Training Data

Michael Kagan is the Chief Technology Officer at Nvidia and co-founder of Mellanox. Recorded live at Sequoia’s Europe100 event, Kagan explains how Nvidia’s $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox transformed the company from a chipmaker into the architect of AI infrastructure. He breaks down the technical challenges of scaling from single GPUs to 100K—and eventually million-GPU—data centers, revealing why network performance, not just compute power, determines AI system efficiency. Kagan also discusses Nvidia’s partnership with Intel, the evolution from training to inference workloads, and why he believes AI will help humanity uncover new laws of physics yet to be imagined.

Irregular co-founder Dan Lahav is redefining what cybersecurity means in the age of autonomous AI. Working closely with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, Dan, co-founder Omer Nevo and team are pioneering “frontier AI security”—a proactive approach to safeguarding systems where AI models act as independent agents. Dan shares how emergent behaviors, from models socially engineering each other to outmaneuvering real-world defenses like Windows Defender, signal a coming paradigm shift. Dan explains why tomorrow’s threats will come from AI-on-AI interactions, why anomaly detection will soon break down, and how governments and enterprises alike must rethink defenses from first principles as AI becomes a national security layer. Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Dean Meyer, Sequoia Capital

Ping Wu built Google's contact center business before becoming CEO of Cresta, where he's pioneering a unique approach to contact center transformation. Rather than full automation Ping advocates a dual approach, automating what's ready while using AI to assist humans with the rest. He makes the case for an abundance mindset—imagining new customer experiences like talking to airline apps or turning synchronous interactions asynchronous. Ping breaks down the technical challenges of deploying Contact Center AI at scale, from solving latency to orchestrating 20+ models in real-time. Sequoia’s Doug Leone shares his framework for building AI companies at speed and why he believes we're at the front end of an Industrial Revolution 2.0. Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Doug Leone, Sequoia Capital

As CTO of Block, Dhanji Prasanna has overseen a dramatic enterprise AI transformation, with engineers saving 8-10 hours a week through AI automation. Block’s open-source agent goose connects to existing enterprise tools through MCP, enabling everyone from engineers to sales teams to build custom applications without coding. Dhanji shares how Block reorganized from business unit silos to functional teams to accelerate AI adoption, why they chose to open-source their most valuable AI tool and why he believes swarms of smaller AI models will outperform monolithic LLMs. Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

Elias Torres has been building AI systems since 1999, from chatbots at IBM to co-founding Drift and now Agency. He believes businesses are caught in an expectation mismatch—demanding AI while rejecting it due to imperfection anxiety. Drawing from his experience scaling HubSpot, Elias explains why human-led customer experience doesn’t scale and how Agency is building AI-first solutions that work autonomously. His contrarian approach focuses on the back-end customer experience rather than front-end AI SDRs, aiming to “deprogram the entire business world” from inefficient human-dependent processes. Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

Thomas Wolf, co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, explains how his company is applying the same community-driven approach that made transformers accessible to everyone to the emerging field of robotics. Thomas discusses LeRobot, Hugging Face's ambitious project to democratize robotics through open-source tools, datasets, and affordable hardware. He shares his vision for turning millions of software developers into roboticists, the challenges of data scarcity in robotics versus language models, and why he believes we're at the same inflection point for physical AI that we were for LLMs just a few years ago. Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

Ryan Daniels and John Sarihan are reimagining legal services by building Crosby, an AI-powered law firm that focuses on contract negotiations to start. Rather than building legal software, they've structured their company as an actual law firm with lawyers and AI engineers working side-by-side to automate human negotiations. They've eliminated billable hours in favor of per-document pricing, achieving contract turnaround times under an hour. Ryan and John explain why the law firm structure enables faster innovation cycles, how they're using AI to predict negotiation outcomes, and their vision for agents that can simulate entire contract negotiations between parties. Hosted by Josephine Chen, Sequoia Capital

When the AI wave hit, n8n founder Jan Oberhauser faced a critical choice: become irrelevant or become indispensable. He chose the latter, transforming n8n from a simple workflow tool into a comprehensive AI automation platform that lets users connect any LLM to any application. The result? Four times the revenue growth in eight months compared to the previous six years. Jan explains how n8n's “connect everything to anything” philosophy, combined with a thriving open source community, positioned the company to ride the AI automation wave while avoiding vendor lock-in that plagues enterprise software. Hosted by George Robson and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital