They Built the Team. They Raised the Money. Now What?
Investing in teams rather than ideas has produced a generation of well-funded startups still searching for the path from vision to product-market fit.
David Cahn's Substack
Writing about AI, tech, and startups. Partner at Sequoia. Author of AI's $600B Question.
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Latest posts
New Podcast: How The AI Bet Pays Off + AI Lab Strategy Game
Interview with Alex Kantrowitz on Big Technology Podcast
Why College Degrees Don’t Matter Anymore
Colleges cannot adapt fast enough to the AI age, and smart young people know it already
AI’s $1.5T Question
Updated math for H2 2026, reflecting H1 CapEx re-acceleration and $3T cumulative revenue requirement since ChatGPT launch
The Great AI Irony
CapEx bottleneck companies are capturing stock appreciation, but in the long-run, the app layer will capture the most value
What are you serving?
The Hidden Motivations of Great Founders
Investing in Astrocade
How two brothers spent four years building an AI gaming platform that has now ramped from zero to 140M game plays / month and 5M monthly active users
After Certainty
AI investing is a high dimensional system with many degrees of freedom — the old heuristics don’t work anymore
A Simple Edge: Help People Early
It takes years to build your own career and five minutes to change someone else’s.
How Inconceivable Startups Happen
Why the best startups seem impossible at first, and how founders learn to see what others can’t.
Power & Transcendence in the Intelligence Age
Will today’s technocapitalism eventually give way to a new economic and religious order?