The Exchanges

Q You mentioned that kind of seed and its attachment to, you know, bluntly the funnel. You said before, when you lose seed, you become private equity. What did you mean by this when you unpack that?

A Well, I'd say when you lose the early stage of building a relationship with the founder, You become private equity. So what I mean by that is they already have their boards, they already have relationship, and you become a price taker. And they're selling things that you have to a founder, how you can help them become less and less. Now, we're lucky enough that we have operating people. I think we have the best people in any partnership. In engineering, well, Bill Korn used to run Google search. In Bogomil, who did the same at VMware, In product management, product marketing, and Carl Leschenbach, you probably knows who ran a sales operation from sixty million to six billion, and so on. And so what you need is the larger you go, the later you come near these companies, the more you have to convince the founders that you have real operational muster to help them. So why were we invested in Zoom? I can tell you that Eric Wan didn't need money, but he needed a Carl Leschenbach. And the same can be said for many of us. It's happened many times. Same thing with ServiceNow and me, and so on. But it is better to do this at the seed state, because then you can help them set the right DNA and so on. And of course, if you come even later, at that point, they have everything. They have Karl Leschenbach, or Bogomil, or Doug Leone. At that point, it's purely price. You know, there's nothing…

AI assessment note: “when you lose the early stage of building a relationship with the founder”

Q And so tell me, how did the meeting go? What did Don ask?

A It was a tough meeting. Don had a little round table at the corner of his office. Don was the kind of person that silence would not bother him. In other words, if you answered a question, he could sit there for 30 seconds in dead quiet, and his heart rate probably wouldn't increase when yours probably doubled. And so he asked me one question. What's important? And I rambled. For maybe four or five minutes. And now it was followed by death science. It felt like an hour. I'm sure it was 20 seconds. And then he said to me, what else? And I started laughing. And I said, what else? Don, I gave you everything I have. And then we warmed up from that point on. And I think what Don noticed that he had someone who was a missile, back then I'd say an unguided type of missile, but someone who had the courage to The humor, and from his point of view, who looked at business from the customer in, not from the technology out, and he liked that as a compliment to some of the people who had at Sequoia that looked everything from the tech out, and which is why he hired me.

AI assessment note: “It was a tough meeting. And so he asked me one question. What's important?”

Q But I do want to ask, Doug, I'm too interested, you know, in terms of the geography and the expansion of Sequoia, Brand and activity. Starting on geography in 2005, you made the decision to do Sequoia, China. Why was that? And how did you think about that decision?

A So I wrote a memo in four, one page that said, I don't know if we're doing this for defensive reasons or offensive reasons. I was noticing that the founders in California were many ethnic founders from India, China, Italy, France, all over the place. And I said, I don't know what's going to happen 20 years from now. And I remember saying, If NEA has posters from Chinese or India companies in their offices, and we're attracting US-based Chinese or India founders, are they going to come to us or are they going to go to NEA? I consider that defense. And then I made a point of where the largest and growing economy, and it was BRIC in Brazil, India, China, and we prioritize them. We said China one, India two. Because if you want to be a partner to the most valuable companies in the world, which is our mission, it could only happen in large economies. It's not going to happen in Thailand, a small economy. And so we decided for defensive and offensive reasons that we needed to be in these other locations. And so two of us went shopping for contacts for teams, first in China, then in India. And that's how we came to it. It all started with a one-page memo and an off-site dinner at some restaurant whose name I cannot recall in San Francisco.

AI assessment note: “we decided for defensive and offensive reasons that we needed to be in these other locations.”

Q And so tell me, how did the meeting go? What did Don ask?

A It was a tough meeting. Don had a little round table at the corner of his office. Don was the kind of person that silence would not bother him. In other words, if you answered a question, he could sit there for 30 seconds in dead quiet, and his heart rate probably wouldn't increase when yours probably doubled. And so he asked me one question. What's important? And I rambled. For maybe four or five minutes. And now it was followed by death science. It felt like an hour. I'm sure it was 20 seconds. And then he said to me, what else? And I started laughing. And I said, what else? Don, I gave you everything I have. And then we warmed up from that point on. And I think what Don noticed that he had someone who was a missile, back then I'd say an unguided type of missile, but someone who had the courage to The humor, and from his point of view, who looked at business from the customer in, not from the technology out, and he liked that as a compliment to some of the people who had at Sequoia that looked everything from the tech out, and which is why he hired me.

AI assessment note: “he asked me one question. What's important? And I rambled.”

Q the vision. I think it's a very important one, and, you know, aligned to that is kind of setting the culture, and I remember before hearing you say that Sequoia is not a family, we're a team. I was intrigued to kind of dig deeper on this. What did you mean by this? What does that mean to the team, and what does that mean kind of number one is?

A So the first thing I did when I took over the sole, you know, whatever title that you want to give me at Sequoia, the leader of Sequoia, I wrote the tenets of Sequoia Capital. It's a play on words. It with 10 tenets. And I put performance as one and teamwork as two. And you've heard me say in other interviews that if you're missing one, the other nine don't matter. And if you have one, then you better have two. Teamwork. We hate the I pronoun at Sequoia Capital. In order to perform, we can't be a family. We all have family members we're stuck with. I know your family. I'm willing to bet you can point to a family members that is going to be a family member forever and is not a performer. I know we have a few in our family, but we are a team. It could be a production company. It could be the making of a movie or a show. There are actors. They're called the investors. They're supporting casts. They are the producers, the writers, the lighting people, even the people that make lunch for the actors and everybody else. Same at Sequoia. We have people who invest, people in data science, our assistant, finance, and so on. And we better have high performance in all those areas, and we better have a good deal of expertise in using the we pronoun. That is the only chance we have. And if you don't perform at Sequoia, we will give you some time. We will figure out a way to help you. But at …

AI assessment note: “In order to perform, we can't be a family. We all have family members we're stuck with.”

Q How did Hogan's Heroes episode impact your thinking around partner selection for the expanded Sequoia China?

A So what Hogan's Heroes is, is a politically incorrect sitcom that ran in the seventies about Americans in a German POW in World War II. And of course the Americans are smart and the Germans were dumb. And the gentleman who ran the camp, Colonel Klink, was particularly dumb and vulnerable, where Hogan, the lead POW, was smart. And Hogan and Klink found themselves in front of a safe in Klink's office that had been jerry-rigged with a bomb. And if you turn the handle of the safe one way, the bomb would explode, and if you turn it the other way, the safe would be open, and there was money in the safe. And Hogan, the American, looked at Klink, the German, and said, Klink, Which way for the handle And Klink said left. And Hogan turned it right, and he opened the safe, and they got some money. And Klink looks at Hogan, and he goes, how did you know? And Hogan said, I wasn't sure whether I'd get it right, but I was positive that you would get it wrong. And that little vignette was what Mike Moritz and I used when we went into China. In other words, we were absolutely sure that he and I would get it wrong. We didn't know we were going to recruit Neil Shen. We didn't know we were going to find someone who would get it. Absolutely. Absolutely right. But we like the chances of an unknown person. We had more than we like the chances of him and me. And I brought up Hogan's ears to him. I tol…

AI assessment note: “In other words, we were absolutely sure that he and I would get it wrong.”

Q What do you think your biggest strength and your biggest weakness is, Doug?

A Somebody said to me about a month ago a topic that I had never thought of. They told me, my greatest strength is empathy. I have an interest and an ability to put myself in another person's shoes. So for example, I get really irritated when somebody at Sequoia doesn't clean their plate and puts it in a dishwasher with crust. Why should somebody that feeds us lunch clean our plate? You know, we all have to be treated with respect and empathy and so on. So I think empathy with founders, what are they going through? How do we help them? How did not stress a situation even more? That is my strength. My weakness, I am not proud to say is insecurity, wanting to look smarter or better than I am. It goes back to the abuse I received. In my high school days, I still want to show those son of a guns what I've become, and so on. That, unfortunately, those random thoughts still flow through my head, and I wish they finally freaking stopped, but I don't think they ever will.

AI assessment note: “my greatest strength is empathy... My weakness, I am not proud to say is insecurity”

Q What would you most like to change about ventures?

A It's very easy. I love to eliminate the irrational competitors. And notice I said irrational competitors. I didn't say eliminate the quality companies that fight for us in, in companies. I'd like to eliminate the ones that come over the top and say, I would do every series B you have at a billion pre. And why would I do that? It's because it sends the wrong message. It's not even for competitive reasons for us. It's because it sends a negative message To founders, What founders need is a true feedback type of system. If you build a great product, customers will buy it, valuation will increase, people are going to be interested. But what do you do with founders that build a crappy product, nobody's buying it, and somebody's willing to invest at a billion pre, just because us or somebody else is in the cap table. And so I would eliminate irrational competitors that always show up with investment cycles. Like I said, the investors of yesteryear, as we call ICG and CMGI, go look them up in 2000.

AI assessment note: “I love to eliminate the irrational competitors.”

Q the vision. I think it's a very important one, and, you know, aligned to that is kind of setting the culture, and I remember before hearing you say that Sequoia is not a family, we're a team. I was intrigued to kind of dig deeper on this. What did you mean by this? What does that mean to the team, and what does that mean kind of number one is?

A So the first thing I did when I took over the sole, you know, whatever title that you want to give me at Sequoia, the leader of Sequoia, I wrote the tenets of Sequoia Capital. It's a play on words. It with 10 tenets. And I put performance as one and teamwork as two. And you've heard me say in other interviews that if you're missing one, the other nine don't matter. And if you have one, then you better have two. Teamwork. We hate the I pronoun at Sequoia Capital. In order to perform, we can't be a family. We all have family members we're stuck with. I know your family. I'm willing to bet you can point to a family members that is going to be a family member forever and is not a performer. I know we have a few in our family, but we are a team. It could be a production company. It could be the making of a movie or a show. There are actors. They're called the investors. They're supporting casts. They are the producers, the writers, the lighting people, even the people that make lunch for the actors and everybody else. Same at Sequoia. We have people who invest, people in data science, our assistant, finance, and so on. And we better have high performance in all those areas, and we better have a good deal of expertise in using the we pronoun. That is the only chance we have. And if you don't perform at Sequoia, we will give you some time. We will figure out a way to help you. But at …

AI assessment note: “In order to perform, we can't be a family.”

Q and I just love your advice, and it's like one We've never seen prices at this current level. I get some advice that says you've got to play the game on the field, deploy, deploy, deploy. It's about playing the game on the field. And then there's others, which is like, no, this is fundamentally ill discipline and not right. What do you advise me? And how do you think?

A First of all, stop using the game on the field, deploy, deploy, deploy. Let's change the question. In a world where the breadth of opportunities has never Been as broad. If you look at the number of one billion dollar market cap companies or ten billion dollar or a hundred billion market cap companies, and you compare 2005 to now, it's a drastic number. It's a drastic increase. And furthermore, the largest increase in the number of largest companies in percentages. Okay. So you have to recognize that the opportunities are getting broader, but at the same time, you have to recognize competition has gotten greater and we face irrational type of competitors. And so that is the situation analysis. And so it does become a pick them business, meaning deploy, deploy, deploy. It's a pick them business. The further are you are to the funnel seed investing in the top of the funnel, the broader you can be. And you can, you know, at the end of the day, what is seed investing is a smart person in a generally interesting area. That's it. There's no need to overthink it because they're going to zig and zag in ways that you can't predict. As you move down the funnel, venture, growth, pre-IPO, the checks get larger. The valuations get a lot higher. And the further down you come, the better you have to get up picking them. And if you go broad there, you're going to get stung. And so the further …

AI assessment note: “The further are you are to the funnel seed investing... the broader you can be”

Q You mentioned that kind of seed and its attachment to, you know, bluntly the funnel. You said before, when you lose seed, you become private equity. What did you mean by this when you unpack that?

A Well, I'd say when you lose the early stage of building a relationship with the founder, You become private equity. So what I mean by that is they already have their boards, they already have relationship, and you become a price taker. And they're selling things that you have to a founder, how you can help them become less and less. Now, we're lucky enough that we have operating people. I think we have the best people in any partnership. In engineering, well, Bill Korn used to run Google search. In Bogomil, who did the same at VMware, In product management, product marketing, and Carl Leschenbach, you probably knows who ran a sales operation from sixty million to six billion, and so on. And so what you need is the larger you go, the later you come near these companies, the more you have to convince the founders that you have real operational muster to help them. So why were we invested in Zoom? I can tell you that Eric Wan didn't need money, but he needed a Carl Leschenbach. And the same can be said for many of us. It's happened many times. Same thing with ServiceNow and me, and so on. But it is better to do this at the seed state, because then you can help them set the right DNA and so on. And of course, if you come even later, at that point, they have everything. They have Karl Leschenbach, or Bogomil, or Doug Leone. At that point, it's purely price. You know, there's nothing…

AI assessment note: “when you lose the early stage of building a relationship with the founder, You become private equity.”

Q side, a big question that often is posed, when is the right time to sell? When is the right time to exit a position? I know we don't like the language, so forgive me for the language, but, like, when's the right time to sell? How do you think about that, Do you have any lessons that you've learned over the years in terms of the right time to exit?

A So think of all the great companies that you love in the public market, whether it is Square, or whether it's Google, or whether it's ServiceNow. Pick any company. I will tell you that those companies always beat a threshold sales price that somebody had. In some conference room, somebody said two years earlier, when it gets to 40, we ought to sell, and the company gets to 40 a year earlier, and they probably sold. And I contend that is absolutely the wrong way, because all those companies clearly overshot those thresholds. In my mind, there's only one question. What can this company be five years from now? Get away from all the models. The models aren't worth their paper. They're written in past a year or two, and yes, you may want to have a model just to do some thought checking, a thought experiment, but the only question that to me matters is, what can this company be five years from now? Let the dream gene go. Not too much, obviously, because not every company becomes a great company, but if you see a company with terrific competitive advantage, take Airbnb. I do not know the numbers. I do not want to mention this quarter, next quarter. This is not that kind of common, but I would say young people are traveling more and more on Airbnb. The hotel industry is dying. The question for me of Airbnb is not the demand, is the supply. Is there going to be enough supply in years to…

AI assessment note: “the only question that to me matters is, what can this company be five years”

Q How did seeing the booms and busts impact your investing mindset?

A Well, I know that things go up and down, and I know things cannot always go up and to the right. Now, in some cases, they may have held me back the last few years. We are in, like I said, in year 14. But boy, it always causes you to ask, what if? And so one of the exercises I've asked, we run more than once at Sequoia. Let's take a fund two cycles ago where the companies are just coming up. How would we feel about those investments? If the market just crashed by 30%, let's figure out how many of those were momentum driven and how many of those are really quality companies. And so boom and bust inject a sense of fear to balance a sense of greed, a sense of reality, and it just grounds you. And it gives you the experience and the strength to overcome the next bust that we absolutely know is coming. I can guarantee that.

AI assessment note: “boom and bust inject a sense of fear to balance a sense of greed”

Q I would love to start today, though. What an incredible thirty-three-year journey with Sequoia, but I did my research before this, and Pratt's Guide to Venture Capital, five p.m. meeting with Don Valentine. How did you get it, and how did the meeting go? What did Don ask?

A Well, some of the training for that cold call Came from my sales days, and when you sold computers back in the late seventies, you had to get past what was then called the secretary to get to someone who might have a budget, and so it was really no different, and the lady who answered the phone, she was not a secretary. I did not know that. She was the right-hand person of Don Valentine. She was a shrewd, tough, great sense of humor, a New Yorker who would not be Bullshitted, if you will, by anybody. We started the call. I quickly sensed what she was, and we had an honest and real conversation, a firm conversation between two people who spent a lot of time in New York, and we hit it off. And I was told afterwards that she walked into Don's office, and she said, this kid may have something you might want to interview. And that's what led to my five p.m. Monday meeting with Don Valentine.

AI assessment note: “And that's what led to my five p.m. Monday meeting with Don Valentine.”

Q there kind of about changing models of venture, and it's off schedule, but I spoke to You know, founder of a big multistage firm this morning, and he said, if any partnership today in multistage is not talking about Tiger and how they're changing the game, they're not being honest. Would you agree with that? And how do you think about it internally in terms of Tiger changing the game?

A Well, look, over the years, we have had numerous entrants trying to change the game. First of all, it's not the game. Remember, I said, we got to get the words right. It is a business where people lives are at stake, their careers are at stake, I should say, and capital for investors, in our case, nonprofits are at stake. So we don't view it as a game at all. Second, once upon a time, before your time, there was ICG, CMGI, firms that institutionalize things. Now we see Tiger. Well, we had SoftBank a few years ago, Tiger now. There's all these attempts that To short circuit what we do. What we do is company building. We'd like to get there early. We'd like to be the first investor when there's one employee, such as Nubank, since you said that you talked to David, and help set the DNA, and then stay with these companies for the next 15 years, maybe 20 years. Like, which is why we now have a hedge fund, because we'd like to say we want to go from seed to IPO and beyond. And doing that takes headcount, takes time, it takes a lot of things, Above and beyond trying to be an index fund for every Series B out there. And we believe that what we do will form a competitive advantage if we do it right. So what we tell founders, you've got to get product market fit. If you can't get product market fit, I doubt Sequoia Capital or any one of us can help. That is the black magic. That is reall…

AI assessment note: “Above and beyond trying to be an index fund for every Series B out there.”

Q What are the signs that someone will go through the abyss successfully versus not be able to overcome it? You've seen many go through it over the years, I'm sure.

A So when someone finds themselves on the abyss, if they start to fib on the performance of the companies, if they wanted to continue to invest at a other rapid pace, almost not really caring about the mistake, there are some investors who, yes, Like a baseball player, you have to forget about the last, the bad, or, or as a goal scorer, you know, you have to forget about the last game if you didn't have one. I find people that lack empathy in some ways are a little too easily forget about the forty million they lost. A little unnerving. I was never able to do that. Those are the telltale signs. They're political. They rally the troop on the inside. They hide between right behind the votes of senior investors. Those are all the negative traits. Conversely, someone that fesses up to what they have, takes aggressive standing in helping those founders realizing, in many cases, there's no market for their business. They develop an area of expertise. They become ultra-focused and are twice as careful in what they do. They've been humbled to death. Those are the great signs, in my opinion.

AI assessment note: “Conversely, someone that fesses up to what they have... Those are the great signs”

Q side, a big question that often is posed, when is the right time to sell? When is the right time to exit a position? I know we don't like the language, so forgive me for the language, but, like, when's the right time to sell? How do you think about that, Do you have any lessons that you've learned over the years in terms of the right time to exit?

A So think of all the great companies that you love in the public market, whether it is Square, or whether it's Google, or whether it's ServiceNow. Pick any company. I will tell you that those companies always beat a threshold sales price that somebody had. In some conference room, somebody said two years earlier, when it gets to 40, we ought to sell, and the company gets to 40 a year earlier, and they probably sold. And I contend that is absolutely the wrong way, because all those companies clearly overshot those thresholds. In my mind, there's only one question. What can this company be five years from now? Get away from all the models. The models aren't worth their paper. They're written in past a year or two, and yes, you may want to have a model just to do some thought checking, a thought experiment, but the only question that to me matters is, what can this company be five years from now? Let the dream gene go. Not too much, obviously, because not every company becomes a great company, but if you see a company with terrific competitive advantage, take Airbnb. I do not know the numbers. I do not want to mention this quarter, next quarter. This is not that kind of common, but I would say young people are traveling more and more on Airbnb. The hotel industry is dying. The question for me of Airbnb is not the demand, is the supply. Is there going to be enough supply in years to…

AI assessment note: “In my mind, there's only one question. What can this company be five years from now?”

Q I know you have kind of grown up children, but in terms of like traits that one would want their children to adopt, what three traits would you want your children to adopt?

A Boy, three traits. I can think a whole bunch. First of all, I'd say love. You've got to have a love for your family, love for your friends, love for life. I think if you're negative, It almost doesn't matter what else you do. You affect everybody else in a negative way. The second, I would say reality. A lot of people live in a world that is not real. Can we have free this? Well, there's nothing's free. Someone who pays for it. Think things through. Don't listen to these one-liners, to what people say that sound good, that are meant to bait you. When you hear something that's too good, it's probably someone saying for their own advantages. So reality, stay real. And if I were going to pick for third would be courage. Go try and do something. It doesn't mean you've got to be perfect every day. It doesn't mean you've got to go a hundred percent every day. Look, I see it in sports. The players don't bring their best every single game. It's impossible, but they bring their best during playoff time, championship time, during the games that matter. So bring it every day and really, really, really, really bring it when it matters. I mean, if you held me down to three, those might be the three that I would choose.

AI assessment note: “First of all, I'd say love... The second, I would say reality”

Q because again, I did a lot of research before this, and you said that when you moved from the maybe more kind of COO role to the more central CEO role with Mike kind of, you know, stepping aside in 2012, you said that your Myers-Briggs changed as a result so significantly. I was too intrigued. How did you change, and what was the most prominent changes in that Myers-Briggs?

A So people have called me more than once a bit of a control freak. I can make the trains run on time. If you ask me to take a hill or to get something done, I will commit to you that things are going to be done on budget and on time. If I'm on the board of a company that fails, it fails in a very organized way. If I'm lucky enough to be on a company that succeeds extremely well, it succeeds in a very organized way. But I knew that those traits were not conducive To being a leader. Those are great traits for being a manager. And I read a whole bunch of books. As soon as Mike Moritz has stepped down, I went to the bookstore. I might've bought 20 books on leadership, and I might even have read another 20. And it became clear to me what leadership is and what management is. And leadership is really a vision. It is inspiration. It's execution. It's instincts. It is not just let the trains run on time at all costs. And so I understood, if you will, to let the horses run, to hire great people, set the direction, let the horses run, use my instincts a little more. And again, I mentioned self-awareness. I think that is one of the greatest things. It's good to know. It's good to not know, which means you can learn. It is not good to not know what you don't know. And that is the killer. And I was lucky enough to know what I didn't know and do something about it.

AI assessment note: “I understood, if you will, to let the horses run, to hire great people”

Q What does that mean? Getting the compensation piece, right?

A It means not having Susie make three percent more than Johnny. It means saying either you're in or you're out. And if you're in as a partner or as an associate or as a something in between, there are compensation level. And when you finally make a partner, There's not 14 levels. We don't use the word junior. We even call, in the U.S., associates. We even call them partners. There's no need to belittle them in public. If I'm in a meeting with someone who's 24 years old, I don't have to say, this is our associate. Everybody knows this is our associate. And so, to make sure we show people the right level of respect, we give them the right level of feedback, at times means giving them more feedback, at times giving them less feedback. You want them to struggle at times and overcome the challenges in front of them just to make them better. It is getting all these things right, and at the end of the road, if you've seen all these monkey experiments where monkeys are being given, they love grapes, but they love the bananas over grape. One monkey, then we'll get a banana, and the second monkey, then we'll get a grape, and the monkey that gets a grape throws the grape out the cage. Screw you. You gave them the banana. I want a banana too. And so, we've seen all those experiments. Just make sure we get those things right so that everybody feels they're treated fairly, and basically, I te…

AI assessment note: “It means not having Susie make three percent more than Johnny.”

Q I would love to start today, though. What an incredible thirty-three-year journey with Sequoia, but I did my research before this, and Pratt's Guide to Venture Capital, five p.m. meeting with Don Valentine. How did you get it, and how did the meeting go? What did Don ask?

A Well, some of the training for that cold call Came from my sales days, and when you sold computers back in the late seventies, you had to get past what was then called the secretary to get to someone who might have a budget, and so it was really no different, and the lady who answered the phone, she was not a secretary. I did not know that. She was the right-hand person of Don Valentine. She was a shrewd, tough, great sense of humor, a New Yorker who would not be Bullshitted, if you will, by anybody. We started the call. I quickly sensed what she was, and we had an honest and real conversation, a firm conversation between two people who spent a lot of time in New York, and we hit it off. And I was told afterwards that she walked into Don's office, and she said, this kid may have something you might want to interview. And that's what led to my five p.m. Monday meeting with Don Valentine.

AI assessment note: “that's what led to my five p.m. Monday meeting with Don Valentine.”

Q because again, I did a lot of research before this, and you said that when you moved from the maybe more kind of COO role to the more central CEO role with Mike kind of, you know, stepping aside in 2012, you said that your Myers-Briggs changed as a result so significantly. I was too intrigued. How did you change, and what was the most prominent changes in that Myers-Briggs?

A So people have called me more than once a bit of a control freak. I can make the trains run on time. If you ask me to take a hill or to get something done, I will commit to you that things are going to be done on budget and on time. If I'm on the board of a company that fails, it fails in a very organized way. If I'm lucky enough to be on a company that succeeds extremely well, it succeeds in a very organized way. But I knew that those traits were not conducive To being a leader. Those are great traits for being a manager. And I read a whole bunch of books. As soon as Mike Moritz has stepped down, I went to the bookstore. I might've bought 20 books on leadership, and I might even have read another 20. And it became clear to me what leadership is and what management is. And leadership is really a vision. It is inspiration. It's execution. It's instincts. It is not just let the trains run on time at all costs. And so I understood, if you will, to let the horses run, to hire great people, set the direction, let the horses run, use my instincts a little more. And again, I mentioned self-awareness. I think that is one of the greatest things. It's good to know. It's good to not know, which means you can learn. It is not good to not know what you don't know. And that is the killer. And I was lucky enough to know what I didn't know and do something about it.

AI assessment note: “it became clear to me what leadership is and what management is”

Q there kind of about changing models of venture, and it's off schedule, but I spoke to You know, founder of a big multistage firm this morning, and he said, if any partnership today in multistage is not talking about Tiger and how they're changing the game, they're not being honest. Would you agree with that? And how do you think about it internally in terms of Tiger changing the game?

A Well, look, over the years, we have had numerous entrants trying to change the game. First of all, it's not the game. Remember, I said, we got to get the words right. It is a business where people lives are at stake, their careers are at stake, I should say, and capital for investors, in our case, nonprofits are at stake. So we don't view it as a game at all. Second, once upon a time, before your time, there was ICG, CMGI, firms that institutionalize things. Now we see Tiger. Well, we had SoftBank a few years ago, Tiger now. There's all these attempts that To short circuit what we do. What we do is company building. We'd like to get there early. We'd like to be the first investor when there's one employee, such as Nubank, since you said that you talked to David, and help set the DNA, and then stay with these companies for the next 15 years, maybe 20 years. Like, which is why we now have a hedge fund, because we'd like to say we want to go from seed to IPO and beyond. And doing that takes headcount, takes time, it takes a lot of things, Above and beyond trying to be an index fund for every Series B out there. And we believe that what we do will form a competitive advantage if we do it right. So what we tell founders, you've got to get product market fit. If you can't get product market fit, I doubt Sequoia Capital or any one of us can help. That is the black magic. That is reall…

AI assessment note: “There's all these attempts that To short circuit what we do. What we do is company building.”

Q Doug, you mentioned tough as nails there. I remember your biceps. They made mine look like peanuts. Help me out here. What does the workout routine look like for you?

A First of all, it's important that as you get older, you shrink, and I would advise everybody as you get older, lighten the weights, increase the reps, and don't worry about size. I've shrunk from an extra large to a medium. I worry about staying healthy, not in pain and longevity right now. Not macho size, which I might have done in my forties, but my workout routine for every body part Just once a week. I lift two hours for one day, two hours another. I hit every body part a whole bunch of times. At least five days. I usually do cardio three to four days, and I stretch every time I exercise. And so it is stretching. It is cardio. It is lifting lighter than before. It is eating right, which isn't to say to eat perfect, but, you know, to limit your intake of sugar and booze. Yes, you got to live. Yes, you got to drink a margarita, a beer, a glass of wine, a bourbon, but don't do it to extreme. Have a life. Enjoy life. If you're gonna die a year or two earlier, so what? I've seen people at 8688, 92. Two years less is okay, as long as they can have a fun time throughout the whole ride.

AI assessment note: “my workout routine for every body part Just once a week. I lift two hours”

Q What does that mean? Getting the compensation piece, right?

A It means not having Susie make three percent more than Johnny. It means saying either you're in or you're out. And if you're in as a partner or as an associate or as a something in between, there are compensation level. And when you finally make a partner, There's not 14 levels. We don't use the word junior. We even call, in the U.S., associates. We even call them partners. There's no need to belittle them in public. If I'm in a meeting with someone who's 24 years old, I don't have to say, this is our associate. Everybody knows this is our associate. And so, to make sure we show people the right level of respect, we give them the right level of feedback, at times means giving them more feedback, at times giving them less feedback. You want them to struggle at times and overcome the challenges in front of them just to make them better. It is getting all these things right, and at the end of the road, if you've seen all these monkey experiments where monkeys are being given, they love grapes, but they love the bananas over grape. One monkey, then we'll get a banana, and the second monkey, then we'll get a grape, and the monkey that gets a grape throws the grape out the cage. Screw you. You gave them the banana. I want a banana too. And so, we've seen all those experiments. Just make sure we get those things right so that everybody feels they're treated fairly, and basically, I te…

AI assessment note: “It means not having Susie make three percent more than Johnny.”

Q and I just love your advice, and it's like one We've never seen prices at this current level. I get some advice that says you've got to play the game on the field, deploy, deploy, deploy. It's about playing the game on the field. And then there's others, which is like, no, this is fundamentally ill discipline and not right. What do you advise me? And how do you think?

A First of all, stop using the game on the field, deploy, deploy, deploy. Let's change the question. In a world where the breadth of opportunities has never Been as broad. If you look at the number of one billion dollar market cap companies or ten billion dollar or a hundred billion market cap companies, and you compare 2005 to now, it's a drastic number. It's a drastic increase. And furthermore, the largest increase in the number of largest companies in percentages. Okay. So you have to recognize that the opportunities are getting broader, but at the same time, you have to recognize competition has gotten greater and we face irrational type of competitors. And so that is the situation analysis. And so it does become a pick them business, meaning deploy, deploy, deploy. It's a pick them business. The further are you are to the funnel seed investing in the top of the funnel, the broader you can be. And you can, you know, at the end of the day, what is seed investing is a smart person in a generally interesting area. That's it. There's no need to overthink it because they're going to zig and zag in ways that you can't predict. As you move down the funnel, venture, growth, pre-IPO, the checks get larger. The valuations get a lot higher. And the further down you come, the better you have to get up picking them. And if you go broad there, you're going to get stung. And so the further …

AI assessment note: “As you move down the funnel, venture, growth, pre-IPO, the checks get larger.”