The Ledger
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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: 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: 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: 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…”
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…”
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.”
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: 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'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: 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: 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: 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.”
Grady: Sequoia's 50-year relevance stems from an underdog desperation
“One of the things that has allowed us to remain relevant for 50 plus years now is this sort of underdog mentality and the sense of desperation and the sense that tomorrow is not our birthright.”
Grady: Investors err by starting diligence without a defined thesis
“One mistake people make is they sort of launch into diligence on something before they really have figured out what they want to diligence.”
Grady: Data signals work far better for growth investing than early stage
“It's a lot better for growth than it is for early. It's a lot harder to get those signals out early, which is why we have the ARC program.”
Grady: Mid-career investors make the best venture capital pickers
“A lot of times the sort of mid-career investors can be the best because they have both the right attitude and the right experience.”
Grady: Entrepreneurship is the least zero-sum activity in business
“Within the world of business, it seems like there are a lot of areas that are somewhat zero sum and entrepreneurship and founding companies is kind of at the opposite end of that spectrum, where it is the least zero sum thing imaginable, meaning you have a ver…”
Grady: Data's core bottleneck is the last-mile human delivery problem
“I actually think the challenge with data has rarely been the processing power or the frameworks through which it's analyzed. I think the challenge with data has been the last mile problem. And what I mean by that is basically just connecting it to human beings…”
Grady: Tech companies must build locally rather than imposing US models
“I think we can try to take what works in the U.S. And impose it upon other countries, but it's much, much, much better to start in those other countries and grow from the ground up, truly appreciating all the cultural nuances that might not be obvious from the…”