Sequoia Capital, Decoded:
A Reading List for Founders
Ten articles on how Sequoia thinks, what it funds and where it sees AI going. Each one summarized, with its key points and a link to the free Sequoia source behind it.
Updated: October 26, 2026 · Articles: 10 · Original sources: 7
At a glance
- Three threads: how Sequoia's leaders think, how to raise from the firm, and how Sequoia sees the AI market.
- The articles are by Guillermo Flor, from his newsletters Product Market Fit and theaiopportunities.com. Most are partly or fully paywalled, so each summary covers what the article sets out to do and what is freely readable.
- The sources are free. Behind nearly every article is something Sequoia published itself: a talk, a template or an essay. Those are linked on every card and collected at the end.
How Sequoia thinks
1. Don Valentine's Sequoia Capital Playbook
An introduction to the thinking of Sequoia's founder, framed for founders and growth teams. It sets out five things Sequoia looks for when it evaluates a startup and follows one Sequoia-backed company from inception to a $25 billion valuation. Most of the piece sits behind the paywall.
- Five evaluation criteria Sequoia applies to startups.
- A case study of a company growing from founding to a $25 billion valuation.
Go to the source:
Don Valentine, "Target Big Markets" (Stanford talk, video)
Valentine's own Stanford talk is free and is the best place to hear the philosophy first-hand.
2. The Doug Leone Playbook
Heuristics drawn from David Senra's long conversation with Doug Leone, who led Sequoia for decades. Organized in ten sections, it covers how fear drives good decisions, the founder profile Leone looks for, a rule of holding great companies for the long run, and how boards should be built. It opens with Leone at 69, back at work and giving himself nine months to prove he is still useful.
- Fear as a working tool, not something to hide.
- A specific founder spec, and a hold-forever rule for the best companies.
- Board composition as a lever on outcomes.
Go to the source:
"How to Dominate for Decades | Doug Leone, Sequoia Capital" (video)
The full conversation is free on YouTube.
3. How to Succeed as a Sequoia Investor
Lessons on venture investing drawn from a conversation between Sequoia partners Pat Grady and Alfred Lin and Jack Altman, on his podcast Uncapped. Useful for seeing how Sequoia partners describe their own craft. The body is behind the paywall.
The source is Jack Altman's podcast Uncapped, in an episode with Pat Grady and Alfred Lin.
Raising from Sequoia
4. How to Get Your Startup Invested by Sequoia Capital
A practical primer on what Sequoia funds. It traces the firm from its 1972 founding by Don Valentine through early bets such as Apple, Google, WhatsApp, Airbnb and Zoom, explains that Sequoia invests from seed to late stage across software, AI, healthcare and fintech, and shows the founder profile it backs: deep, first-hand expertise in the problem. The section on how to contact Sequoia is paywalled.
- Sequoia prefers large markets that already exist. In Valentine's words: "We're never interested in creating markets, it's too expensive. We're interested in exploiting markets early."
- Founders with deep domain expertise get the closest look.
- Sequoia backs companies at every stage, from seed to late stage.
Go to the source:
Don Valentine, "Target Big Markets" (Stanford talk, video)
The original post listed this article twice, as "The Sequoia Capital Pitch Deck" and "How to get your startup invested". Both links lead here.
5. The Sequoia Fundraising Pack
A bundle of fundraising material for paid subscribers: Sequoia's pitch deck template, a presentation Sequoia uses to teach its own founders how to present, notes on how Don Valentine wanted to be pitched, and well-known decks from Airbnb, DoorDash, Dropbox and Reddit.
- Sequoia's official 10-section pitch format.
- How to present to investors, from Sequoia's own founder training.
- Real decks from companies that raised from top firms.
Go to the source:
Sequoia, "Writing a Business Plan" (the 10-section template)
The template at the heart of the pack is free on Sequoia's site. Its ten sections: company purpose, problem, solution, why now, market potential, competition, business model, team, financials and vision.
Sequoia on AI
6. Sequoia AI Ascent: AI Might Be the Biggest Opportunity in Humanity's History
A free write-up of Sequoia's AI Ascent 2025 event. It argues the AI opportunity is larger than the move to the cloud because AI goes after software and services budgets at the same time, that most value will sit in the application layer, and that the next phase is an agent economy of agents that cooperate and transact.
- When cloud began, software was a $400 billion market and 200 million people were online. Today 5.6 billion are.
- "95% of building a company in AI is just building a company. The other 5% is the AI."
- A founder checklist: real revenue versus "vibe revenue", gross margins as token costs fall, and which business metric your data flywheel improves.
- Open problems for agents: memory, communication protocols, and security and trust.
Go to the source:
Sequoia, "AI Ascent 2025" (talks and videos)
One caution: the article's FAQ misnames the speakers. The AI Ascent 2025 talks were given by Sequoia partners Pat Grady, Sonya Huang and Konstantine Buhler.
7. The Sequoia Agent Economy Playbook
Forty-two insights for AI founders distilled from AI Ascent, in two parts: where the AI opportunity sits, and the shift from chatbots to agents. The first ten are free.
- "The value is in the application layer, not the models."
- "Foundation models are moving up the stack. Compete by going narrow and deep, not wide."
- "The best products start customer-back, not model-forward."
- "Your moat is your workflow. Own the end-to-end journey."
Go to the source:
Sequoia, "AI Ascent 2025" (talks and videos)
8. The Sequoia AI Ascent Deck
A walkthrough of a 20-slide Sequoia AI Ascent deck on the agent economy, where value will accrue, and how founders should build. The slides themselves are behind the paywall.
- AI framed as the next platform shift after the internet, apps and mobile.
- A "white space" map of the categories AI may rewrite.
- "AI's $200B question": whether AI revenue can catch up with infrastructure spend.
- A path from copilots to agents, then to planning and reasoning, then to reliability.
Go to the source:
David Cahn, "AI's $600B Question"
The "$200B question" is David Cahn's Sequoia essay, since updated as "AI's $600B Question" and free on Sequoia's site.
9. What Sequoia Told Its LPs About AI
A slide-by-slide read of an AI briefing Pat Grady recorded for Sequoia's limited partners: why Sequoia says AGI has arrived, what the labs believe, how they compete for every token, and the gap between what models can do and what companies actually use them for.
- The "diffusion gap" between model capability and real adoption is where startups make their money.
- Four places Sequoia wants startups to build.
- The good, the bad and the ugly of AI on Main Street.
Go to the source:
Pat Grady and Sonya Huang, "2026: This is AGI"
For Sequoia's public version of the AGI argument, read Grady and Huang: "Long-horizon agents are functionally AGI, and 2026 will be their year."
10. The Next $1T Company Won't Sell Software. It Will Sell the Work.
A breakdown of Sequoia partner Julien Bek's thesis that the biggest AI companies of this cycle will look less like SaaS and more like services firms rebuilt from scratch. Selling the tool means competing with a better model every few months; selling the finished work means every model improvement makes you better. The case studies of founders already doing it are paywalled.
- "The next $1T company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm."
- "For every dollar spent on software, six are spent on services."
- "A copilot sells the tool. An autopilot sells the work."
- Target the labor budget: not software for accountants, but the company that closes the books.
Go to the source:
Julien Bek, "Services: The New Software"
The quotes above are from Bek's original essay, which is free on Sequoia's site.
Go to the source: what we would add
The best companion to this list is Sequoia in its own words. All seven of these are free.
| Source | Why read it |
|---|---|
| Sequoia, "Writing a Business Plan" (the 10-section template) | The pitch structure Sequoia asks for, in ten sections. |
| Don Valentine, "Target Big Markets" (Stanford talk, video) | The founder of Sequoia on markets, founders and timing. |
| "How to Dominate for Decades | Doug Leone, Sequoia Capital" (video) | Doug Leone on fear, founders and building for decades. |
| Sequoia, "AI Ascent 2025" (talks and videos) | Sequoia's annual AI event, with talks from partners and AI founders. |
| Pat Grady and Sonya Huang, "2026: This is AGI" | Why Sequoia calls long-horizon agents functionally AGI. |
| David Cahn, "AI's $600B Question" | The gap between AI infrastructure spend and AI revenue. |
| Julien Bek, "Services: The New Software" | Why the next $1T company sells the work, not the tool. |
Summaries reflect the freely readable part of each article as of October 26, 2026; paywalled sections are described from the article's own outline and are not reproduced. Quotes attributed to Sequoia partners are checked against Sequoia's original pages where they are linked. Spot something out of date, or know a piece that belongs here? Tell us.