Sequoia pens farewell to Cresta as the Stanford-born AI customer-service startup joins Salesforce
timshi_ai · x · 2026-11-04
Sequoia's Doug Leone and Carl Eschenbach congratulate customer-service AI company Cresta on joining Salesforce.
- Founded in 2017 out of the Stanford AI Lab by Zayd Enam with Tim Shi, Sebastian Thrun and Andre Esteva
- Its contrarian thesis: build AI around people — analyzing what the best human agents did and coaching colleagues in real time during live customer conversations
- Emerged from stealth in 2020 as businesses shifted to remote work, putting generative AI to work years before the category went mainstream
- Co-founder Tim Shi recalls the Diego Rivera 'Detroit Industry' print in their first Redwood City office: every tool within reach, the same idea applied to knowledge work
Related event: Salesforce to Acquire Voice AI Startup Cresta(3 posts)→
More from Companies & People
- Anthropic's catwu departs, recalls building on Claude Code without writing a line of code — kavirkaycee · 2026-11-04
- Unusual wave of public departures hits Anthropic right before IPO, founder notes — zeeg · 2026-11-04
- Canva restructuring hits 1,271 staff as nearly a quarter face layoffs or redeployment — CtrlAltDwayne · 2026-11-04
- Sam Altman on OpenAI exec exodus: 'They only trust themselves to build this' — ChrisGPT · 2026-11-04
- Vorelios (YC F26) launches AI that predicts physics in seconds to engineer designs autonomously — KlausCodes · 2026-11-04
- METR-Redwood red team found ~10% of OpenAI's internal Codex traffic went unmonitored — dl_weekly · 2026-11-04