The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 392 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 9 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Sertoglu: Earlybird should have participated in Sequoia's $3B UiPath round
“In hindsight, we should have participated in that three billion dollar round by Sequoia.”
Villig: Bolt remains Sequoia Capital's largest check in Europe
“Still to this day, Bolt is the largest ticket Sequoia has ever done into Europe.”
Frankel: Sequoia's evergreen fund strategy was sound despite poor timing
“Well, I think the timing was problematic, right? Clearly. But I think the theory that they had, I'm impressed with them that they thought about that, and they executed on it. I think the timing was unfortunate.”
Wang: Sequoia considered shutting down its global equities fund in 2016
“And so there's this crucible moment in 2016 where Sequoia decided to part ways with the original PM and actually consider shutting down the business entirely.”
Wang: Only one-third of SCGE's portfolio consists of Sequoia venture companies
“So there is a portion of our business that, our portfolio that is Prior or existing Sequoia portfolio companies, right? That's maybe about a third of the portfolio”
Cahn: Sequoia Defines Success as Backing a Top 50 Global Company
“The bar for success is so, so, so high. Unless this company is one of the 50 most important companies in the world. You haven't done your job well.”
Cahn: Deal selection is more critical than winning or sourcing in VC
“Selection is the most important and I think, and then I think winning comes behind that and sourcing probably is actually, maybe it's tied, but I think it's probably third.”
Asparouhov: Tier-one VC firms Benchmark, a16z, and Sequoia ousted founders recently
“There are firms, tier ones that I mentioned, Benchmark, A-sixteen Z, Sequoia, et cetera, all have examples of sort of founder oustings in the past sort of decade.”
Sequoia outbid Hartz on Airbnb's seed round, but founders included him anyway
“I was angel investing with Keith Rubois and Javid Karim, and Javid is the co-founder of YouTube. And, you know, we just fell in love with those guys and made them an offer. And Sequoia out, out did us and got the lead, but they cut us in nicely because, you kn…”
Stebbings: Top VC brands give startups extra runway to achieve product-market fit
“Because Sequoia and Greylock have such great brands, they will generally, 90% of the time, always get more money, and because they get more money, they have more time to get product market fit.”
Grady: Sequoia's main threat is arrogance and complacency, not market shifts
“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 termino…”
Grady: Doug Leone was the best VC ever at winning deals
“The thing that made him so effective 10 or 15 years ago was he was the tip of the spear. He wasn't the guy who got parachuted in later to play the role of senior big dog, right? And impress upon the founders how important they are because, hey, the big dog is …”
Grady: Sequoia's internal data platform predicts which founders to meet
“We do want it to get to the point where it can tell us whether or not we should meet a company. And it got to that point a year or two ago.”
Grady: Sequoia issued the only term sheet for HubSpot's 2011 Series D
“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.”
Grady: Corporate experiments should default to termination unless wildly successful
“I also think it's really important that the default for any given experiment is that it gets killed. The burden of proof is on the experiment, right? Unless it is a wild success, shut it down. Most companies say, well, unless it's an abject failure, we'll just…”
Grady: Sequoia made $1B+ more on Palo Alto Networks by holding longer
“Or Palo Alto Networks, where we went into that IPO with the exact same ownership position as one of our co-investors. We ended up generating More than a billion dollars more than them because we were more patient, and so sometimes it really pays off.”
Grady: Sequoia looked at and passed on Figma's Series B
“And I think about the series B in Figma, which is a round that we looked at and passed on.”
Grady: Sequoia missed a $30B gain by distributing ServiceNow stock early
“If we'd held ServiceNow through to today, it'd be a, I don't know, a thirty billion dollar gain, right? But we didn't. We distributed it a year or so after the IPO because it was the first billion dollar gain over time, not all at once, but it was within the f…”
Grady: Sequoia holds pricing power at Seed and Series A stages
“And so most founders at the very early stages are willing to, you know, if you think of us as a premium product, you pay something different for a premium product than you pay for a normal product, and they pay for our premium product in the form of their equi…”
Grady: Sequoia never fires or promotes investors over a single deal
“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.”
Dines: Sequoia Capital Can Damage Startups by Backing Their Competitors
“And Sequoia can make, can damage a company investing in competitors helping them.”
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.”
Sequoia's product team wrote a four-page manifesto to keep using Linear
“We adopted linear here at Sequoia with my team. And we actually had another issue tracking tool that we also, you know, had licenses for. Some teams use this, some teams use that, but EPD solely use linear. And we were being, there was a threat of us consolida…”
Ryan: Top Multi-Stage VCs Rarely Compete in AlleyCorp's Seed Deals
“No, we don't see in the last, you know, 20 seed deals they're not in there very often.”
Gili Raanan: Strong Venture Brands Create Virtuous Investment Cycles
“The venture business is, is, is, is a service business. You provide services and once you, I mean, it's very hard to tell, you know, if that, Service provider, if service provider A is significantly better than service provider B, because, you know, what you s…”
Akkina: Sequoia's Dominance Came From Partners Appealing to Different Founder Profiles
“An interesting observation I heard about Sequoia once actually is that one of the things that made them so successful was there was this period where they had Mike Moritz and Jim Getz and Doug Leone all kind of in their prime all very impressive VCs in their o…”
Sequoia's Pat Grady caught errors in HubSpot's unit economics during due diligence
“By the way, during the time he dug through all that, he figured out we were calculating unit economics wrong, and he got our head straight, our pricing model. He fixed a bunch of stuff during that.”
Brian Halligan says Elon Musk's primary operational focus is aligning employee vectors
“He talked about how organizations have all their people that are different vectors. And in most organizations, you have some strong vectors, really strong employees, and some less strong employees. And in most organizations, your vectors are pointed all over t…”
Velez: 2012 Latin American startups were unambitious Silicon Valley clones
“Why would Sequoia, who had access to best entrepreneurs in the world in Silicon Valley, spend time just going and investing in some of these businesses that in a way were just wanted to be clones of Silicon Valley businesses. They were not really shooting that…”
Basu Trivedi: USV belongs in the VC pantheon alongside Sequoia and Benchmark
“I think USV doesn't get the credit that it deserves. I think it should be in that pantheon of greatness that sort of Sequoia and Benchmark are typically put in.”
Jaswa: Sequoia partners staged an intervention to force a Dropbox executive firing
“The first person I ever fired, I won't, obviously won't say who they are, but it was a person in a leadership role at Dropbox and was clearly not delivering results. And Sequoia basically staged intervention with me. So Brian Schreier, who was on our board was…”
Herzberg: First sales hire should be a player-coach, not executive VP
“The next one could be a Player coach who can roll up his or her sleeves, do the selling while simultaneously taking the lead on hiring the next four account executives. And often we see that we look for someone who has led a team before. So they are thinking c…”
Doug Leone: Sequoia stress-tests portfolios against hypothetical 30% market crashes
“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 mom…”
Lixandru: Sequoia operates US and Europe as one unified capital pool
“We changed our name, actually. It's USC, so US Europe, as one team, one pool of capital”
Frankel: Sequoia omits brand on scout program to eliminate signaling risk
“By the way, to Sequoia's credit, they've never used the Sequoia brand on their scout platform, and I think that that actually is A fantastically respectful thing to do to founders, because it eliminates the signaling risk of why didn't Sequoia follow on, and t…”
Herzberg: Trust hiring intuition over isolated negative reference checks
“Your intuition matters. References are critical, but they aren't everything. And if your intuition is saying, I had a good connection with this person, I've heard plenty of good things around them, and sure, they may have frustrated one person or been a really…”
Salur: Mike Moritz personally invested in Getir before Sequoia Capital did
“He was the first to put, and he invested his own money. Sequoia came later”
Doug Leone supported Sequoia's Airbnb investment despite never staying in one
“Now I've never stayed on Airbnb, but I supported the investment, but people of your generation, the Gen Z generation, you know, they go Airbnb first.”
Leone: Candidates describing their siblings reveal the opposite of their own traits
“In a law of diversity, two siblings are less likely to be alike than two strangers. And so how they describe their sibling is usually the opposite on how they describe themselves.”
Leone: Sequoia offboards non-performers with forward vesting and severance
“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 the end, the very first person that knows they're not performing is the individual himself or herself. And then when we part ways with people, it's us…”
Doug Leone: Financial valuation models aren't worth their paper beyond two years
“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 c…”
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.”
Leone: Sequoia partners frequently ask to reduce their own compensation
“I've been in more meetings in my 30 years at Sequoia in people asking for less compensation rather than more, so we can spread it around to other people.”
Leone: Sequoia had to aggressively intervene in every entity at least once
“In every line of business, whether it's China, India, Southeast Asia, our hedge fund, a multi-family office called Heritage, we've had to go in and effect change as Once. So it wasn't that we got it so perfect from the beginning. So we had to go in aggressivel…”
Mullen: Multi-Stage Venture Firms Cannot Scale Hands-On Seed Portfolio Support
“How does a company like Sequoia invest a six hundred million dollar seed fund? How do they write a two million dollar check, let's say in a seed round, and then actually give you the full Sequoia team behind? Maybe they do that. I'm not saying they don't. I'm …”
Palan: Sharing bad news filters out mercenary employees lacking mission conviction
“I still like to err on the side of, let's just tell people that things are not going great, and hope that we can fix it. And the people that are gonna leave are likely the people who don't believe in the mission of the company, and who are there maybe because,…”
Sequoia Passed on Grubhub, Caviar, Postmates, and TaskRabbit
“And actually, between 20 11 and 20 13, we evaluated opportunities to invest in Grubhub, in Caviar, in Postmates, in TaskRabbit, because I was fascinated with this space. We passed on each of those opportunities, not partly because we're somewhat concerned abou…”
Sequoia Led DoorDash's Series C as a Flat or Down Round
“The Series C that Sequoia decided to lead was quite hard. I think the company had thought that because it had doubled or tripled GMV, and the unit economics was getting better, that the valuation from the B to the C would be double or triple, and in fact, it e…”