Carl Eschenbach

Partner, Sequoia Capital · 1 appearance on the record.

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executiveinvestoroperatorLinkedIn ↗sequoiacap.com/people/carl-eschenbach ↗

Carl Eschenbach spent 14 years at VMware rising to President and COO, scaling the company from 200 to over 20,000 employees before becoming a partner at Sequoia Capital. He later served as CEO of Workday and backed major enterprise companies such as Snowflake and UiPath.

8statements → 0claims → 0claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential → 4.1/5argument clarity · the sources → 51said about them ↓

8 insights · every statement was checked. none of them is a claim the record can settle: opinions, insights and disclosures never carry an assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Carl argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.1 / 5 directness 4.5 · coherence 4.4 · precision 3.4 · compression 2.8

redirected or did not address 1 of 10 assessed questions (10%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

214 words/min while actually speaking · 9 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,463 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 4/10

pushed back at the host 1/10

setup questions received 75%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 5:19“I'm really intrigued. We had Rory O'Driscoll from Scale Venture Partners on the show the other day, and he actually said that the later stage you get, the less people matter. He's …” ▶ 17:00“Now, this sounds very naive and probably amateur, but we're talking about kind of VC differentiation there and the competitive landscape. One would automatically assume with Sequoi…”

What they said8 What others said51 Episodes1

Everything Carl Eschenbach said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

Companies fail when external change outpaces internal adaptation

“If the world outside your company is changing faster than you are, then the end is very near.”

Carl Eschenbach Mar 15, 2017 ▶ 7:41 20VC: Sequoia Partner, Carl Eschenbach on Building and Scaling High Performace Teams and The Common Mistakes In Scaling A Go-To-Market Strategy

Insight

Over-hiring without individual rep productivity degrades go-to-market execution

“You can actually over hire because you can hire a bunch of people, but if you're not getting a productivity output from each of the people you're hiring, it actually becomes a negative on your go-to-market because you have not enough people, you know, successf…”

Carl Eschenbach Mar 15, 2017 ▶ 8:04 20VC: Sequoia Partner, Carl Eschenbach on Building and Scaling High Performace Teams and The Common Mistakes In Scaling A Go-To-Market Strategy

Insight

Overbuilding management creates leaders who report news rather than make it

“Don't overbuild your management team, because you get into this environment where if you have too many managers, you have people who just want to report the news and are not making the news.”

Carl Eschenbach Mar 15, 2017 ▶ 8:43 20VC: Sequoia Partner, Carl Eschenbach on Building and Scaling High Performace Teams and The Common Mistakes In Scaling A Go-To-Market Strategy

Insight

Public company quarterly reporting forces executives into short-term tactical thinking

“You had to deliver every quarter, and then you had to report to the street your performance every quarter, and that was at a ninety-day clip, so while you try to focus on being quite strategic in how you build your business plan and your operating model and wh…”

Carl Eschenbach Mar 15, 2017 ▶ 10:58 20VC: Sequoia Partner, Carl Eschenbach on Building and Scaling High Performace Teams and The Common Mistakes In Scaling A Go-To-Market Strategy

Insight

Venture capitalists must lead founders through influence, not direct authority

“In a leadership role in a large company, you can describe what the North Star is. You can put an execution plan in place, and you can go violently execute against that plan, which ultimately defines whether you're successful or not, and then you can hold peopl…”

Carl Eschenbach Mar 15, 2017 ▶ 11:53 20VC: Sequoia Partner, Carl Eschenbach on Building and Scaling High Performace Teams and The Common Mistakes In Scaling A Go-To-Market Strategy

Insight

The most successful board members act like part-time employees outside meetings

“The most successful board members are the ones who work with the company outside of the board meeting itself on more of a day to day kind of operating model. Now you're not there every single day, but be involved in the company. And participate in what they're…”

Carl Eschenbach Mar 15, 2017 ▶ 14:17 20VC: Sequoia Partner, Carl Eschenbach on Building and Scaling High Performace Teams and The Common Mistakes In Scaling A Go-To-Market Strategy

Insight

Competitive venture firms are willing to collaborate when proactively engaged

“I found that if you collaborate and work and build deep and meaningful relationships with other venture firms and partners, actually, they're very willing to work with you. The ones who are competitive are the ones you probably never reached out to and tried t…”

Carl Eschenbach Mar 15, 2017 ▶ 16:46 20VC: Sequoia Partner, Carl Eschenbach on Building and Scaling High Performace Teams and The Common Mistakes In Scaling A Go-To-Market Strategy

Insight

Enterprise salespeople must maintain technical acumen to retain customer credibility

“It just showed me the importance to maintain your technology background and knowledge, because if you just were to go into a customer and only try to sell something and not be able to bet back it up with a business acronym and technical acumen at the same time…”

Carl Eschenbach Mar 15, 2017 ▶ 21:24 20VC: Sequoia Partner, Carl Eschenbach on Building and Scaling High Performace Teams and The Common Mistakes In Scaling A Go-To-Market Strategy

The other half of the tape: Carl Eschenbach's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 46 times in 13 episodes on 20VC. 5 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 17 Daniel Dines 10 Pat Grady 6 David Schneider 4 Doug Leone 3 Ravi Gupta 2 Luciana Lixandru 2 Rory O'Driscoll 1

Statements about Carl Eschenbach, by other people (5)

Insight

Dines: A CEO Who Stops Finding Firing Painful Becomes a Monster

“The moment The moment you will stop feeling difficult to fire people, you become like a monster. You will not be a good CEO.”

Daniel Dines Apr 22, 2024 ▶ 40:09 Daniel Dines: From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man| Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more | E1143 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Carl Eschenbach Promised Sequoia Would Only Invest in UiPath Within RPA

“Carl decided that if Sequoia is gonna invest in RPA, he's gonna invest only in UiPath. Even before signing with him, he told me up front, very extreme candor.”

Daniel Dines Apr 22, 2024 ▶ 1:20:57 Daniel Dines: From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man| Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more | E1143 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Disclosure

Leone: Zoom took Sequoia's investment specifically to get partner Carl Eschenbach

“So why were we invested in Zoom? I can tell you that Eric Wan didn't need money, but he needed a Carl Leschenbach.”

Doug Leone Sep 14, 2021 ▶ 29:02 20VC: Sequoia's Doug Leone on What Has Been Instrumental To Scaling Sequoia Over Generations, How Sequoia Think About International Expansion and What They Learned From China and India & Why When You Lose Pre-Seed You Become Private Equity

Assertion Supported

Gupta: Carl Eschenbach scaled VMware's revenue from $40 million to $6 billion

“Carl talk to you, who's scaled VMware from forty million in revenue to six billion.”

Ravi Gupta Sep 14, 2020 ▶ 16:55 20VC: Sequoia's Ravi Gupta on His Lessons From The Hyper-Growth of Instacart, The Key Question To Ask When Building or Evaluating Teams & The Importance of Investing In and Detecting Slopes Rather Than Intercepts

Assertion Supported

VMware grew from 200 to 20,000 employees during Eschenbach's tenure

“As for Carl, prior to Sequoia, Carl was president and CEO at VMware, where he grew the team from 200 to 20,000 people.”

Harry Stebbings Mar 15, 2017 ▶ 0:32 20VC: Sequoia Partner, Carl Eschenbach on Building and Scaling High Performace Teams and The Common Mistakes In Scaling A Go-To-Market Strategy