Reading up on Sequoia Capital

Demis Hassabis estimates Google DeepMind is 75% of the way to achieving artificial general intelligence, citing AlphaFold and other breakthroughs.

Parallel Web Systems, founded by ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, raised $100M in Series B funding at a $2 billion valuation to build web search for AI agents.

Sequoia argues the next $1T company will sell work as an AI-native service, not a tool, capturing the larger services budget by automating intelligence-heavy tasks.​

AI startups juice valuations by selling stakes to lead investors at a lower valuation, then offering shares to other backers at a much higher valuation soon after, as exemplified by Serval and Sequoia.

The best founders operate across three simultaneous startup phases—opening, midgame, and endgame—rather than sequentially, enabling superior adaptability and strategy.

Long-horizon agents that can figure things out autonomously are functionally AGI, and they will become widespread in 2026.