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Sequoia Capital
Block CTO Dhanji Prasanna: Building the AI-First Enterprise with Goose, their Open Source Agent
59 minutes Posted Sep 30, 2025 at 9:00 am.
Introduction
AI: Friend or Foe?
Block's Journey with AI and Technology
Block's Diverse Product Range
Driving AI at Block
The Evolution of Goose
Integrating Goose with Existing Systems
Goose's Learning and Recipe Feature
Tool Use and LLM Providers
Impact of AI on Developer Productivity
Block's Commitment to Open Source
Future of AI and Swarm Intelligence
Remote Work at Block
Vibe Coding and AI in Development
Making Goose More Accessible
Generative AI in Customer-Facing Products
Design and Engineering at Block
Predictions for the Future of AI
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Show notes
As CTO of Block, Dhanji Prasanna has overseen a dramatic enterprise AI transformation, with engineers saving 8-10 hours a week through AI automation. Block’s open-source agent goose connects to existing enterprise tools through MCP, enabling everyone from engineers to sales teams to build custom applications without coding. Dhanji shares how Block reorganized from business unit silos to functional teams to accelerate AI adoption, why they chose to open-source their most valuable AI tool and why he believes swarms of smaller AI models will outperform monolithic LLMs.
Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital
Mentioned in the episode:
goose: Block’s open-source, general-purpose AI agent used across the company to orchestrate workflows via tools and APIs. 
Model Context Protocol (MCP): Open protocol (spearheaded by Anthropic) for connecting AI agents to tools; goose was an early adopter and helped shape.
bitchat: Decentralized chat app written by Jack Dorsey
Swarm intelligence: Research direction Dhanji highlights for AI’s future where many agents (geese) collaborate to build complex software beyond a single-agent copilot.
Travelling Salesman Problem: Classic optimization problem cited by Dhanji in the context of a non-technical user of goose solving a practical optimization task.
Amara’s Law: The idea, originated by futurist Roy Amara in 1978, that we overestimate tech impact short term and underestimate long term.