LPs

“What's kind of crazy about VC is that you don't really know until fund four. Why is that? Because you typically are raising in two, three year increments. So you don't really know. You don't really have DPI until let's say fund three. So you don't know. You do…”

“So I think DPI is important. And DPI is kind of like ground truth. Like it's an equalizer. You could be the worst marketer in the world, but eventually like your DPI will catch up. Right? So it is a great equalizer is the most empirical fact, but it is a highl…”

“Like all of those are implications that I think actually when venture firms don't consider and they just raise more money and then figure it out as they go, like are bad for LPs and bad for founders and thus bad for those firms.”

“VC has real metrics. Like we have numbers on a page that we're showing to our LPs that we are accountable for. And obviously, you know, sometimes those investing cycles can be long. So sometimes it takes a little bit of time for the numbers to really be clear,…”

“Most of the LPs that are backing this segment, the venture capital segment, know that the real returns come from early stage and later stage is great, but it's a different, it's closer to their buyout category than it is to their what they call venture capital…”

“Carta actually just put out a report, I covered it in Sorcery, that LPs are committing less to the category, about 50% are not going to be allocating to venture anymore.”

“The thing that we measure is being a net liquidity provider to our LPs. So we believe in alignment of interests, and we think about founders first, then LPs, then Sequoia, then our team, and then ourselves. And when you do that, we actually measure how much we…”

“So when COVID happened, We were the first firm to go to the LPs, and we wrote down our portfolio by 40% proactively for no other reason than saying this is not real.”