sequoia-scout
(5)
Sam Lambert
Sam Lambert is the CEO and President of PlanetScale, the database company built on Vitess, the MySQL scaling technology that once powered YouTube. A database engineer by trade, he started as GitHub's first DBA in 2013 and spent roughly eight years there, rising to VP of Engineering leading a 350-person infrastructure and platform organization through the era GitHub scaled to tens of millions of users. After a short stint at Facebook working on internet-scale video infrastructure, he joined PlanetScale as an investor and advisor, became Chief Product Officer, and was named CEO in July 2021. He is known for a product philosophy centered on databases that 'just work' and never go down, a bias toward taste and craft, and blunt views on leadership.
Ellen DaSilva
Ellen DaSilva is the founder and CEO of Summer Health, a New York-based pediatric telehealth company that lets parents text a pediatrician and get an answer in under 15 minutes, 24/7. A mother of three, she built the company after living the gap herself: long waits, short visits, and a pile of unanswered questions. Before founding Summer Health in 2022, she was the eighth employee at Hims & Hers, led business operations at Twitter as revenue scaled from $100M to $2B, and worked on more than $10B of IPOs at Barclays. She is an HBS MBA, a Sequoia Scout, and co-author of the startup business-development book 'Pitching & Closing.'
Arpan Shah
Arpan Shah is a General Partner at Spark Capital in San Francisco, where he leads early-stage investments in AI, fintech, and data infrastructure. A Stanford-trained engineer from Kolkata, he was on the founding team at Robinhood, later founded Flannel (acquired by Plaid in 2021), and was a partner at Pear VC and a Sequoia Scout before joining Spark in November 2024.
Selene Casabal
Selene Casabal is the Managing General Partner and Chief Venture Officer at Fuel Venture Capital, a Miami-based firm managing approximately $550 million across five funds. A former Silicon Valley founder whose retail tech startup was acquired by b8ta, she became an AI super angel with investments in Perplexity, Replit, Impulse Space, and Serve Robotics before joining Fuel VC in October 2025 to lead its $100M+ AI-focused deployment strategy. A Sequoia Capital Scout and South Park Commons fellow, she is on a mission to rewrite the gender imbalance in artificial intelligence one investment at a time.
Ben Tossell
Ben Tossell is a British founder, creator, and investor who built Makerpad (sold to Zapier in 2021), launched Ben's Bites - the AI newsletter that reached 162,000+ subscribers - six weeks before ChatGPT dropped, and now heads Developer Relations at Factory.ai. A self-described 'technical, non-technical person,' he has never written traditional code yet scouts for both Sequoia and a16z and has backed companies like Supabase, Pika Labs, and Gamma.