Trev🙃r

Creative people should be rich. past: founder @makebrud (acq: @dapperlabs) & @fwbtweets.

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

About 18 months ago I started making rave tunes after my therapist said it might help with the burnout I had from startup life (teklife cures tech life tbh).

I made a couple of tracks and had my roomate (now girlfriend) sing on them and it's been a crazy year of playing festivals and sleeping on airport floors.

Anyway our Boiler Room is out and it's a nice reminder that doing what you love is often a better idea than doing what you think people will love.

I wanted to make 160 bpm hard trance songy songs with verses and bridges and we wrote them in spanish thinking about 10 ppl would care but they've brought us all over the world to play music and that's all we could ever ask for really.

PLUR4EVER

Boiler room link in the reply to this post

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

@alexandr_wang can you turn on yolo mode in muse plz

asking me to approve every image upload is loco

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

@pitdesi You think California life is a joke Chat??

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

@bryce i keep joking but not really joking about raising my kids in utah

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

@macheezay Love to hear that

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

Can't explain to you what it meant to be a 19 year old black kid from the midwest who moved to the Bay for school.

Dominant american culture at the time was G-Unit and all of a sudden I'm walking into rooms full of black dudes on ecstasy making the best music ever, and you'd go from a sideshow to a @Dirtybird party. FORMATIVE.

[matdryhurst @matdryhurst]

@pixlpa haven't experienced anything comparable to weird Oakland in the 00's

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

@lily___digital 2 years incredibly broke and having a blast

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

@drydenwtbrown The Redbull fridge but it’s got a big neon ramp logo

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

Corghein

I need Corghein

[Jimmy Heaters @CathPoaster]

My experience partying all night at Berghain in Berlin made me think of how we're lacking this experience in the San Francisco tech scene. We can literally become the coolest, most tasteful social scene on Earth if we had our version of Berghain, but better. So let's build it. The best aspect of Berhain is how they select who gets in. The club has a vibe and atmosphere, and if you aren't wearing the right clothes or have the right demeanor, you don't get in. That's how you cultivate a tasteful crowd. We can improve on this by only letting in high agency, talented operators in the tech scene who can still pull off dope outfits, so no geeks. SF is in dire need of late night venues, and Berghain goes until 8am. That's a little too crazy for high net worth operators who are changing the world so we could do something like 2am. Berghain also is kinda dark and in a weird building so we'd put the club in a SoMa corporate office that we convert to speakeasy or barcade vibe. Maybe add a quiet area for people to bring their laptops and work? I honestly feel like we're improving on the Berghain form here, especially by swapping out the crowd of weird partiers in inappropriate clothes (or lack there of) with insanely cracked founders and engineers. I'm super stoked about this idea, SF tech could really run the dopest parties on the planet.

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

@charlicohen Hahaha

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

Iran stepping up to save us from Kimi 3.1 abliterated

[The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter]

BREAKING: Iran has drawn up detailed plans to attack the 7 major undersea Internet cables in the Gulf as soon as the US and Israel attack it again, per two senior Iranian officials to Reuters.

Iran says it would aim to prevent repairs after any attack to prolong the disruption to communications and internet connections.

"If Iran is attacked, there will be no more red lines, from undersea cables to military bases, including covert ones." The official warned US not to "play with fire," saying Iran has full access to the cables and could easily destroy them.

More than 99% of international data traffic travels through undersea cables. Iran warned this month that US-linked data centres and AI facilities across the Gulf will also be targeted.

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

We used a ton of AI for creating facial rigs, we did single input camera pose estimation and retargeting, deepfake style facial swaps, played with GANs (to little success) and a lot of conversational AI (how we got to know @ClementDelangue and @huggingface when they were chatbot tech!)

The vision was always the tech will accelerate lets meet it where we can to get the best narrative not force tech to a bad narrative

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

@Clara_Gold Looks sick congrats Clara!

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

@traylorjones @being_on_line Love

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

Who did this?? I want to shake your hand

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

@stephzhan Congrats! And take my money pleaaaase.

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

Huge.

I’ve said it countless times on here but Stephanie is such an incredible partner to founders and you’d be lucky to have her as a friend and partner on your journey.

Nobody cares as much about your startup as you do (except for Stephanie).

[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!

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

@poolnoodle93 havent used but just saw thsi https://t.co/IInP3v1m2k

[Triceradtops @fds]

Thank god for @1Password service accounts. Not a single variable in @Railway exposed, just pointers to 1p.

[frye @___frye]

it’s been an honor using the computer with you all

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

@PigsAndPlans @Santigold @kilokish https://t.co/nDnODF08TP

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

Blipster chiming in to remind you that hipster culture was actually pretty black!

[Trev🙃r @whatdotcd]

@being_on_line I’m so curious