The AI founders Playbook

A Founder’s Guide to Building AI Startups: Lessons from Sequoia Capital, OpenAI, Nvidia, LangChain, and Ramp

Hey everybody welcome to Product Market Fit 🔥

I just spent the weekend deep in the weeds of what might be the most important AI strategy briefing of the year — Sequoia’s AI Ascent.

Based on the insights of the founders of OpenAI, Nvidia, Langchain, Anthropic and Ramp, if I were starting an AI company today, these are the 42 insights I’d keep taped to my wall 👇

SEQUOIA — THE HIGH-LEVEL STRATEGY

1. This is the biggest opportunity since the internet. Bigger than cloud. Faster than mobile.

2. AI isn’t one market — it’s eating all markets. Software, services, labor, infrastructure.

3. The value is in the application layer, not the models. Tools people actually use will win.

4. Foundation models are moving up the stack. Compete by going narrow and deep, not wide.

5. The best products start customer-back, not model-forward. Solve one job completely.

6. This is the Agent Era. AI will shift from chatbots to swarms of agents executing work.

7. Speed is everything. There’s a vacuum in every vertical. Whoever ships first, wins.

8. Distribution is built-in now. You’re launching into a 5.6B-person internet. If it works, it explodes.

9. The model doesn’t matter unless the product is great. Startups win on UX, not architecture.

10. Your moat is your workflow. Own the end-to-end journey. Don’t build tools, build outcomes.

HOW TO BUILD AN AI COMPANY (SEQUOIA’S PLAYBOOK)