Investors · new episode 20 Oct 2026
Training Data
Hosted by Sequoia Capital
Sequoia's partners with the founders of AI companies on what they are building.
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Investors named as guests in the most episode titles on Training Data.
Every episode 112 · page 1 of 4
- 112Inside the Robot Data Factory: Mecka's Josh Gao on Sensorizing Humans to Train Robots20 Oct 2026 · 45 min▶
About this episode
Robotics never got the internet's gift of free training data, so someone has to manufacture it. Josh Gao, founder and CEO of Mecka AI, runs one of the largest robot data factories, and he explains what that actually involves: custom baseball caps and tactile gloves because nothing off the shelf captures force,…
- 111David Silver and Lasse Espeholt of Ineffable Intelligence: A Superlearner for the Age of Experience13 Oct 2026 · 1h 8mDavid Silver▶
About this episode
David Silver spent two years building AlphaGo on human data. When he removed human data altogether building AlphaGo Zero, the AI surpassed AlphaGo in under two days. He left DeepMind to run that same bet in pursuit of superintelligence. David and Lasse Espeholt, co-founders of Ineffable Intelligence, explain their…
- 110Google's AI Infrastructure Chief, Amin Vahdat, on the Physics & Economics of Frontier AI6 Oct 2026 · 1h 4m▶
About this episode
At 100,000-accelerator scale, something fails multiple times an hour, which is why Google's Chief Technologist for AI Infrastructure Amin Vahdat thinks FLOPS is a vanity metric. The metric that matters is what he calls goodput: the useful work a workload actually delivers through real failures. Amin walks through the…
- 109Box's Aaron Levie: On Reinventing Yourself in the AI Age and Enterprise Diffusion15 Sept 2026 · 1h 5mAaron Levie▶
About this episode
Starting a company is hard. Reinventing your company for AI as a public company with quarterly earnings results is even harder. Aaron Levie has pulled off the transition with Box and offers hard-won advice for founders. The cofounder and CEO of Box argues the value isn't only in the model; it's in the bridge from a…
- 108Making Cities Awesome: Peregrine’s Nick Noone & Ben Rudolph1 Sept 2026 · 52 min▶
About this episode
Most public safety technology companies grow by collecting more data. Peregrine inverted the model: no sensors, no new data, a business built on connecting the data and information cities already own. Co-founders Nick Noone and Ben Rudolph received more than two dozen no's before San Pablo PD let them in the door in…
- 107Parallel’s Parag Agrawal: Building a New Web for AI Agents25 Aug 2026 · 55 minAndrew Reed▶
About this episode
Parag Agrawal is making a bet that goes against two decades of web search: agents will query the web a thousand times more than humans ever have, and the infrastructure built around human clicks is wrong for them. The former Twitter CEO, now founder and CEO of Parallel Web Systems, explains why Parallel treats human…
- 106Rich Sutton and Khurram Javed: Why AI Models Stop Learning, and How to Start It Again18 Aug 2026 · 54 min▶
About this episode
Rich Sutton, who helped pioneer reinforcement learning and wrote the seminal AI essay The Bitter Lesson, has now cofounded Oak Lab with his former student Khurram Javed. Their goal: to build agents that continuously learn from their own experience rather than from us. Rich doesn't think he holds a radical view: "I'm…
- 105Chai Discovery's Bitter Lesson: Drug Design Is Another Scaling Problem4 Aug 2026 · 47 min▶
About this episode
Most people treat biology as a bespoke, messy science. Josh Meier and Matt McPartlon, co-founders of Chai Discovery, treat it as an engineering problem. They make the case that drug design obeys the bitter lesson: scale data, models, and compute, and the model can learn what a hand-built pipeline simply couldn't…
- 104Building the Automated AGI Lab: Core Automation's Jerry Tworek and Rohan Anil29 Jul 2026 · 49 min▶
About this episode
Jerry Tworek led reasoning at OpenAI, convinced that scaling reinforcement learning was the path to AGI. Rohan Anil co-led Gemini pre-training and built the Shampoo optimizer. Now they've teamed up at Core Automation on a contrarian premise: the transformer has carried us as far as it can, and the bottleneck to…
- 103Factory's Matan Grinberg: The Coming ‘Dark Factory’ Where Software Builds Itself21 Jul 2026 · 52 min▶
About this episode
Factory started building fully autonomous coding agents in April 2023, two years before enterprises were ready. Matan Grinberg now says this is indistinguishable from being wrong. The Factory co-founder and CEO explains how the company survived its "journey in the desert," including the decision to hand nearly all of…
- 102Anthropic's Katelyn Lesse & Angela Jiang: Building an Ecosystem, not a Walled Garden14 Jul 2026 · 49 minAngela Jiang▶
About this episode
Katelyn Lesse and Angela Jiang lead the team building Anthropic's developer platform - the layer that both outside builders and Anthropic's own products run on top of. Angela frames the platform as a three-layer stack: knowledge, execution, and coordination. She argues the real leverage is what’s at the top:…
- 101Inside Zipline's Autonomous System: 140M Miles, Zero Incidents7 Jul 2026 · 55 minKeller RinaudoKeller Rinaudo Cliffton▶
About this episode
The largest commercial autonomous system on earth isn't a robotaxi fleet, it's Zipline, which has flown 140 million autonomous miles with zero safety incidents. Co-founder Keller Rinaudo Cliffton and Eric Watson, who leads systems engineering and safety, explain why the drone itself is only 15% of the solution. The…
- 100Why Hardware-Software Co-Design Is AI's Real 100x: Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis30 Jun 2026 · 1h 10m▶
About this episode
Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis, argues the biggest gains in AI don't come from faster chips, they come from software-hardware co-design. Optimizing the model, the kernels, and the silicon together turns a 2x here and a 2x there into 100x. He explains why DeepSeek's experts were shaped for Nvidia's Hopper (and…
- 99Memory and Continual Learning: Engram's Dan Biderman and Jessy Lin24 Jun 2026 · 45 minShaun Maguire▶
About this episode
Dan Biderman and Jessy Lin, co-founders of Engram, are building a neolab around memory and continual learning, which they call two sides of the same coin. Their contrarian premise: instead of stuffing ever-larger prompts into the context window or bolting on RAG, bake a team's knowledge directly into the model's…
- 98Simulating Humans at Scale: Simile's Joon Sung Park16 Jun 2026 · 39 min▶
About this episode
The race to build superintelligence is producing models that keep getting better at objective problems, but not at behaving like actual people. Joon Sung Park, founder and CEO of Simile and creator of Stanford's "Smallville" generative agents study, argues that simulating human society requires a fundamentally…
- 97Google DeepMind's Logan Kilpatrick: Why the Model Eats the Harness11 Jun 2026 · 51 minLogan Kilpatrick▶
About this episode
The entire startup ecosystem is racing to build agent harnesses. Logan Kilpatrick, who leads Google AI Studio and the Gemini API, argues that scramble has a roughly 12-month shelf life. Models will absorb the scaffolding and run it natively, so the edge moves elsewhere. Google's own bet runs in parallel: a single…
- 96LIVE: Jensen Huang on Building the Dynamo of the Intelligence Age10 Jun 2026 · 41 min▶
About this episode
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, makes the case that computing is undergoing its biggest shift in 60 years: from retrieval, where data centers store files we look up, to generation, where every word, image, and video is produced in real time and customized for whoever is asking. He explains why NVIDIA's AI…
- 95Knowing What Your Customers Want, All the Time: Listen Labs' Alfred Wahlforss2 Jun 2026 · 40 min▶
About this episode
Alfred Wahlforss, co-founder and CEO of Listen Labs, is building an AI agent that interviews your customers at a scale no focus group ever could, thousands of voice conversations at once, drawn from an audience of 30 million people. A year after launch, Listen serves hundreds of Fortune 100s to Startups including…
- 94How Cursor Trained Composer on Fireworks: Distributed Infrastructure for High-Performance RL26 May 2026 · 46 min▶
About this episode
Cursor's Federico Cassano and Fireworks' Dmytro Dzhulgakov explain how they collaborated to build Composer as a specialized foundation model. The core insight: models have finite capacity in their weights, and allocating all those bits to the singular task of software engineering in Cursor frees the model to be both…
- 93Rebuilding IT From the Ground Up for the AI Age: Serval's Jake Stauch19 May 2026 · 38 min▶
About this episode
Jake Stauch, founder and CEO of Serval, is building a ServiceNow for the AI era. His most contrarian bet is that the product should look like boring old enterprise software, but with unlimited intelligence. Serval's architecture splits work between two agents: an admin agent that uses code generation to spin up…
- 92Suno's Mikey Shulman: Everyone Can Make Music Now13 May 2026 · 35 min▶
About this episode
Most music platforms assume you're a listener. On Suno, 90% of daily users make something. Founder and CEO Mikey Shulman explains why that flips the model: the act of creating IS the entertainment, with closer parallels to gaming and Claude Code than to Spotify. He breaks down the technical bets that got them here, …
- 91ElevenLabs' Mati Staniszewski: How Voice Becomes the Interface for Everything8 May 2026 · 27 minMati StaniszewskiAndrew Reed▶
About this episode
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, joins Sequoia partner Andrew Reed at AI Ascent 2026 to talk about how a four-year-old company built a frontier audio AI business with just over 400 people and over $400M in revenue. He explains why audio was overlooked in 2022 when the rest of AI was chasing text…
- 90Anthropic's Boris Cherny: Coding's Printing Press Moment5 May 2026 · 25 minLauren Reeder▶
About this episode
Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, joins Sequoia partner Lauren Reeder at AI Ascent 2026 to talk about where coding goes from here. He explains why he hasn't written a line of code in 2026, why he now ships dozens of PRs a day from his phone, and why he believes coding is effectively solved, at least…
- 89Waymo's Dmitri Dolgov: 20 Million Rides and the Road to Full Autonomy4 May 2026 · 27 minKonstantine Buhler▶
About this episode
Dmitri Dolgov, co-CEO of Waymo, joins Sequoia partner Konstantine Buhler at AI Ascent 2026 to talk about the 20-year arc from the DARPA Grand Challenge to fully autonomous service in eleven cities and counting. He explains how Waymo persisted through every AV hype cycle by treating safety as the non-negotiable…
- 88OpenAI's Greg Brockman: Why Human Attention Is the New Bottleneck1 May 2026 · 28 minGreg BrockmanAlfred Lin▶
About this episode
Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, joins Sequoia partner Alfred Lin at AI Ascent 2026 for a conversation that spans the full OpenAI stack. He explains why the company will never have enough compute, why he believes we're 80% of the way to AGI, and why the agentic coding tools that wrote 20% of your…
- 87Demis Hassabis on Building DeepMind, AlphaFold, and the Final Stretch to AGI30 Apr 2026 · 27 minDemis HassabisKonstantine Buhler▶
About this episode
Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and 2024 Nobel laureate in chemistry for AlphaFold, joins Sequoia partner Konstantine Buhler at AI Ascent 2026 for a wide-ranging conversation about the path to AGI and what comes after. He explains why he believes AGI is achievable by 2030, why drug discovery…
- 86Andrej Karpathy: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering30 Apr 2026 · 30 minAndrej KarpathyStephanie Zhan▶
About this episode
Andrej Karpathy (co-founder of OpenAI, former head of AI at Tesla, and now founder of Eureka Labs) talks with Sequoia partner Stephanie Zhan at AI Ascent 2026 about what's changed in the year since he coined "vibe coding." He explains why he's never felt more behind as a programmer, why agentic engineering is the more…
- 85From SEO to Agent-Led Growth: Profound’s James Cadwallader14 Apr 2026 · 31 min▶
About this episode
James Cadwallader, co-founder and CEO of Profound, makes the case that we are living through the biggest platform shift in marketing history. The front door of the internet hasn't changed, but the visitor walking through it has. Where consumers once clicked blue links, AI agents now crawl the web on their behalf,…
- 84How Autonomous Labs Will Transform Scientific Research: Ginkgo Bioworks’ Jason Kelly24 Mar 2026 · 58 min▶
About this episode
Jason Kelly founded Ginkgo Bioworks in 2008 with a simple but radical idea: DNA is code, and cells are programmable. Sixteen years later, AI is finally making that vision real in ways that could reshape science itself. Jason describes a landmark collaboration with OpenAI in which a reasoning model with access to a…
- 83Greetings, Earthlings: Philip Johnston of Starcloud on Data Centers in Space17 Mar 2026 · 44 minPhilip Johnston▶
About this episode
Philip Johnston, founder and CEO of Starcloud, explains why space will become the primary location for AI compute infrastructure within the next decade. After witnessing SpaceX's massive manufacturing scale at Starbase, Philip realized that declining launch costs would make space-based data centers cheaper than…
Who the show talks about
Firms named in its episodes, and people named in descriptions: talked about, rather than on the show.
