The Ledger, every show

“Over the last few years, there have been a lot of tourists, as you know, a lot of tourists mostly on the hedge fund side who've dabbled in private markets and they've gotten burned. Those tourists are out of the market. We don't see them anymore.”

“We estimate that it's not just delivering revenue. I think it's already delivering about fifteen billion of incremental EBIT, EBIT for Meta, right?”

“So maybe there's three to five foundation models in the world. It's not going to be 10. It's not going to be 20.”

“And I don't think it was reported, but like time was not our friend. We had customers like starting to email like, Hey, what's the, what's going to happen to the company. And we had recruiters. I think almost every employee probably got like 10 or 12 recruitin…”

“I mean, this is a real acquisition. We are being acquired by cognition.”

“So I remember we did some analysis of, you know, kind of mixed panels list prices at the time versus our internal costs, and the difference was a factor of a hundred.”

“And so there's this crucible moment in 2016 where Sequoia decided to part ways with the original PM and actually consider shutting down the business entirely.”

“I do expect the IPO markets to open, say back half of this year into next year.”

“At least in the initial stages of AI, where your data and distribution are so important, I think the mag seven will continue to do quite well.”

“It has to. I mean, The level of just pure entrepreneurship, the level of just the founder quality, how smart and aggressive they are. It's just remarkable. And I just don't think that goes away.”

“You have never seen this level of investment because I think if you roll back to 1999, for example, the, you didn't have this mag seven that was throwing off, you know, one hundred and fifty billion of free cash flow and you can go invest gobs and gobs of mone…”

“When Scott, when I talked to Scott, it was just like, Hey, this kind of makes sense. Like there was other companies. That were interested. There was actually VCs that wanted to invest. But Scott, as a person with Russell, and then I was with Graham just talkin…”

“Some of our partner partners have already started bringing in seven figure deals even without even trying the product.”

“They had tried a bunch of other tools out there and, you know, they were fine, but like they didn't ask, actually answer the key question that they wanted to answer, which was, Hey, how does this particular behavior, you know, seeing errors, In your speech rec…”

“So ten million events, you know, fully utilized at the time. That would have cost us there's ten million events a month, to be clear. That would have cost us 20 dollars a month for a fully utilized account.”

“And so like, you know, the vast majority of our leads in the early days came from existing Xpanel customers.”

“We actually end up with no churn, which was incredible on the part of our customer success team at the time, in particular, the relationship that they'd built, the communication that they came up with to, you know, really, you know, we sent a very, very heartf…”

“As a customer in 2016 for 20,000 dollars a month, and they were sending yeah, not Douyin, not the TikTok equivalent, because that was too big, but like they had a couple of other apps that were quite large in China, and they became one of our largest customers…”

“Now we've been in business now, 15 years. We've had one down year over that 15 year timeframe.”

“One thing that we got wrong is a lot of things return back to pre-COVID. Humans don't really change that much or they change more slowly. And so e-commerce really returned back to the pre-COVID trend line.”

“And so I do think the crossover market is getting more attractive and it's getting more attractive. It's just one tourist exit and two as the IPO markets open up again.”

“I think closer to 20 to 25% would be more comfortable because then that gives us an opportunity to add. I think If we are focused primarily on the public markets, let's say if we had 50% of the portfolio private, that would feel too illiquid to me. So 20 to 25…”

“The history of venture PE firms launching public funds has not been a good one.”

“I think there is going to be massive disruption, for example, in call centers, and I don't think that's going to take a lot of time.”

“If I look at most software companies, you're probably Two thirds kind of US Canada in terms of revenue contribution and then one third everything else.”

“I think one of the things that we've seen in India is that that brutal level of competition that you saw actually in the U S right. So you saw in the U S in the zero interest rate environment that has subsided in India as well. And so that's allowed companies …”

“We actually looked at each other's roadmaps, like product roadmaps and the Devon team was actually looking to build an ID and our team was actually looking to build a remote agent.”

“They're not machine learning researchers. In fact, they were just using the Google Voice API to do the speech recognition”

“I think I want to say when I joined, there was, you know, between 10 and 20 K of ARR. And so not zero, you know, not a lot, but not zero.”

“I would say it wasn't until, like, our Series C, maybe, that we actually got a pitch that kind of resonated, and it ended up being, like, a very technical pitch, where we talked about, like, complex distributed joins, and I would draw, like, architecture diagr…”

“A million ARR in 2014. At the end of 2015, we were at like four and a half or so.”

“The year ended up being great. We ended up over 13. Million in AR.”

“We're doing over 300 now.”

“Canva, which you mentioned, has raised prices on its enterprise plan by three X.”

“And then at events like our holiday party where he makes a speech every year, he makes it a point to remember every single person within all of Sequoia who had a baby that year and the name of their child. He memorizes it, no cards.”

“They had gone through YC. They were actually doing a text by voice company called Sonalite. And so they were trying to kind of do Siri before Siri's really a thing. And they were doing it for Android. And, you know, I'll go into that story a little bit more, b…”