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 74 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Grady: Sequoia rejected a $5B buyout for a now-struggling portfolio company
“There's one in our portfolio now that I'm not going to name, but we had an offer from somebody to buy the company for almost five billion dollars. We own just north of 20%. That would have been a huge home run. Now the company looks like it is, ah, kind of not…”
Grady: 10 years of Sequoia data shows consensus doesn't drive startup outcomes
“So we have actual data on this going back to 20 14 where we started recording the votes numerically on every single investment. So we have about 10 years worth, which believe it or not is not conclusive because there are so few outliers that have emerged even …”
Grady: Value of tech operator experience decays faster than ever
“The rate of decay on the value of your experience as an operator has never been higher, and as a former operator, most people are emotionally anchored to that deeply personal experience that they had, which they should be, and that gives them a degree of empat…”
Grady: Sequoia is 9/10 on sourcing but 6/10 on picking
“I'd say on sourcing, we are eight or nine out of 10. On picking, I think we're maybe a six out of 10.”
Grady: Missing a wildly successful startup is usually Sequoia's mistake
“When a company is a wild success and you don't see us in the cap table, Chances are at some point we screwed it up.”
Grady: My venture success came from Sequoia's platform and 2007 timing
“Let's say you'd picked any random person off the street in March of. And plop them down into Sequoia where they have one, the greatest business card you could possibly hope for to the beginning of the cloud mobile transition. And three, you're about to head in…”
Grady: Prestigious firms attract status-seekers rather than true builders
“When you work at a name brand place like a Viking or like a Sequoia, You're attracting people who want to be part of something great, not people who want to build something great.”
Grady: HubSpot had a mediocre product in a crappy market in 2011
“If you look at HubSpot, mediocre product in a crappy market. Not today. Not today. Not today. Circa of 2011.”
Grady: Passing on Segment and Revolut Series A rounds were terrible mistakes
“I met both of them at the Series A, and both of them told me the entire story in like five or 10 minutes. And it was super clear. And at the end of the five or 10 minutes, I couldn't think of any questions to ask because they had already answered any question …”
Grady: The best founders can articulate their entire story in ten minutes
“And so I think maybe the lesson is sometimes it really is just that simple. Like sometimes the very best founders can articulate things In a complete and compelling way in five or 10 minutes, and that's all you need to hear.”
Grady: Sequoia won nearly 100% of targeted deals over the last year
“We do track this. I think it's a hundred percent in the last 12 months. Actually, I take it back. There's one situation where an existing portfolio company was raising a Series B and they chose somebody else, and To be fair, we didn't make an offer, but had we…”
Grady: Sequoia should have split from India and China branches earlier
“In 2005, when we got into India and China, we did so with the thesis that the world is getting smaller. When we parted ways in 20, 23, it was because that thesis in some ways had been invalidated. And so I think maybe we could have done that a few years sooner…”
Grady: Startups see 4x higher valuations in rounds immediately following Sequoia
“But if you look at the, if you look at the data, it's actually not signaling risk, it's signaling advantage. And it's signaling advantage in the sense that the average valuation for the round that you raise after your Sequoia round. So if you raise a seed from…”
Grady: Sequoia does not require a clear path to a $10B+ outcome
“We don't necessarily have to see, we don't have to see a clear line of sight to ten billion or a hundred billion or some grandiose figure. We do need to see a clear line of sight to good returns with an exceptional founder who could maybe find some upside from…”
Grady: Companies get better returns improving core products than expanding
“Most of the time when a company that we're involved with wants to go do a bunch of new things, it seems to me that the better use of resources is to make the thing you already do better. The thing that you already do Unless it is absolutely heads and shoulders…”
Grady: Freezing current AI models would still create tens of trillions in value
“I don't know if the data supports this or not, but I think that even if you were to freeze the capability set of the current foundation models and turn all of your attention to optimization and tuning and developer ecosystem, it would revolutionize trillions o…”
Venture signaling risk is an overblown founder concern, says Pat Grady
“Signaling risk is this funny thing because most founders are worried about it, but we have never actually seen a situation in which it hurt. The context in which most people worry about it is they say, well, if I receive this round from Sequoia, but then for w…”
Ego and economic demands tear apart most VC partnerships, says Pat Grady
“The natural way of things for venture capital firms is for one or two people to have a couple of nice investments and that makes them relatively more attractive to the next set of founders, and those benefits start to compound into the point where they allow t…”
Sequoia investment decisions always end with full partner consensus
“And so at Sequoia, rarely do investment decisions begin with consensus. It's usually a couple of People who see something special, but they always end with consensus because by the time we invest, we want it to be a team Sequoia investment, not an individual's…”
Founder risk is the only unacceptable risk in venture capital
“And so anyway, I think almost every risk is an acceptable risk. Founder risk is not.”
Sequoia failed on any successful company where it lacks equity
“You can basically just go through the list of companies that have been successful in the last five or 10 years. And if you don't see Sequoia as a major shareholder, it means that we screwed up.”
Grady: VC hiring will swing back toward younger apprentices within 10 years
“My personal view, I think the pendulum in the last five years has shifted towards wanting founders and operators as VCs. I think in the next five or 10 years, it's going to swing back the other way towards Hiring younger people with fresh perspective and more …”
Grady: Big Tech will be the biggest beneficiary of the next platform shift
“In the next platform shift, that will also be true. The biggest beneficiary is likely to be Google or Facebook or Apple or Amazon.”
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.”
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: 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: Quantitative systems cannot systematically identify venture capital outliers
“You can't design a system that's going to systematically identify outliers because each outlier is going to be different. They're going to be one of one if they're a true outlier. So whatever system you design and back test, it's going to miss the next one bec…”
Grady: Venture capital has devolved into passive order taking
“And the venture business in the last several years has turned into a business of order taking. And it's a business of order taking in the sense that a lot of companies are raising money rounds are happening frequently. And when the round comes along, you raise…”
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: 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: Tech ecosystems are becoming geographically isolated rather than globalized
“I think what we're seeing is technology ecosystems that are more geographically isolated than we might've expected. And there's a lot of interconnectivity, but it's not just a single global technology market.”
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 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 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'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…”
Sequoia historically made the mistake of being too greedy on ownership
“I think one of the mistakes we made historically was to be a little bit too greedy, quite frankly, on ownership.”
Sequoia replaced individual partner names with 'Team Sequoia' in its CRM
“In one fell swoop, we actually changed all of the names in the database from individuals to the singular name Team Sequoia, and the point is that every prospect we're talking with, every company with whom we're in business today, they don't belong to an indivi…”
Qualtrics was Sequoia's most expensive software deal at the time
“That was a scary investment for us because at the time it was the most expensive price we had ever paid for a software company.”
Grady: Private equity financial modeling skills can hinder venture capitalists
“In a funny way, the skills that I learned there hurt me here, which might sound counterintuitive. But the skills that I learned there were things like building financial models, and being able to build a financial model is a very good way to break down a busin…”
Grady: Early SaaS was a business model shift, not a UX revolution
“If you look at the last decade or so of software, the transition has been from on-premise to SaaS or on-premise to cloud, and that's been a wonderfully impactful transition, but at a very fundamental level, it's been a transition in the business model, not a t…”
Grady: Next software wave will be driven by design-data feedback loops
“Now, I think the next generation of great software will actually embrace what the cloud enables you to do, and it won't be a business model transition. It'll be a user experience transition. And specifically, I think for that next generation, the companies tha…”
Grady: Data will be the primary source of software moats
“In general, data will fuel great digital experiences. It is likely to be the primary source of moats, and it should be absolutely top of mind for every founder going into a software business of any kind.”
Grady: Rejects Elon Musk's existential fears about artificial intelligence
“My Personal view is it's one of these things that the more we know, the more we realize we don't know, and that there is some magic in being human that we will never be able to replicate. And so, I personally do not have the Elon Musk fears of artificial intel…”
Grady: Silicon Valley's share of global innovation has steadily declined for decades
“Silicon Valley's slice of that pie has been decreasing monotonically for the last 40 or 50 years.”
Grady: Market sets the ceiling, but founders determine actual company size
“The market determines how big a company can get. The founder determines how big the company will get.”