🕶️ Sequoia raised $10B, then shrank

Howdy, founders. Hope your warm intros are warmer than the weather.

Sequoia just raised roughly $10 billion, and in the same memo it shut the two programs most likely to hand a stranger a first check. Later that day, Conductor, a coding app with 100,000+ users by its own count, stopped taking sign-ups because it's joining Meta. Two corners of tech, one pattern: the biggest players have more money than ever and are offering fewer front doors. That's fine if you already know someone inside. If you don't, here's the question for this edition: how many of the doors in your plan belong to someone else?

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

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Raise $10 billion and you'd expect a firm to grow. Sequoia went the other way. In a memo posted to X on Wednesday, it said it had raised roughly $10 billion in new funds, then listed what it's shutting: its Scouts program, its Arc accelerator, its London office and the wall between its early-stage and growth teams.

Three of those were ways for a founder Sequoia didn't know to get in. Here's who used them:

Bay Area or bust: Sequoia says it can back Europe's best founders "from our home base in the Bay Area." Lixandru was offered a move to San Francisco and declined. (If European founders didn't already feel the pull of San Francisco, they will now.) Andreessen Horowitz closed its London office last year, and Coatue closed its own in 2024.

Why shrink with a full wallet? Sequoia says two decades of growth created hierarchy. So it's now seven general partners running one team, with no Monday partner meeting (founders work 24/7, the memo says, so partners will too).

Scout's out: if your route to Sequoia ran through a scout's check or an Arc application, it's gone. What's left is a warm intro to one of seven general partners. The upside: if you do get in, one team now covers you from seed to growth. The people are scattering, too: partner Stephanie Zhan left to start her own firm. Follow people, not just logos.

Looking ahead… Half the industry copied Scouts after it launched. Watch whether it copies the retirement, too.

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If you've watched Codex show you what changed in a file, you've already used the startup OpenAI just agreed to buy. On Wednesday, OpenAI said it will acquire Pierre, whose tools already ship inside Codex. The same day, Conductor, an app for running several AI coding agents at once, said it's joining Meta. Neither disclosed a price.

For years, developers stored their code on GitHub, which Microsoft owns. Now that agents write much more of it, everyone wants the workflow around it. The scorecard:

Awkward family dinner: Microsoft owns nearly a quarter of OpenAI, which is now taking aim at Microsoft's GitHub. Round one goes to the labs. They already own the models, and now they're buying the tools around them.

The two deals also show two very different exits for customers. Pierre's customers can keep using Code Storage after the deal closes. Conductor's get a countdown: cloud workspaces go read-only Nov 13, and data deletion starts Nov 20.

Export before Nov 20: if you use Conductor Cloud, go to Settings → Account → Export data today. If your product leans on a small dev-tool vendor, write down how you'd replace it in two weeks. If you are that vendor, decide whether your exit looks like Pierre's or Conductor's.

Next commit: OpenAI's deal still needs regulatory approval, and Conductor promises "something new" early next year. Somewhere, a developer is asking a coding agent to export their coding-agent data.

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