Stephanie Zhan is a partner on the seed and early-stage team at Sequoia Capital, where she backs founders from a company’s earliest days through to the public markets and beyond. She invests across artificial intelligence, which she views as the defining technological theme of the coming decade, and frequently partners with teams at formation as their first institutional believer. She sits on the boards of companies including Linear, Reflection AI, Ricursive Intelligence, and Skild AI, and her broader portfolio spans developer tools, defense, robotics, business software, and frontier AI research. Raised across Asia during the early internet era, Zhan learned to program as a child by building simple video games before studying computer science at Stanford, where she encountered AI in its early academic days. She was close to OpenAI’s founding in 2015 through friends who started the company, an experience that deepened her conviction in ambitious, mission-driven building. Recognized on the Forbes Midas Brink List and named among Business Insider’s best female early-stage investors, she partners with founders tackling the hardest, most transformative problems of the era.