Pat Grady
Co-Steward & Partner, Sequoia Capital. On 1 show, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorexecutive@gradypb ↗sequoiacap.com ↗
Pat Grady joined Sequoia Capital in 2007, where he long led its growth investing practice and was appointed co-steward of the firm. He is known for leading investments in enterprise software and technology companies including Snowflake, ServiceNow, Zoom, and HubSpot.
1shows
3appearances
74statements
10resolved
8supported
1contradicted
80%fully supported
178said about them ↓ Everything Pat Grady said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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.”
The other half of the tape: Pat Grady's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 170 times in 55 episodes across the shows. 8 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 133Everett Randle 8Brian Halligan 8Elias Torres 3David Cahn 3Adam D'Augelli 3Saam Motamedi 2Shaun Maguire 1
Statements about Pat Grady, by other people (8)
Cahn: Generating $1B+ Gains Is the Only Definition of Success in VC
“There is a definition of success in this business. You're either a slugger or you are not. If you are generating billion dollar gains, you are a slugger. Doug Leone is a slugger. Pat Grady is a slugger. And Jurita is a slugger, right? So you either are sluggin…”
Swisher: Pat Grady's ability to win Series B deals is unmatched
“And I think Pat Grady's ability to pick Series B's is like pretty unmatched. Pick and win Series Bs. He's very, very good, and I think Sequoia is very good at that.”
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.”
Operating experience improves board governance but not deal picking, says Sarah Tavel
“But I think that most operating experience you know, the experience that you get as an executive, as a founder, as a product leader in a company, I think that experience is really timeless. You know, because what you're learning is how to hire great leaders, h…”
Pat Grady: The value of operational experience in VC decays rapidly
“Pat Grady said to me that never has the rate of decay on operational experience been greater.”
Maguire names Sequoia's top deal pickers by sector
“Like if it's a SAS company, Pat Grady, if it's, you have to read someone, you only get like 10 minutes to read the person, then it's Doug Leone. If it's a, like a biotech company, it's definitely Ruloff. If it's an operationally heavy company, it's Alfred. If …”
Stebbings: Top VCs prioritize upside maximization over downside risk
“When I think about Brian Singerman and Pat Grady, They're not worried at all about it going to zero, but they are very worried about upside maximization, and I think you get that uncapped upside lack of fear of downside through immense success.”
Stebbings: Uses "What Would Sequoia's Pat Grady Do?" as Decision Framework
“Think of someone who you deeply respect and admire and you want their life. For me, it's Pat Grady at Sequoia. Three reasons. Great father, great investor, Great husband. And whenever I'm faced with a tough decision, I ask, what would Pat do in this case? And …”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 170
2026 34 mentions in 9 episodes 4 per episode
- Inside Sequoia's Investment Committee | How the SpaceX & Citadel Deals Went Down | Julien Bek
- Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg: How to Make Mega Deals | Lessons from Rabois, Halligan & Grady · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Insights from Coatue's Growth Investor Lucas Swisher · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- The Early Days of Anthropic & How 21 of 22 VCs Rejected It | The Four Bottlenecks in AI | Anj Midha · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Why Margins Don't Matter for Early-Stage Startups | Gili Raanan · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- OpenAI Buys TBPN & Their Management Team Reboot | Mercor Hack & Why Now is the Time for Cyber · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: Raising $400M for 20VC: Fundraising Lessons | Getting Marc Benioff Through 53 Cold Emails: How to Master Cold Outbound | 7 Lessons from 101 Decacorn Founders with Harry Stebbings (Simon Squibb Edition)
- OpenAI vs Anthropic vs Open-Source | Token Maxing, AI Hangovers & The Coming ROI Reckoning · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 32 mentions in 13 episodes 2 per episode
- Benchmark's GP, Everett Randle on Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Elias Torres, Co-Founder and CEO @ Agency: What No One Tells You About Selling Your Company · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Matt Fitzpatrick: Who Wins the Data Labelling Race & Why Al Needs Forward-Deployed Engineers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Sequoia Partner, David Cahn on Who Wins in AI, Defence & The New $0–$100M Playbook · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Michael Burry Shorts NVIDIA and Palantir & Has Defensibility Died in a World of AI? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Yamini Rangan, CEO @ HubSpot: How HubSpot Competes Against Salesforce · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- a16z's David George on the Most Controversial Bet at a16z & Do Margins and Revenue Matter in AI? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- BVP Partner, Byron Deeter: The Future of Venture - Why Chanel vs Walmart is BS · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 5 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 56 mentions in 9 episodes 6 per episode
- David Cahn: Why Servers, Steel and Power Are the Pillars Powering the Future of AI | E1186 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Brian Halligan: Leadership Lessons Scaling Hubspot to $28BN | E1103 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Saam Motamedi: Why Series B Won’t Make Money & Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | E1177 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Akshay Kothari: How Notion Has More Money Than Ever & Why Startup Fundraising is Broken | E1203 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Eric Vishria: Where is the Value in AI - Chips, Models or Apps? | E1206 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jeff Wang: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta|E1212 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Shaun Maguire: Why Iran is the World's Greatest Evil & Trump is the Only Hope for Peace | E1189 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Laela Sturdy: Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund | E1190 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 8 mentions in 6 episodes 1 per episode
- Sheel Mohnot: How I Got Married in the Metaverse; Founder vs Product vs Market | E1035 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Clem Delangue: The Ultimate Guide to Investing in AI; Elon's Threat to Sue OpenAI | E1013 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Chris Degnan: Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think | E1080 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Beezer Clarkson: Are LPs Open for Business & Why Do LP Incentive Mechanisms Need to Change? | E1073 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Miles Grimshaw: The 5 Pillars of Venture Capital & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strategy | E1061 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Sarah Guo: On Her New $101M Fund; How AI Impacts Inequality; AI Startups vs Incumbents | E1007 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 7 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC Exclusive: Sequoia's Luciana Lixandru Unveils Sequoia's New 8 Week Accelerator, Arc | Biggest Takeaways from Working with Doug Leone and Roelof Botha | The Journey From a Small Town In Romania to Partner @ Sequoia
- Semil Shah: Lessons Learned Scaling from a $1M to a $50M Fund | 20VC #951 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Kyle Harrison: Why 75% of Active Investors Will Disappear in the Next Few Years | 20VC #940 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- HubSpot Founder Dharmesh Shah: The Ultimate Guide to Company Culture | E896 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20 Sales: How To Build Sales Teams with a Product-Led-Growth GTM, What is a Sales Hiring Scorecard and How To Construct Yours & How To Structure the Onboarding Process for all New Sales Hires with Dannie Herzberg, Partner @ Sequoia Capital
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: Sequoia's Doug Leone on What Has Been Instrumental To Scaling Sequoia Over Generations, How Sequoia Think About International Expansion and What They Learned From China and India & Why When You Lose Pre-Seed You Become Private Equity
- 20VC: Okta CEO Todd McKinnon on How To Approach Effective Decision-Making in Leadership, When Is The Right Time To Hire Recruiters and Heads of People, Balancing the Expectations of Wall St with Long Term Vision and What Truly Successful Board Management
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Sequoia's Roelof Botha on His Biggest Lessons Working Alongside Don Valentine, Mike Moritz and Doug Leone, Leading Sequoia's US Business and What Sequoia Do To Retain Their Edge at the Top & The Crucible Moments That Define Startup Success
- 20VC: Sequoia's Ravi Gupta on His Lessons From The Hyper-Growth of Instacart, The Key Question To Ask When Building or Evaluating Teams & The Importance of Investing In and Detecting Slopes Rather Than Intercepts
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 12 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: Why Self-Driving Is Still Under-Hyped in The Medium To Long Term, What Will The Ownership Mechanism Be Both In Physical Assets & Data and How To Assemble A World Class Exec Team As A Young Founder with Alex Rodrigues, Founder & CEO @ Embark
- 20VC: How To Think Through Portfolio Construction and The Business Model of VC, Why You Cannot Grow Ownership In Your Best Companies Over Time & How To Make The Space for Serendipity To Strike in VC with Adam D'Augelli, Partner @ True Ventures
- 20VC: Sequoia's Mike Vernal on His Biggest Lessons From 8 Years of Hyper-Growth at Facebook, Why The Strength of Data Moats Is Over-Rated Today and The Challenge of "Overthinking Investments" In Venture
- 20VC: Okta Founder Frederic Kerrest on Why You Want To Be A Monopolist In A Small Market, The Biggest Challenges in Scaling Okta To IPO and Being a16z's First Ever Fund Check
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Benchmark's Sarah Tavel on Why Investing Success Lies In Small Markets Adjacent To Very Large Ones, Why You Have To Be Judicious On When To Pay Up vs Be More Price Sensitive & Why Crypto Investing Is Like The Early Days of AdTech Investing
- 20VC: The 4 Key Skills All VCs Need To Be Successful, How To Build, Maintain and Scale Your Network in VC and What is The Process Through Which VCs Build Conviction in Opportunities with Max Motschwiller, General Partner @ Meritech Capital
- 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: How To Upscale Management Teams Effectively, When Should The CEO Play The Role of "Lifeguard" & What Role Does The Board Play In The Team Upscaling with Matt Straz, Founder & CEO @ Namely
- 20VC: Bessemer's Jeremy Levine on Why We Are In A Fallow Period For Consumer, Why It Is Bogus That Operational VCs Can Add More Value & 2 Golden Rules To Always Tell Entrepreneurs Pre-Investment
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Pat's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Steward & Partner, Sequoia Capital | 3 | 74 | 80% 8/10 | full record on 20VC → |