← Uncapped with Jack Altman
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- [00:00]
A
We've been recording the number that everybody votes on every investment for more than a decade now. Our internal data shows that consensus versus non consensus does not matter at all.
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B
It's just not a factor.
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A
Presence of conviction is what matters. And so if Everybody is a 6, we vote 0 to 10. No. 5. So 6 and above is positive. 4 and below is negative. If everybody's a 6, probably shouldn't make the investment. It's consensus, but nobody has conviction.
- [00:29]
B
Strong yes, strong no is much better.
- [00:31]
A
If three peoples are are nines and three people are one, we should probably make the investment.
- [00:39]
B
All right, guys, thank you very much for doing this. This is my first attempt at a three person podcast and this, this is.
- [00:45]
A
Our first showing together. So.
- [00:48]
B
Yeah. So I apologize if this is a disaster.
- [00:51]
C
It's not going to be a disaster. We're going to ask you questions too.
- [00:53]
B
That's what I want. And then we can edit everything out. This could be a five minute pod with whatever's good.
- [00:57]
C
Love it.
- [00:57]
B
And that'll be fine.
- [00:58]
A
But five minutes might be generous.
- [00:59]
B
That's all right. We'll take what we can get, I guess to start, like, how are you guys? How are you feeling? And like, where's your mindset? Are you, like, do you feel the way you expected to when you first knew this was happening? Like you're a couple weeks settled in, like, what's, what's going on psychologically?
- [01:15]
C
I mean, we just came out of a meeting where we both said we're more excited than ever before. And so we're, we're excited. And it's part of it is because we're, we get to help lead co. Lead Sequoia into the next generation with a great team. And the team that we have is probably one of the best that we've ever had in the history of Sequoia.
- [01:37]
B
Does it feel like heavy or light? Like, does it feel more like you just got to pick up the most fun video game? Or are you like, whoa, I have the weight of something very serious on my shoulders?
- [01:46]
A
I think it's a little bit of both. You know, I think for both Alfred and I, the idea of being steward someday was sort of a dream, but not an objective. I mean, it wasn't something that we sought necessarily, but it's an honor to get to continue the legacy that Ruloff and Doug and Jim and everybody else sort of started for us. So I think it's heavy in the sense that we feel a responsibility to make Sequoia great. I think it's also light In a sense that one of the kind of main things that we want to try to do for Sequoia is to kind of get it back to what it's been for most of our 53 year old history, where Alfred and I are doing minimal amounts of administrative work and mostly in the field making investments alongside a team of people like Andrew Reed and Luciano Alexandru and David Kahn and Konstantin Bueller who are amazing at what they do. And our job is really just to enable them as opposed to really manage people.
- [02:46]
B
If you think about like, you know, aspirationally, like, how good could it get? Do you like have in your mind, like things that have to be like, could it get better than it's. Could it get more dominant than it's been? Or is the goal just to like stay where you are?
- [02:58]
A
So actually I'm obviously biased, but I think that if you took you. I took. I think if you took the partners at Sequoia and you stacked ranked them against all of the other partners in our business, I think that our seventh or eighth person is still in the top 10. I think we truly have. I know that's a really obnoxious comment.
- [03:19]
B
I have like a highlight reel of all the other people. I'm just kidding.
- [03:21]
A
But I think we truly have an unbelievably talented set of partners. You do. And I think for that reason you could even take me and Alfred out of the picture and I think Sequoia would be in amazing shape.
- [03:33]
B
Well, it's an interesting thing because these are individuals who could be incredibly successful on their own, obviously. And then you put them on the Sequoia platform, they get all the advantages that you have on top of that.
- [03:42]
A
And our basic job is to get out of their way. Our basic job is to let them.
- [03:46]
C
Run and enable them. That's why we published our Sequoia. It's about the team based approach and it's about the principles that we have laid out that were laid out before us. We've always thought that it's founders first, then LPs, then Sequoia, then the team, then yourself. We've always thought that we're only as good as our next investments and we added a few things. It's just we'll always do the right thing and do it the right way. We're always going to do that. And if we fail at that because we're human, we're going to apologize, fix it and move on. And this place, because we have such talented people as Pat was talking about, we just want to make sure that influence is awarded to people with expertise, not necessarily tenure or form hierarchy.
- [04:31]
B
You guys are really explicit about your language here. When you talk about stewardship and getting out of people's way. And it's very much not CEO language. Like I don't think you guys think of yourselves as like CO CEOs, right?
- [04:44]
A
Let's talk about that. Yeah, so great point. If you are the CEO of an operating business, okay, chances are you are aiming for something like consistency. Right. You want to produce the same widget the same way over and over and over again, or you want to provide the same service at time, the same, in the same way, at the same level of quality over and over and over again. And so I think if you're the CEO of an operating business, one of your objectives is like quality at scale. And quality to some degree is defined as the consistency of the experience.
- [05:16]
B
When you say an operating business, do you mean like something that makes a widget or are you talking about like a technology startup?
- [05:20]
A
I mean almost any other company technology startup, it could be a restaurant, it could be a manufacturing business. I think for most of those businesses it actually makes sense to have a CEO who is making decisions and pushing them down into the organization because you want to ensure that consistency across whatever product or service you're offering. I think our business is dramatically different because in our, we're in the outlier business. Our objective is not consistency. Right. Our objective is to find the two or three or four outliers in any given year who are going to produce the most important companies of tomorrow.
- [05:54]
B
Yep.
- [05:55]
A
Get into business with them and help them realize the maximum version of their dream. And the key word here, the operative word is outlier. Okay. And so in order to partner with outliers, we need to field a team of outliers. You can't field a team of outliers if you're telling them what to do. You can't field a team of outliers if you're managing them. And so our job is to like find these outliers who are crazy competitive, spiky in some direction or another, but also have a heart of gold so that they can actually operate in a team oriented environment and just like set them free and let them go do what they do.
- [06:28]
B
How do you then manage inputs? Because.
- [06:33]
I would think that you do need consistency of inputs, at least in some sense, or maybe you don't, but there's this thing where it's like the outcomes that you're looking for are these crazy, spiky Founders that you partner with. But the inputs like the day to day work, does that have a consistent rhythm, does that get managed? Or do you not even think of it that way?
- [06:52]
C
Again, to Pat's point, inputs for each partner at Sequoia is going to be different because they're different and they're outliers in different ways. So you can have someone who's very, very thematic and their input is going to the whiteboard with founders and thinking about the future and whiteboarding the landscape and figuring out where the white space is and building a company from that. Or you can have someone who is going to just be out there meeting as many founders as possible, trying to be opportunistic. Those are going to be very different inputs.
- [07:25]
B
Totally.
- [07:26]
C
And that's Jim, who loves going to the whiteboard and landscaping things. And that's Doug who loves just dialing people up. Intermediaries or founders, the best, the smartest people he knows and is like, okay, what's going on? What can I learn from this person? Those are very, very different inputs. And if you saw a blank calendar on Doug's.
- [07:49]
Like day, you would be worried, but not for Jim. And if Jim's like calendar is full.
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B
And full of meetings, this is bad. We gotta get him out.
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C
That's probably a bad day for him. And so he's like, okay, I'm like meeting all these companies, but I'm not actually having time to think.
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A
So think about like one way to frame it is freedom within frameworks. Okay, so we do have frameworks that people can use as guidelines so that they're not. So it's not pure chaos. Right? And so there's a framework that is what are the capabilities that you need? And there are five basic steps in the value chain. Sourcing, picking, winning, building and harvesting. And then there's a framework which is what are the values that we expect you to have? And different teams have different values inside of Sequoia. Sequoia itself has the two primary values of performance and teamwork. But there are certain values that we expect people to adhere to. Assuming you're developing the capabilities and assuming that your values are aligned with the values of your team and of our organization, you can operate the business however you want. And so, for example, Alfred mentioned Jim and Doug. We have a partner in Israel named Dean Meyer. Dean has been very explicit about mapping out the talent nodes in Israel and getting to know the most brilliant former operators and the most brilliant academics, researchers, whatever the case might be, and just kind of like mapping those nodes and using that as a leading indicator of where the world is going. Or for example, our partner Charlie, you know, Charlie is much more high volume. You know, he's out there in the market meeting a ton of people, he's going through a bunch of lists, you know, he's doing a bunch of cold, outbounding companies, like much more of a high volume, you know, build the funnel and then work your way through it sort of approach. And so different people have different approaches that are kind of authentic to who they are. And when you put it all together, if we have the right people and if we have the right sort of incentives in place, it tends to work out pretty well in the end.
- [09:38]
B
I feel like in like, you know, in like a startup or an operating company, a lot of times founders, CEOs think about managing senior people to outputs and junior people to inputs, which I think, you know, maybe that makes sense in a startup context. Do you think about that all in like a venture context where you're like, you know, the way that you're going to think about, you know, somebody who's fresh out of school, been in venture for a couple years or whatever. That's a different thing than, you know, a senior partner on the team.
- [10:03]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [10:04]
C
But I think you have to realize in venture the outputs are like 10 years into the future. So you have outputs that look like their outputs, but those can be mirages too. Like markups can be mirages. So we don't really measure that as much as the inputs and what people do. So like sourcing, there's inputs like how many quality companies have you met? Or how many quality companies do you like want to bring to a Monday for, for picking? It's like the quality of your memo. Like what did you get to the first order questions?
- [10:40]
B
Yeah.
- [10:41]
C
Did you answer them? Did you call the right people? It's not about having a long memo, it's about having getting to the right points.
- [10:48]
A
And for the go ahead was. And so. So for the growth team, to make it a little bit tangible.
- [10:57]
Every June we review people based on values. So we have four core values for the team. Aggressive but humble, strong, under scrutiny, high, give a shit, zero bullshit, and demanding and supportive. So every June, Ravi Gupta. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Demanding, supportive came from Ravi.
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B
Good blog.
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A
And so every June we all get reviewed on those values and literally rated with color commentary on like, to what degree does your behavior adhere to these values? Right. Every December we get reviewed on capabilities, Sourcing, picking, winning, harvesting and building. To what degree does your capability in those different areas reflect the level that we want it to be at.
- [11:37]
Values or behaviors are one kind of input. Capabilities are another kind of input. Over time, we expect those inputs to translate into outputs. And if they're not translating into outputs, then we get to go back and inspect and say, okay, well, what's the broken link in the chain? What's going wrong here?
- [11:52]
B
Can we talk just like, pretty brass tacks about each of these? Because, like, yeah, I think for, you know, I'm starting to think about this. You know, we're obviously tiny, but I'm starting to think about, like, how do you measure and care about each of these, you know, aspects of the job? I would just be curious because you guys have done this a lot, know how to do it. So, like, can we start with, like, how do you decide what it looks like on the, like, seeing stuff? So, like, as an example, you know, do you, do you say we want to see every company ever? Do you say we've got, these are our zones that we care about?
- [12:23]
A
Do you have discussion?
- [12:26]
B
Yeah. So like, I'd be curious, like, what is good? Like, forget the individual level for a second. But as Sequoia, I'm like, you guys, and I'm like, reviewing my year. What do I expect to see? You know, if I'm like, of all the deals in 2026, how many do you expect to see?
- [12:40]
C
So because of the Sequoia platform, the partners at Sequoia can see almost any company they want to see. So if you try to see everything and you pass on everything, because most companies will not be successful, because that's the world we work in, entrepreneurship, you have a very high accuracy rate. So is that the point to make to classify a bunch of, you were.
- [13:05]
B
Right 99% of the time because you passed on the whole world.
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C
You passed on the whole world. So that's not really input. That's not a good input. Good sourcing is finding the great companies and figuring out whether they're worth the time to put in more effort to do the due diligence, to then make an investment recommendation.
- [13:24]
B
So can you only know that historically? Like, in other words, can I only judge how my sourcing in 2025 was like by 2026? Or can I know in real time?
- [13:34]
A
We look at true positives, false positives, true negatives, false negatives. So we bucket it into the four quadrants. We keep a running list of what we think is what, you know, we update it as new data emerges so that you can get higher confidence in your ex post assessment of like, did we make this decision correctly? And so we have. We have that as a running thing that we do. And then we look at it about once a quarter when we go into off sites. Yeah, but it's hard because by the time the decision. By the time it is obvious what the right decision is, you've long since forgotten why you made the decision that you made.
- [14:07]
B
Yep.
- [14:07]
A
So in the moment, we also try to really crystallize, like, why are we making the decision that we're making, which could be somebody does a cycle on a company and recommends that we pass, doesn't bring it into a partner meeting, but they actually send out a memo that's just a page and a half. Hey, here's what we learned. And like, here is the rationale for passing. This is interesting enough to do a bunch of work. Let's do the last 5% and just codify that so that when we look back on it six months from now, we remember exactly why we decided to pass.
- [14:34]
C
And then.
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The process by which we do that is rolling. We get more information. It's like updating your priors. You get some information, you make a decision, you get new information, you have to update your priors, and we're constantly doing that. The other part about how do you know that the company is worth looking at? Each business line has specs. And so for the early team, the spec starts with an outlier team. Are these people truly outliers? You can probably put some judgment around that, that you can make early on, even before you work with them. Now, of course, once you start working with them, you truly find out whether they're an outlier or not.
- [15:17]
B
Totally. So basically you're kind of observing this time goes on, you're updating it. Is there a sense of depth versus breadth on this? Because you're not a huge investment team. So it's like if you're look. Would you rather look at, you know, 3,000 companies deeply or is it better to actually have covered 8,000 companies? You know, so we. A little more shallowly.
- [15:38]
A
Yeah, we track. We track coverage and, you know, we track all sorts of different metrics. Our coverage for the growth business tends to be about 70%. And 70% is defined. There's a list of, you know, 30 or 40 other investors that we say, okay, if they make the investment, you know, they look at things similar enough to what we look at that if they make the investment, we probably should have at least seen it. Right.
- [15:59]
C
So.
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A
And we tend to. We tend to see about 70% of the things that other people end up doing 70% is probably about right. Like, I don't think we want to be 100%, because that incremental meeting probably gets into CYA territory as opposed to net multiple money territory.
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20% is probably too low. You know, then we're probably missing a lot of stuff. And so kind of that 70% neighborhood seems about right. We don't track individual metrics for what it's worth.
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C
Mm.
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A
And this is in part because, you know, I.
- [16:29]
B
Because it incentivizes bad behavior.
- [16:31]
A
Exactly. So, you know, 19 years ago, before I was at Sequoias, at Summit Partners. Summit Partners, amazing investment organization. And like I'm learning, does seem like.
- [16:39]
B
A crazy number of great people have come out of there, Right.
- [16:41]
A
Some. Some it is. I would recommend for anybody coming out of undergrad who wants to join investing, go to Summit Partners. Like, amazing training ground.
- [16:47]
B
Yeah. Paid advertisement.
- [16:48]
C
Come to Sequoia first.
- [16:49]
B
Yeah, exactly.
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A
Then right back, go to Summit, crush it, then come to Sequoia.
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But Summit has this really kind of elegant and brilliant system where everything is incented for output. And so the funnel is very granular and individualized. And the problem that you would run into is if you're a crazy competitive 21 year old, as I was, and you were not number one in the call metrics, you'd pull out of your back pocket the three founders who you knew would pick up the phone that you were never going to invest in and call them to pad the metrics. Right. And so there's just, like, weird behavior that ends up occurring. And so we've never had individualized metrics because we don't want people to. We don't want them to think about hitting the metric. We want them to think about the ultimate goal, which is partnering with the most important founders of tomorrow.
- [17:36]
B
Yeah. Which includes seeing many companies and.
- [17:39]
A
And the judgment that you have to use. The judgment that you have to use. The first. The first leading indicator of good investment judgment for a new investor is how they invest their time.
- [17:49]
B
Yeah.
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A
Like, if you can figure out how to invest your time to get to that end goal of partnering with the best founders, chances are you're going to end up being a pretty good investment.
- [17:56]
B
Well, actually, maybe so one more question on seeing. And then we can kind of move sort of down the chain, but on some level, this 70% number, whatever it is, while it's an input to returns, it's itself kind of an output of, like, activities. Like, I can't just wake up and say, okay, I'm going to See companies day, like, that's not the thing I do. So what are you, like, encouraging people to do to be good at seeing the right companies at the right time and maybe like, on the early stage business in particular, I feel like this is harder, like, at growth in some ways. It's like, most by the time it's a B or a C, you kind of could put the whole universe on a spreadsheet. It's all knowable seed. It's not like that.
- [18:34]
C
But I think, you know, every business is difficult for a different reason. For growth, yes, Someone else is invested. So you get to pick off what. Pick those off. And early it's hard because the waterfront is wide. To your point, for us to cover for seed, we probably cover 50 to 60% of what is done by a competitor that we believe we should be tracking. And in venture, we probably do see 60 to 70% because we have the information from seed funds that a seed fund invested in them. So to see that many companies, though, the question then is not, okay, you saw them. It's like there's a notion that Luciana came up, which is false coverage. So to Pat's point about, like, calling your friend and you saw you had a call, we can, like, just go and see a bunch of companies. Because once a demo day for a variety of places and saw a lot of company that doesn't actually get to the point of finding substantive engagement and substantive engagement. So, like, okay, to Pat's point about, like, investing your time, you know, you saw the demo day presentations. They were one minute each. Very efficient use of time. Okay, what are the five companies out of that demo day that you're gonna spend time with? And so you can the decision quality there is actually fairly important. And so that is measurable. So there's a relative list of companies that you went and looked. And so out of that 30 to 100 companies, what were the top five that you thought were worth pursuing? Did you go pursue them? And so those inputs are actually very, very measurable for quality. And we may be wrong, but then we update our priors on, like, okay, why do we miss something that you didn't take a meeting with? And so then the thing about each of these businesses, and like I tell the early team, we have basically three shots because we want to see companies before company formation, if possible. So for that, it's like, okay, are you in the right networks? Are you in OpenAI or anthropic or these people who are about to leave these companies? And are you able to get in touch with them before they leave. Maybe you don't get that shot or you pass for the wrong reason. You can then once they've left and they've gotten momentum, invest at the seed. Only because you poured some heart and soul into meeting those people in the first place. If you didn't make the seed investment, we can make a series A and investments and so that those are all trackable and it is a funnel that you can track and quality sort of ends up rising to the top.
- [21:12]
A
Totally part of what's different about the growth business. Also, you mentioned you can put the whole universe on a spreadsheet. You also know a lot about the companies on that spreadsheet. And so in 2007, when I joined Sequoia, the primary way that you learned about a company was you cold called them and you talked to the founder. Now, the amount of information that our CRM system.
- [21:32]
B
Yeah.
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A
Produces when you just put the name of a company into it is more than the amount of information that we had when we were making a final investment decision 15 years ago.
- [21:40]
B
Right.
- [21:41]
A
So there's an enormous amount of information that you can get. And so one of the failure modes for young investors is to think of their job as. My job is to meet founders. No, your job is to generate net multiple money returns. Meeting founders is one of the things that you can do to do that.
- [21:57]
B
But reading about their company online is another way.
- [21:59]
A
Go spend 15 minutes in our, like our homegrown CRM system with all the data, science signals and everything is fabulous at this point. Go spend some time in that system, beat it up a little bit. You know, don't just meet, you know, whatever company somebody told you are inflecting. Like, go figure out what we know about them before you decide whether it's worth spending 30 minutes of your time.
- [22:20]
B
And what you know about them. That has nothing to do with a meeting some other partner had. It's truly just information from the Internet.
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A
It's information from the Internet, but it's also information from a bunch of other sources, some of which are paid, some of which are proprietary. Like there's data that we create to feed into this system so that we have the most holistic possible view of these companies.
- [22:36]
B
You want to tell us about the proprietary data sources that you have going.
- [22:39]
A
I'll give you an example.
- [22:42]
Imagine you found some great VP of engineering, and you did a favor for that VP of engineering. And now that VP of engineering says, I love Jack. Jack's the best. I do have anything for Jack.
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B
All the Time, Honestly.
- [22:52]
A
Yeah. Well, it wouldn't be crazy if you went back to that VP of engineering and you're like, hey, VP of Engineering, you owe me. Any chance you could tell me, like, who your five smartest and most respected VP of engineering friends are?
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B
I never do that. And I think that might be. But like, I truly never do that. And I just like can't make myself and I think I should.
- [23:08]
A
But imagine if you did that.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And imagine if you started doing that more than 10 years ago.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And imagine if you tracked all the responses for more than a decade.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And imagine if that all lived inside of a CRM system.
- [23:18]
B
Yeah.
- [23:19]
A
That has a talent map of Silicon Valley.
- [23:22]
B
Yeah.
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A
Not just the founders who are about to pop out of a lab, but also like engineer number 37 in some growth stage company. So imagine that you're talking about.
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B
And so what are you asking? You're saying like, who are your five smartest people?
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A
You know something, it's PageRank for people.
- [23:33]
B
Yeah.
- [23:34]
A
It's the same basic thing.
- [23:35]
B
And you have the whole, the whole firm's doing this.
- [23:37]
C
We have the whole talent team doing this. We have all the investors doing this. Yeah.
- [23:41]
A
And we've been doing it. We had a former partner named Brett Record who came up with this idea more than 10 years ago. So we've been doing it for a long time. Yeah.
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B
And it's not that. I mean, it's not like something that you could just like, oh, that's a good idea. I'll just do it. Because it also requires actually helping people.
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A
And that's it. You can't be transactional about it. You have to make sure that people that they're actually kind of feel good about helping us do this.
- [24:03]
B
Yes.
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C
In fact, if you make it transactional, they'll just give whatever response to get you off the phone. So we very much pride ourselves on making sure that we give before we get.
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A
And so, for example, if I hear about some growth stage company that's inflecting, I can go into our system and very quickly get a sense for like what percentile is this engineering team? Because.
- [24:28]
I can't think of a lot of great companies that became billion dollar plus revenue businesses without having a great engineering team at some point. And so that's a pretty helpful signal.
- [24:37]
B
Yeah. Actually this is a little bit of a side tangent. I want to stick with this sort of like the intricacy of venture, but just as like a quick. Eddie, do you find that there are examples where you can invest in something where the engineering team is not great. And you go in and you're like, we can help make it great. And there's so many other things to like that this can become great. Or do you think if it's not great from the beginning, it never turns great.
- [25:00]
C
It's very, very hard to change the DNA of a company. So generally it starts being great in some aspects and then you can sort of augments things. But in early stage investing, the problem is if they can't build a product and it doesn't work.
- [25:20]
You'Re not going to get off the ground. Now, I think there are quality engineers at different levels. And so you can get off the ground because Nate built all of Airbnb systems and it's a one person show for a period of time. And eventually you have to recruit the next generation of people, the next generation of leaders. Those people may actually be good for a period of time and they will no longer be good. And you have to recruit the next leader and the next leader.
- [25:47]
A
I'll give you a couple examples. So, you know, we got a business with ServiceNow in 2009.
- [25:52]
B
Yep.
- [25:53]
A
ServiceNow was founded in 2005. Okay. In 2009, all of the code was written by one person, Fred Luddy. When ServiceNow went public, most of the code was written by one person.
- [26:04]
B
Wow.
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A
Fred Luddy. So did they have a great engineering team?
- [26:08]
C
No, they have a great engineer.
- [26:10]
A
That one guy who was like not a 10x engineer. He's like a thousandx engineer. Okay. So that's one example.
- [26:15]
B
That's crazy. I've never heard a story quite like that. I don't think, actually.
- [26:18]
A
Well, in Palo Alto Networks, in a different way, like, Palo Alto Networks ended up with an amazing engineering organization, but for a very long time, Nir Zook, the founder, was kind of like the guy who would just fix everything.
- [26:28]
B
Yeah.
- [26:29]
A
Right. And so I think. I think there are a bunch of these examples where there's one person who's.
- [26:33]
B
Actually a crazy, disproportionately ridiculous amount. Yeah.
- [26:36]
A
Another example would be HubSpot. So we got a business with HubSpot in 2011 and at the time, amazing story.
- [26:44]
Awful product, and Brian and Dharmesh would say the same thing. So I'm not speaking out of turn. Maybe they'd say mediocre product, but it wasn't great.
- [26:53]
B
This is before the CRM.
- [26:54]
A
This is before the CRM. So at that point it was only a marketing product.
- [26:57]
B
Yeah.
- [26:57]
A
And they found this company called Performable, run by these two guys, David Cancel and Elias Torres, and they acquired It.
- [27:04]
B
Yeah.
- [27:05]
A
And most of the time that doesn't really work. In this case, they acquired these two founders with 15 or 20 engineers and product managers and whatever. They ended up rebuilding the entire HubSpot platform within a couple of years. And then the HubSpot went from being good story, mediocre product, a good story, great product.
- [27:21]
B
That was when they built the CRM.
- [27:23]
A
Christopher o', Donnell, who came in with that acquisition, was the one who built the CRM. There are obviously a bunch of people involved, but he was kind of points on it.
- [27:31]
B
Yeah.
- [27:31]
A
And then Whitney Sorensen, who also came out with that acquisition, is still CTO of HubSpot today. And Andrew Bielecki, who is the founder of Klaviyo, had also been part of that team.
- [27:42]
B
I guess there are probably some types of companies where you figure the product has to be good, but the engineering doesn't have to be unbelievable and we can make it better. And then there are some types of companies where like the founding, you know, engineer has to be just a genius.
- [27:54]
A
Yes. Yeah. So that's like part of the magic.
- [27:57]
B
Of HubSpot was like Airbnb and OpenAI can start differently.
- [28:00]
A
Yes, yes, yes.
- [28:02]
C
That's exactly our point.
- [28:03]
A
HubSpot managed to get really good engineers to care about marketing software, which most really good engineers do not. And I think another example would be like Open Evidence. Open Evidence is a vertically integrated foundation model for medicine. Right. Like all of their own training all the way up to the application that is in doctor's hands. You can't do that with mediocre engineers. Like that is the absolute all star team that was able to build that product because they're, you know, they end up competing with OpenAI and the other broad foundation models. You can't do that if you don't start with amazing engineering.
- [28:36]
B
Yep.
- [28:36]
C
The more technical the product, the more technical the founders have to be. The more technical the engineering team has to be, the less technical the product, then you can, you can rely on one person.
- [28:47]
B
Yeah.
- [28:47]
C
Literally.
- [28:48]
B
Yeah.
- [28:48]
C
And you know, airbnb started out that way. Doordash started out that way, where the founders were just exceptional. They built everything and over time they complement that with people. Citadel securities, you really want, they're executing a micro nanosecond execution. You need a really good engineering team.
- [29:06]
B
Yeah. Okay. Can we talk about picking in some amount of detail?
- [29:13]
There's so many. I think it's a very hard to discuss part of the job, but it's obviously very important. I would argue for you all, I imagine in some ways it's like the most important maybe because you know you're seeing and winning is going to be very, very good. Obviously you need to keep those very good. But then there's like this picking thing which like there's just like, you know, every year you got to pick well again. And so I imagine you spend a ton of time thinking about it. And it can't just be vibes, it can't just be this market's big.
- [29:45]
A
Vibes don't hurt.
- [29:46]
B
Vibes don't hurt. But like, so like, can you talk about like in some depth what goes into good picking and maybe just to pick a stage in the middle, like a series A or a series B or something like that? Because growth is its own thing, seeds its own thing. But maybe we can start and how do you talk about what goes into good picking in the Series A Series B range?
- [30:11]
C
I can do this in two different ways, one of which is back to making money on money. High multiple returns, that's not that important, is it? No, but that's what we're aiming for. So in a fund.
- [30:25]
A venture fund, and probably a growth fund too, but we have about 45 to 55 shots of which we need six to basically be a 10x or more of which of those three, three of them out of the six, we need them to be $100 million gain or a billion dollar gain. That's what makes for a good fund. And we look historically at all of Sequoias funds and there's a high write off rate. So when you say picking, are we actually that good at it? Now our best fund is Venture 12, which includes Airbnb, Unity and Dropbox. All three of them were billion dollar gains, but There were also 10 companies that were $100 million gains.
- [31:20]
B
That's crazy.
- [31:21]
C
So that is a good fund. The write off right there was like 50%.
- [31:28]
So when you think about picking, you have to be half. Right.
- [31:34]
B
But your point is that good picking isn't not losing money. Good picking is a high enough inclusion rate of asymmetry.
- [31:42]
C
So the point here is we're in the business of risk taking and you have to be able to take risk on things that will run.
- [31:49]
B
Yes.
- [31:50]
C
So, and, and then the other thing that we've learned about picking is you can't just have things run that you put a small amount of dollars in. Yeah. And have low ownership. Like because put a million dollars into this.
- [32:04]
Investment in a venture fund of 400, 500, $600 million, it's just not enough if you don't own enough, it's just not enough. You have to actually have conviction. And so when you have conviction and you focus on the right companies, you're going to be wrong half the time.
- [32:22]
B
When you look at your basket of across many funds of the things that truly ran, like the billion dollar gains, let's say, or the $500 million gains, let's say, did those at the time feel like a lot of people wanted them? And like, can you draw any correlation between how hot and consensus those rounds were?
- [32:40]
A
Not really.
- [32:40]
B
Or because, like, when you're describing, like, you know, this, this sort of like asymmetry where you're seeing something that's not obvious or something has a shape, like, or. And then you have these rounds where nine venture firms all agree this looks good. Like, is there. Do those correlate?
- [32:56]
C
I can give you lots of examples where they.
- [32:58]
B
There's both.
- [32:58]
C
There's both. Right. So one of the sort of. In Doordash's situation, the seed round was really, really hard for Doordash. Almost everybody passed, including us. And that's kind of my fault for not having enough conviction. When the Series A came together, I think everybody knew that it was working. So they probably got like six term sheets in the same week that we offered the term sheet.
- [33:24]
B
So in that case, winnability was super important.
- [33:26]
C
So winability was super important. And, you know, I had passed, so we were coming a little bit from behind. Even though we try to stay.
- [33:33]
With, try staying with the company and learning about the company and trying to add value in the Series B, it was red hot.
- [33:43]
It went from a $50 million valuation to a $600 million valuation. And winability was really, really important. But, you know, the Series C, which nobody wanted to do, was basically at the same valuation, slightly less given. And that turned out to be one of the best. Not venture investments, growth investments. Series D was very difficult. E, F, G, those were super consensus. They all made money. But the best rounds were the Series A and Series C, and those were not consensus at all.
- [34:22]
A
If I go further back.
- [34:25]
We led four rounds in a row with Okta, the Series C, D, E and F because nobody else wanted to invest.
- [34:30]
B
Yeah.
- [34:31]
A
When we got into business with HubSpot, we were the only term sheet. I remember Zoom, Zoom Zoom is like a reasonably hot company because there are a lot of people using the product. But it wasn't a consensus investment and they weren't raising money. And I remember a couple of weeks after we made the investment, I was at dinner with some other investors and one of them was making fun of us for having made the investment. Oh, my gosh. You paid a billion dollars for zoom. How crazy, right? Snowflake. We passed on Snowflake and then six months later begged them to give us another chance. Because in that six month period, it felt like things had inflected. And that was also not a consensus investment. And so I think our internal data, at least for our own decision making, we've been tracking, we've been recording the number that everybody votes on every investment for more than a decade now. Our internal data shows that consensus versus non consistent consensus does not matter at all.
- [35:31]
B
It's just not a factor.
- [35:32]
A
Presence of conviction is what matters. And so if Everybody is a 6, we vote 0 to 10 no. 5. So 6 and above is positive. 4 and below is negative. If everybody's a 6, probably shouldn't make the investment. It's consensus, but nobody has conviction.
- [35:47]
B
Strong yes, strong no is much better.
- [35:49]
A
If three people are nines and three people are one, we should probably make the investment because the presence of the nines is a much more powerful signal than the presence of the ones.
- [35:58]
C
But if you want to describe that mathematically, we're in the risk taking business. We need that volatility because the truth is not somewhere in the middle where everybody agrees.
- [36:08]
B
Yes.
- [36:08]
C
Yeah, we're trying to build the future. The future does not look like the past. And so if everything looks consensus, it's usually because we have something that is measurable to the past, comparable to the past. It's all like, everybody's thinking about it. And when it's consensus, it all gets priced to consensus too.
- [36:26]
B
Let's say you have an investor who is good, you're happy with them, but you notice over a period of six, seven years that like, their, their, their portfolio includes a lot of good stuff, but it doesn't have that outlier tail. What would your coaching be like? What would you. What advice would you give that person to get more asymmetry into their pick? Like, if you're like, I'm gonna help you be a better picker.
- [36:49]
C
Yeah.
- [36:49]
A
This is not hypothetical.
- [36:50]
B
The way I'm gonna help you be a better picker is by helping you get more of the asymmetry.
- [36:54]
A
There are at least three different names in my mind right now. This is not hypothetical at all.
- [36:57]
B
So now I say X to you. Yeah.
- [36:59]
C
No.
- [36:59]
A
So we're gonna. You know, Jim Goetz had this expression front stabbing, which is you want to tell people whatever concerns you have or whatever bad news to their front instead of like saying it behind their back. So we have this conversation all the time with people who, you know, seem to be too risk averse or don't, you know, have enough of that kind of upside potential in their portfolio. And so when that situation happens, we start having the conversation, you know, hey, you seem to be more in the base hits kind of business. We're more in the grand slams kind of business. You know, let's, let's work on taking some more risk. You know, like, let's work on this together.
- [37:35]
B
Yep.
- [37:36]
A
And if years go by and their risk appetite remains kind of modest. Risk appetite, which is very different than what we tend to seek, at some point the conversation becomes, hey, you're actually very good at what you do. You should do something that's a little bit different than what we do.
- [37:52]
B
Okay, but so how do you, you say that the like we should, let's get you more risk appetite. How?
- [37:57]
A
I'll give you so concrete example. There's somebody on our team now who we've been working with over the last few years and it literally starts with this thing that you are talking about right now. We're going to invest in that company. Oh no, no, no, no. But we still need to figure out this. And we still need to figure out this. And I have these five more calls. Oh no, no, no, we're going to invest in that company. Let's go invest in that company now. And so you start with a little bit of a two by four. Because you can see in this example, I'm not going to name names, but in this example, this person is so good at what they do and they come across so many interesting opportunities and they come up with a reason to pass on all of them. And so at some point you just have to say, look, this is the good one. Okay, let's go do this one together. And you do that a few times.
- [38:46]
B
And you show, you basically teach by showing.
- [38:48]
A
And you go from, it goes from like, you know, Alfred or me or whoever is the last 30% to now we're the last 20% to now we're the last 10% to now we're the last 5% to now. This person's doing it on their own because once you've done it a few times you actually get comfortable with taking.
- [39:02]
B
The risk in this situation. Is the person, are they like, they kind of know it's good and you're just encouraging them to trust their instinct. Like is it about like cutting off the process a little bit earlier? Is that the learning it's giving Them.
- [39:15]
A
A little bit of courage.
- [39:16]
C
What Pat's referring to is everybody here at Sequoia came with a lot of success. They went to good schools, they had great careers beforehand, and they were the A students or the A plus students. And in this business, it's not about not making mistakes. As I shared with you, our best performing fund had a 50% write off rate. You're going to make a mistake half the time.
- [39:41]
B
Yeah.
- [39:42]
C
And so you just have to like readjust and think about it from that perspective.
- [39:49]
A
Yeah, I was, I was going to say the exact same thing. And it goes back to the people we hire, the people we hire, these competitive overachievers, most of them got straight A's their whole lives.
- [40:00]
B
Yep.
- [40:01]
A
And so one of the interview questions that is most uncomfortable for them, but most important for us is what's your biggest mistake? Like, what's the biggest failure you've had in your entire life? And usually get some, you know, BS1, and you kind of have to keep pushing until you get to a real one. But a lot of these, a lot of the people that join our team haven't had much failure. And so we kind of have to help them get comfortable with it because otherwise we're not going to get the outlier wins.
- [40:24]
C
To do this business well, you really do need courage.
- [40:27]
B
Yeah.
- [40:28]
C
You need to be able to, hey, you know, in both extremes, if you're going to pay a ridiculous amount of. For a company that you saw and passed a month ago or two months ago or a year ago.
- [40:39]
B
Yeah.
- [40:40]
C
Like Pat did with Snowflake, you have to have real courage. He could have invested a year ago in Snowflake when he decided to pass and he was like, it's a swallow his pride and actually say, okay, I made a mistake. I'm going to pay up for this round. Even though it sounds ridiculous, I'm going to do it. Or the other extreme where you're like, nobody likes this company anywhere in the world except you.
- [41:02]
B
Yes.
- [41:03]
C
But it's a really good company.
- [41:04]
B
By the way, this, this courage thing is like, it's the type of thing that always strikes me as very tidy and nice sounding in a historical story. You know, you tell a story of we did this doordash round, the Snowflake round. Everybody thought we were stupid and then look what happened. But in the moment when you do something where everybody thinks you're stupid, it's like, I'd have to be like, hey guys, let me tell you about this deal I did. And you guys walk away and you're like, Jack's actually stupid. Like, you know, it's like, like, in the moment, it doesn't feel good when everybody around, like, your partners disagree with you. Your, you know, peers at other firms are like, you're not, like, stupid in the cute, like, this turned into snowflake way. Like, we actually just think you're bad at the job and, like, you have to stay with that. Yeah, I think that's really hard for people.
- [41:45]
C
I think it is. I think you're right that it's really hard. But it's also like the two fears, fear of missing out and fear of looking stupid are the two fears that prevent people from making the right decision decisions. And you kind of, kind of have to block out those fears.
- [41:58]
A
We do. On this note, we do a lot of.
- [42:02]
Introspection, post mortems, post parades on decisions that we got right or wrong. Just kind of looking at the outlier decisions one way or the other and saying, okay, like, we've got this one really wrong. Why? We got this one really right. Why? What's interesting about the ones that we get really wrong?
- [42:19]
Every single one of them. If you play the the five whys game, like, why, why, why, why, why? Every single one of.
- [42:26]
Psychological bias or emotional trap.
- [42:28]
B
Totally.
- [42:29]
A
None of them come down to an error in calculation.
- [42:32]
B
Yep.
- [42:32]
A
All of them come down to these background effects that were clouding your judgment.
- [42:35]
B
Yeah.
- [42:36]
A
And, you know, we cataloged them. You know, we have a list of 40 of these things so that we can kind of like, use the common vernacular and be able to be able to kind of get in front of them so that we can have a conversation before we make that mistake. Like, hey, hey, do you have separation of church and state here? What's separation of church and state? Well, letting the thrill of the chase bleed over into your clinical decision making. Yeah, right. The thrill of the chase is a very passionate, emotional thing where you're falling in love with the founder, but then you have to come back and put your emotions aside and clinically assess all the merits and risks and make a good decision. And so it's pretty natural to co mingle those two things. But that can lead you down the wrong path.
- [43:16]
B
How do you guys, as senior partner stewards, like, you know, partners, partners, equal partners. How do you. How do you. With younger partners who are newer, how do you react when you see them doing something where they're doing something that is courageous but you think is genuinely a bad idea?
- [43:35]
A
Love it.
- [43:36]
B
You're like, let them. Let them learn the lesson.
- [43:38]
A
Maybe they're no, Be curious, not judgmental. The conversation. The conversation that we have with our partners all the time is, I observed you doing this thing. I am curious why, when you start a conversation that way, they immediately are like, oh, did I do something wrong? But if you genuinely come from a place of curiosity, this is what makes us all better. When somebody joins our team, we don't want David Kahn to become another Alfred or another Pat. We want David Kahn to become the best possible David Kahn he can become. And so if David goes off and does something that's not obvious to me or Alfred, I'm going to be pretty curious. We know this guy's incredibly talented. What does he see that we don't see? Like, what method has he come up with that's not in our toolkit today? And so we would much rather let people just run, make some mistakes. Now they're doing something that we don't understand. They do it four times in a row, and they're over four. Okay, now we're going to say, hey, maybe we don't want to do that anymore. Right? But we're going to start with curiosity.
- [44:36]
B
Y.
- [44:38]
What else besides courage would you sort of like? That was very resonant. Besides courage, is there anything else that you would imbue as lessons to help people be better at picking as defined by including this asymmetric upside?
- [44:52]
C
I think the. The other. That the other thing that comes with courage is to play your game, like, figure out what you're, like, uniquely good at. Like, for me, when I got into this, to this business, I knew nothing. Well, I knew a little bit about investing, but not really. Could I made some seed investments here? There? Yeah, sure. But this business is about making sure you partner with the best companies of tomorrow. How do you break that down? Are you market led? Are you founder led? I just thought of it as, like, well, that's interesting. How about founder market fit? And so I'd encourage everybody just like.
- [45:30]
B
Founder market fit is sort of your lens on things.
- [45:32]
C
It's my lens on things. Like, you can't really for Uber, Travis is like a perfect fit for Uber. For Airbnb, Brian's a perfect fit. For Airbnb. For Doordash, Tony's like, a perfect fit. They can't go actually run someone else's business.
- [45:49]
B
So when you go into meeting a company, the top thing you're trying to figure out is, was this person made.
- [45:52]
C
For this company, this person made for this company, and the problems of this market, how do you do it? Just like, by asking them Questions and riffing with them. And they all come prepared with a pitch. And I try to say, okay, beyond this pitch, what do you know about this industry? Why is this industry interesting to you? Okay, you started with a problem that you're solving for yourself. What other problems do you want to solve along the way? If that's the only problem you want to solve.
- [46:20]
That would be some Runway. But that's not going to get you to Act 2 and Act 3 and Act 4. And the companies that are just mega, legendary companies, they have multiple acts that one can lead you a long, long way. It can be a decade or two decades. But most companies that are around for a long period of time and are considered legendary, they're around for a few decades.
- [46:45]
B
When you meet the company, have you already visualized this is kind of what shape I think this company is? And I'm therefore trying to figure out if the founder fits that shape?
- [46:55]
C
No, because that would imply that I know something that would be bad. Because in that situation, we often talk about this as like for the former operators at Sequoia, you're likely to do that because you see a problem, you think about a solution.
- [47:08]
B
Yeah, I know what this company will.
- [47:09]
C
Become, I know what it should become. And then you're trying to force fit your vision onto the founder. And that's usually a mistake because if the founder, if it's your vision and you're force fixing that and the founder isn't aligned with that vision, that's a mistake. And the other mistake is like, oh, you know so much about this industry, it doesn't matter the quality of the founder. It's like, well, you don't actually run this company. You actually have to let the founder run. And so I always approach these conversations with, as we kept talking about curiosity in this business, you just have to be very, very curious and you have to ask questions five levels deep of why, five levels deep of. Five levels deep of how. And through that process, you riff with the founder and hopefully the vision gets more clear to you and to the founder at the same time. And look, this is a 10 year journey at the minimum. I think in some of these situations with seed companies because of how seed funds are becoming larger and larger, it's at least the five year journey, even if it doesn't work.
- [48:18]
B
Totally.
- [48:19]
C
And if it works, I'm still on the board of Airbnb. That's been almost two decades now. And then Jensen's still doing it. It's been like 30 years. So if you want to shoot for A legendary status company. You want to find a founder and a team that want to go for it for many decades.
- [48:40]
And then you yourself may be on that board for a decade or two.
- [48:45]
B
Yeah. Do you have an equivalent lens to this founder market fit sort of idea?
- [48:51]
A
Well, can I zoom out and kind of give like an overall framework on wherever you want picking?
- [48:55]
B
Yeah.
- [48:56]
A
Okay, perfect. And my, my lens fits within the framework, but there's kind of the. The, like what, the why and the how. Okay, so what are we trying to find? We're trying to find the most important companies of tomorrow. And one way that you can think about that is the market determines how big the company can get, and the founder determines how big the company will get. And so the market and the founder are by far the most important variables. And the thing we care about in the market is not how big it is today, it's how big is it going to be in 10 or 20 years. So it's more of a why now Question than a what exists today question. So the what we're looking for the most important companies of tomorrow. Why we're in the outlier business. You know, we got to take risk. If we can actually get into business with the most important companies of tomorrow, that's where all the outsized returns are going to come from. You know.
- [49:46]
We don't serve our mission for our limited partners if we're just getting doubles and triples all the time. Like, we actually have to find the most important companies of tomorrow. It's also way more fun. Like, have you ever tried company building with a company that is not working versus have you ever tried company building with a company that is working? Company building with a company that is working is the easiest thing in the world. Right. And so it's way more fun.
- [50:10]
And then the how. There's a lot that goes into the picking that we do. Right. So part of it is a shared language. And Alfred mentioned earlier that we have, we have a spec. We have a spec for seed investing, venture investing, growth investing, expansion investing. The spec is just a shared language. And the shared language for growth specifically is emerging market leader unique and compelling value prop, sustainable competitive advantage. And if you map those onto a set of financials, the emerging market leader piece basically says this will be the most important company in a market that is important tomorrow, which implies high revenue scale. The unique and compelling value prop piece, unique suggests that you're going to have good gross margins because you're not having to compete on price. Compelling suggests that you're going to have Good operating margins because you don't have to spend a lot of money on sales and marketing to get people to adopt your product. And then sustainable competitive advantage says that the free cash flow produced by those nice margins on that nice revenue scale is going to be around for a while. Those are the characteristics we're looking for in a business. Back to what I said earlier about the founder and the market being the most important thing. By the time a company reaches the growth stage, if the founder is as good as you think they are, chances are these characteristics have materialized. So the thing we care about most, even at the growth stage is actually the founder. But the sanity check on is this founder as good as we think they are, is whether or not these characteristics have started to show up in the business.
- [51:34]
B
Yeah.
- [51:35]
A
And then in terms of mechanizing that, you know, we have a funnel like anybody does, and we realized a long time ago that the most important decision is actually not the final decision that happens on a Monday. The most important decision is the mid funnel decision that determines what gets to a Monday. By the time it gets to a Monday, we're pretty good at making the decision. Our biggest misses are the things that don't even make it to a Monday.
- [51:59]
B
Is you looked, but you didn't spend real time on something that deserved it.
- [52:01]
C
Exactly.
- [52:02]
A
And so having better hygiene around those mid funnel decisions, you know, we used to just go back to back meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting. Now you can't have a meeting if you don't save time afterwards for a debrief so that we can have a concrete conversation about what did everybody think about this meeting? What are the pros and cons? What's the thesis? Where do we go from here and similarly back to our CRM system that we have. Every single meeting you take, you put a rating in the system. You're rating it on quality of the opportunity, 0 to 10, no fives. And so we just have this kind of. By the way, none of that is perfect. None of that guarantees that we're going to make good decisions. It's just trying to get a little bit better every day so that over time, hopefully we end up with more wins and losses.
- [52:46]
C
We believe in consistent compounding. So just doing this over and over and over again. Adjusts, adjust, adjust, adjust. Yeah, because the debrief thing we didn't have probably like five years ago.
- [52:58]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [52:58]
B
It's a really good.
- [53:00]
C
Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. I mean it was like, wait a minute, why didn't we have this before?
- [53:04]
B
Otherwise you just run between meetings. At the end of the day, you can't remember what happened.
- [53:06]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [53:07]
C
And then if you don't write down exactly what you thought, maybe you want to still sleep on it. But at that moment, what were your impressions? Like, we want to be able to marry. Thinking fast and thinking slow.
- [53:21]
B
We can spend the least amount of time on this. But I'm, I'm just curious about winning. Let's. Like when you want, when you want to partner with an entrepreneur and you've decided we would like to do this deal. I know.
- [53:33]
A
Strike this long term business partnership.
- [53:35]
B
Yeah, exactly. That's a nice way to say it. What do you, you know, like, what do you do? Like, I realize, like, you know, a lot of what you're trying to do is show them that you're a good partner.
- [53:44]
A
But like, actually, no.
- [53:45]
B
No, so.
- [53:47]
A
And we might. And again, like, everybody has their own style. So Alfred and I may have different responses to this, but my basic mental model on this has always been if you genuinely love a founder and the company that they are building, they'll be able to feel it. And so what I found is that if you actually do your homework to really understand this person and to really understand this company, and then you just tell them why you want to be in business with them, like the authenticity and the passion and the, you know, the depth of the thinking, like all that stuff should just come out.
- [54:27]
B
To ask the pointed question on that, does that work for you because this is Sequoia, or is that a good strategy in general?
- [54:33]
A
That worked for me when I was 24 years old and nobody had any idea who I was. And honestly, half the companies I was talking with didn't know who Sequoia was.
- [54:41]
B
So what does it look like to show that much love for what they're doing? Because you can just say it. But I'm sure you're not just saying it. I'm sure that it was expressed through some work you were doing on their company or reflecting some thought you'd put into something.
- [54:56]
A
It's kind of like when people say that your brand is the sum of the experiences that people have with you. You can't just be lazy and sloppy throughout the process and then pop out of a cake and tell somebody you love them. Yeah, right. That's not consistent with what they've experienced of you thus far. And so every moment as you're engaging with the founder forms their ultimate impression of you. And if you are consistently engaged and thoughtful and responsive and just kind of behaving the way that you would expect or want somebody to behave throughout that process by the time you get to the end, having now done your homework, if you are also now saying, like, hey, here's why I'm really excited about this opportunity, usually that resonates pretty well. Usually that's consistent with their experience of you so far.
- [55:42]
B
I don't know if you remember this.
- [55:45]
And this was, like, a positive thing, but you passed on one of the early lattice rounds.
- [55:51]
A
I know.
- [55:51]
B
And it was the most gracious, high quality pass that I got in my life. And I got hundreds of passes, and I still remember that you called me and explained exact details of, like, what you were thinking and what the risks were and limitations and whatever. And it was just, like, clear that you had thought about it more than anybody else. And I was like, that's like. That is like the gold standard pass. So I guess it can't be faked because you have to do the work along the way to do that. Yeah, yeah. Passing, I guess, well, is really important for you all because, like, you know, if you're, you know, if you're me, it's like, if I miss the A, I don't have big, like, I'm not gonna do it. You always want to be in business with a great company. And so I'm guessing on this, you know, picking thing, the way that you pass has to be, like, excellent in general.
- [56:41]
A
Yeah.
- [56:41]
B
Like, you need to pass in ways that keep the relationship healthy.
- [56:45]
C
Yeah. I think the way we talk about it is it's maybe not now. It's not that we're passing, we're just not investing at this point in time. And look, I experienced this when I was on your side. Even though we made money for Sequoia at Link Exchange.
- [57:04]
When we were running Zappos.
- [57:08]
Sequoia passed on Zappos like, two or three times before they invested. But it was always very gracious. There was always a good reason. This was Mike Moritz doing it. And then we learn from previous partners on how to pass. And one way is to show a lot of love. One way is to show a lot of work and being diligent and telling you why, as a founder, maybe you should work on these things. This is what we found in your diligence, and hopefully we make your company better even when we're passing. And that shows, to Pat's point, real love and real love for the problem, real love for your business, and real love for you.
- [57:43]
B
Yeah. It also shows love for your own craft, which I think founders respect too. Like, I always respect it when I'm like, these people are working really hard and they care about what they're doing and all of that, like, that matters a lot.
- [57:53]
C
Yeah. And since just to add on the winning side, it really helps that we're on the Sequoia platform, but we have like really strong competitors. We don't take it for granted that we're going to win totally. I think if you start with that, that's a good position to start. And we do it from a level of humility. The founder is going to run the company. We're there to help. We're supposed to be the shock absorbers, we're supposed to be the sparring partners. We're not cheerleaders. We tell the founders not. What we want to strive for is at the end of the day because we love the company, we love the business, we love the founders, that we're always the first call.
- [58:32]
B
Once you've won and now you're working with the company, how do you start the relationship? Like, obviously it's like the beginning of this long thing, but like, what do you, you know, you start working with a founder, you're in business with them now. Like, what do you, what do you say? How do you start things?
- [58:46]
C
I think different partners will do it differently, but maybe from the same level of humility. Humility that we have, which is we don't know anything about the business. Let me like learn as much as I can and we start there. And there have been times when I go to the first few board meetings and I don't say very much. I'm just observing, I'm listening, I'm reading the materials, I'm asking follow up question questions.
- [59:09]
You can't help unless you understand. And as a board member, your job is not to like operate. Your job is, we're not management, we're board members and we're there for you to be a sounding board. But the thing that we can help with is pattern recognition of things that have worked in the past and have not worked in the past. And ask you the question, hey, I've seen this not work 9 out of 10 times. Explain to me why you're going to be the one company that is different. We don't ask it like, oh, 90% of the time this is not going to work, so don't do it.
- [59:46]
We try to be very, very open minded.
- [59:49]
A
I think in your first year.
- [59:52]
If the founder actually trusts you, by the time you're a year in, you're good. That's a good place to be. Because I think, I think it's hard to actually get somebody's trust.
- [60:06]
And so with that as the objective for year number one, the two components of trust are competence and intention. I think the competence piece people mistake as let me show them how valuable I am. That's nice. But it's actually probably better to make sure that you have all of the relevant context on the company.
- [60:29]
B
It's better to be like, let me show you how much I understand.
- [60:32]
A
And so I go through employee onboarding so that I have the same experience that a new employee to the company has and kind of understand things the way that they would understand it on their first day at the company. Usually we do one on ones with all the sort of key VPs or direct reports as part of diligence. But if we haven't done that as part of diligence, we do that, you know, as part of onboarding. Usually we get access to the last couple of years of board decks as of part of diligence. If we haven't done that as diligence, we do that as part of onboarding. If there's any sort of employee like culture manual or whatever, we get access to that. And so we, we try to get as much context as we can after the investment has been made to make sure that when we go into those first handful of board meetings, we're not just saying random things off the cuff. Like to the extent we have an opinion to share, it's at least grounded in the reality of the business as it exists today. So that's, that's on the competent side, on the intention side.
- [61:28]
I think because every founder has the horror stories of the venture capitalists that, you know, did them wrong. You know, I think because our competitors like to say nasty things about us from time to time. Like I think we really have to show that our intentions are pure. And one of the ways that I describe it to founders is, look, I have two objective functions, okay? I have the objective function that I owe to our limited partners, which is to maximize the share price of your company. Because our objective function is very explicitly net multiple money returns.
- [62:00]
But then my second objective function is my personal one, which is like the reason I do this is because I really enjoy watching founders become amazing CEOs, right? And build these world changing companies. And so my personal objective function is to help you become the absolute best possible version of yourself. And you can't just say that and then do whatever you want. You have to say that and then behave accordingly. Right? But I Think starting off by saying that and just kind of explaining that to them at least kind of lodges that idea in their head. Like, okay, maybe this person really is here to help me get better. And then if you behave accordingly, by the end of the first year, hopefully you're in a position where the founder thinks that you have both the competence and the intention to kind of, like, be in the trenches with them. And then from there you can actually start to make an impact. But to me, the first year is all about, like, actually become trusted by the founders.
- [62:59]
B
When you think about the board seats where you are the proudest of that, you'll, like, look back at the end of your career and say, that's where I shined. Like, what is that? What do those look like? You know, like, are you. Are you, like, part. Are you, like an extended part of the executive team? Are you a consigliere? Is it different situation to situation? Like, there's a. What are the ones you're proudest of?
- [63:22]
A
There is a. A company that I was involved with that went public. And, you know, when you go public, you go to the NASDAQ or the NYSE or whatever, and, you know, they ring the bell and they take a bunch of photos and.
- [63:36]
And this is a trivial thing, but this meant a lot to me. There was a photo that was board and management team. There was a photo that was management team. There's a photo that was board, there's a photo that was founders, and then there was a photo that was founders and me. And they didn't do it with the other board members. And I felt so special. You know, I felt like that was a, you know, like they were treating me as an extension of the founding team, which I wasn't. I was just an investor.
- [64:07]
B
No, it was a great sign of.
- [64:08]
A
Product, but it, like, meant the world to me.
- [64:09]
C
Yeah, so it's always the. It's always the founding, the founders and how much you engage with them that sort of matters. And it's not a. You know, for me, it's never. It's about helping them get it right and helping them reach their full potential and helping their companies reach their full potential. And in those situations, I'm pretty proud that we got to the right sort of outcome and conclusion. I think that a lot of boards that you've been involved with, a lot of boards where there are people who always have to rewrite, they have to prove how smart they are, those don't tend to be the great board meetings or the board discussions.
- [64:49]
B
No, those are particularly Tough when that board member is a real accomplished personality and everybody. I think those can be very difficult sometimes. Those are situations. There's a lot of value, obviously, from those people.
- [65:05]
It changes things.
- [65:06]
C
But I think that being right, in business, things change so much, and in technology, they change even faster. So your paradigm of what makes you right can change. And if you're not curious, if you don't update your priors, that previous notion could be wrong. We've seen that time and time again for most of our careers. Software is the way to make a lot of money. And it was on prem software.
- [65:36]
It was SaaS software. And then something changed. Hardware became this interesting place to invest. Defense tech became an interesting place to invest. There's just going to be more and more things in the world, and the world is going to expand, and you have to be open to new ideas. And whatever works for a software company may not work for a hardware company and vice versa. So if you've been a successful chip company going into a software company, you do have to sort of check some of your paradigms and just be cautious that maybe those things may not work the same way in a software company and vice versa, from a software company to a hardware company.
- [66:12]
B
All right, my last question. You guys are going into first holidays. You know, I'm sure you have some downtime. You're going to think about 2026. What are you. What. What are you thinking about? Like, what's, what are your bullets on your little note to yourself of like, this is. This is what we gotta, you know, do in 2026 in our new, new rules?
- [66:31]
C
Well, you know, we're gonna have an off site in January 2026, and we'll put those down then. Yeah, but it's not, you know, we've delegated that to Luciana and Andrew and they're going to run that off site. So that's going to be fun for them to run that.
- [66:47]
A
Yeah, that's. Our new role is. Our new roles are 95% our old roles. Like, first and foremost, our job is to help the daring build legendary companies from idea to IPO and beyond. You know, in 2025, Alfred and I spent the vast majority of our time investing working with founders. In 2026, Alfred and I are going to spend the vast majority of our time investing, working with founders. And so I think part of the reason this is a good time for generational transition is because our business is in really good shape. The teams are in really good shape, the funds are in really good shape, the strategy is in really good shape. The operating teams, sort of the platform that we have is in really good shape. And I think 2026, the punchline is it's going to be more of the same. Like our. Our partners are doing an amazing job winning in the market with the very best founders and becoming great business partners to them, and we want to do more of the same.
- [67:38]
C
It's business as usual.
- [67:40]
B
See, it's funny because I would just be, and this is why I would be terrible at your job. I would be so tempted to be like, you know, what's next? Like, what, what do we add? What's the new thing? And it seems like there's a commitment to just improve this, you know, and perfect the core of what you have.
- [67:59]
A
And like Alfred mentioned it earlier, you know, we try to get a little bit better across multiple dimensions every single day. We will always try to get a little bit better across multiple dimensions every single day. From time to time, we'll take a big swing. And a big swing could be adding something big to our business. A big swing could be removing something big from our business. Right. And so we're. We're always hypothesis testing and evaluating and experimenting and trying to figure out how to get better. But as we sit here today, the business is in great shape, and we're in the, I don't know, third ending of the tectonic shift that's going to define our lifetimes. And so, yeah, we don't see a lot of need for big structural changes.
- [68:38]
C
We just need to go execute, just building on that. I mean, one of the things that investors share in this business, in the venture business, is that we have a novelty change. We like the next new thing. But what you have to build is something that is stable over time. So the things that we're building on are things that we've built on again and again, year in and year out, improving those things. And so, yeah, every now and then, we'll take a big swing. But the core business is a good business, and so it is a good business. Why not keep that core business and to your point, like, perfecting that craft, getting better every single day, and just build that core business.
- [69:17]
A
And the stability at the partnership level is what allows for volatility at the partner level.
- [69:22]
B
Yes.
- [69:22]
A
So when we talk about all these crazy outliers that we get to be in business with.
- [69:25]
B
The high trust, small partnership lets people do high volatility decisions.
- [69:30]
A
Exactly.
- [69:30]
B
Yeah.
- [69:31]
A
Exactly.
- [69:31]
B
Yeah. All right, guys, this was amazingly fun. Thanks for doing it.
- [69:34]
C
Thank you. Thank you, Jack.