Pocket Jacks Capital

rick rubin of in the flow members of technical staff

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

@lessin Or when funds rent out movie theaters

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

Kalshi should be illegal

[Jeff Feiwell @jfeiwell]

Sports gambling should be illegal

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

Breakfast by Salt’s Cure

[Jack Raines @Jack_Raines]

Saw a 30% tip option for breakfast spot where you stand in line to order today.

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

There is no loyalty in San Francisco anymore

[Katie Mishra @katieruthmishra]

noticing an inflection in optionalitymaxxing

- founders seeding side incubators to taste investing
- founding engineers whispering to competitors for a higher-equity role
- “mentors” advising fledgling startups only to carry their secrets to older, more credible entrepreneurs

where went the autistic singlemindedness i grew up around and was inspired by? where went those who burn it all to the ground, put their back against a wall, and walk along one vector, through fire and through delusion, to their goals? i fear every live player must lash a commitment anchor around their neck, or all the ai winners will grow up godless and figless

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

my bicoastal nontechnical friends are the happiest

[Emma @emmamariecryer]

ppl who have lived in both nyc and sf long term - which do you prefer and why?

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

The VC job is so easy that we have normalized moonlighting

[Stephanie Zhan @stephzhan]

I’m starting a new early-stage AI fund, doing what I love: partnering with founders from company formation on bold bets, long before consensus.

The fund’s LPs will include Sequoia, Jeff Dean, Sachin Katti, Philip Wong (my Stanford professor and Chief Scientist adviser to TSMC), and others whose work has shaped our industry and how I think about AI’s future.

I’ll remain a partner at Sequoia and keep serving on my boards on Sequoia’s behalf.

Sequoia has been my home for the past 11 years. I joined as the youngest investor the firm had ever hired. I grew up here. Through years of intense debate and shared work, I found lifelong mentors and friends who took me under their wing and taught me this craft. They taught me to aim high and take big swings. I’ll carry that into what I build: outsized ambition, relentless truth-seeking and curiosity, and a refusal to become complacent.

Working alongside founders has made me want to build something of my own: a firm shaped from day one around the convictions I’ve developed over the past decade.

Life has taught me not to take time for granted. This is how I want to spend mine.

Why now

We’re seeing a new way of building companies in today’s AI era. Research and products often advance together. A breakthrough can open a market or accelerate a business far faster than expected. Some companies require extraordinary capital and compute early on. Others reach meaningful scale with remarkably small teams. The rules for how big these businesses can get, and how fast, are being rewritten.

But early on, the technology is unproven, the resources required enormous, and the vision seemingly implausible.

This is what I love most: seeing the potential right from the beginning, and helping founders realize their full scale of ambition.

More than ever, it starts with an extreme willingness to believe early, with bold, independent conviction in a founder’s technical insight before any product or market validation. Then, it means helping founders take the biggest swings, giving the rare, long-term patience to see those bets through uncertainty, ambiguity, and turbulence, and serving as a level head when the stakes are highest.

I learned this kind of partnership at Sequoia. It’s the foundation of the firm I’m building.

Believing before consensus

My fascination with AI’s potential took root at Stanford in the early-to-mid 2010s, studying computer science and working in Andrew Ng’s lab. The friendships I formed connected me to a community whose people and ideas would help shape modern AI and build some of our generation’s defining companies. What stayed with me was the gap between what those people saw was possible and what the wider world could imagine.

I’m drawn to founders pursuing ambitions that sound impossible today.

I start with a simple question: “What if everything goes right?”

Then we work backward together to make it happen.

In 2023, Deepak and Abhinav set out to build a general-purpose robot brain at @SkildAI, before physical AI was a consensus bet. Their sim-to-real breakthroughs gave me conviction where earlier robotics approaches had fallen short. But the data flywheel required deployment at scale. We made commercialization as urgent as research and brought in strategic partners like NVIDIA and SoftBank to support the ambition. Three years in, Skild is advancing the frontier of physical AI with nine figures in annualized revenue.

In 2024, Ioannis and Misha founded @reflection_ai with an insight into scaling reinforcement learning. As that grew into the ambition to build a Western frontier lab for open models, the hard question was how a startup competes with labs spending tens of billions. An introduction to NVIDIA and many compute calls and recruiting events later, the team has built Beam, now one of the leading US open models.

In 2025, Anna and Azalia, the co-creators of AlphaChip, founded @RicursiveAI to design models and hardware together. From day one, we made early customers and ecosystem partners a priority. Today, they are showing order-of-magnitude improvements on real workloads, working with some of the industry’s most consequential players, and reaching a defining inflection point.

The ambition keeps growing as these companies scale.

@linear has always had a kind of magic to it. Now it’s the system a new generation of AI companies builds on, for teams and agents alike.

@tavus saw early that we’d one day talk to AI the way we talk to each other. Today, it’s building the human computing interface for a world of AI colleagues.

@Mach_Industries began as hydrogen experiments in an MIT dorm room. It has since become one of the most exciting next-generation defense companies.

Making the ambition possible

Being a first believer is only the beginning. Compute falls through. A deep-pocketed incumbent makes your mission its top priority. A breakthrough changes the opportunity and the capital required overnight.

These are stomach-churning moments, and early belief carries a responsibility to help make the bet work.

This is the partnership I love: turning the full ambition into concrete steps. Raising capital, securing compute and strategic partners, recruiting exceptional people, and winning the first customers together. Thinking several moves ahead while solving what’s in front of us. And as breakthroughs open new possibilities, helping founders dream even bigger.

Thank you

To the founders I’ve worked with: thank you for trusting me and Sequoia to be your first partner and first believer. It’s been the joy of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to keep building together.

Thank you to Alfred and Pat for your leadership of Sequoia and your support of my next chapter. To Roelof, for bringing me into Sequoia and believing in me from the beginning. Alfred and Roelof, you have been mentors in investing and in life. So much of what I know, and the investor I’ve become, comes from your guidance and generosity over the years. To Bill, for the close partnership and wealth of knowledge, always wrapped in humility. To Shaun, for showing me how to think deeply and imaginatively. To Michael Moritz, for inspiring 22-year-old me to dream big. To Doug, for teaching me to keep things simple. To Bogie and Jess, for bringing joy to the everyday and perspective on what matters. And to all my Sequoia teammates, for the friendship, camaraderie, and lessons I’ll carry with me.

To my family, especially my husband and my brother, who have each started companies of their own: thank you for giving me the courage to take this leap.

Let’s get to work!

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

@sur4js 🤔

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

Don't tell Sarah Guo

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

@andrew__reed Is Sequoia an investor in ramp

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

This is the reason why OpenAI won’t win the personal agents war

Muse at least realizes that normies want one agent

[Tibo @thsottiaux]

My work dot "Burger" coordinated with my personal dot "Dorito" over email at my personal dots request to get documents, which then coordinated with with my CPA in order to file some tax stuff. Took 20 minutes. We're still so early.

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

The Bitter Lesson comes for us all
RIP Traversal and Resolve

[Cognition @cognition]

Introducing Devin Oncall: Devin automatically investigates alerts and bugs, helping your team diagnose and resolve production incidents.

Devin Oncall already handles thousands of alerts every day for some of the world’s largest companies. Let it become your SRE today.

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

Factory guys could do the funniest thing ever

[Vinod Khosla @vkhosla]

I'm hiring my next Chief of Staff. You won’t know every field I work in. What matters is how quickly you learn, the questions you ask, and whether you can think from first principles. You’ll help evaluate opportunities and work with founders building consequential companies. Technical background preferred. Three-year commitment. Menlo Park, in person. Apply: https://t.co/CnljKR3lHr

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

cathedrals everywhere

[varepsilon @var_epsilon]

now this is what I’m fucking talking about

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

Fuck Sequoia

[Brendan (can/do) @BrendanFoody]

In the summer of 2023, my friend @benspector, who co-founded Anysphere (aka Cursor), reached out to one top venture funds in Silicon Valley, suggesting we meet.

They turned down the intro, saying it wasn’t a category they were interested in.

Ben insisted that he thought our team was special and that they had to meet us, but the partner still wouldn’t even take a meeting.

I drove over to their office on Sandhill Road and left a note at the front desk saying: “I think you couldn’t be more wrong. This is the largest opportunity of the 21st century.”

They ignored my note, and I never heard back.

My cofounders were still enrolled and left torn as to whether they should drop out with no funding.

We ended up taking the leap of faith and building the fastest-growing company in history.

It was a valuable lesson in persistence and why not to listen to investors.

The best startups are deeply contrarian.

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

@thogge Hope she sees this bro

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

Don't tell Sarah Guo

[David Kwon @dkwon98]

With neoclouds rerating down, the revenue multiples for some of these inference businesses seem really silly

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

Just put the interchange in the bag guys

[JC Bahr-de Stefano @jbahrdestefano]

Dramatic week for biz banking 🤣

@tryramp takes a shot at @mercury for paying 0% on checking

@mercury fires back at @tryramp for paying <1% cashback

@airwallex enters the chat + calls out @tryramp’s advertised yield as misleading

@slashapp fires one off at @rhobusiness

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

@darian314 Short it king

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

I never want stripe to go public because this is the first thing an activist investor would cut

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

I’m very biased, but the new @WorksInProgMag is IMO a masterpiece in both design and content.

https://t.co/0oNl1XSoOE

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

How much revenue do these guys have?

[Natural @naturalpay]

A look inside the Natural Reset Lounge, our oasis to recharge and connect in the middle of SF Tech Week

[Pocket Jacks Capital @rl_env]

To translate pc intellectual speak into something more normal:

Companies often profit because we don’t have time to compare every option, read the fine print, or cancel unused subscriptions. Personal AI agents could do that work for us, making better products more likely to win: provided the agents work for us, not whoever pays to influence their recommendations.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy:

• Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies.

• How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be.

• In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good!

• It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.)

• A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to).

• Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big.

• Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions.

Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.