YouSaid · the spoken record

Jess Lee

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57
first
2022-07-05
most recent
2022-07-05
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1
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podcast

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  1. “I think they're all interconnect. I think a lot of the reason that people choose to work with Sequoi, and our style is not for everyone, is a lot of us are former operators. We don't take very many board seats. Each investor does one, two, maybe three investments per year. And we try to work really hard for our founders. And it's not just the board member, but it's the firm, it's the product, it's all of it. And so we are deeply maybe more deeply involved. And so the better we are at helping you. And that could be through the board member, through Roloff sharing an anecdote from his time as CFO at PayPal or Alfred talking about what it was like to compete with Amazon at Zappos and how they outsmarted or out innovated. And so sometimes it's that and sometimes it's that little piece of advice that you got in an article that you read because we had the library of articles at your fingertips or sometimes it's actually just connecting you like maybe you came to our founder event base camp or heard a great piece of advice.”

    2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Like any good product team, we look at the metrics, so we track DAO Mao on a regular basis. We look at what percent of posts get replied. We look at the DM activity. We obviously don't read the DMs, but just knowing our people talking to each other, are people reading the new content? So we look pretty carefully on a daily basis in our Slack channel. It posts like here are the metrics for the Ampersand app.”

    2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And then there are things that are constantly evolving, like the best growth marketing tactic right now. That's always going to be changing as the platforms shift, whether you're growth hacking TikTok or Instagram, caks are going up and down. So for there, we try to connect you with community. Who are the right people you need to know in the network? And so 1% also has a DM function, a directory of all the people in the community. So you can reach out and actually find that expertise. Or we set up a lot of events. You can just decide to attend any one of the events and talk to various experts or ask questions.”

    2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “There's that sort of scaling the level of ambition, the core concepts. And then there's something as tactical as should I give out the title head of or VP for my first exec? And that is an article you can find inside of Ampersand, which is our founder mobile app”

    2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Try to think about a portfolio of products that work. There's some things that are evergreen, like core foundational company building concepts, founder-led sales how to do it well, how to write a great culture deck, all those kinds of things are really important to get right from the early days. And for that, we have programs like ARC, which is our take on an accelerator, but it's eight weeks of programming curriculum. You get a lecture created by Sequoia taught by a Sequoia partner that boils that concept down into a simple framework. And then you get a talk by someone from the field who has applied that and can tell you the real example of how they applied it at their company as an exec or as a founder. And that's eight weeks. Actually, this week we're running the European cohort, the first class of this. They're in Stockholm right now. Went to visit Karna to sort of see, here's an example of greatness. This is what a great company looks like, how far they've come, talking with the founders and the execut team.”

    2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Compelling value prop. And so we think about that a lot. I'm actually, in addition to being an investor, I spent about 70% of my time investing, also our chief product officer. So that's literally my job is to be customer obsessed. For a founder, I often think, what could we offer? There's some parts of the business of your company where you're really innovating. You're inventing new technologies. You're building products that customers ever seen before, new UI patterns. And then there's like a bunch of things that you are doing that other founders have already done before where you do not need to completely reinvent the wheel. Say comp philosophy or the best way to do a ladder for your career levels or how to run a really good one-on-one, how to have an exec team, your hiring process for engineering. You're always innovating at the edges of some of those things, but there's some things I just wish someone had told me from the early days. So those are some of the things we think about at Sequoia.”

    2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Is a great question and one that I found myself wondering as a founder I met so many VCs when we were pitching my company, Polyvor, and it felt like a lot of the firms just offered money. And then if you were lucky, you got capital plus a really great board member. And I just found myself thinking like, oh my God, I do so much as a founder. There's so many things I don't know about company building. I wish there was something else, something more out there. And so after my founder journey and I came to Sequoia, I found myself thinking about that a lot. I do think there's a way to apply the product mindset to venture capital and to investing. And if you think about Sequoia's customers, our customers are the founders. And if we want to be great, we need to be customer obsessed just like our greatest founders are customer obsessed. And then you need to delight your customers. You need to be innovating. You need to be doing things differently. You have to have the better unique.”

    2022-07-05 · Invest Like the Best · Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source