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“AI slop” might just spawn the next YouTube, driven by a new AI-native creative class: The Generators. After sharing this thought on the @WithDelphi Library of Minds podcast, I’ve gotten a ton of follow-up questions, so here’s a deeper dive... Consumer AI in 2025 rhymes with Consumer Mobile in 2008. Like early mobile, we’re seeing both potential giants and flash-in-the-pan fads. In 2008, the top apps in the App Store were Facebook, Flashlight and iPint (a game that let you drink a virtual pint by tilting your phone). Only one became an enduring business. As aggregation theory reminds us, the best consumer companies aggregate massive networks of demand or supply (h/t @benthompson). Everything else gets commoditized. Beware vibe revenue (h/t @gregisenberg). Many current apps generate revenue from curiosity, novelty, or FOMO, with high initial conversion and fast growth, but poor long-term retention. As competition increases, products will commoditize and pricing will drop. We need to separate temporary revenue from sustainable businesses. Still, don’t dismiss “small” beginnings. YouTube started with silly homemade videos like keyboard cat, Numa Numa, and Chocolate Rain. Then came Ryan Higa’s sketches, Justin Bieber’s discovery, and OK Go’s treadmill music video. Over time, quality rose, legitimacy followed, and YouTube became the world’s largest video platform. Similarly, TikTok began as Musical.ly with teens dancing and lipsyncing before evolving into a global entertainment engine. In consumer, what seems trivial or lowbrow can be the wedge into something massive. Is “AI slop” this generation’s cat videos? What critics dismiss as junk is often content that would’ve been prohibitively expensive or impossible to make without AI: podcasts with historical or fictional guests, Pokemon nature documentaries, cooking shows hosted by animals, romantasy microdramas, Ghibli in real life, Dramione fanvids. These technically imperfect but creatively unbounded experiments are just the first wave of a sea change in UGC content. Every technology shift mints a new creator class that the old guard mocks. Bloggers weren’t “real writers”. Twitter microbloggers weren’t “real bloggers”. YouTubers weren’t “real filmmakers.” Instagram influencers weren’t “real tastemakers”. TikTok teens weren’t “real creators.” Now comes the AI-native generation, the Generators. They conjure worlds instead of filming them, blending ideas, moodboards, scripts, and real footage with prompts and generative AI models. They create, remix, regenerate,and refine until it becomes something new. Today, many are teenagers in their bedrooms, not too different from how prior UGC revolutions began. Over time, this new creator class will become more mainstream: film students making dragons on dorm room budgets, camera-shy solopreneurs sharing their real voices and expertise through avatars, small businesses turning iPhone photos into cinematic ads, scriptwriters becoming their own showrunners, creative directors running one-person agencies. AI doesn’t just lower the cost of creation. It expands who gets to create. When new creators appear, old platforms rarely welcome them. YouTube and TikTok reward face-forward performance, not surrealist fantasy. A new home may rise for the Generators, with audiences who love their worlds and communities who nurture them. For this shift to fully take hold, the underlying models must evolve. As @trymirage founder @gmharhar often says, the AI video race has barely begun. Producing scenes with consistent characters, voices, and styles still takes too much work. We need multimodal video models that can blend real footage and authentic voices with AI VFX. We need orchestration to handle multiple characters, multiple scenes, and multiple camera angles. Apps like Sora, @canofsoup_inc, Captions by @trymirage, @Picsart, and @tavus hint at where this is going, but the creative tools for this new medium are only just being invented. We’re witnessing the dawn of a new creative medium. Like every revolution before it, it’ll look weird and a little "sloppy" before it looks brilliant. -- If you’re a founder, creative, or Generator building in this new wave, we at @Sequoia would love to hear from you. You can reach out via the normal channels to any of our partners, or feel free to pitch my Delphi about the future of consumer AI: delphi.ai/jesslee. --- Thanks to my partner @buckhouse for helping coin the term “Generator” and to ChatGPT for copyediting help. Relevant reading Augmented Imagination by James Buckhouse buckhouse.medium.com/augmented-imag… Playlist of Generator content I mention above tiktok.com/t/ZTHvb3Hha14t… Playlist of the earliest viral YouTube content youtube.com/watch?v=Cqd1Gv… Vibe Revenue by Greg Isenberg x.com/gregisenberg/s… Aggregation Theory by Ben Thompson stratechery.com/2015/aggregati…

After 8.5 years at Polyvore, I'll be moving on to a new adventure. Excited to help the next gen of entrepreneurs as a partner @Sequoia!

Just uploaded my brain to Delphi’s Library of Minds. 🧠 I recorded a pod with @withdelphi founder @daraladje. That conversation—along with all my past interviews, articles, blog posts, and talks—is now live inside my Delphi digital mind. You can now chat with all my past content and ask me questions: delphi.ai/jesslee Delphi captures not just your knowledge and stories, but the way you think. In the podcast, I shared several powerful mental frameworks I've collected over the years: 1) The EQ/IQ/PQ/JQ framework, h/t to my partner @shaunmmaguire 😀 Emotional Quotient: One-on-one people skills 👫 Political Quotient: System-level people skills 🤓 Intellectual Quotient: Raw intellectual smarts 🎯Judgment Quotient: Good judgment Some brilliant people (high IQ) make terrible decisions (low JQ). PQ is a force multiplier because leading teams requires navigating group dynamics. Very few people excel at all four dimensions. 2) Moving 3 points on a 10 point scale, via Cheryl Dalrymple, CFO of AdMob, Confluent, and my startup Polyvore: 💪 Hard work typically moves you just 3 points on a 10-point scale. 🎯 It’s far better to push from 7→10 in your strengths than struggle from 2→5 in your weaknesses. ⚡ Since your energy is finite, invest it where you naturally excel. 🤝 Hire exceptional people who thrive where you don’t. 🚫 A common startup mistake: seeking perfectly well-rounded people who score 7+ across every dimension—they’re rare and expensive. 🦔 Instead, hire “spiky” talent—people who are 10s in one dimension, even if they’re 1s elsewhere. 🧩 Build teams where collective strengths cover all critical areas. 3) Startups are turn based games and why velocity matters, h/t @mvernal: 🎮 Startups are like turn-based games. 🂡 You’ll flip a lot of cards and make a lot of moves. 🔁 Most moves won’t be perfect—but what matters is how quickly you turn the next card and learn the next lesson. 🏆 Winning requires a mix of playing the right card and playing quickly. ⚡ It’s easier to be faster than it is to be right-er. So play fast. 🚀 Speed compounds. If you want to go deeper into lessons from my time at Google, the truth of my founder journey at Polyvore, or my hot takes on the future of consumer AI, watch below or have a conversation with my Delphi. 00:00 Intro 1:00 Who is Jess Lee 02:50 The EQ / IQ / PQ / JQ framework 03:44 What early Google taught her 05:35 How ambition is a double-edged sword 07:34 Customer discovery vs visionary intuition 09:31 Polyvore: from user → CEO 12:37 Imposter syndrome & finding authentic leadership 15:20 Picking the wrong market 18:24 Firing fast & setting high performance bars 20:12 Building cult-like community and emotional loyalty 22:13 Velocity vs delight in product 24:32 What she looks for in founders (turn-based velocity) 25:59 The business model wake-up call 27:27 Storytelling as a founding superpower 28:26 Hot take: consumer isn’t dead, it’s being reborn 31:50 AI-generated media, fanfic, and the next YouTube Check out the full library minds at libraryofminds.com Or create your own Delphi at delphi.ai!

Every @Sequoia founder journey begins differently: - @matanSF of @FactoryAI cold emailed us - We cold emailed @oegerikus of @Xbow - @DevinBhushan of @SquintAI is someone we had known for a decade - @_anish_agarwal of @traversal_ai got on our radar via his Arc application Arc is our bi-annual call for outlier pre-seed and seed stage founders to share their company story with us. The open call closes on August 17th. We’d love to hear from you! sequoiacap.com/arc

Delighted to announce Arc applications are now open for the Americas! Arc is @sequoia’s 7-week seed-stage catalyst for outlier founders. We teach Company Design, the Sequoia way to start, build and scale enduring companies. Apply here: sequoiacap.com/article/arc-am…

Every era creates new giants. We @Sequoia launched new seed and venture funds to back outlier founders building generational companies. Our mission is to bend the arc of every company we partner with. Last week, we brought our newest pre-seed and seed founders together for the Arc Intensive, with five decades of hard-won company-building lessons packed into an intense four day retreat. Here are some of the ideas we hope to seed next 👇

“In a world where AI is abundant and infinite, and information is no longer the bottleneck, the bottleneck and the premium thing becomes the connection, the curation, the trust and the energy.” @daraladje is building @withdelphi to amplify our most uniquely human qualities.

Sequoia is in great hands with our new stewards, @Alfred_Lin and @gradypb. They’ve been the beating heart of our early and growth teams for nearly a decade. Brilliant investors, humble leaders, and deeply good humans. I couldn’t be more excited for them to take the helm. ❤️ Each steward’s mission is to leave @sequoia better than they found it. @roelofbotha has done that. He’s continually raised our standards and pushed us to innovate. In addition to his extraordinary investing record (MongoDB, Instagram, YouTube, Block, and Natera), he pioneered the first Scout program in the industry, created the Sequoia Capital Fund, and built the prototype for our company-building program (which later became Arc). On a personal note, Roelof changed the course of my life. He recruited me to Sequoia (though I thought I was there to pitch him my startup 😅), brought me into the fold, and gave me a seat at the table. He patiently answered a million of my questions as I learned the business. He shared investment opportunities he could have taken for himself, because his instinct is to set others up for success. He championed our data science efforts and entrusted me with the role of Chief Product Officer. He’s been my first believer, a mentor, a wonderful partner, and a friend. Thank you, Roelof, for your vision, generosity, and belief. And congratulations, Alfred and Pat. The next chapter is bright. 🌲✨

Congrats to Roon on raising a $15M Series A from @eurie_kim at @ForerunnerVC and @rick at @FirstMarkCap! We at @sequoia are proud seed investors and excited for Roon's next chapter! 🎉 Healthcare information online is broken. We've all been there: Googling symptoms only to find unreliable sources, outdated content, and endless patient forums. The constant question: "can I trust this?" For Roon CEO Vikram Bhaskaran, this hit home when his father was diagnosed with ALS. Frustrated with "Dr Google," he was shocked to find no better alternatives. Meanwhile, cofounder @drRohanR saw this from the doctor's side as chief of neurosurgery. Short appointments meant limited time for patient questions. He needed a way to share reliable answers at scale. With CTO @arun, they built something genius: world-class doctors answering questions through short-form video, enhanced by AI. Think WebMD meets TikTok meets ChatGPT—but actually helpful. The secret sauce? 16,000+ video answers from top doctors at leading institutions. While others talk about "AI in healthcare," Roon brings the irreplaceable human element. That's the magic. ✨ Read more here: techcrunch.com/2024/11/26/roo…

1/ It’s been an incredible week! We @sequoia kicked off our latest Arc cohort on Monday, and today I spoke with @ingridlunden @techcrunch and founders about all things PMF at #TCEarlyStage2024. Recap in this🧵: (h/t @meliarobin for the photo)

1/ What if you could talk to your heroes? Not just read their books—actually talk to them. Ask questions. Get advice. Hear them in their own words. That’s the magic of @withdelphi. 🧵 Why @Sequoia led their Series A:

“AI slop” might just spawn the next YouTube, driven by a new AI-native creative class: The Generators. After sharing this thought on the @WithDelphi Library of Minds podcast, I’ve gotten a ton of follow-up questions, so here’s a deeper dive... Consumer AI in 2025 rhymes with Consumer Mobile in 2008. Like early mobile, we’re seeing both potential giants and flash-in-the-pan fads. In 2008, the top apps in the App Store were Facebook, Flashlight and iPint (a game that let you drink a virtual pint by tilting your phone). Only one became an enduring business. As aggregation theory reminds us, the best consumer companies aggregate massive networks of demand or supply (h/t @benthompson). Everything else gets commoditized. Beware vibe revenue (h/t @gregisenberg). Many current apps generate revenue from curiosity, novelty, or FOMO, with high initial conversion and fast growth, but poor long-term retention. As competition increases, products will commoditize and pricing will drop. We need to separate temporary revenue from sustainable businesses. Still, don’t dismiss “small” beginnings. YouTube started with silly homemade videos like keyboard cat, Numa Numa, and Chocolate Rain. Then came Ryan Higa’s sketches, Justin Bieber’s discovery, and OK Go’s treadmill music video. Over time, quality rose, legitimacy followed, and YouTube became the world’s largest video platform. Similarly, TikTok began as Musical.ly with teens dancing and lipsyncing before evolving into a global entertainment engine. In consumer, what seems trivial or lowbrow can be the wedge into something massive. Is “AI slop” this generation’s cat videos? What critics dismiss as junk is often content that would’ve been prohibitively expensive or impossible to make without AI: podcasts with historical or fictional guests, Pokemon nature documentaries, cooking shows hosted by animals, romantasy microdramas, Ghibli in real life, Dramione fanvids. These technically imperfect but creatively unbounded experiments are just the first wave of a sea change in UGC content. Every technology shift mints a new creator class that the old guard mocks. Bloggers weren’t “real writers”. Twitter microbloggers weren’t “real bloggers”. YouTubers weren’t “real filmmakers.” Instagram influencers weren’t “real tastemakers”. TikTok teens weren’t “real creators.” Now comes the AI-native generation, the Generators. They conjure worlds instead of filming them, blending ideas, moodboards, scripts, and real footage with prompts and generative AI models. They create, remix, regenerate,and refine until it becomes something new. Today, many are teenagers in their bedrooms, not too different from how prior UGC revolutions began. Over time, this new creator class will become more mainstream: film students making dragons on dorm room budgets, camera-shy solopreneurs sharing their real voices and expertise through avatars, small businesses turning iPhone photos into cinematic ads, scriptwriters becoming their own showrunners, creative directors running one-person agencies. AI doesn’t just lower the cost of creation. It expands who gets to create. When new creators appear, old platforms rarely welcome them. YouTube and TikTok reward face-forward performance, not surrealist fantasy. A new home may rise for the Generators, with audiences who love their worlds and communities who nurture them. For this shift to fully take hold, the underlying models must evolve. As @trymirage founder @gmharhar often says, the AI video race has barely begun. Producing scenes with consistent characters, voices, and styles still takes too much work. We need multimodal video models that can blend real footage and authentic voices with AI VFX. We need orchestration to handle multiple characters, multiple scenes, and multiple camera angles. Apps like Sora, @canofsoup_inc, Captions by @trymirage, @Picsart, and @tavus hint at where this is going, but the creative tools for this new medium are only just being invented. We’re witnessing the dawn of a new creative medium. Like every revolution before it, it’ll look weird and a little "sloppy" before it looks brilliant. -- If you’re a founder, creative, or Generator building in this new wave, we at @Sequoia would love to hear from you. You can reach out via the normal channels to any of our partners, or feel free to pitch my Delphi about the future of consumer AI: delphi.ai/jesslee. --- Thanks to my partner @buckhouse for helping coin the term “Generator” and to ChatGPT for copyediting help. Relevant reading Augmented Imagination by James Buckhouse buckhouse.medium.com/augmented-imag… Playlist of Generator content I mention above tiktok.com/t/ZTHvb3Hha14t… Playlist of the earliest viral YouTube content youtube.com/watch?v=Cqd1Gv… Vibe Revenue by Greg Isenberg x.com/gregisenberg/s… Aggregation Theory by Ben Thompson stratechery.com/2015/aggregati…

After 8.5 years at Polyvore, I'll be moving on to a new adventure. Excited to help the next gen of entrepreneurs as a partner @Sequoia!

Just uploaded my brain to Delphi’s Library of Minds. 🧠 I recorded a pod with @withdelphi founder @daraladje. That conversation—along with all my past interviews, articles, blog posts, and talks—is now live inside my Delphi digital mind. You can now chat with all my past content and ask me questions: delphi.ai/jesslee Delphi captures not just your knowledge and stories, but the way you think. In the podcast, I shared several powerful mental frameworks I've collected over the years: 1) The EQ/IQ/PQ/JQ framework, h/t to my partner @shaunmmaguire 😀 Emotional Quotient: One-on-one people skills 👫 Political Quotient: System-level people skills 🤓 Intellectual Quotient: Raw intellectual smarts 🎯Judgment Quotient: Good judgment Some brilliant people (high IQ) make terrible decisions (low JQ). PQ is a force multiplier because leading teams requires navigating group dynamics. Very few people excel at all four dimensions. 2) Moving 3 points on a 10 point scale, via Cheryl Dalrymple, CFO of AdMob, Confluent, and my startup Polyvore: 💪 Hard work typically moves you just 3 points on a 10-point scale. 🎯 It’s far better to push from 7→10 in your strengths than struggle from 2→5 in your weaknesses. ⚡ Since your energy is finite, invest it where you naturally excel. 🤝 Hire exceptional people who thrive where you don’t. 🚫 A common startup mistake: seeking perfectly well-rounded people who score 7+ across every dimension—they’re rare and expensive. 🦔 Instead, hire “spiky” talent—people who are 10s in one dimension, even if they’re 1s elsewhere. 🧩 Build teams where collective strengths cover all critical areas. 3) Startups are turn based games and why velocity matters, h/t @mvernal: 🎮 Startups are like turn-based games. 🂡 You’ll flip a lot of cards and make a lot of moves. 🔁 Most moves won’t be perfect—but what matters is how quickly you turn the next card and learn the next lesson. 🏆 Winning requires a mix of playing the right card and playing quickly. ⚡ It’s easier to be faster than it is to be right-er. So play fast. 🚀 Speed compounds. If you want to go deeper into lessons from my time at Google, the truth of my founder journey at Polyvore, or my hot takes on the future of consumer AI, watch below or have a conversation with my Delphi. 00:00 Intro 1:00 Who is Jess Lee 02:50 The EQ / IQ / PQ / JQ framework 03:44 What early Google taught her 05:35 How ambition is a double-edged sword 07:34 Customer discovery vs visionary intuition 09:31 Polyvore: from user → CEO 12:37 Imposter syndrome & finding authentic leadership 15:20 Picking the wrong market 18:24 Firing fast & setting high performance bars 20:12 Building cult-like community and emotional loyalty 22:13 Velocity vs delight in product 24:32 What she looks for in founders (turn-based velocity) 25:59 The business model wake-up call 27:27 Storytelling as a founding superpower 28:26 Hot take: consumer isn’t dead, it’s being reborn 31:50 AI-generated media, fanfic, and the next YouTube Check out the full library minds at libraryofminds.com Or create your own Delphi at delphi.ai!

Every era creates new giants. We @Sequoia launched new seed and venture funds to back outlier founders building generational companies. Our mission is to bend the arc of every company we partner with. Last week, we brought our newest pre-seed and seed founders together for the Arc Intensive, with five decades of hard-won company-building lessons packed into an intense four day retreat. Here are some of the ideas we hope to seed next 👇

“In a world where AI is abundant and infinite, and information is no longer the bottleneck, the bottleneck and the premium thing becomes the connection, the curation, the trust and the energy.” @daraladje is building @withdelphi to amplify our most uniquely human qualities.

1/ Every art form begins as mimicry. Film copied theatre. Photography copied painting. Both found their magic once they stopped imitating and started inventing. AI isn’t there yet. We’re in the “slop” era. But when creativity meets code, new mediums will emerge, such as…🧵⬇️ (w/help from the new @Grok imagine)

Delighted to announce Arc applications are now open for the Americas! Arc is @sequoia’s 7-week seed-stage catalyst for outlier founders. We teach Company Design, the Sequoia way to start, build and scale enduring companies. Apply here: sequoiacap.com/article/arc-am…

1/ This is my real voice, but not my real face. Introducing Mirage Studio by @getcaptionsapp, which generates lifelike expressive video. Just upload an audio clip, reference image, or scene description. Endless possibilities for storytelling!

A perfect use case for AI-generated personal software: I merged multiple Thanksgiving recipes into one idiot-proof step-by-step timeline with a timer. I tried a few different options: @Claudeai Code was fast and ergonomic, and even looked up sous vide temps, but the design was rough and it didn’t get my request for a “dark academia vibe.” @Lovable was fast, but made a critical logic error by assuming I’d hit “start” at the exact right moment. Also missed the aesthetic. More prompting fixed it. @MakeGizmos succeeded in one shot and was the only one that understood the assignment on dark academia. Mobile first was super convenient. One nit: the timer paused when I exited the app. @wabi ignored my design direction and stuck to its white liquid glass look. It made the same timing mistake as Lovable and had to be prompted to fix it. Happy Thanksgiving!

1/ It’s been an incredible week! We @sequoia kicked off our latest Arc cohort on Monday, and today I spoke with @ingridlunden @techcrunch and founders about all things PMF at #TCEarlyStage2024. Recap in this🧵: (h/t @meliarobin for the photo)

1/ The killer app for LLMs? AI-powered user interviews at scale. @ListenLabs is revolutionizing how companies understand their users, and we @Sequoia are thrilled to have led both their seed and Series A. From Microsoft to Canva, product teams are uncovering hidden insights.

1/ Congrats to @mytandaofficial and @jessechor on the launch of the TANDA app and $4.5M raised from @sequoia & @Initialized. Tandas are an age-old tradition of communities saving money together. Chip in weekly until it's your turn to draw the whole pot. techcrunch.com/2023/11/15/tan…