Sequoia’s new stewards 🏆, the new YC 🚀, ElevenLabs story 👋

Sequoia Capital has elevated Alfred Lin and Pat Grady to firm stewards. Lin and Grady led Sequoia's early and growth-stage investments ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With  TLDR Founders 2025-11-05 Aligning pricing with AI-driven growth models: What leaders at OpenAI, Zapier, and Salesforce are saying (Sponsor) At Metronome's Monetize 2025 conference, one thing was clear: pricing has gone from a tactical play to a board-level conversation, as companies grapple with ways to align value with monetization in the age of AI: Zapier moved from pure PLG to enterprise sales. Temporal opened sales-led infrastructure to self-serve. Salesforce introduced "flex agreements" trading seats for consumption. Top operators are focused on building systems where PLG and SLG coexist, creating predictability in usage-based models, and establishing clear ownership via Chief Value Officer roles. Read the full breakdown on the Metronome blog 📈 Headlines & Trends Sequoia Capital transitions to new leadership (2 minute read) Sequoia Capital has elevated Alfred Lin and Pat Grady to firm stewards, succeeding Roelof Botha. Lin and Grady led Sequoia's early and growth-stage investments, backing companies like Airbnb, DoorDash, HubSpot, and Zoom. Botha, known for creating the scout program and leading fund restructuring, will remain with the firm. On the 'new' Y Combinator (5 minute read) YC's latest batches look like a time warp to its early days, but with an AI-era twist. The average founder is now 26, often a Stanford or MIT grad who left OpenAI, Stripe, or Google to build fast in San Francisco. Nearly 85% of YC startups are Bay Area–based, half the founders come from top 20 universities, and almost as many worked at top-tier employers. They're technical, pedigreed, and surrounded by alumni who've done it before. 🧠 Strategies & Tactics Where you build is who you are: the ElevenLabs story (6 minute read) ElevenLabs didn't start in San Francisco, and that might be its biggest advantage. Born from the frustration of single-voice dubs in Poland, the company built an AI that gives machines human nuance - tone, emotion, and accent - shaped by a team spread across London, Warsaw, and San Francisco. Geography became the edge: only people who've heard meaning flattened by translation would obsess over making voice universal again. The company's rulebook is pragmatic: if research can't solve a problem in three months, building a good product will. Work with creatives instead of against them. Pay artists for their voices. Scale globally, but keep the culture weird and local. Less-Is-Better Effect (3 minute read) A $16 NARS mini concealer costs more than double per ounce than the full size, yet it outsells it. Psychologist Christopher Hsee found that when we judge one thing in isolation, our brains anchor on what's easy to notice, not what's objectively better. A small cup overflowing with ice cream feels richer than a big one half empty. The same logic drives how we buy. A tiny luxury feels premium, a pre-portioned meal kit feels smart, a mini beauty product feels indulgent. When the Music's Over: Founder Life After Failure (6 minute read) Founders should set clear financial boundaries, track personal runway, and avoid personal debt while running a startup. Shifting quickly into advisory or consulting roles helps monetize lessons learned and regain momentum. Openly sharing failures builds credibility and signals readiness for future opportunities. ⚒️ Tools & Resources 🆕 Humanity Protocol integrates Mastercard's Open Finance into Human ID (Sponsor) Verifying personal financial information can often be time-consuming and involve manual touchpoints. Humanity Protocol's Human ID now integrates Mastercard's open finance connectivity, enabling users to verify personal financial information such as income level, cash flow, and asset ownership. Users can use reusable and privacy-preserving credentials across traditional and decentralized financial platforms. Learn more. String.com (Tool) String.com is an AI agent that helps you build, run, and deploy other AI agents in seconds. LLM Gateway (Tool) LLM Gateway lets you route, manage, and analyze AI model requests from multiple providers through a single unified API. a0.dev (Tool) a0.dev is an AI platform that instantly generates full React Native apps, complete with UI, backend, payments, and App Store deployment. 🎁 Miscellaneous The Only Thing That Matters (6 minute read) In business, everything feels urgent until you notice that only one thing actually changes the outcome. Jim Kilts saw that at Gillette. Faced with seven turnaround options and endless noise, he picked one core issue in each line, kept Duracell and fixed marketing discipline, pulled personal care out from razors, focused only on dry shaving, and ignored the rest. Ask what truly drives the result, drop the rest fast, and repeat until it becomes instinct. That's how good operators think and how wisdom begins. A simple test for developing taste (4 minute read) Taste isn't about what you like—it's about how your preferences change once you've seen something better. You read Middlemarch after Remains of the Day, and suddenly the scale resets. You can't unsee the difference. That's how taste develops: through comparison, awareness, and the slow upgrading of what you think good means. It happens in every field - music, design, writing, code. The more you expose yourself to better work, the clearer your sense of what fits. What if we are the bubble? (4 minute read) Everyone keeps wondering if AI is the bubble. What if the bubble is us? For decades, we've treated human labor (especially knowledge work) as sacred and scarce, when much of it is just bureaucracy in disguise. Startups bragged about headcount, not output. Corporations paid armies to copy, check, and forward information. Now AI is quietly marking those tasks to market. ⚡ Quick Links AI Wins When It Does the GTM Work People Won't (2 minute read) An AI SDR booked a six-figure meeting while the team was at dinner at 6:02 PM on a Saturday - no human rep would have done that, and that's the point. Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble? (7 minute read) Nvidia's $110 billion vendor financing strategy in AI, notably through its commitment to OpenAI, draws comparisons to the telecom bubble's risky loans. AI as the greatest source of empowerment for all (10 minute read) AI democratizes knowledge by offering personalized insights, doubling learning rates compared to traditional methods. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/fbea1bf0/7 Track your referrals here. 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