Sequoia Capital

“Starting with the why, I think it's a deep and secure need to remain relevant and prove to yourself that you're not getting old and you're not going to be out of date. I mean, if I look back on my career each time I remade myself, it wasn't really done out of …”

“I told one of my partners just an hour ago that if nine months from now, which is the one year since I return, I feel just as irrelevant. I'm going to take myself out.”

“I'm quite miserable at Sequoia right now, not because of what anybody else does, because I feel that three months into it, I'm really good for nothing.”

“No, it felt like an overwhelming challenge that I didn't know how to conquer, and I felt that until the day I stopped working at 65.”

“I remember when I was made a partner at Sequoia, I was down to zero money. I actually, I have never said that to anybody, but there was a time in my first month where I became a partner that I was homeless. I slept in my car for a week. I showered at 3000 Sand…”

“It turned out the rule of step down, Pat and Alfred took over. They weren't the kings I chose, and 30 days into it, they came to my house, and they said, would you like to come back?”

“I came back from vacation over the weekend. I saw a memo. I won't tell you the name of a startup company that wants to raise money without anything at ten billion pre.”

“One of them is, would I put my kids money into it? Second, if I only make 20 investments in my life, Is this one of the 20? Third, can I return the whole fund with this investment? And if I don't pass those three, I'm not gonna make the investment.”

“Yeah, it's SpaceX. Now, we haven't cashed out yet or whatever, but, you know, there's a shot of a twenty billion dollar gain or more, and so he ruined it for all of us.”

“And you know, we own 20% of NVIDIA. Think about that. I mean, you know, we own 10% of Google. And there's many others, you know. Apple. Are you kidding me? We were the first investor of Apple, in Apple. Cisco. We own a quarter of Cisco systems.”

“If they have to rely on me to help shape the product 10, 20%, we're in big trouble.”

“No one that's establishing great is going to join you as a startup. That means you have to have an eye for these up and comer people in sales and marketing, because the made people are going to play it a little safer.”

“And what the trick is, is to retain that founder in a company forever if you can, and for as long as possible. Because once you lose that founder, you do lose the soul of the company.”

“We closed the investment in Instagram on a Thursday, and he sold it on a Sunday. Great IR, but we didn't make any money, really.”

“70% of our capital comes from nonprofits, charities, so I never thought of it as a game.”

“We sold our Cisco shares for cash for the total gain of ninety million. We owned a quarter of Cisco systems.”

“How many of distributions I push for at ServiceNow? I left a 10 Xer on a table.”

“You know, I really haven't lost an investment in 30 years in Silicon Valley. People have beaten me because of price, but I haven't lost otherwise.”

“A term sheet is not worth the paper it's written on, but once you sign it, Both sides, I think you have to honor it. You know, many times we're out, we're, I'm on the board of a company, and we signed a term sheet with an investor, and then three days later, s…”

“Out of 10 venture folks, and I've said this, and I've taken Shifford, maybe 30% are incompetent. They don't know what they're doing. Another 40% I call them no ups, no damage, no anything. They nod, you know, they nod with a group and maybe 30% of fewer, maybe…”

“Mike had the ability to dream broadly in ways that I've never seen before. He could answer the question better than anybody I've ever known. What if everything goes right? Not, oh, we're hedges and that, no, what if everything goes right? What can this busines…”

“Constantine Bueller my partner Helped us lead the investment in Citadel Securities, Ken Griffin's company. They had never taken outside capital. The reason we were able to invest is Constantine built a relationship with Ken since he was a student. He had been …”

“Yeah, we call that revisiting our priors. It's very important that you update your priors if the environment's changed, and I think it came from the realization that if AI is going to be so transformative, we are just on the foothill of this incredible exponen…”

“Recently we backed a company called Ineffable here in the UK with a large seed round”

“In, in hardware now, for instance, which is like the new thing, right, that's consensus physical AI the time to get validation is just a lot longer, and so you have to invest early, hoping that those companies can get through those phases of experimentation an…”

“In your career, you can make 20 investments. Some people do more than that. That's just not my style. I partner with two, three founders a year, and so in my career, I can expect to do basically be on the board of 20 companies. I'm not going to short myself. I…”

“If you look at Relit we met with 17 public company CFOs since the start of the year. Some of them have become customers.”

“Time and time again, if I have to pick, I'll pick Dean Meyer, my partner who sits in Tel Aviv, but basically lives on plane. He's just a phenomenal human being. He was a professional football player for multiple years. He, so he has the competitive juices of m…”

“That one's easy. Luciana Alessandro my partner who actually Brought me into Sequoia. We worked together at Excel before, so I've worked with Luciana for most of my career now. She, you know, when I met her, she had just invested in Deliveroo then she did Frame…”

“Credits to Sean when he brought in the SpaceX investment, We vote on companies. I think someone voted a one. Yeah. I've seen fours, of course. I've seen threes. Never seen a two. I didn't even know we could do one. I didn't even know it was on the scale. But w…”

“As we're always reminded, the best investments in all the funds are always the companies where the sponsor had the highest conviction. That's just the one thing that's been so that happened time and time again across funds.”

“First, I've only seen that happen a handful of times, and I think that's probably giving us too much credit.”

“It sounds crazy, but I told you we're now 12 people in the early team. About the same number in the growth team.”

“After the discussion, everyone votes, and the sponsor is equipped to make the decision they want with that information. So you can still do it? You can still do it.”

“First, if everyone's a seven or eight, Quite dangerous. Because look, founders know what we want to hear. The best founders are able to you know, retrofit the narrative that they think is going to land with investors, and that can be dangerous. So in, in those…”

“I remember this year is the first year I uncovered a fraudulent founder”

“If you look at founders you like versus founders who make money as a two by two matrix your job is to figure out in which part of the quadrant we make money. And he used to tell that to many of our partners. And it's not because you don't like the founder that…”

“I had lunch with Anton Ossica from Lovable before he founded the company, and I just didn't see it. And I'll tell you one thing that I learned from that is I didn't come to the meeting with a plan. I just had lunch with him, and it was three of us and him, and…”

“If they're French or German you add one or two points. If they're Americans, usually you want to retract Act one or two points on the other hand.”

“You want to ask exceptional people if someone is exceptional, not good enough people, and that's often the problem with references.”

“Do not mistake an outlier operator for an outlier founder.”

“His argument is that judgment is actually more important than IQ, and PQ is more important than EQ.”

“It's funny you say that, because in the case of, really, we had the board meeting recently, and they have this thing they call Project Iowa, and it's basically appealing to companies outside of tech, And we, this is the fastest growing segment in the business,…”

“So the prediction was that the next trillion dollar company will be a software company that masquerades as a service business. It's very important the masquerading because they cannot be a service company.”

“I will not invest in one of those companies. For the following reason. I think you can make money in that business. The reality is I've only seen it in my career. The best companies are able to concentrate talent and you just not going to get frontier talent w…”

“Probably legal. I think there's, you know, there's just so many me too's in this category. Whereas I think that the winner is already in existence. I'm obviously biased, but I think Harvey is very well positioned because they have the widest distribution. And …”

“It's probably cursor. One, they're in one of the most important markets. But second, where there was a lot of chatter around AI wrappers, they were the first company to really understand that you could post train models and actually be, go deeper into the stac…”

“So I never lost a deal an investment in my time at Sequoia, but I've lost investments before.”

“Oh you know what, the funny thing is people love to say Sequoia believes X and Y, but we actually have very different opinions. There's no house view on AI.”

“Speaking of high IP businesses, literally, like, three weeks ago, Etched raised at ten billion. Today, they've announced they've raised seven hundred million at twenty-one billion from Jane Street, Kleiner, Sequoia, Andreessen.”

“Valar Atomics triples to six billion dollar prices Sequoia bets on nuclear for AI. It's a three-year-old small modular reactor company raised at two billion, now Sequoia leading around at six.”

“Last week we had a call with my 75 co-investors in my new company, QXO. So my wife and I are putting in nine hundred million dollars and then Sequoia And a few dozen friends and family, like really friends and family, like my sister and my brother and my niece…”

“In fact, when Sequoia launched their most recent fund, they said, I guess we're now Presteed investors, too.”

“Four hundred million at a 3.8 billion dollar valuation led by Index, Kleiner, Sequoia, Dimension.”

“Senra Systems officially closed our Series B fundraising for sixty-five million dollars. We had Lower Carbon, Interlagos leading the round with a lot of our existing investors coming into the mix, such as Sequoia, Founders Fund, General Catalyst Andreessen Hor…”

“I think that richer investors make better investors, and you're like, Sequoia are focused on upside maximization. How big could this be? They are not fearful of LPs coming back for their next fund. They're not fearful of deployment speed compressing, so, you k…”

“The amount of great operators who you're like, well, they wouldn't be, I'm so, I don't mean this rudely, dumb or naive enough to just join a company because of a VC. Do just join a company because of a VC. They'll go, oh, it's a Sequoia-backed company, oh, it'…”

“There was so much momentum, I'm, you know, I, he answered my email, we got along well, I met the co-founder the next day, and I was like, you know what, fuck it. Dropped out, sent him a screenshot, and he was like, alright, you have a meeting with the Sequoia …”

“So generally, yes. I mean, they're the best firm.”

“The first round I raised, Was impossibly hard, and I got caught in between a fight, in a fight in between Peter Thiel and Sequoia, and he had just started Founders Fund, and Sequoia didn't like that, and they were mad at each other, and Peter had said, I'm gon…”