Jess Lee | Partner @ Sequoia Capital

hi everyone [Applause] hi I'm Jess Lee I'm a partner at Sequoia Capital and before this I was the CEO and co-founder of a company called poly in the fashion tech space thank you thank you and then before that I was a product manager at Google Maps back in the days when we used to print our driving directions and carry them around in the car so it's a while back and I think I'm supposed to tell you a little bit about my life story in ten minutes and sort of share some of the lessons that I've learned so I'm gonna take you back to high school I grew up in Hong Kong I was not a very popular kid in high school I was super into art and drawing and anime and manga and my goal in life was to be a go to art school and be a graphic novelist that didn't work out my parents are Asian and they said no you can't go to art school so I did it but I I was I did get pretty good grades so I wasn't right but I maybe I was like if you think about the totem pole and how popular maybe I was in like the 35th percentile of popularity but I was I got good grades and one day one of my teachers my English teacher came to me and she said hey why don't you take the AP English exam and I was like oh but I'm not in the AP English class I I don't qualify it she's like why does that matter and so she encouraged me to take the test because she thought I was I was good at writing and I aced it and I got a five and who cares what my actual AP English score was but I think that was an important lesson for me because that teacher taught me that sometimes there are rules around what the requirements are and how you're supposed to be qualified for something and you don't really meet them but you'd still go for it anyway and so that's what I did and that was a very early important lesson that has carried through the rest of my career so let's fast-forward to college I ended up not at art school but at Stanford where I was really excited I moved this I was moving to the US for the first time and I had been I gotten pretty good grades in in high school in fact I I think I was probably in the I think I was valedictorian at my school but I got to Stanford and I realized that every other kid there was valedictorian for their high school and so for the first time I felt like oh my god I'm so dumb I remember feeling like I didn't understand I wasn't as well-read I wasn't as articulate I was also fresh off the boat I just moved from another country I didn't understand any of the pop culture references or jokes that were happening in my dorm and I just felt completely out of place and I wondered if it was a mistake that they had let me into the Stanford but it was also Stanford that I learned about this thing called duck syndrome and I think it applies not just to Stanford but to all of Silicon Valley where you look at a lake and you see these ducks floating along and they look really peaceful and they're like swimming along but underneath they're paddling furiously and they're working really really hard just to stay stay up and look calm and that's what I realized Stanford was like everyone there felt a little bit like oh I'm not the smartest person anymore I don't get good grades anymore and all you have to do is you have to just work really really really hard and I end up majoring in computer science and I don't think the main thing I took away from my computer science degree was actually any of the theory or the problem sets it was actually the ability to force yourself to work really really really hard and be a duck that's something I've always carried with me because I think in Silicon Valley in particular there's sort of this feeling of like oh how you do how's it going how's it going with your company and there's this pressure to feel like yeah I'm doing great I'm crushing it but nobody's ever really crushing and that was a lesson that I learned at Stanford so I killed myself trying to get my computer science degree at Stanford and it was my senior year I had accepted a job as an engineer at a company called in to it and I was like you know that was my path my parents were happy again that I was not going to be graphic knowledge I was gonna go be an engineer but then I got a call from Google and this is in 2004 and they said hey we would like you to interview for the associate product manager program and I had never heard of a product manager before but because it was Google I was like you know maybe I should just take take the interview and see what happens but I remember feeling really bad about it and feeling like oh man I accepted this other offer like what should I do with my life and so I actually said that to pretty much all sites I just probably not a good thing to say in interview but I just genuinely didn't I mean I hadn't really interviewed very much before so I asked all my interviewers I'm like well you know I I spent four years studying computer science and I'm supposed to be an engineer like should I do this product manager thing and I remember one of my interviewers looked at me funny and then he got up and went to the whiteboard and he wrote two words he wrote sunk cost and he was like do you know what that means and I was like no and he said sunk cost is you've already given up those four years killing yourself for your computer science major and you're never gonna get that time back so you should really just optimize for your future which is really great advice he's like don't think about that don't let the past decide your future just do what you think is best going forward and I was like wow that was a really smart guy my second interviewer was Brett Taylor who was in the house Brett later went on to become the CTO of Facebook and I just remember as I met him he was a computer science major like me smart and just seemed kind of comfortable in his own skin I was like wow I kind of want to be like that I want to be confident and cool and so I just remember thinking like maybe I should just go be near the awesome people and then I will absorb their awesomeness through osmosis but that was a lesson I thought okay I have to go and find beer around the awesome people one of my later interviewers was Marissa Mayer who was at the time a director of product at Google and then later went on to become the CEO of Yahoo but at the time she ran the APM program at Google and I asked her the same thing should I take this job and she said okay well when I look back on my life and I think about all the times I had to make a difficult decision between two paths I always tried to pick the more challenging path because at least I would learn something and I would grow even if I failed so I would encourage you to pick the more challenging path and so I thought about that I thought well I know how to be an engineer that's what I trained for but there's this exciting product thing the sunk cost being around awesome people and doing something challenging so so that's what I did I ended up at Google became early p.m. for Google Maps and I had an awesome time there I learned so so much then one day someone showed me Polyvore I was Polyvore was actually created by 3x yahoo engineers and they it's an app where you can like mix and match products and express your sense of style and it was so much fun I became a heavily addicted user using it three or four hours a night and I decided to write to the founders and give them some of my suggestions and complaints I said hey you know there's this problems can you fix this I have some suggestions and then they wrote back and said hey these are all great why don't you just come work here and fix all this stuff yourself and I was like oh you know I interesting so I met with them and I really liked them and I felt like that was another set of really awesome people that I wanted to go be near and I thought okay when else are you gonna find opportunity work on something that's like you thought you were in love with where the team is really really small and so I ended up going to Polyvore and I remember still again being very nervous about this decision and then when I resigned from Google and I went to talk to the VP of Product Jonathan Rosenberg he said something to me that was very interesting he said don't worry you can always come back and then I realized Google hires like a hundred people a week I could go back right so that was a really important like lesson like when you have that choice between something you know that feels kind of once-in-a-lifetime like you should grab that because oftentimes the other path will still be available to you in the future right so seni way that was another important lesson so Polyvore it was three people when I joined and we had so much to do and I had never managed a human in my life but I just kept volunteering to do things by virtue of being maybe you know I think as a good p.m. what you do is you just try to volunteer and do whatever needs to get done to move product forward so in the beginning I wrote code I wash dishes I answered the phone when advertisers called I wrote our blog just kind of did whatever because I was the worst engineer on the team and I thought hey you know if there's something that needs to get done I should probably let the real engineers write the code and I'll just do the other stuff and over time what happened was I picked up these responsibilities never felt qualified to do them like running marketing but what what I did was I learned just enough to be dangerous and enough to hire someone who was awesome who I wanted to be around me to help teach me how to how to be excellent at something like marketing or sales and so the team grew and grew and grew and fast forward eventually all the groups in the company were reporting to me except engineering because I had hired so many people and it was at that point that some of the the original founders came to me and they said hey you know what we've always thought of you as a co-founder and you've always acted like one so we're gonna start calling a co-founder and we're gonna give you some of our shares and that is an incredibly incredibly generous thing to do and I will say that you know I have been mentored by many great women and by many great men but I will always be grateful to joining Pasha and Guang way for that very very generous act so I became sort of an official co-founder and then eventually I became CEO and as CEO I learned a lot of lessons about startups the primary one is that startups are really really hard and again I felt that duck paddling that duck syndrome because I looked around and I read TechCrunch and I read like all these different blogs and I felt like man everyone else's company is amazing but I have a lot of problems my VP left like how to fire someone like our traffic is down this week like I just felt like was paddling furiously it turns out that that's true of most startups but we just kept growing and growing and growing and eventually we you know through lots of ups and downs I learned a lot about how to be a CEO probably the first I think I'm most important lesson was that the end of the day team and culture matter so much you cannot always control the outcome like you'll go through ups and downs that are totally outside of your control but you're on a clock you have money that you could run out of your funding and you have the patience of your team and if you treat your team really really well and you build a culture and you surround yourself with awesome people who want to work to get they will give you just that little bit of extra time when it looks like you know probably everyone should just leave it's not really working they'll be like you know what I really love this culture and I really love this teens I'm gonna stick it out for another month or two and then you sort of turn the corner and so we we we kept going and eventually we were acquired by Yahoo in 2015 and it was actually a successful outcome but I'm you know I know again the entire time I just felt totally unqualified to be doing that job but it ended very well and so that brings me to today I have thought about what to do next after Polyvore and I realized that all those lessons I learned along the way brought me to where I am today and I decided to go be an investor enjoying the dark side and as I was thinking about that I thought you know maybe should I go do something should I try being a founder again I spent all this time working on being a founder and maybe I would do it like slightly better than second time around and then I thought about sunk cost and I thought about well I could always go back to that right though you know it's now that I've done it once maybe there will be options going forward so I should do this thing that seems more difficult more challenging where I'm gonna grow and learn the most so I decided to go be an investor I chose Koya because I felt like if I'm gonna go and learn the art of venture capital I'd like to learn it from some of the best people every person I met there was more awesome than the next and seemed like there would be a lot of great osmosis for me and then you know one of the things I'm passionate about is helping women in tech I was a female founder working on a product targeted at women and it was hard to raise money sometimes so one of the projects I work on now is this thing called female founder office hours where the goal is to get all the female founders together let go of duck syndrome for a little bit and just like really share the stories of how hard it is and really help problem solve so that's female founder office hours at female founder dot work so that's my story I I don't know what the next chapter will be but I will say that the interesting thing is when I look back on my entire career I have felt pretty unqualified for almost every role that I've ever been in like I never done it before our first time founder first time p.m. first time CEO first time investor but what I realize now is that feeling of being unqualified is exactly what you're supposed to look for I go back to Marissa Mayer's advice and she said pick the more challenging path go where you're gonna grow and learn and learning feels like being totally unqualified so now I think when I think about my career I always try to think about how do I go find that really nauseous feeling where I'm like oh I don't know how to do this it's really uncomfortable and that's really the advice that I mostly wanted to share with the group tonight go seek out that feeling if you feel really comfortable and like you know exactly what you're doing it's probably time for you to do something different thank you [Applause]

Channel: My First Million

Views: 23,365

Rating: 4.950078 out of 5

Keywords: the hustle, sequoia capital, 2x, 2xstrong, female VC, women in finance

Id: y01gpxEBUV4

Length: 14min 8sec (848 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2018