YouSaid · the spoken record

Doug Leone

lines on the record: 74
first: 2025-02-28
most recent: 2025-02-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And there's a lot of that, believe it or not. I think one of the benefits of being around for 50 years is that while two, we have the fear of FOMO, of course we do, right? We're humans. We have a little more perspective of how deep to jump in AI is real. AI is the next platform. But how do we not invest in everything that walks? How do we make certain investments based on market maps, based on thought processes that are more rational and not do every investment just because every other venture firm is doing every investment? So that's how we're going to be participating. We are going to be for real, whether it's with our ARC program, a C program, venture program growth. We have many ways in which to invest in companies. But we're not going to jump in indiscriminately as we never had. Now, we've drank our load of Kool-Aid, whether it's 1998 or 2018, 2018.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually think that AI is the next platform shift in the same way that mobile was the one before. Internet was the one before. Infrastructure, the hardware, software layers that allow the internet to be overlaid over that. So I think AI is real. But I said earlier, we're going to overestimate it in the short term. We're going to invest in everything in the same way that in 1999 we invested in everything. But then Google came out of that or Facebook came out of that. So I think you have to have a good head on your shoulder where you don't practice FOMO, where you don't chase every company. And you make the investments that you think are appropriate where if it doesn't make sense to you, you know, a lot of things don't make sense and you see every five venture firms wanting to invest. And the thought process, if your young investor said, well, I don't really get it, but they get it. It must be great. Let me go in.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a lease in the water a little more of a restraint, a little more thought process of who do I want to bring as my next 10-year partner? Not I got a term sheet last Thursday. Very different. Got a term she last Thursday is I walk into a bar and the first male or female that talked to me, I got married. As opposed to no, I met and dated someone for a year, six months, so whatever it is, or three months, got to know them a little bit, either thought our value system was going to be aligned. We decided to get together and build a company. These are much healthier times. And like everything else in life, reality is usually the opposite of what it seems. Tough times, healthier times, some of the greatest companies got created during times like this, whether it was Cisco, whether it was PayPal and Google, whether it was Stripe and Square. Those companies with terrific DNAs got built.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we have right now is a bit of a shit show, a whole bunch of companies. There's companies with 500 million in the bank, a billion in the bank I heard of one, with maybe an $80 million run rate and no growth perspective. They don't know what to do. Bad habits all over the place. And that's what happens during, quote, wonderful time, all these lousy habits are built. You're in times like these where I'm much more optimistic. You have real founders coming out. There's a lot more balance between investors and founders. That helps founders. It doesn't hurt founders. There's still people that are willing to invest. Now it's AI. We'll invest in everything.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, in my opinion, it's gone from a high margin cottage industry to a lower margin mainstream business. And when you see that, you see all type of peoples coming in. You start having all these cycles, momentum cycles, down cycle in a momentum cycle. You hear things from people that have never made a dime, don't know what they're doing, raise us as money as you can. Screw the venture guys. Give them as little equity as you can. And without being self-serving, I think those are the wrong types of messages. The messages are raise as little money as you can to get to the next milestone. Find an investor in the same way you'd find an engineer. It's not, I just got a term sheet. Achieve balance on your board and your company so that you are in some ways a forced to behave correctly. And in the momentum cycles, and we've seen them before, where there was 97 to 90.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you have to share the DOA appropriately. And in my case, I never called us a family. I thought family is bullshit. I've got members in a family have to endure forever. Can't get rid of them. I tell people we are high performance. And pick your noun rap performance team if you don't believe in sports, production, a movie, and maybe the investors are the actors, maybe the investors of the goal scorers. But you know what we need? We need trainers. We need coaches. If you're a movie, we need a director, a producer, maker artist. And it takes everybody. And so just believing internally, that's what we need and incorporating into the investment business into what I think is the most fabulous culture of any partnership in the investment area is really our secret sauce.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you say, boy, I don't want to do that. And the people that you meet, you meet two kinds of people that teach you the one that teach you what to do and the ones that teach you what not to do. And the trick for me, I never understood when the father's an alcoholic or as an abuser and the son becomes an abuser. Because I have to tell you, I've had some tough rides, but I made a promise to myself that if I ever became someone, I would not do unto others as I was done to. I thought that was disgusting. I thought it was very upsetting. And when you've come to Sequoia, when I was running it, I made sure everybody respected the people that feed us. You better put your plate away. You better say thank you and so on because it starts at the foundational layer. And if you do that right, then the culture starts being right. And if you share your winnings and if you just don't talk the talk, we are team. We're this.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Predecessor of the internet. So a little negative turned into a little positive and with a little bit of success and then joining Sun Microsystems or in some ways was shooting ducks in a barrel and just coming up with a business plan that we could be successful on Wall Street. One of the biggest market segments for Suns, all the trading stations, and breaking that market down and learning to use the We Pro now. Here's what being smart and not greedy. Whenever I sold something and somebody help, I insisted on commission splits and those things. And I understood management took an eye that, well, not only is this kid selling, but look, everybody loves it. He's taking care of other people. And next thing you know, they had an eye on me. And boy, I took note of that, right? Okay. Ooh, that's how you do things. And the other things, the mistakes that you make when you're too aggressive, when you're too hardcore.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I remember when I had my first job at Hewlett Packard, and two guys, they looked like they were six years old, maybe they were 40, and I was 22. They said, we'll split Manhattan in two thirds. And you don't have to be in the medium when we split. And, you know, as a naive young guy, oh, I'm going to get third of Manhattan. Well, I got north of 96th Street in Manhattan. North of 96 now is cool. Let me just tell you, North of 936 in 1979 was not cool. It was downright unsafe. The formative part is that for me, I didn't give up. And you always ask yourself, how do you turn a negative into a positive? And I was lucky, you know, luck does play a little bit of a role. I was lucky that there was Columbia, the university up there. And there was a head of computer science called Traub that just came from Carnegie Mellon. And he was big in open systems in Unix. And he drew me a graph of the ARPANET. I never knew what the ARPANET was, which was.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made up question Who cares? That's certainly a question I wouldn't ask somebody if I had 10 15 minutes to ask about a new job. So I think maybe the answer to your question is maybe one or two meetings and a dinner.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hate when they set me up for 30 minutes interview. I said, forget it. The first 30 minutes is all make will be. Gotta let people let their guard down. And then if you really want to understand someone, I think it probably takes two to three hours, including a dinner, when people do relax and start showing you things, you know, and you want to see how people play orders and you want to see what things they say, you know, I always like to put salt on my food. Well, that tells me you're high-wired and you're not open to new ideas. The old classic how you treat a waiter or a waitress, boy, that really drives me crazy. The questions I ask, does not ask me, oh, Doug, I'd like to ask about your journey. Why would you ever want to ask me, you're in a job interview, you got to want to learn anybody, the role who you're going to be reporting to, where you're going to be doing every day. If you succeed, why will you succeed? If you fail. But the last question is, Doug, let me understand my journey.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We love best athletes. If we find best athletes with a little experience and first principle thinking, that's a home run. And we look for that.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to know the upbringing. I want to know what kind of kids they were, their journey through life, their maturation through life. I love to ask whether they have a sibling to describe three adjectives for their sibling, their close sibling, and three adjectives that describes them by comparison. I don't really care about the sibling, but you start learning things. I love asking the setup question of where would you get your best reference? And they're eager to tell you that. Complete setup question. Because the next question is, where would you get your worst reference and why? And again, I'm not looking to nail anybody. We've all had journeys that are up and down. Very few of us have had a linear up journey. But just understanding, looking for self-awareness. Because self-awareness means breaking problems down to first principles, and meaning using your experience to solve a new problem.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maximum type of success. So I dig for that. I just really wanted to understand what makes this person tick. And to me, the greatest question is why. Why, why, why? When someone says I was recruited by, I hear I was lazy ass sitting down. I got a call from a recruit. I was nothing better to do. I got suckered into listening something. I got sweet talked. Then I talked to a company that made me an offer. I wasn't too happy with my job or a little bored and I went. To me, that's what I was recruited by sounds like. The converse of that, of course, is I was sitting on a job. I saw an opportunity in a market segment that I didn't know existed. I call seven or eight companies. I realized this is the leading company. I call the companies or I found a way to get a meeting. I sold my way in. I got an offer. I negotiated. I took a job. And I went. Whoa, what an answer.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're embarrassed and so on. So we look for those things. And sometimes, believe it or not, genetics. I've actually met some people that I'm now convinced they were just wired that way. And I try to look for that for the simple reason that I view that to be the greatest advantage, but could be the greatest weakness, if not channeled appropriately. So why I look for it to see if it's there because I like to be it there, then I look to see what it is and whether it's on the right side of this good versus bad trade. And thirdly, because once we understand it, and then that's the good side, then how do we channel it complement and make sure this incredibly wonderful, insecure, scared, because that's what we all are when we're coming up. How do we help them as if we were their brothers to achieve”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, what we look for founders, we also look for sequoia partners, investors, young people, the same set of traits, use the word in sufferable, use the word, he doesn't listen, she doesn't listen, or is belligerent, she's belligerent. Those that other people may view as a negative, we actually view as a positive. Because in order to get something done in life, you can't just walk down Main Street and be a sweetie pie. We look for outlier people, whether it's founders or investors. And outlier people do extraordinary things. Outliers, what do I mean by that? Extra driven for whatever reason. Maybe daddy told them they weren't good enough and they want to show daddy how good they are. Maybe they have a twin brother. Twins where we have competing with one another. They love one another, but they compete with one another. Maybe they fail miserably in their first.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suddenly, I went from insufferable to charming, and I'm aware of that. And I chuckle because I was not as insufferable then as I was viewed, and I'm not as charming now as I'm viewed. But I'm very well aware of the Markom transformation. And I find it amusing just understanding what human nature is. Everybody tries to position things and how the world is full of baloney and three quarters of stuff you read is not true, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To answer the second part of your question, in men essentially being an unguided missile. It means Over competitiveness, do what it takes. Doug, go take that hill. I went and took that hill because that was the mission and the cause, and nothing else really mattered. And immaturity plays a role, lack of experience plays a role. And quite frankly, lack of track record. So you are a no track record, abrasive, pain in the ass young man with a New York accent and clearly a kid from the street. While that doesn't play, that's really not the best marketing message. Now, some people saw through that and they saw a genuine human being. And it worked well in those cases. Contrast that with now. I have a bit of a track record. I am a little more mature, a little smoother, you know, a coat of paint, not to mislead, but that's the way you lead your life a little more wisdom.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To reprogram myself. He knew what I needed. But on the other hand, just to give you a little sense, when everybody wanted me out as an associate because I was insufferable, it was Don that saw something and said, give the kid more time. So within that toughness, frontally, there was enormous support when you were looking. And boy, I think that's the best way to lead and manage.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were engineering managers at a chip company that started a new company, maybe ages 40 to 50. Those founders, once they misbehave or something goes wrong, they really can't be saved. They're too opinionated, too big, as opposed to a 22-year-old that you certainly can make head a products or head of strategy or head of something. So it was a different time where the aggressiveness those founders was far greater, which if you implemented that in 2023 would ruin your reputation. That's both the good side and the bad side of being tough. I think you have to overlay the issue of time. Maybe that was appropriate for 1978. It certainly would not have been appropriate in 2020. But internally, he knew how to get you going. And it wasn't the same style for everybody. He happened to know that I needed a good bash on my head.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember attending a meeting with a founder. And as we walk out of the meeting, Don only wrote in Greening, yellow pads and grinning. And in Greening, he left a note on the table, said, Doug, not fit to listen to founders. And he just left it there for me to see. And in this new day and age, everybody wants weekly feedback. Why should I do better and this and that? Let me tell you, you read that note from Doug Valentine. That's all the feedback you need for the next 12 months. You have to break that feedback down. What does he say then? You certainly don't go in his office and say, Don, what do you mean by that? You know what you mean? And you understand maybe you were too aggressive, the wrong style. The other side of being too tough, he was tough on founders, but keep in mind we were dealing at a time where we're investing in semiconductors, the founders were not the twenty two year old who created new industries because of the internet of mobile.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And how much you love youth, and how much you love new ideas, and so on. So, very, very, very interested, very interesting human being for the time in which he lived. He would sell shares at $2 billion, not buy shares a $2 billion. Back in his day, if you reach $2 billion or $3 billion, that was a huge exit. So there was the learning curve of a world that was changing at a rapid pace. He understood that he wasn't going to adjust to that world. He got out of the way. He never asked a question unless he was asked. The only comments he made once he stepped down, comments when he was asked for his opinion. I found that extremely interesting. He was the ultimate of what the, if you will, the old king should do. In fact, I model my behavior now being the old king to his, never intrusive, always helpful.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had images and knowledge of other leaders. His age or a little younger that were falling asleep in meeting and there was starting to be a drag on their partnerships. And he was very cognizant of not wanting to do that. And the other thing he was very cognizant of is, boy, how do we leave Sequoi in the best possible place for the next generation? And it was interesting that he chose, and I say chose as if he's pointed us out. He had his own subtle way of choosing, assigning Carrie, maybe two of us at 10% more than the other folks. That's how he chose leadership, that he chose younger folks that he was willing to mentor. And I would just say that the heart showed up. And it was a transformation, not a transformation out of weakness, but a transformation out of wisdom. And you got to see his heart and how much he deeply cared and how much you cared a mentor.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Truth be known for the first 20 years, I did not know whether he had heart. It was all pure business. It was all for the cause of generating returns for a client, most of which are endowments and foundations. So for the first, I would say 15, 20 years, he was visionary, but extremely tough. And certainly dedicated to the cause. At his eulogy, I was very amused and interested to find out from his kids that they spoke of it as having his huge heart when he went home. And it was really interesting how he segregated his work life from his home life. As he got older and developed a sense of history and put himself in perspective of other leaders, there were certain things he did not want to do. He did not want to be one of the older folks that stuck around too long.”
2025-02-28 · Invest Like the Best · Doug Leone - Lessons from a Titan - [Invest Like the Best, CLASSICS] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source