Brian Halligan, HubSpot co-founder and Sequoia's in-house CEO coach, shares his frameworks for building and scaling tech companies. He details his LOCKS framework for evaluating founders, offers tactical advice on hiring "spiky" talent over consensus picks, and discusses the future of go-to-market strategies in the age of AI.
Ping Wu, CEO of Cresta, and Sequoia’s Doug Leone discuss the transformation of contact centers with AI. They explore a dual approach, blending AI-powered human agent assistance with full automation, to meet enterprises where they are. Wu details the immense technical challenges of deploying AI at scale, from orchestrating over 20 models in real-time with sub-800ms latency to solving for legacy on-premise systems. Leone provides a framework for building AI companies at speed, arguing that value will accrue in the application layer and that we are at the beginning of an "Industrial Revolution 2.0".