Greylock

“This is one of these things we manufacture, like how wonderful it is. Benchmark has a flat partnership. I mean, who cares, right? It's not disciplined. It's optimized to make the most money.”

“He used to teach at Greylock. You couldn't stop referencing a founder until you hit a negative reference. So you would know you had exhausted the reference. When you finally hit a negative reference.”

“The fund multiple is 18 X. Greylock, who did the series A is sitting on an 11 X fund. They did the series A out of a six hundred million dollar fund. KP, which did the series B is sitting on a 10 X fund out of a seven hundred million dollar fund, which is just…”

“A lot of the original VCs who built the firms originally back in the fifties, sixties, seventies were actually operators, right? So Tom Perkins and Gene Kleiner had been operators, Don Valentine, Pierre Lamont had been operators the founders of Greylock had be…”

“Greylock investment in Airbnb, which I led the series A of, had that similar characteristics of just bleeding money, and then later being the amazing business we see today.”

“Speaking for Greylock, you know, when Greylock invested at Facebook at a five hundred million pre-money valuation, literally all of the companion VC firms were, oh, that's crazy, this college website, Greylock's demonstrating that it's past, past time, et cete…”

“And if we don't like the answers to those questions, it doesn't matter if the company's gone zero to twenty million in six months, we're not going to invest.”

“On the other hand, we do think there are some applications where you need to own the model because the model needs to be tied to the application. Whether it's a personal agent, as an example, you referenced inflection. And for those, we actually do believe mon…”

“I think we're going to see hybrid pricing models. Where you're going to layer on to seats the type of work that you're doing for the end user, and you're going to monetize that separately, and that will allow these companies to continue growing inside accounts…”

“Now, why has there not been a new deep horizontal system of record SaaS company built over the last five or six years? I can't think of one.”

“And I would argue in 10 years, sales reps won't even know what the Salesforce UI looks like because the interface to the underlying system of record has changed.”

“For series A, based on what we're saying, again, for that kind of cohort of companies, If you have a little bit of product market fit, again, we're seeing pricing between 80 and maybe a 152 hundred post on the high end.”

“So when you find one of those teams, I really don't believe you should be passing on price in those ranges. Because whether you do it at 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, if that company goes on to get to a hundred million plus of ARR with high growth, you're going to be ve…”

“We backed a team coming out of NetApp, where they had previously built and scaled a business and they sold it to NetApp for half a billion dollars, and they're building a new cybersecurity company called Upwind that's off to the races, and we led a really larg…”

“For us, you know, we invest, you know, we're investing in our 17th fund. It's a billion dollar pool of capital. We are more ownership sensitive than price sensitive within a range, and so the lens we take on our kind of core early stage positions is how many o…”

“In this case, we got to know these people when they were still full-time employees elsewhere, and we're helping them before the company even existed, and that actually, I think something like 80% of our investments, they're of that flavor, where we met the per…”

“I think it's total bullshit.”

“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.”

“And so, as I said, it's not uncommon for us to start with a five million dollar position. It yields a 70, seventy, five hundred million dollar position.”

“Reserves aren't just for when things are going great. It's also for when like companies hit an air pocket. And many of the great companies we've been a part of have been Have hit those air pockets and we've had to step up and we have gladly done that and let i…”

“We were fortunate at Greylock to initiate a company called Abnormal Security, which recently announced they've crossed a hundred million of ARR growing north of a hundred percent.”

“Markets have gravity. And I don't think even the best founder can overcome a market that has the wrong dynamics when it's too late.”

“I think we are more likely to do it if we think the general zip code is good, right? So, like, if you're in a good zip code, but the street you've picked to build your house on is a bad street, like that we're more willing to get behind because we're like, hey…”

“Our biggest mistakes where we have not, you know, pursued the investment has been where we've met someone truly iconic and we did not like the idea. And by the way, Harry, often we're right. Often two years later, the founder is working on something different,…”

“I think most young investors make a big mistake, which is they think too about too much about themselves and not enough about the firm.”

“If you can start with a better focused model and then very quickly move up the stack into the application layer, it's actually a very good strategy.”

“I would say in my experience, it's not correlated. Like I have backed great founders who did 12 references on me and I've backed great founders who did zero references on me. And so for what it's worth in my data set, it hasn't been correlated”

“Like one of Greylock's portfolio companies, Cresta, did a study of which people in the customer service were most benefited by early AI, and it was the entry level people. It was the people coming in, right, and learning the job much more quickly.”

“Without question, Ethereum. I, you weren't expecting that. I can see, you know, what, well, Ethereum, I mean, I remember I was at Greylock. And the ICO had just happened, I believe, or just closed. And I was reading more about what's possible with smart contra…”

“So, like, I'm part of the reason why Greylock didn't invest in Magic Leap and other things because I go, look, this is really amazing technology, but I just don't see it coming together as the new tech platform yet.”

“What you want is some people going, you guys are out of your minds, and some people going, I see it. You want a polarized reaction.”

“And we manage money for the partners of founding partner of Excel and Greylock. So I knew that it was tough to get into those funds because I had it in and it still wasn't like”

“What we really wanted to do was because for us, like, time was of the essence, like, we wanted to ship very quickly and still kind of build mindshare in this space, we just kept the fundraising process very efficient. I think we basically did it in, like, a we…”

“You also just announced just last month a 8.5 million dollar seed round. Led by our friends at Greylock.”

“We went out to Greylock to convince them to invest in custom made, which they said they would if we moved out to California and worked for the CEO that they were going to place into the business.”

“The worst thing is you launch a product and no one cares or notices. And if you had sales reps complain or customers file bugs against it, then two things. One, you're releasing while you're so embarrassed, a la your role, and B, people only complain when they…”

“If you only have five barrels, you can only do five things simultaneously, right? And so as you're hiring people, just keep an eye out for who those barrels are. And when you find one, do everything in your power to keep them engaged, throw more responsibility…”

“We then went pitch Greylock on Kayak, and Greylock turned us down”

“Greylock was our only VC investors, and they only invested after we'd already been profitable.”

“That being said, the investment criteria that I apply is, would I give this person the money and walk away and say, Five years from now, how did it go? Because it's about the entrepreneur's journey, not yours, not I, as an entrepreneur, can make this successfu…”

“I believe that the first 150 hires will make or break your business. They are your cultural co-founders, and it's up to you, the founder, to get everyone right.”

“I almost left the firm in 2003.”

“The business was becoming very specialized and much more focused, and so I was pushing to say, we need to have people that have expertise in a domain, and as a result, if you're going to narrow down your domain focus, we need to have to give them the freedom t…”

“Facebook was very controversial, both internally and externally at Greylock when it was announced, because we invested at a five hundred million plus pre and wrote one of the biggest Checks that Gerlach had ever written at that time, and that was considered in…”

“So I do think that you need to have price discipline, and so you need to think about, does this have the ability to run to a huge outcome? Does this Show the potential to be a winner takes most or winner takes all kind of business. If that's the case, and you …”

“Be really careful that you get too wrapped up on the wedding because it's a long-term marriage.”

“The reality is, at Greylock, if you do your work, you can get most deals through the partnership if you really believe in it, and the way we are. You'll get challenged, but if you do the work, and you push, and you believe in it, most of the cases, and the vas…”

“The most powerful moment is when the partnership gives the conditional yes. And when the partner who owns the deal goes away and thinks about it, when they come back in those cases, when they come back and they go, you know what? I took the feedback. I did som…”

“But I would say on average, on basis, someone who is new to the partnership on a relative basis has an incredible amount of power to say things. And so we really work as a team where we empower every partner to say what they mean, do what they say, and to own …”

“And the partners who are senior, one of their biggest goals is to get out of the way, to become obsolete, because that is the definition of success for the next generation, and it'll be the definition of success for Greylock in the long run.”

“I mean, we've had folks fail because they didn't understand how to navigate the dialectic between team and individual. Usually more too individual in the sense of like running over people or not listening to feedback or not learning. That's something that I th…”

“I tend to start with the heart, which is, I have to, like, sort of fall in love with the idea, or fall in love with the founder, or some combination of that, and what it could be. Then you go to the head, and you do all your work, and you crunch all the number…”

“The two things you do control are what journeys you go on and who you go on them with. So make sure that the journeys you go on are ones that you really want to be on through the bad times and the good times, whether it works out or not, that you don't say, oh…”

“I came in early on, like I said, believing that founder-friendly meant you backed the founder, whatever they said you did and whatever they said you backed. And what I learned is that's not always the case, that you need to help founders be better. You need to…”

“I looked at Baidu at fourteen million pre. And because we had this rule of thumb that said we had to be boots on the ground all the time at that time, it was that narrow a definition again back in those days, I was told that I was going to be going to China ev…”

“We sat at the back of the bus each time on every stop on this tour through China, and we just mind melded. It was great. We got along so well. We were fast friends, and that led to the investment in LinkedIn and me inviting him to come to Greylock”

“To date, Linda has raised over fifty million dollars with Common Room, from the likes of Danny Reimer at Index, Sarah Grew at Greylock, Dylan Field at Figma, Dick Costolo, and of course, TwentyVC Fund.”

“And so, for example, some of the things that I do within kind of the venture partnership is I will sometimes say, okay, because by the way, you always have to second guess yourself on these things. I go, all right, this is something that's super secret that th…”

“David turned to me and said, look, every venture capitalist Has to have a deal that they cratered, and it is a disastrous amount of work, and that doesn't work in order to learn, and Airbnb can be yours.”

“And to give you an example, when we were talking to Kevin Systrom about investing in Instagram, and they were 13 employees, and they said, well, what's their major pain point in terms of how they operated? We said, okay, great. Because we have this network of …”