YouSaid · the spoken record

Pat Grady

lines on the record: 87
first: 2024-07-08
most recent: 2024-07-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, in sales parlance, people talk about the difference between making something happen and order taking. And the venture business in the last several years has turned into a business of order taking, and it's a business of order taking in the sense that a lot of companies are raising money, rounds are happening frequently, and when the round comes along you raise your hand and say, okay, well, we'd like some please. That is very different than the way that it often worked ten plus years ago where companies may not have been raising another round. They might have been generating cash. They might have had no need for money. And it was a business of figuring out if there was some reason that they would be better off if they had you as a shareholder, articulating that to them.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't give 10 out of 10s, but I'd probably give us a 9 out of 10 for winning. Some people want to believe that because we have this nice brand, we can just waltz in and founders will hand the shares in their company. And that is far from true. Like it is an absolute knife fight every time. And we try to have a team and a culture where even if your business card meant nothing and nobody had ever heard of the name Sequoia, you can still be put in position to win because you've built the sort of relationship with the founder that just makes them want to be in business with you independent of what firm you're from.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do track this. I think it's 100% in the last 12 months. Actually, I take it back. There was one situation where an existing portfolio company was raising a Series B and they chose somebody else. And to be fair, we didn't make an offer. But had we made an offer, we probably would not have won. So I would count that one against us.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and Andrew's also got range though. I mean, you mentioned Vanta. He led our series and Vanta. There's a big company over here in Europe called Bolt. He led our investment in Bolt, you know, which is the ridesharing business. He led our investment in Robin Hood. I mean, he's got pretty good range. Yeah.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of people are really good pickers. I'll keep it on the growth team because that's where I'm better versed. I'd probably have to say Andrew Reid. If you look at Andrew's portfolio, very few false positives, very few false negatives. Most of the stuff in there is very good, and a lot of it wasn't obvious at the time. So the Series C and Figma and Figma had, I think, 4.6 million of ARR. That was not at all obvious, but Andrew had spent three years studying the design market and had a real point of view”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first name that comes to mind is David Kahn. David joined us about a year ago. He is an absolute force of nature. I get into the office pretty early. He's always in there on a zoom when I get in. He's always in there when I leave. David is just a total force of nature. I think some people are high volume, some people are high quality. He's both. I think Sonya's done a really good job of making a name for herself in the world of AI and creating magnets in the form of blogs, in the form of a podcast that we're releasing soon. I think Sonia's done a really good job putting herself in that position.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and Jim Gatz and Rulapota and Michael Morritz and all these other people who really knew what they were doing and through all those repetitions I got to kind of figure out how does Jim think about investment? How does Doug think about investment? How do I want to think about investment? And I think that's the best thing you can do”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We spend every off site on this topic. I think the answer is to be true to the nature of this as an apprenticeship business. The answer on getting better at picking is not to erect a bunch of scaffolding around people to try to help them make better decisions because this is not a manufacturing plant, right? We're in the outlier business. You can't design a system that's going to systematically identify outliers because each outlier is going to be different. They're going to be one of one if they're a true outlier. So whatever system you design in Backtest, it's going to miss the next one because the next one's going to break the bolt. And so the way you solve for that is, again, be true to this as an apprenticeship business. Have experienced investors in the field doing the work alongside the people who are earlier in their career so that they can see how it works. And they can see from a variety of people. One of the benefits I had when I joined Sequoia, I wasn't assigned to a particular partner. I got to work with everybody. So I got to make investments alongside Dougloni.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not necessarily willing to say that he's better, but somebody who I really admire is Mamoon at Kleiner. I think Mamoon has an exceptional track record of investing in companies that are not at all obvious at the time. And I think about the series B and Figma, which is around that we looked at and passed on. I think about the whatever round it was in Slack when it had just become Slack Yeah, Ripling's a good point. So I think Mamoon, if you look at his track record, it seems like he's a pretty exceptional picker.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harvesting is actually generating returns. So sourcing, are we getting in front of interesting stuff, picking, are we doing a good job of selecting, winning, are we able to invest in the companies that want to invest in? building, are we actually helping founders build market leading companies and then harvesting? Are we eventually turning that into returns for limited partners? If I were to go across the value chain, I'd say on sourcing, we are eight or nine out of ten. We're not perfect. And particularly at the very earliest stages, it's really hard to have complete coverage because founders can come out of anywhere. But I think for the most part, we're in front of good stuff and we're in front of it early enough to have a real point of view. So I think that sourcing we're probably an eight or nine out of ten. On picking different people may disagree. I think we're maybe a six out of ten because there's so much uncertainty in this business. It is incredibly hard to make these decisions.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not literally true, but it's effectively true. If I were going to decompose our value chain and let's say there's sourcing, picking, winning, building, harvesting. Hosting.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I met both of those for series A's, and both of them told me the entire story in like five or ten minutes. It was super clear, and at the end of the five or ten minutes I couldn't think of any questions to ask, because they had already answered any question that I would have wanted to ask. And then they just kind of looked at me and said, so do you want to invest or what? And I didn't know what to do. And so, you know, I went off and tried to do some homework and tried to come up with an answer. And it was almost too simple. And because it was so simple for whatever reason, I didn't have the conviction to lean in and we ended up passing on both of those. And in retrospect, both of those were terrible decisions. And so I think maybe the lesson is sometimes it really is just that simple. Like sometimes the very best founders can articulate things in a complete and compelling way in five or ten minutes and that's all you need to hear.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is one thing, and there are a couple of founders that I'm thinking about on a mistake that I've made. So Peter Reinhard of”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. You know, Eric Yuan, as the legend goes, it was his ninth visa application that finally got him into the US. He was seeking out a better opportunity for himself, and he stuck with it because he really wanted to see it through. There are lots of little tidbits like that in the founders we work with.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“which was the vector that describes the person, you know, vectors have both direction and magnitude. The magnitude component people tend to refer to as the spike around a founder, I don't necessarily need it to be a singular identifiable spike. If it's just a track record of consistent performance, that might count. But I need to believe that there's some exceptional magnitude on some dimension that matters. And then for direction, this kind of comes down to the motivation, like why are they doing this? Building a startup is insanely hard, as you know. And it's not for the faint of heart. Being a CEO might be even worse, right? And so you need to have some serious motivation or you're just not going to stick with it to the degree that you need to to build something that matters. And so trying to understand that is important too.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My framework is there are kind of two things that I care most about when assessing founders. So one is founder market fit and two is the vector that describes them. And so for founder market fit, people tend to commingle two distinct variables in here. There's the problem variable and there's the solution variable. The problem variable is do you understand what problem you're solving? And a lot of times that means do you have somebody who comes from this domain? And so one example we're in business with this company Harvey, which is doing AI for legal services, Winston comes from the world of law, so he understands the problem. The other variable is solution. You may understand the problem. Do you actually know how to build the solution? Well, Winston doesn't know anything about AI. I mean he does now two years ago he didn't. Fortunately, his co-founder, Gabe, comes from the world of AI research. And so Gabe understands how to build the solution. So you put those two things together, you have both the problem and the solution accounted for. That's pretty good founder market fit. The second thing that I mentioned”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Officer until a couple years ago. And so that was transformative because that took them from good story to bad product to good story, great product. And then the other one was when they had kind of built out the full marketing suite and they said, okay, we got the full marketing suite. What's next? Well, if you got marketing, the logical act two is going to be sales. The traditional way to do that would have been to just build some mediocre sales product and hand it to your go-to-market organization and let them sell it. And they decided to put a hard constraint on it and say, look, nobody is allowed to touch the sales business. The sales business has to stand on its own two feet. Hey, sales business, keep building stuff until you find something so good it sells itself. And so putting a hard constraint on it and saying, look, we don't want to live with the three or four or five X LTV to CAC sort of business. We want to build something that can be 10x plus, something that can sell itself. And that was transformative to the business too. And so I think just one good strategic decision after another, they just nailed it.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not today, not today. Not today. Circa 2011. Okay. And so the reason I say, Brian, is because one strategic decision after another, he and Darmesh just absolutely nailed it. There's the decision to focus on the SMVs or all the math told you to go up market and Brand and Darmesh correctly concluded while everybody else is doing the same math. If we go up market, it's going to be a red ocean. If we stay down here, it's going to be a blue ocean. Someday we'll become the default and the unit economics will get better. That's exactly what happened. It was acquiring performable back in 2011, a few months after we got into business with them because they wanted to build out this new part of the product, which is sort of the middle of the funnel. HubSpot at the time was top of funnel lead generation performable as middle of funnel marketing automation. That ended up being a transformative acquisition because the engineering team there was excellent. And one of the guys that they brought in with that acquisition is still the CTO of HubSpot today. One of the other guys they brought in with that acquisition was the chief product.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will choose Brian Halligan again. So by comparison, if you look at Snowflake, amazing product in an amazing market, right? If you look at Zoom, amazing product in an amazing market. If you look at Okta, amazing product in an amazing market. And so they're really powerful tailwinds for those products in those markets. If you look at HubSpot, mediocre product in a crappy market.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is a big learning for me over the years because in the world of growth investing, everybody has the same basic inputs. Everybody looks at the numbers. Everybody talks to the customers. Everybody spends time with the team. And then everybody builds the same basic financial model and it tends to end five years out and it tends to have decelerating growth rates and some reasonable margin assumptions and some reasonable multiple assumption. And if you just invest on the basis of that model, you're never going to distinguish yourself as an investor. Because the key question is actually what happens after that model ends. So when you get five years out, has that founder grown even faster than the company? And has that founder now attacking new markets with Act 2 and Act three and different products and different businesses? Or has that founder run out of gas and the company is grinding to a halt and eventually it's going to go fire sale to a private equity firm? And so the founder variable ends up being the most important thing.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, my overall framing on this is the market determines how big a company can get, the founder determines how big the company will get, meaning market in some ways establishes the ceiling on an opportunity. And there are different orders of magnitudes in terms of the markets that you can go after. But you could have the biggest market in the world if the founder is just not that good. You're not going to get anywhere. I will take a market of modest size being attacked by a spectacular founder over a market of gigantic size being attacked by an OK founder. Between the two variables, the founder variable is more important.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was controversial for a bunch of different reasons. The numbers were okay, the product was okay, the storytelling was very good. And the thing that actually got it over the line, probably two things, and this is true of almost every investment. It always comes down to the founder in the market, right? Hopefully I've gotten better over the years at trying to understand people. In 2011, I was good at understanding numbers, not so good at understanding people. Fortunately, Jim gets, I was number two on the investment Jim Gets was number one. Fortunately, Jim Getz has always had an amazing way of understanding people. And when he saw Brian and Darmesh, he saw something very special. And so that was part of what got it over the line. And then the second thing with the market, and this might be where I contributed a little bit, we had done a bunch of work around marketing or trying to understand the structural changes in the market. And”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that there are any bonus points awarded for degree of difficulty because there are a lot of very smart people in the world of venture capital. One currency is I'm going to be contrarian and right and then I get to be smarter than everybody else. I don't care whether we're contrarian or not. I just want us to help the Daringfield Legendary companies and generate exceptional net multiple money returns for our limited partners. And so some of the investments that I've been a part of, so for example, HubSpot back in the day, we led the series D in 2011, we would later find out that we were the only term sheet nobody else wanted to invest. And even inside the partnership, it was controversial.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's pretty straightforward. Conceptually it's a process of crystallizing the thesis and then stress testing it to make sure that it's real and that's it. I think one mistake people make is they sort of launch into diligence on something before they really have figured out what they want to diligence. So the crystallizing the thesis part of it, that is the declarative statement we should invest because we should invest in Zoom because A, spectacular founder, Bomeday every room will be a Zoom room. That's it. It doesn't have to be a complicated thesis, but it does have to be a crystal clear thesis”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You will never see anybody at Sequoia reprimanded, fired, chastised for a failed investment. You will never see that. Similarly, you will never see anybody at Sequoia promoted, lauded, praised for a single great investment. And again, it's because we're in the risk-taking business. If you have a string of bad investments, there's probably something wrong in your process. If you have a string of good investments, there's probably something right in your process. And so one data point doesn't make a trend. If somebody has a bad investment or a great investment, we're not going to react. We do try to inspect the inputs as much as possible because we're in a long feedback cycle business. And so the activities that somebody is doing today may not produce tangible results for another five or ten years. And so we try to inspect the activities. We try to inspect the behaviors. If the activities and the behaviors are good, but one of the outcomes happens to be bad, that's okay. If the activities in the behaviors are bad and one of the”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's amazing. But yes Whatever that is. As far as specific criticisms, the stuff that's unfair, I think, is just related to misunderstanding about how Sequoia works. And so a lot of what you read about leadership transitions and that sort of thing is out of date. You know, again, the leadership has been pretty stable in the U.S.-Europe business for the better part of a decade. Anytime we have an investment that blows up, that is our responsibility. The reason limited partners trust us with their money is because they trust us to find the right investments, make the right decisions, do rigorous diligence, and there is always some other card that you could have turned over to produce a different conclusion. And so anytime an investment blows up and people give us slack for that, that's deserved. Like, that's our job. We're in the risk-taking business, and so not every investment is going to work, but at the end of the day, anytime an investment fails, that's on us.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's got some pros. He got some cons. You know, overall, pretty good guy, right? That's not an interesting story. An interesting story is Harry Stevens is amazing, or Harry Stebbings is the worst. Do you know what”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Media goes in cycles. Like, I remember one time somebody gave me sort of the three points for what constitutes an interesting story. There's counter-narrative, there's counterintuitive, and there is hyperbolic. And so counter-narrative is everybody is saying X, but we're going to say Y. Counterintuitive is you may believe that X is true, but it turns out Y is true. And then hyperbolic is the first, the worst, the best, the last, you know, that sort of thing. This third one kind of leads to these media cycles where you can be the hero or you can be the villain, but there's no middle ground. Really do you see an article published that says Harry Stebbings? Pretty good guy”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the answer is nuanced. If the brand hit is fair, the fact that we're taking the brand hit doesn't hurt me, the fact that we screwed up and deserve the brandhead is what hurts me. If the brand hit is unfair, that hurts a little bit, but I tend to ignore it because I know that it's not reality. And so the thing that hurts me is not people talking about our mistakes. The thing that hurts me is when we actually make mistakes, particularly when they are self-inflicted wounds, they are avoidable, we should have known better. That's the stuff that's painful, and you can only have so many of those and continue to perform at a high level.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was talking with this guy named Ben Jacobs the other day who used to be the CIO of Viking, and he left to start his own firm four or five years ago. In one of the comments he made really stuck with me, which was when you work at a name brand place like a Viking or like a sequoia, you're attracting people who want to be part of something great, not people who want to build something great. That really stuck with me because one of the things that has allowed us to remain relevant for fifty plus years now is this sort of underdog mentality and the sense of desperation and the sense that tomorrow is not our birthright. Like we have to work to earn it today. And I do worry that we may have adverse selection when we try to find people because they're attracted to the name brand and they're attracted to a place that's already been built versus being attracted to a place where they feel like they can build. And I think we screen for that reasonably well. And I think if you look at our team, for the most part, they are hungry, ambitious, chip on the shoulder over a”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet that is the thing people see the winners what they don't see is we have a chance to get into business with pretty much any company out there and so when a company is a wild success and you don't see us in the cap table chances are at some point we screwed it up.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe, but you could also do the counterfactual litmus test of let's say you'd picked any random person off the street in March of thousand and plopped them down into Sequoia where they have one the greatest business card you could possibly hope for, two, the beginning of the cloud mobile transition, and three you're about to head into the global financial crisis where all of a sudden every company trades at two times revenue. Those are pretty magical conditions to start with and so the fact that I've been associated with some nice companies may not have much to do with me might have everything to do with the circumstances.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Theoretically, I would just get everything into the green and stay there. So it's not exactly continuous improvement, but yeah, I certainly try to learn and improve.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do this annually. So I actually have a scorecard that I do once a year, and it has different buckets on it, and it's similarly red, yellow, green, and then I figure out what I can do better the next year.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think different people have different answers to the question, you know, what is the meaning of life? And I think the simplest and most straightforward answer would just be happiness, but then it's kind of a recursive question, okay, well, how do you define happiness? And I think for some people, the greatest happiness comes from some feeling of productivity or some feeling that you've contributed something to the world around you, right? And so when I say irrelevance is my greatest fear, it would be the point at which I am not a good husband, I am not a good father, I am not a good partner, I am not contributing to the world around me because I think that's the thing that most people get the greatest sense of satisfaction or joy out of.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think my one liner would be happy but desperate. And the word life. The word desperate is probably a bit too dramatic in the context of the first word because it was very happy. My parents were wonderful people. I got a great brother. It was a very loving family. There's no trauma. There's no suffering in my childhood. I think like a lot of people who grow up in small towns, you just have this desperate need to figure out what else is out there. And when you're in a small town, even if it's a very nice town, and we lived in Gillette, Wyoming, which is in the northeastern part of the state, it's coal mining country, but it's a really nice place to grow up. Even when you're in a nice place like that, you just feel like the world is small and feel like there must be more out there. And you kind of have this desperate need to go figure out what that is. And so when I was in high school, my greatest fear was boredom. And I think now that kind of translates into my greatest fear, which is probably irrelevance, just kind of feeling like you are living a life that is worthwhile.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you have Sequoia on your cap table, chances are your life just got a lot easier. There are kind of two things that I care most about when assessing founders. So one is founder market fit, two is the vector that describes them. The market determines how big a company can get. The founder determines how big the company will get. I'd say on sourcing, we are eight or nine out of ten. On picking, I think we're maybe a six out of ten. When a company has a wild success and you don't see us in the cap table, chances are at some point we screwed it up.”
2024-07-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Sequoia Investment Process | Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha & Alfred Lin | Sequoia's Framework for Analysing Founders | The True Benefit of Having Sequoia on a Cap Table & Sequoia's Biggest Threat with Pat Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source