Matt Miller’s Post

I’m in a lot of conversations right now about AI and the principles to apply to building an AI company. Here’s are some thoughts I share with founders building in this space: 👇 With every wave of new tech, the rules get rewritten and a new set of opportunities is created for founders, but the core concepts in company building remain the same. One thing we recommend to founders in this space is to evolve from focusing on the first mover’s advantage to building a sustainable competitive advantage. In the AI wave, there are opportunities to leverage open LLM models and build businesses that can grow rapidly–but what next? Compare it to the early days of Cloud: you can achieve great revenues at the beginning but if you’re benefiting from a tech available to all, other people are going to figure out how to use it and the advantages will change. As a founder, you’ve got to think several steps ahead, beyond the first mover’s advantage, to create something that customers love and that will endure. If you’re building something on top of a third party LLM  you need to think about what are the workflows, what are the services, what are the things that your customers will value? The ones who will win are thinking about what will continue to keep a customer with them and what can they build to give themselves a lead over others who will come into the space. Because the one thing we know for sure is everybody is rushing into this space. Larger companies–and I’d include the incredible OpenAI, even though they’re still a young company–have an edge in an environment where scale is more important than ever. Larger companies have access to more data and more resources to train ever more powerful models. But if you’re a startup, your huge opportunity is to develop a unique insight about what’s important to the customer. You can be closer to the customer and their experience - if you can solve for that, you can build a really unique, differentiated product or service and create hooks, experiences or workflows that are so unique for that customer that they love you. A community that champions you is a powerful thing. If you want to read more Sequoia perspectives on AI, take a look at https://lnkd.in/eBYy4JBt for Konstantine’s post on the frontier paradox, and many wonderful insights from Sonya Huang, Cornelius Menke, Stephanie Zhan, Pat Grady, Lauren Reeder, Charlie Curnin, and more. 

Always love a chance to visit Stockholm. Even better when I get to talk with Joel Hellermark from Sana Labs about building competitive advantage in the AI wave. Thank you for the invitation!

Really enjoyed my conversation with Jay Kreps of Confluent at #slush2022. Jay talked about his journey from growing up in Sonoma County and rejecting the notion of High School. To solving hard data problems at Linkedin and developing Kafka. Onward to launching Confluent from the back of a dentist's office and growing it to a global business with thousands of employees and customers all over the world. Jay's outlier mentality and relentless pursuit of excellence sets him apart. His story is an inspiring one and worth a watch for anyone in the world of open source and infrastructure. Full video can be found here: https://lnkd.in/eZS3-AAu

Excited to share the news of our partnership with Yokoy. Yokoy is changing the way enterprises empower and manage their spend through automation. We are thrilled to be partnering with them to build the enterprise spend category leader. https://cnb.cx/3wGPPaF

Update on Sequoia Capital in Europe! Excited to finally share why we are building a team on the ground and how we will work with European founders to help them build global businesses. Check out Alex Konrad's piece to learn more. https://seq.vc/iu1 We are building out our team on the ground, starting with Luciana Lixandru, George Robson and Zoe Jervier Hewitt. I'm excited to join this team in London this summer as I continue to work with founders in both the US and Europe. Sequoia has been partnering with great companies that were founded in Europe for over a decade, including Unity Technologies & Klarna. Global category leaders are increasingly getting their start in Europe, and we’re excited to double down. This is just the beginning!

Excited to share the news of our partnership with Fishtown Analytics, the creators of DBT. The data analyst is the MVP of the data driven enterprise. Delivering the insights that guide the strategies of almost every organization. Tristan Handy, Drew Banin and Connor McArthur have built a product that gives them superpowers and a community they could call their own. We knew this was a company we had to partner with when across multiple board meetings across the Sequoia portfolio we were hearing references as to how DBT was helping them to get better insights out of their data faster than ever before. More on the thesis behind our partnership can be found here: https://lnkd.in/ggbH4Pc

We at Sequoia Capital were excited to partner with Tecton at the seed and now again at the Series A. We believe Tecton will be one of the most valuable partners to data-driven companies as they take advantage of the benefits of machine learning. https://lnkd.in/gPJxyFy

Great article about Eric S. Yuan, one of the most inspirational founders we have had the opportunity to partner with in recent years. Congratulations Eric and Team Zoom! https://lnkd.in/g2eVx5e