Alfred Lin, partner at Sequoia Capital, explains investment discipline and why company quality outweighs valuation sensitivity in venture capital.
Insight
Sequoia Capital prioritizes an employee's learning slope over their past experience
“At Sequoia, we hire for slope, not intercept. So experience obviously matters, but if you just hire for the experience and their slope is not fast, that's going to become a problem at some point. And so we really, really ask founders to think about what is the…”
Insight
Lin: Startups Can Scale by Making First Orders Profitable via Service
“Or in sales, and here's a company that basically raised ten million dollars, and it probably was undercapitalized, but it really did highlight that you can build a company by having CAC be profitable on the first order, by being focused on customer service, an…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zappos's most valuable customers also had the highest product return rates
“We then did this analysis and this is the type of analysis I really enjoy doing, like, let's take our best customers, and let's take our worst customers, and look at their return rates, and it turned out our best customers at the highest LTVs return the most”
Insight
Lin: Regulate AI applications and consumer deployment, not foundational lab research
“As an example, with the combustion engine, nobody regulated the engine. We regulated what engines can go on the streets, what can go into a plane. We regulated how it was applied. But in a lab, and people were, you know, sort of doing research and trying to ma…”
Opinion
NVIDIA's biggest vulnerability is its singular dependency on CEO Jensen Huang
“They, they've only had one leader in their whole cycle. I worry about what happens when Jensen decides not to be at the head of NVIDIA.”
Insight
Lin: Early Airbnb functioned as a listing service rather than a true marketplace
“Maybe in the early days of Airbnb, I think people forget it was much more of a listing service, and it was less of a marketplace, and if you sort of take the definition of a marketplace, you have to complete the transaction, and you just not only have to compl…”