YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Wang

lines on the record: 86
first: 2024-10-09
most recent: 2024-10-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So it's a really interesting question, and this is a visualization that I like to give to everyone who joins our team. You have to be a pirate interpreting a treasure map. We need to sail to the Right Island. And if we get there, great, great. There is a massive amount of buried treasure. But if we're in the second ship there, we're also doing pretty well. Even the third ship is going to do pretty well. So if we get AI right, there will be a lot of good ships. NVIDIA is clearly the best ship today, but a lot of others are doing well also. Now, if we don't sail to the right island, it doesn't really matter which ship you picked. Those are just not good investments. So yes, we want to pick the best company, but we definitely better pick the right theme. And so for us, 70% of our research process is actually upfront on the theme and only 30% on the actual company. And so the example that you gave there, I think we'd positive both Shopify and Amazon.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have pretty concentrated portfolio, so about 15 to 20 longs. I want to make sure that the top longs can really move the portfolio in a major way. And as I mentioned, I think the power law still exists in the public markets, obviously to a lesser extent than the private markets. But we want to have the top side of the portfolio be pretty chunky. And so about 15 to 20 longs, about top five or about 35, 40 percent of the portfolio. So it's pretty meaningful. And then what we'd like to do is to, you know, have the shorts just essentially fall out of that. Again, it's really how much more conviction do we want to express on our longs, albeit on the other side. We're not necessarily trying to solve for the short side in a target a particular grocer net.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Closer to 20 to 25 percent would be more comfortable because then that gives us an opportunity to add. If we are focused primarily on the public markets, let's say if we had 50% of the portfolio private, that would feel too illiquid to me. So 20 to 25% feels like a pretty comfortable level.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's kind of the deal that you made with investors and employees. I mean, I don't. I think there were a couple companies that could do that, but do you think the $5 billion SaaS company that's a good, it's not maybe the best company in the world can really do that? Right? So, like, I think there may be a certain set of companies out there that can pull off what you're talking about before 99% of the companies out there, I think that's really difficult. I think it's actually pretty natural and organic for us because we're at about a third of the portfolio that is private. That is probably more than I want to be steady state. And that's a function of some of these companies just not going public in the time frame that we thought they would.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years for the companies to get there. It also took a couple years, I think, for a lot of these companies to get to a level of predictability of their revenue that the public markets expect, right? So if you're coming off COVID, you have all these just weird headwinds, tailwinds to your business that make it really hard to project. And so now I think we roll forward a couple years. The markets are more stable. These companies are more IPO ready. And so I do think the IPO market will open as we look into next year.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think these continuation funds exist. Some of them exist today because there's no liquidity. And so it's effectively a way to get some of these LP's liquidity at a time where the IPO markets are shut. I do expect the IPO markets to open, say, back half this year into next year. We'll see. But we have a number of companies on file, Sebastian, as you know, has been very vocal about going public. I think there will be a number of other companies that test the public markets. And one of the things that we've seen over the last couple years is that it took a couple years for these companies to write the ship in terms of the financial profile, right? And now a lot of these companies, I think, are ready. The days of rule 40, you're going out at 60, negative 20, those are gone. You have to be a 30 and 10, 40 and zero kind of growing into a nice profitability curve in order to get public. And it took a couple.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure if continuation funds are a permanent or a cyclical feature. Right now, the IPO markets have not been open. We have not gotten a lot of liquidity. I don't know what it looks like when the IPO markets do reopen. And I mean, right now we are still well, well below obviously the 2020-2021 levels for the IPO markets, but we're also well below the pre-2020 2021 levels, right? We're below 2019.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure because the public markets are still the biggest, I mean, they're the biggest capital markets. It is freely tradable. Liquidity is important for a lot of institutions. And I do think there is still four companies, still a big branding event when you go public. There will be value to companies going public. I don't know when some of these big companies that have stayed private for a long time are going to go public, but look, I look at, say, Aklarna. I mean, Sebastian clearly wants to go public. There are a lot of reasons for that. And I think employees want these companies to go public, right? They're excited about it.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think also having a perspective on these companies from a competitive standpoint also helps us inform public market investing and vice versa. And then we're also able to allocate between publics and privates based on where we see the best opportunities at that specific moment. And so right now, for example, we do not see for SEGE as many opportunities in the private markets. And so most of our attention is actually on the public markets. And so we can flex between those depending on where we see the opportunity set. One other thing is over the last few years, there have been a lot of tourists, as you know, a lot of tourists, mostly on the hedge fund side who have dabbled in private markets and they've gotten burned. Those tourists are out of the market. We don't see them anymore. And so I do think the crossover market is getting more attractive and it's getting more attractive. It's just one tourist exit and two as the IPO markets open.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it still helps. I mean, I've known, for example, I've known David, but I've also known the CFO lago for a long time before he was the CFO at the company. There's only so much that Doug can say, look, go help this person or go help that person, go make these connections. There is a part of it that just has to be organic, right?”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'll give you an example. So, New Bank is a Sequoi portfolio company, as you know, Doug is on the board. David and I joined Sequoia at around the same time. SEG led an investment in a secondary round in 2019. We participated in later rounds again at the IPO. We even bought shares even post-IPO in the straight public markets. It's now a top five position in the portfolio. And if we were doing our jobs right, I think we should know that company better than anyone else in the world.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a couple of reasons. So I think one, the crossover thesis of investing in late stage private companies, getting to know them well and then having a better view on whether to own them into the public markets is still fundamentally very sound.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've looked at this and it's surprisingly consistent. I'm not really sure why that's the case, but it's surprisingly consistent. The area where we have done really well actually are some of these private companies where we can partner with the growth team primarily and co-invest alongside early on. And so I think the private portfolio has done really nicely. And then you write it into the public portfolio.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think most of the time it's 10 and it doesn't matter. I think 2022 was a period where a lot of these stocks got ahead of themselves. We had to trim. We trimmed a bunch, but we should have trimmed more. I mentioned the Shopify example where Shopify from the 2022 price is still back to, I think, about halfway to the peak, right? Whereas, you know, you have other companies, say, a service now that is now above the peak. So you do need to make those choices very actively.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't sweat those details. I think about the big dials. And the big dials are really are you making the right investments? Is your investment process working? Is this company going to be a much bigger company over the next five years?”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and so our bias is definitely, I'd say, to keep something because you just know it best, you know the team, you have a lot of confidence in what they're doing. I think it is really hard to say, sell something that's 10% too expensive, hope to buy it back when it comes down 10%, and then continue to ride it. That is a very hard discipline. And so I don't focus on the short term. I think those are the small dials. I tell my team, don't tell me if ServiceNow is 10% too expensive. If we have a three to five year investment hold period, 10%, if you get six months ahead of yourself in terms of the pricing, it's not going to impact your IRR that much. Where we have to be careful, though, is if it's now 18 months ahead in a three to five year investment time horizon, because now it really starts to impact your IRRs, and then we have to really think about trimming it back and maybe potentially rotating it to something else. But, you know, if it's 10% too expensive,”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Buy and sell specific companies. You know, I was talking to Pat Grady about this the other day. We were not just judged on, okay, did we sell this company at the right time? But then did we go buy something else because we sold this company that outperformed this company when we sold at that time, right? I mean, it's you have to be deploying capital all the time. It's not just”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the public markets, especially when you're trading actively like we do, is actually a very different discipline from a continuation fund. So in a continuation fund, right, what you're typically doing is saying this company that I've known for a long time, do I sell it or distribute the shares over time? And I think that most funds, most venture funds can be very good at that. What we do is different. So there is a portion of our business that our portfolio that is prior or existing Sequoia portfolio companies, right? That's maybe about a third of the portfolio is that. There's a lot of our business that is not. We own, for example, Shopify was not a Sequoi portfolio company. It's a company that we admired in the private markets, but we did not invest in the private markets. And our first chance to invest is when they go public, right? So that is a very different discipline. And then also having the discipline to go know when to”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was terrified. I was terrified. And I didn't really know if it would really work. I give Mike Moore its all the credit for this. The way he suggested framing it was, yes, this is a leap of faith to invest behind this team and this strategy now. But it is way less of a leap of faith than back in 2009 when we didn't have a team, we didn't have any capital or LPs, no back office function, no clarity on whether we would have any ecosystem advantages in the public markets. And now we have all these things and we have a team that's bonded together that believes in it.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Miles program. Yeah. And so we were just focused on the Sequoia sweet spot. And when you looked at the pro forma analysis,”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To part ways with the original PM and actually consider shutting down the business entirely. So as the senior most partner remaining on the team, I was asked to come up with a business plan and convince the broad partnership why version two would be better. And for us, it was an incredibly unifying moment because we were really fighting for our survival, right? The team actually, we actually all left the office. We rented some co-working space down at the HANA house in downtown Palo Alto just to get some space and for clarity of thinking. And ultimately, the prescription, the strategy was pretty simple. It was just simply focus on the areas where we have an advantage. That is investing in growth tech with a meaningful thematic overlap with broader sequoia and co-investing alongside in late stage privates. So gone were the days of investing in lodging companies, port infrastructure. We even invested in an airline.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you've probably listened to the Sequoia Crucible Moments podcast where Roloff dives into these difficult moments in a company's journey that require a lot of fortitude, but ultimately set the company in a better direction. That was 2016 for SEG. I'm not a founder, but I did help guide SEGE through what I call a refounding moment. So Sequoia had hired an original portfolio manager for SEGE. You know, in 2009, he was a smart, hardworking guy, but didn't really unlock the synergies that we should have within our ecosystem. So really, he had the same playbook at his prior hedge fund. And so in a lot of ways, he was trying to recreate his prior hedge fund, even investing in non-tech areas, for example, as opposed to building something special and unique to Sequoia. And so performance was good. It was not great. And so there's this crucible moment in 2016 where Sequoia decided.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It just makes you focus on being dispassionate in a way that I think if I can get help from data science, if I can get help from my partners, I think that helps us be better. One of the things that we do is we have a quarterly review of the entire portfolio where we do a re-underwrite of every single position. Because unlike the venture world, we can buy and sell every day, every minute. And so typically the re-underwrites driven by the teams that the team, the individual partner and the analyst who are supporting a particular investment. In the controversial investments, one thing that we will do is we will have a fresh underwrite from a different partner where you have a devil's advocate position. I think that's important for helping us be dispassionate.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Passionate when you see the data changing, and we held out hope for longer that okay, this is just a blip in the data, it's going to get better again, it's going to return back to this very positive trend line we had. And instead, it stepped down. It's still a great business. It still continued to grow against a very positive trend in e-commerce taking share from overall retail spend. But that trend line was simply lower than we thought.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Shopify has been one of our biggest winners. It is also one of my bigger regrets in terms of post COVID. Coming out of COVID, we simply modeled a baseline that still had the post-COVID trend continue to go up into the right. And that was the case for a lot of e-commerce companies, right? So one thing that we got wrong is a lot of things returned back to pre-COVID. Humans don't really change that much or they change more slowly. And so e-commerce really returned back to the pre-COVID trend line. Shopify is still continuing to gain share against the total e-commerce and the total retail pie in a very nice solid way. But to model this 800 basis point step up in a year and to say that that was going to continue from that trend, that was obviously incorrect. We started to see that in the data and being detached to a company, really liking the management team there, having it be one of our biggest winners, I think it's you have to be”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we have as investors is a thesis. On the private side, you can get a lot of data to go verify that thesis, right? You're under NDA or you're on the board and you have depth of information that you can then go verify thesis. We don't have that in the public markets. The data that you have in the public markets is the same as every other investor. That's Reg FD, right? So the smallest investor to the largest investor in a company, you don't have any different information. So to the extent that we can from the outside in verify a thesis that is very helpful for validating how big do we want to make that position is that thesis actually still holding true? Has something changed? Has competition come in and knocked us off the top seat? So I think that is very helpful for investment process.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's hard. I think it's hard to know, and this is part of the being emotional and attached or not. I think it's really important to be dispassionate and look at the data in a way that synthesizes it for what it is. So if it's good, we have to really call it good. If it's bad, we have to really call it bad. And so one of the things that we've done is we've actually pulled in our data science team as an extension of the investment team. They joined our weekly pipeline meetings. We have them very tightly integrated with our investment team to make sure that I think we have that data science angle in all of our processes.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the key things for us is we partner with an LP base that is long term oriented. A lot of them, as I mentioned, are Sequoia LPs. And so they know how we invest, they know our product, they know that technology can be volatile.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are definitely moments in time where the markets will say, we used to love growth, we now love value. And if you think about how we are positioned as a fund, it's generally long growth and short value, right? The value companies are in general the ones that the growth companies are disrupting. So there are moments in time where the markets rotate. And that's typically a function of, say, rates or maybe macro scares where you want to be in more defensive companies. And that's tough for our portfolio. But that's why I think about performance over the long term. Those rotations are very painful, but they happen in a pretty short period, let's say it's three months. We may have a very rough three months, but if I look out over the span of, now we've been in business now 15 years, we've had one down year. Over that 15 year timeframe, and you build your business in a way that you can weather these storms.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could take leverage, but then you're taking more volatility. And I just don't think in technology where you already have a lot of beta, you already have a lot of volatility, you don't need to take a lot of leverage, especially because there is the power law, and even in the public markets, if you get a stock right, there should be a power law.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, that's right. I think you would take risk in different formats, right? So if you were Citadel, if you are another hedge fund that takes a lot of leverage, I do think you need to have low volatility because you're amplifying it with, say, 6x leverage. In our model of the world, we don't take a lot of leverage. And so what we're trying to do is express more of a specific viewpoint with low leverage.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way we short is a bit different from how other hedge funds do it. So we are not looking for frauds. We are not looking for valuation arbitrage. We're looking to further express a disruptive thematic viewpoint that we hold on the long side, albeit on the short side. So it's really important to see these trends early. And so the view into the private ecosystem is actually quite valuable for that. So for example, if you hold a positive view on SpaceX and Starlink, What does that mean for other satellite businesses? What does that mean for rural telcos? If you are bullish on AI, what does that mean about call centers? So Rshoring is really expressing further conviction in the longs, albeit in the other direction.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was super intrigued because it was a chance to go build a public equities business that had true ecosystem advantages in technology. And I believe those advantages would translate into the public markets. I was also encouraged by the support and backing that SDG had from Sequoia's most senior leaders like Jim and Doug and Michael and Ruoloff. On the flip side though, I was taking a 70% pay cut and there was a real risk of failure, right? Most hedge fund launches don't survive. And so my career prospect, if it failed, wouldn't have looked very good. And so I took the plunge and tried to build something special.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we started SEGE, or Sequoi Capital Global Equities in 2009, and it was really hatched actually by Jim Getz originally. So he worked with Michael, Doug, and Ruoloff to really get it off the ground. And I joined a year later in 2010 before we externally launched and raised money from LPs. I think I joined for the same reason that most people join a startup. I believed in the mission, and this was to build a world-class public equities business partnered with Sequoi Capital, which I believed at the time and still considered to be the best venture capital firm in the world. And so I joined as an early employee. We had 50 million of internal capital. We now manage about $9 billion of mostly external LP capital, but that internal capital amount is also now about a billion. The portfolio is about two-thirds public and then one-third private, and that one-third private is almost exclusively co-investments with Sequoia. And so when the SEG opportunity came along,”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you so much for having me on the pod. By the way, I did see your tweet the other day about your frustration with folks going on the podcast circuit. This is my first podcast ever, and I don't expect to do them regularly. So I've been listening to your pod for a long time, Sequoia folks have had such good things to say about you, and so I'm super excited to be on.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think there are more threats on Ghoul's business than there have been ever in the company's history. I think NVIDIA's price is reasonable if you think it's going to continue to keep going. For us, 70% of our research process is actually upfront on the theme and only 30% on the actual company. You have to be a pirate interpreting a treasure map. We need to sail to the right height. Now, if we don't sail to the right eye line, it doesn't really matter which ship you picked. Those are just not good investments.”
2024-10-09 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta | How to Play AI in the Public Markets | China & Europe: Is the Future Bleak | The Opportunity for Crossover Funds with Jeff Wang, Managing Partner @ SCGE · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source