.
Working alongside founders has made me want to build something of my own: a firm shaped from day one around the convictions I’ve developed over the past decade.
Life has taught me not to take time for granted. This is how I want to spend mine.
Why now
We’re seeing a new way of building companies in today’s AI era. Research and products often advance together. A breakthrough can open a market or accelerate a business far faster than expected. Some companies require extraordinary capital and compute early on. Others reach meaningful scale with remarkably small teams. The rules for how big these businesses can get, and how fast, are being rewritten.
But early on, the technology is unproven, the resources required enormous, and the vision seemingly implausible.
This is what I love most: seeing the potential right from the beginning, and helping founders realize their full scale of ambition.
More than ever, it starts with an extreme willingness to believe early, with bold, independent conviction in a founder’s technical insight before any product or market validation. Then, it means helping founders take the biggest swings, giving the rare, long-term patience to see those bets through uncertainty, ambiguity, and turbulence, and serving as a level head when the stakes are highest.
I learned this kind of partnership at Sequoia. It’s the foundation of the firm I’m building.
Believing before consensus
My fascination with AI’s potential took root at Stanford in the early-to-mid 2010s, studying computer science and working in Andrew Ng’s lab. The friendships I formed connected me to a community whose people and ideas would help shape modern AI and build some of our generation’s defining companies. What stayed with me was the gap between what those people saw was possible and what the wider world could imagine.
I’m drawn to founders pursuing ambitions that sound impossible today.
I start with a simple question: “What if everything goes right?”
Then we work backward together to make it happen.
In 2023, Deepak and Abhinav set out to build a general-purpose robot brain at @SkildAI, before physical AI was a consensus bet. Their sim-to-real breakthroughs gave me conviction where earlier robotics approaches had fallen short. But the data flywheel required deployment at scale. We made commercialization as urgent as research and brought in strategic partners like NVIDIA and SoftBank to support the ambition. Three years in, Skild is advancing the frontier of physical AI with nine figures in annualized revenue.
In 2024, Ioannis and Misha founded @reflection_ai with an insight into scaling reinforcement learning. As that grew into the ambition to build a Western frontier lab for open models, the hard question was how a startup competes with labs spending tens of billions. An introduction to NVIDIA and many compute calls and recruiting events later, the team has built Beam, now one of the leading US open models.
In 2025, Anna and Azalia, the co-creators of AlphaChip, founded @RicursiveAI to design models and hardware together. From day one, we made early customers and ecosystem partners a priority. Today, they are showing order-of-magnitude improvements on real workloads, working with some of the industry’s most consequential players, and reaching a defining inflection point.
The ambition keeps growing as these companies scale.
@linear has always had a kind of magic to it. Now it’s the system a new generation of AI companies builds on, for teams and agents alike.
@tavus saw early that we’d one day talk to AI the way we talk to each other. Today, it’s building the human computing interface for a world of AI colleagues.
@Mach_Industries began as hydrogen experiments in an MIT dorm room. It has since become one of the most exciting next-generation defense companies.
Making the ambition possible
Being a first believer is only the beginning. Compute falls through. A deep-pocketed incumbent makes your mission its top priority. A breakthrough changes the opportunity and the capital required overnight.
These are stomach-churning moments, and early belief carries a responsibility to help make the bet work.
This is the partnership I love: turning the full ambition into concrete steps. Raising capital, securing compute and strategic partners, recruiting exceptional people, and winning the first customers together. Thinking several moves ahead while solving what’s in front of us. And as breakthroughs open new possibilities, helping founders dream even bigger.
Thank you
To the founders I’ve worked with: thank you for trusting me and Sequoia to be your first partner and first believer. It’s been the joy of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to keep building together.
Thank you to Alfred and Pat for your leadership of Sequoia and your support of my next chapter. To Roelof, for bringing me into Sequoia and believing in me from the beginning. Alfred and Roelof, you have been mentors in investing and in life. So much of what I know, and the investor I’ve become, comes from your guidance and generosity over the years. To Bill, for the close partnership and wealth of knowledge, always wrapped in humility. To Shaun, for showing me how to think deeply and imaginatively. To Michael Moritz, for inspiring 22-year-old me to dream big. To Doug, for teaching me to keep things simple. To Bogie and Jess, for bringing joy to the everyday and perspective on what matters. And to all my Sequoia teammates, for the friendship, camaraderie, and lessons I’ll carry with me.
To my family, especially my husband and my brother, who have each started companies of their own: thank you for giving me the courage to take this leap.
Let’s get to work!
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
Last week we released Ripple-65B Preview. This Friday, come build with it.
Ricursive After Dark Hackathon: Fri Nov 13, 3PM–10PM, at our Palo Alto office. Compute, dinner, and hardware prizes.
Applications close Thursday, November 12 at noon PT. Accepted participants will be notified by email Thursday night with the address and full details.
luma.com/qnsar3a2?utm_source…
One of @SkildAI’s core competitive advantages, enabling it to move at breakneck velocity 🏎️
Today we’re open-sourcing Steel, our internal physics solver built with @NVIDIA.
It runs simulations up to 13× faster than PhysX while using ~3× less GPU memory.
Steel unlocks scaleable simulation for manipulation, for everyone.
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
AI is using more and more of the world’s energy. But how much economic value are we getting from AI?
We’re introducing Joules-to-GDP (J2G), a framework that measures how well AI turns energy into economic value and shows which tasks, models, and hardware give the best return.
Across 44 occupations in finance, engineering, law, administrative work, and more in @OpenAI's GDPval, we arrive at three findings:
1) The tasks with the highest economic value are not the tasks with the highest economic value per joule. For example, CAD design earns ~10% more per task than building websites, but the latter earns ~27% more value per joule.
2) The most powerful model isn’t always the best use of energy. Gemma 4 31B delivers 56% of GLM 5.2’s net value with 23% of the energy, for 2.5x the value per joule.
3) More chips don’t guarantee proportionate returns. Moving the same model from 1 to 8 NVIDIA H100s uses 3.2x the energy but cuts completion time by only 22%, with about the same value.
With @SnorkelAI, we’re also releasing GDPWorks, a benchmark for economically valuable tasks across 36 additional occupations.
Joint work co-led by @amirzeinaalii and @Avanika15, with @Mersad_Abbasi, @Jon_Hartley_, John Hennessy, @HazyResearch, and @Azaliamirh.
More details below 🧵
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
Very excited to launch Ripple-65B Preview, a new state of the art for U.S. open-weight model on agentic coding!
You can run Ripple-65B locally and efficiently on a MacBook Pro or DGX Spark!
Give it a try:
HuggingFace: huggingface.co/ricursiveAI/R…
Together AI: together.ai/models/ripple-65…
GMI Cloud: console.gmicloud.ai/model/ll…
OpenRouter: openrouter.ai/gmicloud/rippl…
Today we release Ripple-65B Preview, our 65B dense LLM we pretrained from scratch.
Ripple sets a new state-of-the-art for U.S. open-weight models in agentic coding tasks, surpassing significantly larger models including Muse Spark Open-816B, Beam-501B, Inkling-975B, and Nemotron 3 Ultra-550B.
Learn more: ricursive.com/ripple
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
Thrilled to announce Ricursive's first model, Ripple-65B Preview, which we pretrained from scratch!
We achieved a new U.S. open-weight SOTA on agentic coding at a tenth of the cost of the prior SOTA, and can run locally on a Macbook or DGX Spark.
By adapting our model and training recipes to the hardware, we were able to achieve massive efficiency gains equivalent to training on 16x more GPUs.
This result is a testament to the team's depth in both model and chip architecture.
Today we release Ripple-65B Preview, our 65B dense LLM we pretrained from scratch.
Ripple sets a new state-of-the-art for U.S. open-weight models in agentic coding tasks, surpassing significantly larger models including Muse Spark Open-816B, Beam-501B, Inkling-975B, and Nemotron 3 Ultra-550B.
Learn more: ricursive.com/ripple
So proud of this team @RicursiveAI! @annadgoldie and @Azaliamirh's vision: Better models design better chips, and better chips train better models.
Ripple-65B Preview, is a step toward that loop:
• 65B parameters, trained from scratch
• $32M in total R&D
• U.S. open-weight SOTA on TerminalBench 2.1
• Runs locally on a MacBook Pro or DGX Spark
Ricursive designed the model architecture around the hardware it trains and runs on.
An internal variant already powers Ricursive’s AI chip design platform.
Today we release Ripple-65B Preview, our 65B dense LLM we pretrained from scratch.
Ripple sets a new state-of-the-art for U.S. open-weight models in agentic coding tasks, surpassing significantly larger models including Muse Spark Open-816B, Beam-501B, Inkling-975B, and Nemotron 3 Ultra-550B.
Learn more: ricursive.com/ripple
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
Political uncertainty doesn't change our commitment.
With gigawatt-scale capacity across Asia (Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and more) plus our US footprint, @gmi_cloud is the neocloud that spans the Pacific. Reliable compute, delivered on time.
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
Ethos Technologies (Nasdaq: LIFE) Q3 FY26 results are out.
Revenue of $235M, up 151% YoY - our third consecutive quarter of triple-digit growth. Adjusted EBITDA of $35M and $41M of cash flow from operations.
See our press release for full results: investors.ethos.com/news-rel…
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
if you're curious about compute, we should chat. we're just starting to build the business team and hiring for our first strategic finance + compute role. you'll be responsible for helping scale compute and structuring large infra transactions jobs.ashbyhq.com/Ricursive%2…
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
We've had the pleasure of working alongside Stephanie for over 11 years. She's an incredibly sharp thinker on what technologies will power the future before it's obvious to others. We're excited to support her and her new fund, investing in founders making bold, non-consensus bets.
I’m starting a new early-stage AI fund, doing what I love: partnering with founders from company formation on bold bets, long before consensus.
The fund’s LPs will include Sequoia, Jeff Dean, Sachin Katti, Philip Wong (my Stanford professor and Chief Scientist adviser to TSMC), and others whose work has shaped our industry and how I think about AI’s future.
I’ll remain a partner at Sequoia and keep serving on my boards on Sequoia’s behalf.
Sequoia has been my home for the past 11 years. I joined as the youngest investor the firm had ever hired. I grew up here. Through years of intense debate and shared work, I found lifelong mentors and friends who took me under their wing and taught me this craft. They taught me to aim high and take big swings. I’ll carry that into what I build: outsized ambition, relentless truth-seeking and curiosity, and a refusal to become complacent.
Working alongside founders has made me want to build something of my own: a firm shaped from day one around the convictions I’ve developed over the past decade.
Life has taught me not to take time for granted. This is how I want to spend mine.
Why now
We’re seeing a new way of building companies in today’s AI era. Research and products often advance together. A breakthrough can open a market or accelerate a business far faster than expected. Some companies require extraordinary capital and compute early on. Others reach meaningful scale with remarkably small teams. The rules for how big these businesses can get, and how fast, are being rewritten.
But early on, the technology is unproven, the resources required enormous, and the vision seemingly implausible.
This is what I love most: seeing the potential right from the beginning, and helping founders realize their full scale of ambition.
More than ever, it starts with an extreme willingness to believe early, with bold, independent conviction in a founder’s technical insight before any product or market validation. Then, it means helping founders take the biggest swings, giving the rare, long-term patience to see those bets through uncertainty, ambiguity, and turbulence, and serving as a level head when the stakes are highest.
I learned this kind of partnership at Sequoia. It’s the foundation of the firm I’m building.
Believing before consensus
My fascination with AI’s potential took root at Stanford in the early-to-mid 2010s, studying computer science and working in Andrew Ng’s lab. The friendships I formed connected me to a community whose people and ideas would help shape modern AI and build some of our generation’s defining companies. What stayed with me was the gap between what those people saw was possible and what the wider world could imagine.
I’m drawn to founders pursuing ambitions that sound impossible today.
I start with a simple question: “What if everything goes right?”
Then we work backward together to make it happen.
In 2023, Deepak and Abhinav set out to build a general-purpose robot brain at @SkildAI, before physical AI was a consensus bet. Their sim-to-real breakthroughs gave me conviction where earlier robotics approaches had fallen short. But the data flywheel required deployment at scale. We made commercialization as urgent as research and brought in strategic partners like NVIDIA and SoftBank to support the ambition. Three years in, Skild is advancing the frontier of physical AI with nine figures in annualized revenue.
In 2024, Ioannis and Misha founded @reflection_ai with an insight into scaling reinforcement learning. As that grew into the ambition to build a Western frontier lab for open models, the hard question was how a startup competes with labs spending tens of billions. An introduction to NVIDIA and many compute calls and recruiting events later, the team has built Beam, now one of the leading US open models.
In 2025, Anna and Azalia, the co-creators of AlphaChip, founded @RicursiveAI to design models and hardware together. From day one, we made early customers and ecosystem partners a priority. Today, they are showing order-of-magnitude improvements on real workloads, working with some of the industry’s most consequential players, and reaching a defining inflection point.
The ambition keeps growing as these companies scale.
@linear has always had a kind of magic to it. Now it’s the system a new generation of AI companies builds on, for teams and agents alike.
@tavus saw early that we’d one day talk to AI the way we talk to each other. Today, it’s building the human computing interface for a world of AI colleagues.
@Mach_Industries began as hydrogen experiments in an MIT dorm room. It has since become one of the most exciting next-generation defense companies.
Making the ambition possible
Being a first believer is only the beginning. Compute falls through. A deep-pocketed incumbent makes your mission its top priority. A breakthrough changes the opportunity and the capital required overnight.
These are stomach-churning moments, and early belief carries a responsibility to help make the bet work.
This is the partnership I love: turning the full ambition into concrete steps. Raising capital, securing compute and strategic partners, recruiting exceptional people, and winning the first customers together. Thinking several moves ahead while solving what’s in front of us. And as breakthroughs open new possibilities, helping founders dream even bigger.
Thank you
To the founders I’ve worked with: thank you for trusting me and Sequoia to be your first partner and first believer. It’s been the joy of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to keep building together.
Thank you to Alfred and Pat for your leadership of Sequoia and your support of my next chapter. To Roelof, for bringing me into Sequoia and believing in me from the beginning. Alfred and Roelof, you have been mentors in investing and in life. So much of what I know, and the investor I’ve become, comes from your guidance and generosity over the years. To Bill, for the close partnership and wealth of knowledge, always wrapped in humility. To Shaun, for showing me how to think deeply and imaginatively. To Michael Moritz, for inspiring 22-year-old me to dream big. To Doug, for teaching me to keep things simple. To Bogie and Jess, for bringing joy to the everyday and perspective on what matters. And to all my Sequoia teammates, for the friendship, camaraderie, and lessons I’ll carry with me.
To my family, especially my husband and my brother, who have each started companies of their own: thank you for giving me the courage to take this leap.
Let’s get to work!
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
@stephzhan, it's been a delight to see you blossom as an investor ever since we first met at a Stanford entrepreneurship event many years ago. We collaborated on the seed-stage investment in Ethos, and you pushed my thinking when you championed Linear, to name just two examples. I have no doubt you will continue to flourish.
I’m starting a new early-stage AI fund, doing what I love: partnering with founders from company formation on bold bets, long before consensus.
The fund’s LPs will include Sequoia, Jeff Dean, Sachin Katti, Philip Wong (my Stanford professor and Chief Scientist adviser to TSMC), and others whose work has shaped our industry and how I think about AI’s future.
I’ll remain a partner at Sequoia and keep serving on my boards on Sequoia’s behalf.
Sequoia has been my home for the past 11 years. I joined as the youngest investor the firm had ever hired. I grew up here. Through years of intense debate and shared work, I found lifelong mentors and friends who took me under their wing and taught me this craft. They taught me to aim high and take big swings. I’ll carry that into what I build: outsized ambition, relentless truth-seeking and curiosity, and a refusal to become complacent.
Working alongside founders has made me want to build something of my own: a firm shaped from day one around the convictions I’ve developed over the past decade.
Life has taught me not to take time for granted. This is how I want to spend mine.
Why now
We’re seeing a new way of building companies in today’s AI era. Research and products often advance together. A breakthrough can open a market or accelerate a business far faster than expected. Some companies require extraordinary capital and compute early on. Others reach meaningful scale with remarkably small teams. The rules for how big these businesses can get, and how fast, are being rewritten.
But early on, the technology is unproven, the resources required enormous, and the vision seemingly implausible.
This is what I love most: seeing the potential right from the beginning, and helping founders realize their full scale of ambition.
More than ever, it starts with an extreme willingness to believe early, with bold, independent conviction in a founder’s technical insight before any product or market validation. Then, it means helping founders take the biggest swings, giving the rare, long-term patience to see those bets through uncertainty, ambiguity, and turbulence, and serving as a level head when the stakes are highest.
I learned this kind of partnership at Sequoia. It’s the foundation of the firm I’m building.
Believing before consensus
My fascination with AI’s potential took root at Stanford in the early-to-mid 2010s, studying computer science and working in Andrew Ng’s lab. The friendships I formed connected me to a community whose people and ideas would help shape modern AI and build some of our generation’s defining companies. What stayed with me was the gap between what those people saw was possible and what the wider world could imagine.
I’m drawn to founders pursuing ambitions that sound impossible today.
I start with a simple question: “What if everything goes right?”
Then we work backward together to make it happen.
In 2023, Deepak and Abhinav set out to build a general-purpose robot brain at @SkildAI, before physical AI was a consensus bet. Their sim-to-real breakthroughs gave me conviction where earlier robotics approaches had fallen short. But the data flywheel required deployment at scale. We made commercialization as urgent as research and brought in strategic partners like NVIDIA and SoftBank to support the ambition. Three years in, Skild is advancing the frontier of physical AI with nine figures in annualized revenue.
In 2024, Ioannis and Misha founded @reflection_ai with an insight into scaling reinforcement learning. As that grew into the ambition to build a Western frontier lab for open models, the hard question was how a startup competes with labs spending tens of billions. An introduction to NVIDIA and many compute calls and recruiting events later, the team has built Beam, now one of the leading US open models.
In 2025, Anna and Azalia, the co-creators of AlphaChip, founded @RicursiveAI to design models and hardware together. From day one, we made early customers and ecosystem partners a priority. Today, they are showing order-of-magnitude improvements on real workloads, working with some of the industry’s most consequential players, and reaching a defining inflection point.
The ambition keeps growing as these companies scale.
@linear has always had a kind of magic to it. Now it’s the system a new generation of AI companies builds on, for teams and agents alike.
@tavus saw early that we’d one day talk to AI the way we talk to each other. Today, it’s building the human computing interface for a world of AI colleagues.
@Mach_Industries began as hydrogen experiments in an MIT dorm room. It has since become one of the most exciting next-generation defense companies.
Making the ambition possible
Being a first believer is only the beginning. Compute falls through. A deep-pocketed incumbent makes your mission its top priority. A breakthrough changes the opportunity and the capital required overnight.
These are stomach-churning moments, and early belief carries a responsibility to help make the bet work.
This is the partnership I love: turning the full ambition into concrete steps. Raising capital, securing compute and strategic partners, recruiting exceptional people, and winning the first customers together. Thinking several moves ahead while solving what’s in front of us. And as breakthroughs open new possibilities, helping founders dream even bigger.
Thank you
To the founders I’ve worked with: thank you for trusting me and Sequoia to be your first partner and first believer. It’s been the joy of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to keep building together.
Thank you to Alfred and Pat for your leadership of Sequoia and your support of my next chapter. To Roelof, for bringing me into Sequoia and believing in me from the beginning. Alfred and Roelof, you have been mentors in investing and in life. So much of what I know, and the investor I’ve become, comes from your guidance and generosity over the years. To Bill, for the close partnership and wealth of knowledge, always wrapped in humility. To Shaun, for showing me how to think deeply and imaginatively. To Michael Moritz, for inspiring 22-year-old me to dream big. To Doug, for teaching me to keep things simple. To Bogie and Jess, for bringing joy to the everyday and perspective on what matters. And to all my Sequoia teammates, for the friendship, camaraderie, and lessons I’ll carry with me.
To my family, especially my husband and my brother, who have each started companies of their own: thank you for giving me the courage to take this leap.
Let’s get to work!
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
Stephanie's been in our corner since the very early days. Since investing in Middesk in 2019, she's been the definition of an incredible partner: sharp, caring, ambitious, always willing to challenge, and a true bridge-builder.
Congrats on the fund! Excited for you.
I’m starting a new early-stage AI fund, doing what I love: partnering with founders from company formation on bold bets, long before consensus.
The fund’s LPs will include Sequoia, Jeff Dean, Sachin Katti, Philip Wong (my Stanford professor and Chief Scientist adviser to TSMC), and others whose work has shaped our industry and how I think about AI’s future.
I’ll remain a partner at Sequoia and keep serving on my boards on Sequoia’s behalf.
Sequoia has been my home for the past 11 years. I joined as the youngest investor the firm had ever hired. I grew up here. Through years of intense debate and shared work, I found lifelong mentors and friends who took me under their wing and taught me this craft. They taught me to aim high and take big swings. I’ll carry that into what I build: outsized ambition, relentless truth-seeking and curiosity, and a refusal to become complacent.
Working alongside founders has made me want to build something of my own: a firm shaped from day one around the convictions I’ve developed over the past decade.
Life has taught me not to take time for granted. This is how I want to spend mine.
Why now
We’re seeing a new way of building companies in today’s AI era. Research and products often advance together. A breakthrough can open a market or accelerate a business far faster than expected. Some companies require extraordinary capital and compute early on. Others reach meaningful scale with remarkably small teams. The rules for how big these businesses can get, and how fast, are being rewritten.
But early on, the technology is unproven, the resources required enormous, and the vision seemingly implausible.
This is what I love most: seeing the potential right from the beginning, and helping founders realize their full scale of ambition.
More than ever, it starts with an extreme willingness to believe early, with bold, independent conviction in a founder’s technical insight before any product or market validation. Then, it means helping founders take the biggest swings, giving the rare, long-term patience to see those bets through uncertainty, ambiguity, and turbulence, and serving as a level head when the stakes are highest.
I learned this kind of partnership at Sequoia. It’s the foundation of the firm I’m building.
Believing before consensus
My fascination with AI’s potential took root at Stanford in the early-to-mid 2010s, studying computer science and working in Andrew Ng’s lab. The friendships I formed connected me to a community whose people and ideas would help shape modern AI and build some of our generation’s defining companies. What stayed with me was the gap between what those people saw was possible and what the wider world could imagine.
I’m drawn to founders pursuing ambitions that sound impossible today.
I start with a simple question: “What if everything goes right?”
Then we work backward together to make it happen.
In 2023, Deepak and Abhinav set out to build a general-purpose robot brain at @SkildAI, before physical AI was a consensus bet. Their sim-to-real breakthroughs gave me conviction where earlier robotics approaches had fallen short. But the data flywheel required deployment at scale. We made commercialization as urgent as research and brought in strategic partners like NVIDIA and SoftBank to support the ambition. Three years in, Skild is advancing the frontier of physical AI with nine figures in annualized revenue.
In 2024, Ioannis and Misha founded @reflection_ai with an insight into scaling reinforcement learning. As that grew into the ambition to build a Western frontier lab for open models, the hard question was how a startup competes with labs spending tens of billions. An introduction to NVIDIA and many compute calls and recruiting events later, the team has built Beam, now one of the leading US open models.
In 2025, Anna and Azalia, the co-creators of AlphaChip, founded @RicursiveAI to design models and hardware together. From day one, we made early customers and ecosystem partners a priority. Today, they are showing order-of-magnitude improvements on real workloads, working with some of the industry’s most consequential players, and reaching a defining inflection point.
The ambition keeps growing as these companies scale.
@linear has always had a kind of magic to it. Now it’s the system a new generation of AI companies builds on, for teams and agents alike.
@tavus saw early that we’d one day talk to AI the way we talk to each other. Today, it’s building the human computing interface for a world of AI colleagues.
@Mach_Industries began as hydrogen experiments in an MIT dorm room. It has since become one of the most exciting next-generation defense companies.
Making the ambition possible
Being a first believer is only the beginning. Compute falls through. A deep-pocketed incumbent makes your mission its top priority. A breakthrough changes the opportunity and the capital required overnight.
These are stomach-churning moments, and early belief carries a responsibility to help make the bet work.
This is the partnership I love: turning the full ambition into concrete steps. Raising capital, securing compute and strategic partners, recruiting exceptional people, and winning the first customers together. Thinking several moves ahead while solving what’s in front of us. And as breakthroughs open new possibilities, helping founders dream even bigger.
Thank you
To the founders I’ve worked with: thank you for trusting me and Sequoia to be your first partner and first believer. It’s been the joy of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to keep building together.
Thank you to Alfred and Pat for your leadership of Sequoia and your support of my next chapter. To Roelof, for bringing me into Sequoia and believing in me from the beginning. Alfred and Roelof, you have been mentors in investing and in life. So much of what I know, and the investor I’ve become, comes from your guidance and generosity over the years. To Bill, for the close partnership and wealth of knowledge, always wrapped in humility. To Shaun, for showing me how to think deeply and imaginatively. To Michael Moritz, for inspiring 22-year-old me to dream big. To Doug, for teaching me to keep things simple. To Bogie and Jess, for bringing joy to the everyday and perspective on what matters. And to all my Sequoia teammates, for the friendship, camaraderie, and lessons I’ll carry with me.
To my family, especially my husband and my brother, who have each started companies of their own: thank you for giving me the courage to take this leap.
Let’s get to work!
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
I've been lucky to partner with @stephzhan for the last six years.
She's been demanding and supportive, helping us to push the business from the first iteration of the product to the thousandth customer.
Excited for what's next for you!
I’m starting a new early-stage AI fund, doing what I love: partnering with founders from company formation on bold bets, long before consensus.
The fund’s LPs will include Sequoia, Jeff Dean, Sachin Katti, Philip Wong (my Stanford professor and Chief Scientist adviser to TSMC), and others whose work has shaped our industry and how I think about AI’s future.
I’ll remain a partner at Sequoia and keep serving on my boards on Sequoia’s behalf.
Sequoia has been my home for the past 11 years. I joined as the youngest investor the firm had ever hired. I grew up here. Through years of intense debate and shared work, I found lifelong mentors and friends who took me under their wing and taught me this craft. They taught me to aim high and take big swings. I’ll carry that into what I build: outsized ambition, relentless truth-seeking and curiosity, and a refusal to become complacent.
Working alongside founders has made me want to build something of my own: a firm shaped from day one around the convictions I’ve developed over the past decade.
Life has taught me not to take time for granted. This is how I want to spend mine.
Why now
We’re seeing a new way of building companies in today’s AI era. Research and products often advance together. A breakthrough can open a market or accelerate a business far faster than expected. Some companies require extraordinary capital and compute early on. Others reach meaningful scale with remarkably small teams. The rules for how big these businesses can get, and how fast, are being rewritten.
But early on, the technology is unproven, the resources required enormous, and the vision seemingly implausible.
This is what I love most: seeing the potential right from the beginning, and helping founders realize their full scale of ambition.
More than ever, it starts with an extreme willingness to believe early, with bold, independent conviction in a founder’s technical insight before any product or market validation. Then, it means helping founders take the biggest swings, giving the rare, long-term patience to see those bets through uncertainty, ambiguity, and turbulence, and serving as a level head when the stakes are highest.
I learned this kind of partnership at Sequoia. It’s the foundation of the firm I’m building.
Believing before consensus
My fascination with AI’s potential took root at Stanford in the early-to-mid 2010s, studying computer science and working in Andrew Ng’s lab. The friendships I formed connected me to a community whose people and ideas would help shape modern AI and build some of our generation’s defining companies. What stayed with me was the gap between what those people saw was possible and what the wider world could imagine.
I’m drawn to founders pursuing ambitions that sound impossible today.
I start with a simple question: “What if everything goes right?”
Then we work backward together to make it happen.
In 2023, Deepak and Abhinav set out to build a general-purpose robot brain at @SkildAI, before physical AI was a consensus bet. Their sim-to-real breakthroughs gave me conviction where earlier robotics approaches had fallen short. But the data flywheel required deployment at scale. We made commercialization as urgent as research and brought in strategic partners like NVIDIA and SoftBank to support the ambition. Three years in, Skild is advancing the frontier of physical AI with nine figures in annualized revenue.
In 2024, Ioannis and Misha founded @reflection_ai with an insight into scaling reinforcement learning. As that grew into the ambition to build a Western frontier lab for open models, the hard question was how a startup competes with labs spending tens of billions. An introduction to NVIDIA and many compute calls and recruiting events later, the team has built Beam, now one of the leading US open models.
In 2025, Anna and Azalia, the co-creators of AlphaChip, founded @RicursiveAI to design models and hardware together. From day one, we made early customers and ecosystem partners a priority. Today, they are showing order-of-magnitude improvements on real workloads, working with some of the industry’s most consequential players, and reaching a defining inflection point.
The ambition keeps growing as these companies scale.
@linear has always had a kind of magic to it. Now it’s the system a new generation of AI companies builds on, for teams and agents alike.
@tavus saw early that we’d one day talk to AI the way we talk to each other. Today, it’s building the human computing interface for a world of AI colleagues.
@Mach_Industries began as hydrogen experiments in an MIT dorm room. It has since become one of the most exciting next-generation defense companies.
Making the ambition possible
Being a first believer is only the beginning. Compute falls through. A deep-pocketed incumbent makes your mission its top priority. A breakthrough changes the opportunity and the capital required overnight.
These are stomach-churning moments, and early belief carries a responsibility to help make the bet work.
This is the partnership I love: turning the full ambition into concrete steps. Raising capital, securing compute and strategic partners, recruiting exceptional people, and winning the first customers together. Thinking several moves ahead while solving what’s in front of us. And as breakthroughs open new possibilities, helping founders dream even bigger.
Thank you
To the founders I’ve worked with: thank you for trusting me and Sequoia to be your first partner and first believer. It’s been the joy of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to keep building together.
Thank you to Alfred and Pat for your leadership of Sequoia and your support of my next chapter. To Roelof, for bringing me into Sequoia and believing in me from the beginning. Alfred and Roelof, you have been mentors in investing and in life. So much of what I know, and the investor I’ve become, comes from your guidance and generosity over the years. To Bill, for the close partnership and wealth of knowledge, always wrapped in humility. To Shaun, for showing me how to think deeply and imaginatively. To Michael Moritz, for inspiring 22-year-old me to dream big. To Doug, for teaching me to keep things simple. To Bogie and Jess, for bringing joy to the everyday and perspective on what matters. And to all my Sequoia teammates, for the friendship, camaraderie, and lessons I’ll carry with me.
To my family, especially my husband and my brother, who have each started companies of their own: thank you for giving me the courage to take this leap.
Let’s get to work!
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
Partnering with Stephanie in 2021 is one of the core reasons Tavus is where it is today.
She’s an optimist, sees contrarian visions and looks for the reasons it could work when others see why it won’t. She believed in us and the vision long before it was obvious.
And that conviction doesn’t stop at the investment. Through thick and thin, she’s been a true partner to Hassaan and I- one that pushes us to take bigger bets, stay focused, and above all else, never lose sight of the dream we’re building towards.
It takes a certain kind of partner to build something generational- someone with an unwavering belief in what’s possible. That’s what makes Stephanie so special. We’ve been so lucky to partner with her, and even luckier to continue!
I’m starting a new early-stage AI fund, doing what I love: partnering with founders from company formation on bold bets, long before consensus.
The fund’s LPs will include Sequoia, Jeff Dean, Sachin Katti, Philip Wong (my Stanford professor and Chief Scientist adviser to TSMC), and others whose work has shaped our industry and how I think about AI’s future.
I’ll remain a partner at Sequoia and keep serving on my boards on Sequoia’s behalf.
Sequoia has been my home for the past 11 years. I joined as the youngest investor the firm had ever hired. I grew up here. Through years of intense debate and shared work, I found lifelong mentors and friends who took me under their wing and taught me this craft. They taught me to aim high and take big swings. I’ll carry that into what I build: outsized ambition, relentless truth-seeking and curiosity, and a refusal to become complacent.
Working alongside founders has made me want to build something of my own: a firm shaped from day one around the convictions I’ve developed over the past decade.
Life has taught me not to take time for granted. This is how I want to spend mine.
Why now
We’re seeing a new way of building companies in today’s AI era. Research and products often advance together. A breakthrough can open a market or accelerate a business far faster than expected. Some companies require extraordinary capital and compute early on. Others reach meaningful scale with remarkably small teams. The rules for how big these businesses can get, and how fast, are being rewritten.
But early on, the technology is unproven, the resources required enormous, and the vision seemingly implausible.
This is what I love most: seeing the potential right from the beginning, and helping founders realize their full scale of ambition.
More than ever, it starts with an extreme willingness to believe early, with bold, independent conviction in a founder’s technical insight before any product or market validation. Then, it means helping founders take the biggest swings, giving the rare, long-term patience to see those bets through uncertainty, ambiguity, and turbulence, and serving as a level head when the stakes are highest.
I learned this kind of partnership at Sequoia. It’s the foundation of the firm I’m building.
Believing before consensus
My fascination with AI’s potential took root at Stanford in the early-to-mid 2010s, studying computer science and working in Andrew Ng’s lab. The friendships I formed connected me to a community whose people and ideas would help shape modern AI and build some of our generation’s defining companies. What stayed with me was the gap between what those people saw was possible and what the wider world could imagine.
I’m drawn to founders pursuing ambitions that sound impossible today.
I start with a simple question: “What if everything goes right?”
Then we work backward together to make it happen.
In 2023, Deepak and Abhinav set out to build a general-purpose robot brain at @SkildAI, before physical AI was a consensus bet. Their sim-to-real breakthroughs gave me conviction where earlier robotics approaches had fallen short. But the data flywheel required deployment at scale. We made commercialization as urgent as research and brought in strategic partners like NVIDIA and SoftBank to support the ambition. Three years in, Skild is advancing the frontier of physical AI with nine figures in annualized revenue.
In 2024, Ioannis and Misha founded @reflection_ai with an insight into scaling reinforcement learning. As that grew into the ambition to build a Western frontier lab for open models, the hard question was how a startup competes with labs spending tens of billions. An introduction to NVIDIA and many compute calls and recruiting events later, the team has built Beam, now one of the leading US open models.
In 2025, Anna and Azalia, the co-creators of AlphaChip, founded @RicursiveAI to design models and hardware together. From day one, we made early customers and ecosystem partners a priority. Today, they are showing order-of-magnitude improvements on real workloads, working with some of the industry’s most consequential players, and reaching a defining inflection point.
The ambition keeps growing as these companies scale.
@linear has always had a kind of magic to it. Now it’s the system a new generation of AI companies builds on, for teams and agents alike.
@tavus saw early that we’d one day talk to AI the way we talk to each other. Today, it’s building the human computing interface for a world of AI colleagues.
@Mach_Industries began as hydrogen experiments in an MIT dorm room. It has since become one of the most exciting next-generation defense companies.
Making the ambition possible
Being a first believer is only the beginning. Compute falls through. A deep-pocketed incumbent makes your mission its top priority. A breakthrough changes the opportunity and the capital required overnight.
These are stomach-churning moments, and early belief carries a responsibility to help make the bet work.
This is the partnership I love: turning the full ambition into concrete steps. Raising capital, securing compute and strategic partners, recruiting exceptional people, and winning the first customers together. Thinking several moves ahead while solving what’s in front of us. And as breakthroughs open new possibilities, helping founders dream even bigger.
Thank you
To the founders I’ve worked with: thank you for trusting me and Sequoia to be your first partner and first believer. It’s been the joy of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to keep building together.
Thank you to Alfred and Pat for your leadership of Sequoia and your support of my next chapter. To Roelof, for bringing me into Sequoia and believing in me from the beginning. Alfred and Roelof, you have been mentors in investing and in life. So much of what I know, and the investor I’ve become, comes from your guidance and generosity over the years. To Bill, for the close partnership and wealth of knowledge, always wrapped in humility. To Shaun, for showing me how to think deeply and imaginatively. To Michael Moritz, for inspiring 22-year-old me to dream big. To Doug, for teaching me to keep things simple. To Bogie and Jess, for bringing joy to the everyday and perspective on what matters. And to all my Sequoia teammates, for the friendship, camaraderie, and lessons I’ll carry with me.
To my family, especially my husband and my brother, who have each started companies of their own: thank you for giving me the courage to take this leap.
Let’s get to work!
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
“Be more ambitious” was one of the first things Stephanie ever told me. That sums up how I think she sees the world, and what it’s like to have her in our corner.
She was one of our first believers, back when we were just a couple of kids hacking GPUs in the basement of an MIT frat. Since then, she’s been an incredible partner, friend, and just an overall awesome human being.
She’s someone I can call (and have called) at 3 in the morning when things are going sideways. She’ll kick down doors to get us the connections and resources we need to build, while pushing us to think bigger about what we could accomplish.
As far as bets go, Stephanie has an uncanny ability to see the future. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was a time traveler. Her bets are bold, she makes them before there is even a consensus to disagree with, and she puts everything behind helping us make those bets work. I’m so glad she will have the agency to build a firm around that conviction.
If I were an LP, I’d be begging to invest, and if I were starting my journey as a founder, I’d be knocking down her door. Having her on your team is a superpower.
So excited for this next chapter, Stephanie. Go big or go home!!
I’m starting a new early-stage AI fund, doing what I love: partnering with founders from company formation on bold bets, long before consensus.
The fund’s LPs will include Sequoia, Jeff Dean, Sachin Katti, Philip Wong (my Stanford professor and Chief Scientist adviser to TSMC), and others whose work has shaped our industry and how I think about AI’s future.
I’ll remain a partner at Sequoia and keep serving on my boards on Sequoia’s behalf.
Sequoia has been my home for the past 11 years. I joined as the youngest investor the firm had ever hired. I grew up here. Through years of intense debate and shared work, I found lifelong mentors and friends who took me under their wing and taught me this craft. They taught me to aim high and take big swings. I’ll carry that into what I build: outsized ambition, relentless truth-seeking and curiosity, and a refusal to become complacent.
Working alongside founders has made me want to build something of my own: a firm shaped from day one around the convictions I’ve developed over the past decade.
Life has taught me not to take time for granted. This is how I want to spend mine.
Why now
We’re seeing a new way of building companies in today’s AI era. Research and products often advance together. A breakthrough can open a market or accelerate a business far faster than expected. Some companies require extraordinary capital and compute early on. Others reach meaningful scale with remarkably small teams. The rules for how big these businesses can get, and how fast, are being rewritten.
But early on, the technology is unproven, the resources required enormous, and the vision seemingly implausible.
This is what I love most: seeing the potential right from the beginning, and helping founders realize their full scale of ambition.
More than ever, it starts with an extreme willingness to believe early, with bold, independent conviction in a founder’s technical insight before any product or market validation. Then, it means helping founders take the biggest swings, giving the rare, long-term patience to see those bets through uncertainty, ambiguity, and turbulence, and serving as a level head when the stakes are highest.
I learned this kind of partnership at Sequoia. It’s the foundation of the firm I’m building.
Believing before consensus
My fascination with AI’s potential took root at Stanford in the early-to-mid 2010s, studying computer science and working in Andrew Ng’s lab. The friendships I formed connected me to a community whose people and ideas would help shape modern AI and build some of our generation’s defining companies. What stayed with me was the gap between what those people saw was possible and what the wider world could imagine.
I’m drawn to founders pursuing ambitions that sound impossible today.
I start with a simple question: “What if everything goes right?”
Then we work backward together to make it happen.
In 2023, Deepak and Abhinav set out to build a general-purpose robot brain at @SkildAI, before physical AI was a consensus bet. Their sim-to-real breakthroughs gave me conviction where earlier robotics approaches had fallen short. But the data flywheel required deployment at scale. We made commercialization as urgent as research and brought in strategic partners like NVIDIA and SoftBank to support the ambition. Three years in, Skild is advancing the frontier of physical AI with nine figures in annualized revenue.
In 2024, Ioannis and Misha founded @reflection_ai with an insight into scaling reinforcement learning. As that grew into the ambition to build a Western frontier lab for open models, the hard question was how a startup competes with labs spending tens of billions. An introduction to NVIDIA and many compute calls and recruiting events later, the team has built Beam, now one of the leading US open models.
In 2025, Anna and Azalia, the co-creators of AlphaChip, founded @RicursiveAI to design models and hardware together. From day one, we made early customers and ecosystem partners a priority. Today, they are showing order-of-magnitude improvements on real workloads, working with some of the industry’s most consequential players, and reaching a defining inflection point.
The ambition keeps growing as these companies scale.
@linear has always had a kind of magic to it. Now it’s the system a new generation of AI companies builds on, for teams and agents alike.
@tavus saw early that we’d one day talk to AI the way we talk to each other. Today, it’s building the human computing interface for a world of AI colleagues.
@Mach_Industries began as hydrogen experiments in an MIT dorm room. It has since become one of the most exciting next-generation defense companies.
Making the ambition possible
Being a first believer is only the beginning. Compute falls through. A deep-pocketed incumbent makes your mission its top priority. A breakthrough changes the opportunity and the capital required overnight.
These are stomach-churning moments, and early belief carries a responsibility to help make the bet work.
This is the partnership I love: turning the full ambition into concrete steps. Raising capital, securing compute and strategic partners, recruiting exceptional people, and winning the first customers together. Thinking several moves ahead while solving what’s in front of us. And as breakthroughs open new possibilities, helping founders dream even bigger.
Thank you
To the founders I’ve worked with: thank you for trusting me and Sequoia to be your first partner and first believer. It’s been the joy of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to keep building together.
Thank you to Alfred and Pat for your leadership of Sequoia and your support of my next chapter. To Roelof, for bringing me into Sequoia and believing in me from the beginning. Alfred and Roelof, you have been mentors in investing and in life. So much of what I know, and the investor I’ve become, comes from your guidance and generosity over the years. To Bill, for the close partnership and wealth of knowledge, always wrapped in humility. To Shaun, for showing me how to think deeply and imaginatively. To Michael Moritz, for inspiring 22-year-old me to dream big. To Doug, for teaching me to keep things simple. To Bogie and Jess, for bringing joy to the everyday and perspective on what matters. And to all my Sequoia teammates, for the friendship, camaraderie, and lessons I’ll carry with me.
To my family, especially my husband and my brother, who have each started companies of their own: thank you for giving me the courage to take this leap.
Let’s get to work!
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
We worked with Stephanie since Linear's seed round in 2020, before others believed in us. Congrats on the new fund and upcoming big bets! xitter.twitterapi.xyz/stephzhan/status/21133…
I’m starting a new early-stage AI fund, doing what I love: partnering with founders from company formation on bold bets, long before consensus.
The fund’s LPs will include Sequoia, Jeff Dean, Sachin Katti, Philip Wong (my Stanford professor and Chief Scientist adviser to TSMC), and others whose work has shaped our industry and how I think about AI’s future.
I’ll remain a partner at Sequoia and keep serving on my boards on Sequoia’s behalf.
Sequoia has been my home for the past 11 years. I joined as the youngest investor the firm had ever hired. I grew up here. Through years of intense debate and shared work, I found lifelong mentors and friends who took me under their wing and taught me this craft. They taught me to aim high and take big swings. I’ll carry that into what I build: outsized ambition, relentless truth-seeking and curiosity, and a refusal to become complacent.
Working alongside founders has made me want to build something of my own: a firm shaped from day one around the convictions I’ve developed over the past decade.
Life has taught me not to take time for granted. This is how I want to spend mine.
Why now
We’re seeing a new way of building companies in today’s AI era. Research and products often advance together. A breakthrough can open a market or accelerate a business far faster than expected. Some companies require extraordinary capital and compute early on. Others reach meaningful scale with remarkably small teams. The rules for how big these businesses can get, and how fast, are being rewritten.
But early on, the technology is unproven, the resources required enormous, and the vision seemingly implausible.
This is what I love most: seeing the potential right from the beginning, and helping founders realize their full scale of ambition.
More than ever, it starts with an extreme willingness to believe early, with bold, independent conviction in a founder’s technical insight before any product or market validation. Then, it means helping founders take the biggest swings, giving the rare, long-term patience to see those bets through uncertainty, ambiguity, and turbulence, and serving as a level head when the stakes are highest.
I learned this kind of partnership at Sequoia. It’s the foundation of the firm I’m building.
Believing before consensus
My fascination with AI’s potential took root at Stanford in the early-to-mid 2010s, studying computer science and working in Andrew Ng’s lab. The friendships I formed connected me to a community whose people and ideas would help shape modern AI and build some of our generation’s defining companies. What stayed with me was the gap between what those people saw was possible and what the wider world could imagine.
I’m drawn to founders pursuing ambitions that sound impossible today.
I start with a simple question: “What if everything goes right?”
Then we work backward together to make it happen.
In 2023, Deepak and Abhinav set out to build a general-purpose robot brain at @SkildAI, before physical AI was a consensus bet. Their sim-to-real breakthroughs gave me conviction where earlier robotics approaches had fallen short. But the data flywheel required deployment at scale. We made commercialization as urgent as research and brought in strategic partners like NVIDIA and SoftBank to support the ambition. Three years in, Skild is advancing the frontier of physical AI with nine figures in annualized revenue.
In 2024, Ioannis and Misha founded @reflection_ai with an insight into scaling reinforcement learning. As that grew into the ambition to build a Western frontier lab for open models, the hard question was how a startup competes with labs spending tens of billions. An introduction to NVIDIA and many compute calls and recruiting events later, the team has built Beam, now one of the leading US open models.
In 2025, Anna and Azalia, the co-creators of AlphaChip, founded @RicursiveAI to design models and hardware together. From day one, we made early customers and ecosystem partners a priority. Today, they are showing order-of-magnitude improvements on real workloads, working with some of the industry’s most consequential players, and reaching a defining inflection point.
The ambition keeps growing as these companies scale.
@linear has always had a kind of magic to it. Now it’s the system a new generation of AI companies builds on, for teams and agents alike.
@tavus saw early that we’d one day talk to AI the way we talk to each other. Today, it’s building the human computing interface for a world of AI colleagues.
@Mach_Industries began as hydrogen experiments in an MIT dorm room. It has since become one of the most exciting next-generation defense companies.
Making the ambition possible
Being a first believer is only the beginning. Compute falls through. A deep-pocketed incumbent makes your mission its top priority. A breakthrough changes the opportunity and the capital required overnight.
These are stomach-churning moments, and early belief carries a responsibility to help make the bet work.
This is the partnership I love: turning the full ambition into concrete steps. Raising capital, securing compute and strategic partners, recruiting exceptional people, and winning the first customers together. Thinking several moves ahead while solving what’s in front of us. And as breakthroughs open new possibilities, helping founders dream even bigger.
Thank you
To the founders I’ve worked with: thank you for trusting me and Sequoia to be your first partner and first believer. It’s been the joy of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to keep building together.
Thank you to Alfred and Pat for your leadership of Sequoia and your support of my next chapter. To Roelof, for bringing me into Sequoia and believing in me from the beginning. Alfred and Roelof, you have been mentors in investing and in life. So much of what I know, and the investor I’ve become, comes from your guidance and generosity over the years. To Bill, for the close partnership and wealth of knowledge, always wrapped in humility. To Shaun, for showing me how to think deeply and imaginatively. To Michael Moritz, for inspiring 22-year-old me to dream big. To Doug, for teaching me to keep things simple. To Bogie and Jess, for bringing joy to the everyday and perspective on what matters. And to all my Sequoia teammates, for the friendship, camaraderie, and lessons I’ll carry with me.
To my family, especially my husband and my brother, who have each started companies of their own: thank you for giving me the courage to take this leap.
Let’s get to work!
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
We partnered with Stephanie in 2019 and she’s been a force ever since, supporting us on the company building and helping us navigate AI
Every now and then she asks pointed questions with a gentle touch, pushing us to explore ideas while giving us room to find our own way
I’m starting a new early-stage AI fund, doing what I love: partnering with founders from company formation on bold bets, long before consensus.
The fund’s LPs will include Sequoia, Jeff Dean, Sachin Katti, Philip Wong (my Stanford professor and Chief Scientist adviser to TSMC), and others whose work has shaped our industry and how I think about AI’s future.
I’ll remain a partner at Sequoia and keep serving on my boards on Sequoia’s behalf.
Sequoia has been my home for the past 11 years. I joined as the youngest investor the firm had ever hired. I grew up here. Through years of intense debate and shared work, I found lifelong mentors and friends who took me under their wing and taught me this craft. They taught me to aim high and take big swings. I’ll carry that into what I build: outsized ambition, relentless truth-seeking and curiosity, and a refusal to become complacent.
Working alongside founders has made me want to build something of my own: a firm shaped from day one around the convictions I’ve developed over the past decade.
Life has taught me not to take time for granted. This is how I want to spend mine.
Why now
We’re seeing a new way of building companies in today’s AI era. Research and products often advance together. A breakthrough can open a market or accelerate a business far faster than expected. Some companies require extraordinary capital and compute early on. Others reach meaningful scale with remarkably small teams. The rules for how big these businesses can get, and how fast, are being rewritten.
But early on, the technology is unproven, the resources required enormous, and the vision seemingly implausible.
This is what I love most: seeing the potential right from the beginning, and helping founders realize their full scale of ambition.
More than ever, it starts with an extreme willingness to believe early, with bold, independent conviction in a founder’s technical insight before any product or market validation. Then, it means helping founders take the biggest swings, giving the rare, long-term patience to see those bets through uncertainty, ambiguity, and turbulence, and serving as a level head when the stakes are highest.
I learned this kind of partnership at Sequoia. It’s the foundation of the firm I’m building.
Believing before consensus
My fascination with AI’s potential took root at Stanford in the early-to-mid 2010s, studying computer science and working in Andrew Ng’s lab. The friendships I formed connected me to a community whose people and ideas would help shape modern AI and build some of our generation’s defining companies. What stayed with me was the gap between what those people saw was possible and what the wider world could imagine.
I’m drawn to founders pursuing ambitions that sound impossible today.
I start with a simple question: “What if everything goes right?”
Then we work backward together to make it happen.
In 2023, Deepak and Abhinav set out to build a general-purpose robot brain at @SkildAI, before physical AI was a consensus bet. Their sim-to-real breakthroughs gave me conviction where earlier robotics approaches had fallen short. But the data flywheel required deployment at scale. We made commercialization as urgent as research and brought in strategic partners like NVIDIA and SoftBank to support the ambition. Three years in, Skild is advancing the frontier of physical AI with nine figures in annualized revenue.
In 2024, Ioannis and Misha founded @reflection_ai with an insight into scaling reinforcement learning. As that grew into the ambition to build a Western frontier lab for open models, the hard question was how a startup competes with labs spending tens of billions. An introduction to NVIDIA and many compute calls and recruiting events later, the team has built Beam, now one of the leading US open models.
In 2025, Anna and Azalia, the co-creators of AlphaChip, founded @RicursiveAI to design models and hardware together. From day one, we made early customers and ecosystem partners a priority. Today, they are showing order-of-magnitude improvements on real workloads, working with some of the industry’s most consequential players, and reaching a defining inflection point.
The ambition keeps growing as these companies scale.
@linear has always had a kind of magic to it. Now it’s the system a new generation of AI companies builds on, for teams and agents alike.
@tavus saw early that we’d one day talk to AI the way we talk to each other. Today, it’s building the human computing interface for a world of AI colleagues.
@Mach_Industries began as hydrogen experiments in an MIT dorm room. It has since become one of the most exciting next-generation defense companies.
Making the ambition possible
Being a first believer is only the beginning. Compute falls through. A deep-pocketed incumbent makes your mission its top priority. A breakthrough changes the opportunity and the capital required overnight.
These are stomach-churning moments, and early belief carries a responsibility to help make the bet work.
This is the partnership I love: turning the full ambition into concrete steps. Raising capital, securing compute and strategic partners, recruiting exceptional people, and winning the first customers together. Thinking several moves ahead while solving what’s in front of us. And as breakthroughs open new possibilities, helping founders dream even bigger.
Thank you
To the founders I’ve worked with: thank you for trusting me and Sequoia to be your first partner and first believer. It’s been the joy of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to keep building together.
Thank you to Alfred and Pat for your leadership of Sequoia and your support of my next chapter. To Roelof, for bringing me into Sequoia and believing in me from the beginning. Alfred and Roelof, you have been mentors in investing and in life. So much of what I know, and the investor I’ve become, comes from your guidance and generosity over the years. To Bill, for the close partnership and wealth of knowledge, always wrapped in humility. To Shaun, for showing me how to think deeply and imaginatively. To Michael Moritz, for inspiring 22-year-old me to dream big. To Doug, for teaching me to keep things simple. To Bogie and Jess, for bringing joy to the everyday and perspective on what matters. And to all my Sequoia teammates, for the friendship, camaraderie, and lessons I’ll carry with me.
To my family, especially my husband and my brother, who have each started companies of their own: thank you for giving me the courage to take this leap.
Let’s get to work!
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
Steph believed in @SkildAI from day one. One of the things I value most about working with her is how well she understands the details and how often she brings a perspective we haven’t considered. As a founder, having someone who cares enough to challenge your thinking and help you see your blind spots means a lot. We’ve been lucky to have her in our corner.
Excited to see you build your own firm, @stephzhan! Here’s to many more years of partnership. Godspeed.
I’m starting a new early-stage AI fund, doing what I love: partnering with founders from company formation on bold bets, long before consensus.
The fund’s LPs will include Sequoia, Jeff Dean, Sachin Katti, Philip Wong (my Stanford professor and Chief Scientist adviser to TSMC), and others whose work has shaped our industry and how I think about AI’s future.
I’ll remain a partner at Sequoia and keep serving on my boards on Sequoia’s behalf.
Sequoia has been my home for the past 11 years. I joined as the youngest investor the firm had ever hired. I grew up here. Through years of intense debate and shared work, I found lifelong mentors and friends who took me under their wing and taught me this craft. They taught me to aim high and take big swings. I’ll carry that into what I build: outsized ambition, relentless truth-seeking and curiosity, and a refusal to become complacent.
Working alongside founders has made me want to build something of my own: a firm shaped from day one around the convictions I’ve developed over the past decade.
Life has taught me not to take time for granted. This is how I want to spend mine.
Why now
We’re seeing a new way of building companies in today’s AI era. Research and products often advance together. A breakthrough can open a market or accelerate a business far faster than expected. Some companies require extraordinary capital and compute early on. Others reach meaningful scale with remarkably small teams. The rules for how big these businesses can get, and how fast, are being rewritten.
But early on, the technology is unproven, the resources required enormous, and the vision seemingly implausible.
This is what I love most: seeing the potential right from the beginning, and helping founders realize their full scale of ambition.
More than ever, it starts with an extreme willingness to believe early, with bold, independent conviction in a founder’s technical insight before any product or market validation. Then, it means helping founders take the biggest swings, giving the rare, long-term patience to see those bets through uncertainty, ambiguity, and turbulence, and serving as a level head when the stakes are highest.
I learned this kind of partnership at Sequoia. It’s the foundation of the firm I’m building.
Believing before consensus
My fascination with AI’s potential took root at Stanford in the early-to-mid 2010s, studying computer science and working in Andrew Ng’s lab. The friendships I formed connected me to a community whose people and ideas would help shape modern AI and build some of our generation’s defining companies. What stayed with me was the gap between what those people saw was possible and what the wider world could imagine.
I’m drawn to founders pursuing ambitions that sound impossible today.
I start with a simple question: “What if everything goes right?”
Then we work backward together to make it happen.
In 2023, Deepak and Abhinav set out to build a general-purpose robot brain at @SkildAI, before physical AI was a consensus bet. Their sim-to-real breakthroughs gave me conviction where earlier robotics approaches had fallen short. But the data flywheel required deployment at scale. We made commercialization as urgent as research and brought in strategic partners like NVIDIA and SoftBank to support the ambition. Three years in, Skild is advancing the frontier of physical AI with nine figures in annualized revenue.
In 2024, Ioannis and Misha founded @reflection_ai with an insight into scaling reinforcement learning. As that grew into the ambition to build a Western frontier lab for open models, the hard question was how a startup competes with labs spending tens of billions. An introduction to NVIDIA and many compute calls and recruiting events later, the team has built Beam, now one of the leading US open models.
In 2025, Anna and Azalia, the co-creators of AlphaChip, founded @RicursiveAI to design models and hardware together. From day one, we made early customers and ecosystem partners a priority. Today, they are showing order-of-magnitude improvements on real workloads, working with some of the industry’s most consequential players, and reaching a defining inflection point.
The ambition keeps growing as these companies scale.
@linear has always had a kind of magic to it. Now it’s the system a new generation of AI companies builds on, for teams and agents alike.
@tavus saw early that we’d one day talk to AI the way we talk to each other. Today, it’s building the human computing interface for a world of AI colleagues.
@Mach_Industries began as hydrogen experiments in an MIT dorm room. It has since become one of the most exciting next-generation defense companies.
Making the ambition possible
Being a first believer is only the beginning. Compute falls through. A deep-pocketed incumbent makes your mission its top priority. A breakthrough changes the opportunity and the capital required overnight.
These are stomach-churning moments, and early belief carries a responsibility to help make the bet work.
This is the partnership I love: turning the full ambition into concrete steps. Raising capital, securing compute and strategic partners, recruiting exceptional people, and winning the first customers together. Thinking several moves ahead while solving what’s in front of us. And as breakthroughs open new possibilities, helping founders dream even bigger.
Thank you
To the founders I’ve worked with: thank you for trusting me and Sequoia to be your first partner and first believer. It’s been the joy of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to keep building together.
Thank you to Alfred and Pat for your leadership of Sequoia and your support of my next chapter. To Roelof, for bringing me into Sequoia and believing in me from the beginning. Alfred and Roelof, you have been mentors in investing and in life. So much of what I know, and the investor I’ve become, comes from your guidance and generosity over the years. To Bill, for the close partnership and wealth of knowledge, always wrapped in humility. To Shaun, for showing me how to think deeply and imaginatively. To Michael Moritz, for inspiring 22-year-old me to dream big. To Doug, for teaching me to keep things simple. To Bogie and Jess, for bringing joy to the everyday and perspective on what matters. And to all my Sequoia teammates, for the friendship, camaraderie, and lessons I’ll carry with me.
To my family, especially my husband and my brother, who have each started companies of their own: thank you for giving me the courage to take this leap.
Let’s get to work!
Stephanie Zhan retweeted
In June of 2025, Stephanie sent me a cold email before anyone knew that Azalia and I were even thinking of starting a company.
Our vision was wildly ambitious and far from industry consensus at the time, but Stephanie put in the work and quickly built conviction: interviewing fifteen chief scientists and executives from major semiconductor and AI companies, reading my entire PhD dissertation and all the papers that we ever wrote in this area, and even checking my ability to speak Mandarin Chinese.
Stephanie immediately saw what is now obvious, that AI can massively accelerate chip design and there is enormous demand for custom AI accelerator chips, and she fought hard to lead our first round.
I feel incredibly lucky to have Stephanie in our corner. She has been endlessly supportive, and excited day or night to step in to help the company on every possible front from securing compute to building relationships with the fabs.
I’m really happy to see Stephanie launch her own new venture and I look forward to seeing all of the bold, ambitious bets she will make in the future!
I’m starting a new early-stage AI fund, doing what I love: partnering with founders from company formation on bold bets, long before consensus.
The fund’s LPs will include Sequoia, Jeff Dean, Sachin Katti, Philip Wong (my Stanford professor and Chief Scientist adviser to TSMC), and others whose work has shaped our industry and how I think about AI’s future.
I’ll remain a partner at Sequoia and keep serving on my boards on Sequoia’s behalf.
Sequoia has been my home for the past 11 years. I joined as the youngest investor the firm had ever hired. I grew up here. Through years of intense debate and shared work, I found lifelong mentors and friends who took me under their wing and taught me this craft. They taught me to aim high and take big swings. I’ll carry that into what I build: outsized ambition, relentless truth-seeking and curiosity, and a refusal to become complacent.
Working alongside founders has made me want to build something of my own: a firm shaped from day one around the convictions I’ve developed over the past decade.
Life has taught me not to take time for granted. This is how I want to spend mine.
Why now
We’re seeing a new way of building companies in today’s AI era. Research and products often advance together. A breakthrough can open a market or accelerate a business far faster than expected. Some companies require extraordinary capital and compute early on. Others reach meaningful scale with remarkably small teams. The rules for how big these businesses can get, and how fast, are being rewritten.
But early on, the technology is unproven, the resources required enormous, and the vision seemingly implausible.
This is what I love most: seeing the potential right from the beginning, and helping founders realize their full scale of ambition.
More than ever, it starts with an extreme willingness to believe early, with bold, independent conviction in a founder’s technical insight before any product or market validation. Then, it means helping founders take the biggest swings, giving the rare, long-term patience to see those bets through uncertainty, ambiguity, and turbulence, and serving as a level head when the stakes are highest.
I learned this kind of partnership at Sequoia. It’s the foundation of the firm I’m building.
Believing before consensus
My fascination with AI’s potential took root at Stanford in the early-to-mid 2010s, studying computer science and working in Andrew Ng’s lab. The friendships I formed connected me to a community whose people and ideas would help shape modern AI and build some of our generation’s defining companies. What stayed with me was the gap between what those people saw was possible and what the wider world could imagine.
I’m drawn to founders pursuing ambitions that sound impossible today.
I start with a simple question: “What if everything goes right?”
Then we work backward together to make it happen.
In 2023, Deepak and Abhinav set out to build a general-purpose robot brain at @SkildAI, before physical AI was a consensus bet. Their sim-to-real breakthroughs gave me conviction where earlier robotics approaches had fallen short. But the data flywheel required deployment at scale. We made commercialization as urgent as research and brought in strategic partners like NVIDIA and SoftBank to support the ambition. Three years in, Skild is advancing the frontier of physical AI with nine figures in annualized revenue.
In 2024, Ioannis and Misha founded @reflection_ai with an insight into scaling reinforcement learning. As that grew into the ambition to build a Western frontier lab for open models, the hard question was how a startup competes with labs spending tens of billions. An introduction to NVIDIA and many compute calls and recruiting events later, the team has built Beam, now one of the leading US open models.
In 2025, Anna and Azalia, the co-creators of AlphaChip, founded @RicursiveAI to design models and hardware together. From day one, we made early customers and ecosystem partners a priority. Today, they are showing order-of-magnitude improvements on real workloads, working with some of the industry’s most consequential players, and reaching a defining inflection point.
The ambition keeps growing as these companies scale.
@linear has always had a kind of magic to it. Now it’s the system a new generation of AI companies builds on, for teams and agents alike.
@tavus saw early that we’d one day talk to AI the way we talk to each other. Today, it’s building the human computing interface for a world of AI colleagues.
@Mach_Industries began as hydrogen experiments in an MIT dorm room. It has since become one of the most exciting next-generation defense companies.
Making the ambition possible
Being a first believer is only the beginning. Compute falls through. A deep-pocketed incumbent makes your mission its top priority. A breakthrough changes the opportunity and the capital required overnight.
These are stomach-churning moments, and early belief carries a responsibility to help make the bet work.
This is the partnership I love: turning the full ambition into concrete steps. Raising capital, securing compute and strategic partners, recruiting exceptional people, and winning the first customers together. Thinking several moves ahead while solving what’s in front of us. And as breakthroughs open new possibilities, helping founders dream even bigger.
Thank you
To the founders I’ve worked with: thank you for trusting me and Sequoia to be your first partner and first believer. It’s been the joy of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to keep building together.
Thank you to Alfred and Pat for your leadership of Sequoia and your support of my next chapter. To Roelof, for bringing me into Sequoia and believing in me from the beginning. Alfred and Roelof, you have been mentors in investing and in life. So much of what I know, and the investor I’ve become, comes from your guidance and generosity over the years. To Bill, for the close partnership and wealth of knowledge, always wrapped in humility. To Shaun, for showing me how to think deeply and imaginatively. To Michael Moritz, for inspiring 22-year-old me to dream big. To Doug, for teaching me to keep things simple. To Bogie and Jess, for bringing joy to the everyday and perspective on what matters. And to all my Sequoia teammates, for the friendship, camaraderie, and lessons I’ll carry with me.
To my family, especially my husband and my brother, who have each started companies of their own: thank you for giving me the courage to take this leap.
Let’s get to work!