[MUSIC] You've clearly had a very impressive
career but before becoming one of the- >> That's not what my mother says- >> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] >> Before becoming one of the top venture capitalists in the world, being knighted
by the queen, you were a boy from Wales. What did you want to be when you grew up? >> Actually, not that this game or
sport is played in America, and so it won't translate, I wanted to
be a cricket player, a cricketer. But I was a coward, and
the ball was very, very hard. And so I spent most of my time in a sport,
whether it was cricket or rugby, trying to avoid being anywhere near the ball, so-
>> [LAUGH] >> I have a friend actually who became a spectacular rugby player,
he played for Wales which, and I told him that the only
thing that separated him and me on the rugby field was
when he took to the field. He wanted the ball to
come in his direction. >> [LAUGH]
>> And I of course wanted the reverse, I never wanted to see it
come in my direction. As I got a bit older I became interested in journalism and
when I was at Oxford, and I knew that I wanted to be
a journalist when I was at Oxford. >> So I'm interested in the story
of how your family came to Wales. It was quite inspiring that your
parents actually escaped Germany during the second World War, arrived in
Wales as refugees, in the UK as refugees. How did their struggles and
their experience shape you early on in sort of what
you wanted to do with your life? >> Well they were very lucky. They didn't escape during
the second World War. They escaped beforehand. Not many people escaped Germany
during the second World War. And my father left Germany,
he was born in Munich and went to Britain when he was a 14 year old. My mother went on something called
the Kinder transport which was 10,000 kids from Germany
basically that were rescued and put in foster homes and they then met subsequently in Britain and after the war they got married. And those searing experiences, difficult. I'm sure there are people
here either who have first hand familial experience
of something as disquieting, unsettling and wrenching as
those sorts of experiences, but those are the experiences that
come down through generations. My father's father served in
the German army during World War I. He was decorated. And my father's mother was
a nurse in the German army. During World War I and then both of them were killed,
they were murdered by the Nazis. And my father died about 15, 16 years ago. My mother [LAUGH] I saw her last week,
is 95 and is still vibrant but those experiences,
they color everything. They hang over everything
like a dark cloud. It is always the anxiety and the fear of the whole world being
ripped out from underneath you and it colors the way that you live,
understandably. >> And that drives you today, still? >> Well I don't know about that. >> [LAUGH]
>> But it certainly had a profound effect on my parents and
they came to Wales as outsiders and obviously Britain I owe everything, my parents owe everything
to the fact that Britain opened its borders and
allowed them to settle there. But it was not easy. They were in a minority. They weren't exactly, I mean, I was one of I think three Jewish kids
at the high school that I went to. So I've always, one always felt, an outsider in the delineation
between religions in Britain which as 40, 50 years ago was very, very sharp. And so if you didn't belong to the
majority it was very obvious that you were on the outside, so
that's obviously had a huge effect. >> Well, you did them very proud. You worked really hard to get into Oxford. And I'm sure you had many opportunities
professionally in Europe, but you decided to come to the United States. Why the United States? >> Well, I didn't have many professional
opportunities in Europe because I grew up in the Britain that
predated Margaret Thatcher. And those were extremely
difficult times in Britain, I mean obviously Britain is going through
its own issues today with Brexit. But the times in the 1970s
people who weren't around. There's no reason that anyone
here should know about it. But it was a strike-ridden country,
where you never knew whether the electricity was going to work, whether
there was going to be a gas strike, whether the railways wouldn't run, or
whether the newspapers would be delivered, because there'd be a wildcat strike,
and I wanted to be a journalist. And I wanted to work on Fleet Street. And I wanted to work at the Times or
the Daily Telegraph or the Guardian or one of the big broad sheet newspapers that at that point dominated
journalism in Britain. But, because of union restrictions
the Fleet Street newspapers, the big newspapers, were not permitted to
hire anybody straight out of under grad. You had to go and serve a multiyear apprenticeship
on small provincial newspapers. And I had no appetite in doing that. I wanted to work on Fleet Street. I want it to sort of work in
the premiere league, so to speak. And I had a, I went to see a gentleman who was
the editor of the Daily Telegraph, a fellow who,
he was a Fleet Street legend and a character on whom Evelyn Waugh
had based the novel Scoop. Which is hilarious if
you've never read it. And he said if I was your age,
get out of Britain. Go to America. >> [LAUGH]
>> And that was what sent me to America. It was that sort of weird
peculiar encounter. And I often think about that. That's what made me up sticks and leave. I mean, well, and I was lucky. I wouldn't have been able to come to
America had I not got a scholarship because I didn't have the money and
all the rest of it. But I got lucky in that,
and I came to America, this is 1976, not knowing where anything would lead but have obviously stayed. >> Yeah, 40 years you said. So you started out when you
got here as a journalist for Time Magazine-
>> Right. >> In San Francisco Actually,
not in San Francisco. In Detroit, of all places. >> In Detroit? >> Covering the first collapse of
the Chrysler Automobile Company. >> And then you made your way to
San Francisco to cover technology. And during this time you
got to know Steve Jobs. What do you believe made Jobs
such a unique innovator and leader in the time that
you spent with him? >> So this is, again,
this a long time ago. This is 1980. And Microsoft was a company that I
remember going to an event at Apple, one of these sort of management events,
small management events. Probably this was probably 1982 or '83. And Steve had a sort of
fireside chat like this. And he asked the guest, a fellow who at that point was a Morgan
Stanley analyst called Ben Roselyn, who later went on to found a very
successful venture capital firm. He said, so Ben,
pick the year when Microsoft, you think Microsoft will break the $10
million revenue barrier, right? $10 million, and
Ben was scratching his head. So it's a very, very long time ago. >> [LAUGH]
>> But that was the only point I
was lamely trying to make. I realized I hadn't met anyone like Steve. I'd spend time with fellow called
Lee Iaccoca who was a living legend in American industry at that point,
and been the president to the Ford Motor company and
then became the CEO of Chrysler. And Steve was the first person who's
salesmanship was on a par with Iaccoca's. Iaccoca was just mesmerizing character,
but he didn't have the product and
engineering attributes that Steve had. And obviously, there was a difference
in age of probably 35 years or so. But Steve was a spellbinder. And obviously,
as everybody knows these days, a very difficult and
complicated character. But he was an extraordinary, and even though I had all sorts of issues
in dealing with him, have nothing but massive admiration for what it is that he eventually went on and
did. And but as I said, it's a long time ago. And I think at that time I
probably held a minority opinion of how spectacular
an individual he was. Because later, he was,
again, ancient history, he was fired from
the company that he founded. Which to me always seemed
like a real travesty. >> So following your time with
Time Magazine, you would make the switch to the venture capital industry by
joining Sequoia, which is very uncommon. How did that happen? >> Well I'd left time because,
while I've enjoyed four years or so as a journalist, I also got frustrated. It was a big company,
I was working on the periphery of it. And sort of for some reason it always
felt I didn't want to be a journalist when I was 30 years old. And I had that as some
sort of mental benchmark. Goodness knows where that came from. I think it was largely because, again,
back then, I saw what happened to people. It was eye opening to me, I saw what happened to people who stayed
in journalism and were 60 years old. And certainly, if they worked for Time,
which was a sort of cushy job, but you got sent all over the world and
you wound up as an alcoholic. >> [LAUGH]
>> Which appeared to me to be a really beckoning
career trajectory. >> [LAUGH]
>> And so I left. And together with somebody else,
I started a little company that published newsletters, stage conferences
about the technology industry. And so much for my. And that fellow stuck with it,
and eventually many years later, no thanks to me,
Dow Jones bought that company. But I always felt that it was
going to be a small company. And I heard through my work at Time,
through my work at this little company, I'd met a lot of people around
the technology industry. And had met a lot of people in
the venture capital business. Time had run a cover story that I
had reported on about the venture industry that had Arthur Rock
who was the original founder, investor in Intel, and
then of Apple on the cover. And during the process of that, had met
a lot of people in the venture business. And when I came to California,
I didn't know about Silicon Valley, didn't know anything about the venture
industry, and had got interested in it. And made a list of five firms where I knew somebody, wrote to them. You wrote to them in those days,
you didn't e-mail them. And got interviewed at all, got rejected at four of them. Journalist, history major,
no experience working in a Silicon Valley company,
therefore totally useless. Probably correct on most of those counts. And then Don Valentine, who was
the founder of Sequoia, decided that he needed to do something to change
Sequoia's image with minority hiring. >> [LAUGH] >> And so, decide to hire a history major. [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH] >> And but it was head scratcher for most of Don's peers in the venture
business wondering why on Earth he was wasting his time
with somebody like me. And so that's how it happened. >> [LAUGH]
>> It was great good fortune. If Don had said, voted like the others, I don't know what I'd be doing. >> So in the era of the prized
engineering degree in Silicon Valley, what value does that broad based
humanities education bring? Given that about 50% of
last year's incoming class came in with a Humanities undergraduate
degree, what value does that bring to the technology ecosystem
here in Silicon Valley? What do you think? >> Well,
I obviously have a prejudice and bias. And knowing full well
that I wish I understood more about the details of technology and
engineering and all the rest of it. But if you're in the investing business
in Silicon Valley, you cover such a wide waterfront of investing,
that it's very difficult. You can't be, no matter how numerate and
technical you are, you cannot be an expert in everything. So the ability to be able to, and this is much like being a journalist,
to start on an endeavor where you know nothing,
where you gather a lot of materials and facts, where you have to
distill all of those facts. And then form a cogent opinion and
make a decision. It's not unlike writing a story,
writing a history essay, or making an investment, or
helping to determine an investment. What comes after that,
after making the investment, all the sorts of things that these days
go towards helping a little company that might be composed of three people
becoming something significant, that's very different set of skills which,
I think, just experience brings along. It doesn't matter whether or not you
have a technical degree or anything. And then, the ability to be
a story-teller and a clear communicator. I think those are really,
very, very helpful pursuits. But again, as I said, I have a bias and prejudice,
and I was looking at the numbers. At Stanford, for example you had, if I've got the numbers right,
which they're roughly right, you had 647 undergrads in
1965 who were history majors. In 2014, which was the last set
of data that I saw, you had 84. So they're a threatened
species around here. [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH] Well, I think you put those skills
to good use at Sequoia, given that it's consistently listed as
one of the top venture capital firms. And I have to get this statistic right, because it kind of blew my
mind when I first saw it. Since 1972,
Sequoia has backed companies that now have an aggregate public market
value of over $3.3 trillion. To put that in relative size, that's
larger than the current GDP of the UK. What are the most-
>> [LAUGH] >> That's right. >> [LAUGH]
>> So- >> Put down! >> [LAUGH] So what do you think
are the most important leadership traits needed to build enduring
organizations such as Sequoia? >> Well, that's nice of you to say. Obviously, that's a question that's at
the heart of our pursuit at Sequoia, and also the heart of the pursuit
of the very distinctive companies that we would like
to be an investor with. And being able to think and work in 20 year increments
is such an advantage. And I know that sounds a little weird and a little peculiar, and
obviously you can talk a grand fashion about a 20 year plan and
it all sounds very good. But then, you also have to work
on what this afternoon brings. But having a sense of eventually
where your compass is heading and where it's set, and
the trajectory you want to go on, and then breaking it down
into all sorts of steps. Knowing that every step along the journey
is going to require different people, different skills, different relationships, different virtues that you constantly
going to have to change along the course. And reacting to changing circumstances,
changing market conditions, and all the rest of it, but never losing
sight of eventually where you want to go. I think that's the biggest thing
that has helped with us and helped with some of these companies that we've
had the good fortune to be involved with. Now, obviously not everything
works out like that. A lot of companies start,
and maybe they flourish for a certain period of time,
and then they're sold. But the ones that we're looking for,
I mean, now where are we, 2019? It's 20 years since we invested in Google, right, I still own the majority
of my Google shares. And when somebody asks me today, why is a client interested
investing in a our company? I'll always say to them, if I think it
happens to be true in that particular regard, because some companies
don't fit in to that. It's because if we're all fortunate,
if the sun shines on us, we can be shareholders in your
company 20 years from now. Today, Airbnb,
I think we invested in Airbnb $600,000 in 2008 I think, maybe 2009. It's ten years, happens like that,
and the company is still private. Stripe, which is a payment services
company we invested in when it was three or four people, that was 2010. Again, nine years later, these are very,
very long journeys that we're on. And it takes time and patience,
and spectacular people, and a massive market opportunity, to build the real
companies that matter and have an influence and
great impact on society. >> And you and Sir Alex talk about
the importance of identifying high potential talent in building
these types of organizations. So the example he uses is a footballer
some of you may know by the name of David Beckham, who is pretty good. >> [LAUGH]
>> What characteristics are you looking for when trying to identify
this high potential talent, whether it be a founder or
somebody you hire at Sequoia? >> The reason that I approached
Alex to write the book about Manchester United was, for
whatever perverse reason people have been asking me to write a book about
Silicon Valley or Sequoia. And I had no interest in doing that, but I was interested in writing
about enduring organizations. And I picked United because it was
a long way away from Silicon Valley, but because I knew that he shared
the approach that we cherished as well. One of which, Patrick, was the one
that you just fingered, which was, identifying people when they are young and
then helping them develop. And why? Part of it is because you're
not taking a lot of risk. Beckham, I think, they knew about Beckham when Beckham was
eight years old at Manchester United. Now, we're not going around Stanford
looking for eight year olds, but- >> [LAUGH] >> We do like hiring at Sequoia people who are young. Because it's a business that,
even though it looks simple, and today I understand everybody is
an investor, from someone who writes $5,000 checks to somebody who
writes a much bigger kind of check. But to do it well in the fashion
that we like to do it, takes time, and patience, and persistence,
and a willingness to learn. And assuming people like that flourish, you have incredible loyalty, and
they'll stay with you forever. And so that was true for a lot of
the players who played for Sir Alex. And I think being able to
grow organically like that, it's such an enormous competitive
advantage, where you have a stable team of people which you're always amending,
you're always changing. Someone is perhaps no longer playing
as well as they used to play, so you figure out a way to Deal with that. But then you're always
replenishing the bench. But you're doing it in an imperceptible
fashion to people on the outside. So that all they see is, in the soccer
metaphor, the winning team on the field, without realizing that actually there are two players on there today who
weren't on that team 24 months ago. But that's worked spectacularly for us. We've got these great who's a graduate at GSB and
he became, he want to PayPal. And after PayPal he joined Sequoia. And that was probably now 17,
18 years ago? And he's just spectacular,
he's just one example. We got a whole bunch of other
people like that, so it's great. >> One of the characteristics
you mentioned that I was really intrigued by is
this idea of obsession. So the best founders, the best athletes, tend to be obsessed with whatever it is,
the thing that they're working on. I was curious, what do you think obsession
means to you, and how does it feel? How do you know it when you see it? >> There's a gentleman called
Apoorva Mehta, who's the founder and CEO of Instacart,
the online grocery company. And we've been with Apoorva on his journey
for a considerable period of time now. And before we invested,
I asked him how he had happened on grocery delivery as
a business that he wanted to be in. And he said he'd played around with and toyed with a variety of other
businesses that he wanted to start, and he'd got down the road on, I forget,
two, three, four of those. But he said the only one, or
he realized Instacart was the one for him when it was the last,
the idea of the business was the last thing that he thought about
when he went to sleep and the first thing that he thought about
when he woke up in the morning. And to me, that was as good a definition
of obsession as any I've heard. But it's that sort of
full-on experience that you can never stop thinking about and
you don't switch off. I'll give you another
example from yesteryear, which was, again,
this is back to the early 1980s. And I had been up in Seattle working
on a story about Microsoft for Time. And again, this was when
Microsoft was still private and it was still quite small. And Bill Gates gave me a ride
to the airport in his car. And not many people can say that
they were chauffeured by Bill Gates. >> [LAUGH]
>> In fact, I may put that on my LinkedIn profile. >> [LAUGH]
>> Above all other forms of education. And the radio was missing in the car. Big, gaping hole in the dashboard. And I said, Bill, so what happened to you? Did you get ripped off? And he said no, I had it taken out. Why'd you have it taken out? Well, I drive from my home to the office,
which is 7 minutes and 32 seconds. And then, I'll drive from the office
to the airport, which is however long. And he said if I've got the radio, I'm afraid that I'll switch it on and
I won't be thinking about Microsoft. That's obsession. >> [LAUGH]
>> I believe you. [LAUGH] So the funding environment
right now, as you alluded to, is becoming extremely competitive. There are a record number of firms-
>> I didn't allude to it. You alluded to it. >> [LAUGH]
>> True. There are a record number of new venture
firms and capital in the market. Just raised a $1 billion vision fund,
Sequoia just raised an $8 billion fund. Are there too many investment
dollars chasing too few investable opportunities right now? >> So that's the line I've heard since 1986. With one or two exceptions,
maybe 1991, 1992. And then, right after the dot-com blow up,
when capital was, everybody understood
that capital was scarce. It's always been a competitive
funding environment. There have always been, look,
how many companies get financed? And then how many become worth it,
become tremendously important companies? So if you just do that winnowing,
and look at the funnel, there are very, very few great companies. So everybody is madly in
pursuit of those companies, and obviously there are these tangible
examples of the enormous value that's being created in the world of
technology in the last 30 or 40 years. And so, money has poured into the sector. But for us, it's always been this sort of,
almost always been this sort of environment where a really
spectacular idea can raise capital, where somebody who's starting a company
usually has choices of capital. I mean, that's the world that I grew
up in, that's the world that we've always operated in, and I suspect will
be the world that we always operate in. It's just part of life in our business. >> So no bubble. You're good? >> Well, there are always
things that we will have done, others will have done that five,
ten years from now we'll say to ourselves how did we ever do
something as silly as that? Or wasn't it inane or crazy? Or we didn't anticipate this, that, or the other
>> So I'm sure we'll have egg on
our face from time to time. Again, it's just an occupational hazard. >> So I want to talk a little bit
about how Silicon Valley has changed. There continues to be many discussions
happening about how to make both technology companies and
venture capital more diverse, potentially beyond history majors. What responsibility does the venture
industry have to fostering diversity in the technology ecosystem? >> The responsibility
of the valley of firms like ours is to identify
burgeoning talent. And the more the merrier,
irrespective of gender, irrespective of background,
irrespective of color. Now, that's easy to say,
and it's a bland statement. And you will then rightly say well,
what are you doing about it, and what are you doing about it actively? So we're doing what we can, but
there's only so much that we can do. Firms like ours are representative
of social trends. And I sort of sensed that this
question might come up, so I turned the question around because I
dug up the data on diversity at Stanford. >> [LAUGH]
>> In majors. And it's shocking. So let me give you some statistics. Because I think this whole issue is one that all of us have something to do about. So and I'll give you one little
example say from the math department in
the undergraduate program here. And this is germane, I have a friend
of mine whose daughter is in the math department at the moment, and is thinking
about leaving the math department and switching to another major
because she is surrounded by men. And so in 1983,
if you were an undergraduate at Stanford, there was only 22% of the students who had
elected math as their major were women. Guess what that number was in 2014, which
is the last year when data was available. 22% in 1983, 16% in 2014. If you're a computer science
graduate at Stanford, the percentage of women in
the class in 1983 was 21%. In 2014, 20%, and
the only point I'm making is, we'll hire as quickly and
as merrily as we possibly can. We have seven female
investment partners today, we've got I think close to half a dozen
female CEO's that we've backed. But we're a reflection of society and we can only change as the fast as
the rest of society will change. But we're more than happy to do our part. We funded all these different
initiatives to help women in particular. In technology we have one of our partners, is working with something
called female founders. But it's imperative for
the high schools and for the universities of America to change before we'll see
the real acceleration in technology, which I gotta say is a lot better
today than it was 10 or 15 years ago. And I think if you look at
the computer science numbers, those are the best numbers
that I could find at Stanford. But you even saw they're not overwhelming. In 1983, the computer science
proportion of the computer science class here undergrad was 18%. It progressed but
in 2014 it was still only 28%. So there's tons of work for
all of us to do. That's my only point. >> So I want to take our
discussion beyond the Valley because investing outside of Silicon
Valley is become a very popular topic for a lot of people including Sequoia. Do you think this is still the best
place in the world to start a company? >> It's here and it's in China. And their trials and
tribulations involved with both places. And obviously everybody knows
about how expensive it is and the cost of living and
gross receipts taxing San Francisco and all these other impediments
that we wish weren't here. But my goodness, gracious me. Much as people here will complain and moan about different aspects
of Silicone Valley, you go to places elsewhere around the world,
they all wish they were Silicone Valley. So it's a spectacular, fantastic place
in which to start a company and then I was saying to your illustrious Dean,
before I came, while we were chatting backstage,
that I've spent the last three weeks travelling in China and Southeast Asia,
those are vibrant places. One of the very big changes, China
obviously, everybody's read about but Southeast Asia, is really pulsing
with entrepreneurial activity, and that's a big change in the last five,
six years. Everybody knows about India,
and talked about India, but Southeast Asia is surprisingly vibrant. So there are lots of the big change from
when I started in the venture business, a long time ago now,
largely Silicon Valley, and to some extent, Boston,
we had 100% market share give or take on the most important
technology companies of tomorrow. That's completely changed. So that so much of the investment now
occurs outside of the United States for a whole variety of reasons. >> So I want to get a little bit of advice
before we turn it over to the audience. So I think we're all trying to determine
how to focus our time, energy, and resources upon graduation. If you were to put yourself in
our shoes today, what problems or industries would you be focusing on maybe
another way to ask that question is, where is Sequoia going to be investing so
we can the bugs going to be. >> [LAUGH]
>> Well, that's assuming that we
know what we're doing. I've always found,
you go to any website and every investors website despite the
Windows dressings, they all look the same, and everybody's going to invest in your,
whatever the buzz phrases of the year are, you will read them on all the sites. And today may be data science and
machine learning and artificial intelligence and
whatever the attributes are. To me, the best investments
are always the ones that don't fit in a convenient bucket. And so you think about,
I mentioned Airbnb a few minutes ago. You think about Airbnb, what bucket would
you have put three couch surfers in, in 2008? And in retrospect it all looks so obvious,
they're upsetting the hotel industry and all the rest of it. But at the time that we met the company,
it was three young founders who were sort of
sleeping on airbeds, and it was sort of pigeonholed
this very niche service, it's the young people who
would have ever imagine. And I can point to any number of
other investments that seems similar. To me it's, with year, years ago,
a Stanford, this was a yet another offshoot of the incredible fertile
Stanford campus when we invested in Young. The idea of investing in a company
that gave its service away for free this is 1995, was totally foreign. Came out of left field. So it's those investments, the ones that aren't the obvious ones
that are the really interesting ones. We invested some years ago when in TJI
in which is a drone company, in China. Nobody imagined that the time that
we invested to do I think it did, I maybe a bit off with the numbers. But $2 billion in sales, last year,
from what seem like a little, nice little consumer toy at the beginning of
the investment, but which is now becoming a company of substance particularly as
it expands into industrial applications. So it's the, or unfortunately we
weren't an early investor in Uber. But who would've, luxury black car executive ride sharing. Is that ever going to become a business? If you switch the clock back ten
years whenever Uber got started. It's another one of
those sorts of examples. So that's the thing to look out for. It's the unexpected. >> I'm going to move to
the lightning round. Last chance, anyone? Okay, so I'll explain the format as we go. These are supposed to be fun. One-word answers, generally,
but a couple of lists. So prioritize the following
in order of importance. Product, team, market. >> Equal weighting. >> [LAUGH]
>> Unbelievable. It depends. Fill in the blank. The greatest entrepreneur of all time is? >> Whoever invented the wheel. >> [LAUGH]
>> Wow, talk about yesteryear. The greatest individual investor
outside of the Sequoia partnership is? >> It's obvious,
you know where he is in Omaha. >> [LAUGH]
>> What is one company you passed on that
you wish you had invested in? >> I wish it was only one. >> [LAUGH]
>> Uber. We'd became late stage
investors in the company but always with, invested very good. >> What percentage of
success in VC is luck? >> 101%. >> [LAUGH]
>> The most underrated skill in a leader is? >> Listening. >> I thought you would
have said disappointing. >> What?
>> I thought you were going to say disappointing for sure. >> Listening, listening,
listening, listening. >> It shows. Would you rather beat Liverpool or
Benchmark? >> [LAUGH]
>> We just concentrate on beating them both. >> [LAUGH]
>> Please join me in thanking Sir Michael Morris for coming today. >> [APPLAUSE]
>> Good job. >> [APPLAUSE]
>> Thanks so much. [MUSIC]
