Sequoia Capital

The first interview at Notion no longer involves a resume. The CEO of Notion, Ivan Zhao, wants to see something you've actually built. That’s not a quirky startup thing anymore, it’s the new normal. In the AI era, companies want to see what you can do with the AI tools. The candidates who stand out aren’t just AI curious. They’re "fluent". They’ve built Skills, they've shipped projects, automated workflows, prototyped ideas, and moved faster because they treat these tools like a superpower. The resume is becoming table stakes. Your portfolio, especially the one you’ve built with AI, is what gets you in the room. And yes, compensation is shifting too. Companies are starting to reward people who actually leverage these tools to deliver significantly more value. If you’re early in your career or reinventing yourself right now, here’s my direct advice: Stop consuming, start building. Get creative. Ship something this month. Document your process. Share what you learn. The future belongs to the makers, and it’s arriving faster than most people realize. Links below for the full episode 👇

🚨 NEW Long Strange Trip episode just dropped: Ivan Zhao, CEO of Notion Ivan is the definition of a Refounder, and has rebuilt his company nearly three times. Anyone who is looking to move into this new era, the “jazz era” should listen to this one Notes from our chat: 1. The Next Evolution to companies is structured freedom You need operators who can improvise and contribute creatively without waiting for orders. Think jazz band over marching band. Leaders must build teams that riff off each other dynamically rather than blindly following a rigid sheet of music. 2. Build a barbell engineering team Pair hyper senior architectural minds with junior talent. Senior leaders provide the taste and direction that language models lack, while junior engineers manage fleets of coding agents to execute the vision. 3. The best companies reinvent themselves When a startup stalls, incremental pivots rarely save it. Sometimes you must cleanly sever the past and start fresh. True technological shifts shouldn't feel like feature updates; they should feel existential. Interacting with frontier models should command a complete re-evaluation of your company's purpose. If a founder hasn't built with AI to feel this paradigm shift firsthand, they cannot find a new path forward. 4. Hire people who can blur traditional roles The best Notion hires have always blurred lines: designers who code, PMs who ship, engineers with taste. Baseline capability is no longer the bottleneck. The premium is now on a candidate's energy, optimism, and fundamental taste across multiple areas. 5. Acqui-hire founders aggressively As companies scale, they naturally calcify and slow down. The antidote is systematically acquiring early-stage startups just for the founders. Ex-founders act as aggressive machinery, breaking old patterns and forcing the organization to regenerate. 6. Financials March, Product Strategy Jazzes You cannot build a rigid product roadmap anymore because the underlying technology shifts too rapidly. Financial planning is the only system that still requires predictability; product strategy must be entirely fluid and improvisational. 7. Make compensation radically more meritocratic The SaaS era of "peanut buttering" compensation across the entire team is over. Companies must transition to extreme meritocracies to reward top performers. 8. Don’t reinvent the wheel unless you must Notion tried to first principle their way into sales. Eventually, they realized that was just plain wrong. Founders waste years trying to creatively invent a new sales system when the classic playbook works best. 9. Decentralizing the CMO Traditional marketing departments move too slowly to keep up with modern shipping cadences. The solution for Notion was to rip the CMO org apart and embed storytelling directly next to the product team. Demand generation now strictly serves the sales function. (links below)

We're only year 3 of a decade (if not multi-decades) long transformation of work. 3 years ago we bet on building an horizontal platform for work with agents, a chance to invent a new operating system for companies, from scratch, with AI as a fundamental premise. Many people considered us crazy for going after that, praising verticalized AI products as the winning strategy. But here's the thing: the time horizon of tasks successfully handled by agents has been predictively increasing form minutes to hours and will in all likelihood reach the equivalent of days and weeks of human work equivalent in the coming quarters. This is were verticalized and/or single-player AI falls short. Single-player tools, one person, one agent, confined to your machine is the wrong architecture for what's coming. We're shifting from using AI to produce things, to managing fleets of agents that do the producing. 3 years ago I wrote[1]: "ChatGPT is the Pong of LLMs. [...] Imagine, one day we'll get the DOOM, Civ, Red Alert, and Counter Strike of LLMs. Let alone multiplayer modes." Weeks long tasks in companies are inherently collaborative and mechanically spanning multiple teams. The new bottleneck in harnessing agents within organizations is coordination: multiple humans and multiple agents need to work together, with shared context, shared tools, shared goals. Agents that can hand work off to other agents or surface decisions to the right person at the right time. Humans who can review, steer, and step in without losing the thread. Teams that can run parallel workstreams and actually stay aligned. This is Multiplayer AI, and that's what we've been building at Dust. Across Datadog, Clay, Persona, 1Password, Doctolib and 3,000+ organizations globally, we've watched teams figure out what this looks like in practice. 300,000+ agents deployed. 70% weekly active. 240%+ NRR. Today we're announcing a $40M Series B with Abstract, Sequoia Capital, Snowflake and Datadog to accelerate our vision. Designing the right interfaces for multiplayer AI is the next frontier.  Join us to redefine work by defining multiplayer AI.  Blog in the comments.

Software is mostly just workflows on top of a database. This hasn't changed. What's changed is how those workflows are built. Jake Stauch and Serval saw the world changing and nailed it.

The offensive advantage now belongs to teams that can operationalize AI fastest. At Sequoia Capital AI Ascent 2026, XBOW founder and CEO Oege de Moor describes the shift from AI-assisted hacking to fully autonomous hacking. He compares the moment to the Battle of Nagashino in 1575: one side adapted quickly to new technology, while the other relied on established tactics and past success. Cybersecurity is entering a similar transition. Teams that can operationalize AI offense effectively will have a significant advantage. Watch the full video: https://bit.ly/4evIYqx