HeyJaredDavid Cahn's Substack
Writing about AI, tech, and startups. Partner at Sequoia. Author of AI's $600B Question.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
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- Sep 1, 2026
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- Jul 6, 2026
Latest issues
Investing in Form Energy: America’s Battery Champion for the AI Grid (opens the original)
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There are certain companies you can’t stop thinking about.During my garden leave before joining Sequoia, I kept thinking about Form Energy. During my family vacations, I’d tell my siblings about Form Energy. For me, it was always one of these companies that represented what venture capital was all about: a phenomenal team of entrepreneurs pursuing a world-changing idea that, if successful, could scale into a category-defining company.Thanks for reading Dav
They Built the Team. They Raised the Money. Now What? (opens the original)
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Every era of startups brings with it new canonical challenges.The 2010s was a period dominated by Enterprise software, and the main challenge was finding a big enough market and broad enough surface area to build a large company that could get public. By far, most companies with PMF never made it that far.Today, we are in an amorphous period, which I wrote about in “After Certainty.” The market’s response to this has been to invest in teams, rather than ideas. This was a rational
New Podcast: How The AI Bet Pays Off + AI Lab Strategy Game (opens the original)
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Last Monday, I joined Alex Kantrowitz on the Big Technology Podcast to discuss the latest on AI ROI debate, as well as deep dives into each of the major tech companies’ strategies. We fleshed out some of the parallels from The Greatest Strategy Game in the History of the World in terms of StarCraft and Azad. We also discussed some of my writings on Deus Ex Machina and how AI relates to the transcendence quest.<
Why College Degrees Don’t Matter Anymore (opens the original)
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There has always been the meme of college dropouts running Silicon Valley companies. But for every Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley is filled with dozens of founders like Jeff Bezos or Larry Page or Sergey Brin — highly educated founders with a bachelor’s degree or more.This is changing. College dropouts are all the rage, as they are running some of the most successful AI companies of this moment: Companies like Mercor, Etched, Scale (now MSL), and more. It’s not just that these companies are run
AI’s $1.5T Question (opens the original)
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This is a repetitive blog post and so I will keep it brief. A lot of people have reached out to me for the updated math behind AI’s $600B question. It is now AI’s $1.5T question.I have been tracking AI data center spending as compared with total ecosystem revenue for almost 3 years now. The rough trajectory has been as follows:September 2023: AI’s $200B questionJune 2024: AI̵
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