Oliver Cho

@sequoia @princeton with djing on the side

[Oliver Cho @ochonaut]

There's so much signal scattered across the internet. Hype is just the tip of the iceberg. Excited to dig in more with @Konstantine!

[Konstantine Buhler @Konstantine]

Should you chase hype or ignore it? The tech industry has been debating this for decades. So at @Sequoia, we dug into 20 years of hype data.

This summer, I worked with Sequoia intern @ochonaut to measure hype over the past 2 decades. The chart below ranks the most hyped topics on Hacker News for every year since 2007. Under each year sits the most valuable company founded that year.

Here are a few observations:
1/ The top company founded in a given year is rarely related to the hype of that period. Airbnb was founded in 2008, when the top topic was Google. Uber arrived in 2009, while the conversation revolved around low-level programming. Anthropic came in 2021, while the internet was consumed by crypto. Chasing hype rarely leads to enduring outcomes. The top companies of recent years have yet to be decided.

2/ New trends announce themselves five to six years early. LLMs first cracked the top 15 in 2016 and took until 2022 to hit #1. AI coding entered at #12 in 2021 and tops the list in 2026. Crypto entered in 2011 before 2017 and 2021 peaks. “New” trends don’t appear out of nowhere, and internet subcommunities are often the first to know where the puck is headed.

3/ Long-term “hype” is a durable signal. The “Musk-Verse” has been a top 15 topic for every one of the past 14 years. Sustained attention on the internet is rare and tends to mark something real.

Next up, we want to run the same analysis with sources like X and LinkedIn. If that's of interest, give us some encouragement and we'll share the results.

[Oliver Cho @ochonaut]

@MaxBessler @Konstantine @sequoia Exciting!

[Oliver Cho @ochonaut]

@MaxBessler @Konstantine @sequoia We used most recent valuation as of August 2026 and a weighted tf-idf for hype

[Oliver Cho @ochonaut]

@kevskgs 🫡 thank you for your work sir

[Oliver Cho @ochonaut]

@rushilkukreja well said

[Oliver Cho @ochonaut]

@kevskgs such amazing body control

[Abhishek Malani @abhishekm1636]

Last night we welcomed some of the brightest young people in SF to the @sequoia office!

We ran a challenge: write down a whole number from 0 to 100. Closest to two-thirds of the average wins.

Guess what number won.

[Oliver Cho @ochonaut]

@kevskgs @palashaw_ good cook kevin. well done

[Oliver Cho @ochonaut]

@kevskgs @UseCorgi Sana’s Cafe 🍵

[Oliver Cho @ochonaut]

@aidangch @cadenbuild @attentioninc lfgggg congrats aidan

[Kimberly Tan @kimberlywtan]

It was great hosting a fireside chat with @AshwinSreenivas and @chenxcynthia on lessons learned scaling @DecagonAI — what they got right, wrong, and what they’re still figuring out. It’s been almost exactly 3 years since we partnered at the seed, and it was great to hear Ashwin and Cynthia reflect on learnings from the last few years + what’s to come

[Oliver Cho @ochonaut]

the views were absolutely stunning

i love LA and Amca

[Oliver Cho @ochonaut]

which is a bigger deal opus 5 or lebron

[Oliver Cho @ochonaut]

@aidangch @marvinvonhagen @0xrwu @interaction @function aura

[Oliver Cho @ochonaut]

@YangFanYun this is really cool work. the price-to-performance disparities were fascinating

[Oliver Cho @ochonaut]

4 miles in LA is a 30 minute drive 😭

and I thought SF was tough

[Abhishek Malani @abhishekm1636]

@Etched is building the machine that builds the machine.

Walk into their office and you can feel it: a team that knows exactly what they’re building toward, and that they’re going to serve the world’s inference.

Have known @UbertiGavin, @robertwachen, and the rest of the Etched team for years. Getting to finally work together, and proud that @sequoia is leading the Series C.

[Oliver Cho @ochonaut]

subway surfers and poker… bullish!!

[Oliver Cho @ochonaut]

@sonyatweetybird @sequoia @Etched Woooo! Congrats 🎊