Podcast Summary: Uncapped #36 with Pat Grady & Alfred Lin from Sequoia

Date: December 9, 2025
Host: Jack Altman (Alt Capital)
Guests: Pat Grady and Alfred Lin (Sequoia Capital)

Episode Overview

In this in-depth conversation, Jack Altman chats with Pat Grady and Alfred Lin, two of Sequoia’s leading partners, about their transition into stewardship, the enduring philosophies and evolving practices at Sequoia, and granular details about how decisions, investments, and partnerships actually happen inside one of the world’s most elite venture capital firms. The episode is rich with practical advice, frameworks, and lessons learned from decades of company-building and investing.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Stewardship, Team Structure, and Culture at Sequoia

• Stewardship Over Leadership: Grady and Lin explicitly reject traditional “CEO” language. Their focus is on stewardship: “Our job is really just to enable [our partners] as opposed to really manage people.” (Pat Grady, 01:39)
• Team-First Mentality: Sequoia puts founders’ needs first, then LPs, then the firm, then the team, and finally the individual partner. Influence is awarded based on expertise, not tenure or hierarchy. (Alfred Lin, 04:00)
• Empowering Outliers: The goal is to build and support a team of outlier investors—people who are spiky, driven, and collaborative. “You can't field a team of outliers if you're telling them what to do.” (Pat Grady, 05:55)

2. Frameworks, Inputs, and Values

• Freedom Within Frameworks: Sequoia uses frameworks for investments—Sourcing, Picking, Winning, Building, and Harvesting. Values are measured during reviews: “aggressive but humble, strong under scrutiny, high give-a-shit, zero bullshit, and demanding & supportive.” (Pat Grady, 10:56)
• Inputs vs. Outputs: With venture bets taking years to mature, Sequoia puts more weight on the quality of partner inputs (e.g., where they spend time, quality of memos, quality of companies sourced) than on short-term outputs or “mirage” signals like markups. (Alfred Lin, 10:04)

3. Sourcing & Coverage

• Coverage Metrics: Growth teams aim to see about 70% of potential deals also reviewed by a curated set of peer firms—not 100% for CYA reasons, but not too far off either. Seed and early deals are harder: “It’s not about seeing every company; it's substantive engagement with the right ones.” (Pat Grady, 15:38)
• Avoiding Vanity Metrics: Sequoia avoids individualized activity metrics to prevent gaming (like making pointless founder calls): “We don’t want people 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.” (Pat Grady, 17:36)

4. Proprietary Data, Talent Networks & Intelligence

• Building Talent Networks: Sequoia has spent years mapping out engineering and founder talent using a “PageRank for people” approach—collecting referrals, tracking relationships, and managing it all in their own CRM. (Pat Grady, 23:15)
  “Imagine if you started doing that more than 10 years ago and tracked all the responses… That all lived inside of a CRM system that has a talent map of Silicon Valley.” (Pat Grady, 23:12)
• Giving Before Getting: The database works because Sequoia genuinely helps people first—otherwise, information quality suffers. (Alfred Lin, 24:03)

5. High-Impact Engineering and Founding Teams

• Engineering is Crucial: Especially for technical products, engineering DNA is non-negotiable. The stories of ServiceNow and Palo Alto Networks exemplify companies whose success began with one exceptional engineer—Fred Luddy, Nir Zook. (Pat Grady, 25:47)
• Augmenting Talent: Over time, companies may need to bring in new engineering leadership as they scale, but initial quality is critical: “It's very, very hard to change the DNA of a company.” (Alfred Lin, 24:59)

6. The Art of Picking (Investment Decisions)

• Fund Math Realities: Success comes from finding a handful of huge winners—venture funds expect half of their bets to be write-offs. “Our best fund had a 50% write off rate.” (Alfred Lin, 31:27)
• Conviction Over Consensus: “Presence of conviction is what matters. If everybody's a 6, probably shouldn’t make the investment… If three people are nines and three people are one, we should probably make the investment.” (Pat Grady, 35:31)
• Risk Appetite: Sequoia actively encourages partners to seek asymmetry—true outliers and grand slams, not base hits. They push partners who are playing it safe, providing “courage” coaching and sometimes hands-on help. (Pat Grady, 38:45)
• Reflection & Debiasing: Post-mortems show most errors are due to emotional traps, not analysis mistakes. The firm codifies and names biases to help partners notice and manage them (e.g., “Separation of church and state”). (Pat Grady, 42:26)
• Individual Approaches: Lin focuses on founder-market fit—does the founder feel destined for this problem? Grady offers a framework: market size determines how big a company “can get,” founder quality determines how big it “will get.” (Alfred Lin, 45:32; Pat Grady, 48:55)

7. Winning and Maintaining Founder Relationships

• Authenticity Matters: The best way to “win” deals is to genuinely care—and show that care consistently through actions and preparation. “You can’t just be lazy and sloppy throughout the process and then pop out of a cake and tell somebody you love them.” (Pat Grady, 54:55)
• Passing Graciously: Even passes should be thoughtful, detailed, and aimed at helping the founder for future engagement. “Hopefully we make your company better even when we’re passing. And that shows, to Pat’s point, real love...” (Alfred Lin, 57:43)

8. The Board Relationship

• Humility First: At the outset, Sequoia partners listen and learn before prescribing; trust is built through competence (context) and intention (genuine support).
  “If the founder actually trusts you by the time you’re a year in, you’re good.” (Pat Grady, 59:52)
• Personal Connections: The proudest board moments are when founders see the investor as an extension of their team. (Pat Grady, 63:36)

9. Stability, Continuity & Evolution

• Business as Usual, But Better: Despite their new stewardship roles, Grady and Lin see 2026 as a continuation—“more of the same”—with constant, incremental improvement across every dimension, occasional big swings, and a culture that prizes both stability and the ability to experiment. (Pat Grady, 67:46) “The stability at the partnership level is what allows for volatility at the partner level.” (Pat Grady, 69:17)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Conviction Over Consensus:
  “If everybody’s a 6 [in our voting system], probably shouldn’t make the investment… If three people are nines and three people are one, we should probably make the investment.” (Pat Grady, 35:31)
• On Courage:
  “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.” (Alfred Lin, 39:39)
• On the Long Game:
  “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.” (Alfred Lin, 48:18)
• On Supporting Outliers:
  “You can't field a team of outliers if you're telling them what to do.” (Pat Grady, 05:55)
• On Winning:
  “If you genuinely love a founder and the company that they are building, they'll be able to feel it.” (Pat Grady, 54:47)
• On the Board Relationship:
  “The two components of trust are competence and intention… My personal objective function is to help you become the absolute best possible version of yourself.” (Pat Grady, 60:29)
• On Continuous Improvement:
  “We try to get a little bit better across multiple dimensions every single day… The business is in great shape, and we're in the, I don't know, third inning of the tectonic shift that's going to define our lifetimes.” (Pat Grady, 67:59 & 68:37)

Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |------------|---------------------------------------------------------| | 00:00–04:30| Sequoia’s voting system, stewardship philosophy | | 05:15–07:57| Distinction from CEO roles, outlier business approach | | 10:02–11:52| Measuring inputs vs. outputs, behavioral values | | 12:25–16:25| Sourcing, coverage, incentives, pitfalls of metrics | | 21:11–24:15| CRM/talent network, “PageRank for people”, giving first | | 25:47–28:35| Engineering DNA, founder-centric company evolution | | 29:12–36:25| Picking: fund math, conviction vs. consensus, risk-takers| | 42:01–44:35| Post-mortems, psychological biases, curiosity culture | | 45:32–49:46| Lin: founder-market fit; Grady: market & founder analysis| | 54:33–57:53| Authenticity/planning in “winning” and passing | | 59:09–64:48| Board relationship, building trust, humility, impact | | 66:46–69:31| 2026 outlook, evolution vs. disruption, stability theme |

Tone and Style

The episode is candid, exploratory, and generous with its playbook. Grady and Lin offer humility, humor, real talk about mistakes, and tactical details throughout. They both display a belief in continuous learning—at the individual, team, and organizational level.

Final Thoughts

This wide-ranging conversation demystifies how Sequoia operates: culture-first, data-informed but intuition-driven, relentlessly focused on people (within and outside the firm), and unwaveringly committed to finding and backing outliers. It’s a gold mine for aspiring investors, founders, and anyone interested in how legendary venture firms sustain success over decades.