Grady: Sequoia's main threat is arrogance and complacency, not market shifts
Pat Grady · Pat Grady: Sequoia Partner on Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha and Alfred Lin | E1174 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 8, 2024 · at 1:01:48
Pat Grady, Partner at Sequoia Capital, explains his annual pre-mortem exercise evaluating what could cause Sequoia to lose its market leadership.
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“And so the premortem for Sequoia has nothing to do with the financial markets or technology platform shifts or competitive dynamics out in the market. And it has everything to do with staying hungry, staying humble and pretending like To use the Amazon terminology, you know, behaving as if it is day one every single day, and that the default is if we don't go out there and earn it tomorrow, we are irrelevant. I think that is true, and I think as long as everybody inside the building believes that is true, and everybody inside the building behaves accordingly, we'll probably be ok. But I think every premortem begins with arrogance, Complacency. You know, taking it for granted that we get to be Sequoia tomorrow because we were Sequoia yesterday.”
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