Gupta: Sequoia evaluates founders on trajectory (slope) rather than baseline (intercept)
Ravi Gupta · 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 · Sep 14, 2020 · at 29:03
Ravi Gupta, Partner at Sequoia Capital, explains Sequoia's core framework for evaluating prospective founders.
0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.3s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I think that when we talk about the people we like to invest in at Sequoia, we talk about investing in slope rather than intercept.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ravi Gupta
Gupta: Sequoia Capital requires unanimous partner approval for all investments
“This is reinforced by things like unanimous decision-making, which means we all need to be bought in when we decide to partner with a company.”
Gupta: Sequoia allows founders to choose which partner joins their board
“When entrepreneurs ask somebody at Sequoia, hey, if I work with Sequoia, who will my board member be? And the answer is always the same, which is whoever you want. You get to choose.”
Gupta: A Sequoia partner shared their 360 feedback with the entire partnership
“At Sequoia, one of our partners late last year shared their three 60 feedback with all of us at a partner meeting and then asked, can you help me get better on these?”
Gupta: Any team evaluation short of 'enthusiastic rehire' is a no
“I think the question you've got to ask if you're building or evaluating your team is, would you enthusiastically rehire this person if given the chance, knowing everything you know? And I think the word enthusiastically is so important here because it removes …”
Gupta: Stripe maintains its talent bar by enduring unfilled open roles
“I think that Stripe is absolutely inspirational on this topic. And I personally, I think they've done it the right way, which I think they are willing to deal with the pain of not filling a spot because they respect that spot so much that they're only going to…”