Sonya Huang
- Growth
What I admire most in a founder is imagination. Technology is a great enabler, but it takes imagination to harness that technology and create something useful and delightful.
Backstory
I’m a Silicon Valley kid at heart. I was born in Mountain View and grew up in the gravity well of innovation that was 1990s Silicon Valley. It was a fascinating time, from learning to code in third grade to witnessing blockbuster IPOs and the dotcom bubble burst.
Growing up in the Valley made me believe deeply in the American Dream and technology’s role in creating a better future. My parents are immigrant engineers, and technology and entrepreneurship gave them the vehicle to create something lasting. I see venture capital as a conduit to amplify the best founders and the best ideas and give them every possible unfair advantage.
I worked at Goldman Sachs and private equity before joining Sequoia. My time in the financial world helped train my eye for operating and financial KPIs, and I try to bring this strategic finance mindset to bear in service of the companies I work with.
I chose to work at Sequoia because it’s deeply fulfilling to see a founder transform from “outsider” to leader. We get to partner with companies in their earliest, most delicate stages, and watch them bloom. It’s an honor to be a wingperson on that journey.
On the lookout for
I seek to partner with founders who take incredible care and joy in their craft. One of the companies I work with, dbt Labs, has a beautiful company value that I think about every day: “Work done well is its own end. We do great work because it is an expression of who we are, a contribution of our unique talents and perspectives to a purpose larger than ourselves.”
I also like to work with founders who are thinking a decade ahead, rather than solving the problems of today. They see the future impact of the technology they’re building the way an artist sketches—it’s hazy at first, and then it comes into view. Emily Weiss at Glossier comes to mind: she’s constantly pushing the boundaries of what a consumer brand can be.
These days, I spend a lot of time in fintech and software, seeking to find companies that are reinventing legacy financial services and enterprise technology in a design-first, user-first way. I’ve also been spending more time in Latin America and am blown away by the scale of founder ambition.
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Companies
Current Companies
| Company Name | Short Description | Current Stage | Founders | First Partnered | collapse |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apollo.io | Apollo.io is a B2B sales intelligence and engagement platform. | Growth |
| Growth (2021) | Collapse |
| Attentive | Attentive is a personalized text messaging platform for innovative brands. | Growth |
| Growth (2019) | Collapse |
| Census | Census is the data automation platform that syncs users' data warehouse with all their business apps. | Growth |
| Early (2020) | Collapse |
| Cribl | Cribl helps customers easily sift through data to find the nuggets they need. | Growth |
| Growth (2020) | Collapse |
| Dashlane | Dashlane secures users' digital identity across a wide range of platforms and devices. | Growth |
| Growth (2019) | Collapse |
| dbt Labs | dbt helps data teams work like software engineers to ship trusted data faster. | Growth |
| Growth (2020) | Collapse |
| Fintual | Fintual offers a simple way for consumers in Latin America to invest online. | Growth |
| Growth (2021) | Collapse |
| Fireworks AI | Fireworks AI is a high-performance inference platform for developers and enterprises. | Growth |
| Early (2022) | Collapse |
| Glean | Glean searches across all your company’s apps to help you find what you need and discover the things you should know. | Growth |
| Growth (2022) | Collapse |
| Glossier | Glossier is an online direct-to-consumer beauty brand. | Growth |
| Growth (2019) | Collapse |
| Gong | Gong delivers insights on every customer interaction at scale so revenue teams can make smarter decisions. | Growth |
| Growth (2019) | Collapse |
| Hugging Face | Hugging Face is a community-based repository for open-source ML technology. | Growth |
| Growth (2022) | Collapse |
| Keen Technologies | Keen Technologies is John Carmack's AGI effort. | Collapse | |||
| LangChain | LangChain is an LLM programming framework for AI applications. | Early |
| Early (2024) | Collapse |
| Magic | Magic is training frontier models to build an AI software engineer that feels like a co-worker. | Growth |
| Growth (2024) | Collapse |
| OpenAI | OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. | Growth |
| Growth (2021) | Collapse |
| Pendulum | Pendulum is a biotechnology company working to improve the human microbiome. | Growth |
| Early (2017) | Collapse |
| Tecton | Tecton provides data management for ML. | Growth |
| Pre-Seed/Seed (2018) | Collapse |
| Thumbtack | Thumbtack is an online platform for managing the home. | Growth |
| Early (2013) | Collapse |
Enduring Companies
| Company Name | Short Description | Current Stage | Founders | First Partnered | collapse |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amplitude | Amplitude is an analytics platform that enables organizations to see and predict which combination of features and actions translate to business outcomes. | IPO |
| Growth (2018) | Collapse |
| Armis | Armis is the first agentless, enterprise-class security platform for unmanaged and IoT devices. | Acquired |
| Early (2015) | Collapse |
| Nubank | Nubank provides next-generation mobile banking and financial services to the Latin American market. | IPO |
| Pre-Seed/Seed (2013) | Collapse |