Quotesby GlyphDavid Cahn quote, Dec 3, 2025
Partner, Sequoia Capital · Dec 3, 2025 11 months ago · Essay, AI in 2026: A Tale of Two AIs
In 2026, we’re going to see the emergence of a $0 to $1B club.
Words found on the source page on Nov 6, 2026.
Across Glyph
More from David Cahn
- Dwarkesh Patel’s recent podcast interviews with Richard Sutton, Andrej Karpathy, and Ilya Sutskever are a demarcating line; the new consensus is that the AGI window will be in the 2030s, at earliest.
- My prediction, especially coming off of the successful Gemini 3 launch and hype around TPUs, is that the TSMC constraint could become material in 2026.
- On the one hand, it will be a year of delays, first in data center buildouts, many of which will fall behind schedule, and second, in the AGI timeline. At the same time, AI adoption will continue its relentless rise.
- AI’s $200B question is now AI’s $600B question.
- But we need to make sure not to believe in the delusion that has now spread from Silicon Valley to the rest of the country, and indeed the world. That delusion says that we’re all going to get rich quick, because AGI is coming tomorrow, and we all need to stockpile the only valuable resource, which is GPUs.
- GPU computing is increasingly turning into a commodity, metered per hour. Unlike the CPU cloud, which became an oligopoly, new entrants building dedicated AI clouds continue to flood the market. Without a monopoly or oligopoly, high fixed cost + low marginal cost businesses almost always see prices competed down to marginal cost (e.g., airlines).
On the same topics
- The solo founder is part of a list of maybe new archetypes that I think we’ll soon see a lot more of - and I’ll make both the pro and con case for each here: Solo founders Why: Solo founders can do 100x with AI, so they can ship a v1 when previously they couldn’t have before Why not: Maybe a team of cofounders still makes more progress.Unverified
- These days at a16z I’m mostly working on Speedrun , where we write the first check into brand new startups (up to $1M), and a lot of what we focus on is founder backgrounds/profiles. What are the right ones? How will the profiles change as we enter the age of AI?Unverified
- That’s a fair question at the dawn of the AI age when an app might take about as much time to build as editing a Youtube video. So this means average product retention will collapse, and the days of seeing >20% D30 will feel like a dream.
- The future of marketing (and by extension, a large swath of product) is zero-sum and PvP - the abundance of apps/videos/pods/creators/experiences will mean we have infinity times more supply than demand.
- The obvious AI variant is to let your users opt in to training your model on their interactions with it. Many will resist that, but if some don't, the model they get to use will outperform the vanilla one used by the others.
- You own the customer relationship, and the model companies are in effect component suppliers. The question is how easy it would be for them to engulf you, or even your customers.
About this quote
- Said by
- David Cahn, Partner, Sequoia Capital
- Where
- AI in 2026: A Tale of Two AIs
- Topics
- Startups
- Company
Sequoia Capital
- Source
- sequoiacap.com/article/ai-in-2026-the-tale-of-two-ais
A quote is one moment, not the whole argument. Read it in context at the source.