The Do's & Dont's of Company Building with Doug Leone, Global Managing Partner at Sequoia Capital

well thank you everyone for for joining us today my name is paige mandozo and i'm one of the partners at pear ventures for those of you who don't know us um we are an early stage fund in silicon valley and um we aspire to be the best partner for entrepreneurs going from zero to one stage our our investment team have started and sold eight companies so we have been in your shoes eight times and our notable investments are doordash gusto garden health branch aurora solar and many others but but more importantly we have a special guest today my friend for over 20 years and my mentor doug leone ceo of global ceo of sequoia capital so doug welcome and thank you so much for for being here today i know how busy you are this means a lot to us well thank you for having me someone in the chat let me know they're from the other side of the globe where it's 1203 in the morning so thank you to all of you who are listening and mostly to those of you especially to those of you who are in the wee hour of the night where it's not lunch time it's it's sleep yes um i i i have so many questions but you know we were talking about it last week we saw the announcement of airbnb and doordash going public and they filed before they announced it is this becoming habit at your office that every every every big um ipo there's sequoia there and i'm going to ask more about that well it's not a habit if you say a habit then you're taking the wrong attitude i will say that we've had over 300 ipos 7 trillion a market cap and we calculated just yesterday 27 percent of the nasdaq is made up of sequoia backed companies so we've had some success but keep in mind that all these companies require 10 to 15 years worth of work i think we've been investors in airbnb for 13 years so to call it a habit would do a disservice but it's something that's happened before it's something we don't really celebrate because in our minds we've been working at this for years and the ipo is not an exit for us the ipo is just another day in the life of the company and if we do our jobs right we probably want to hold airbnb and doordash shares for the next 10 years and those of you founders i want to tell you there's always a tendency to sell early and once you get the flywheel going the real money's made the real return it's a lot tougher to go from zero to 100 million in revenue than from 2 billion to 4 billion in revenue even though you're adding 2 billion in revenue and so for us when we get a chance to find great founders in great markets we we plan on being shareholders for 20 25 years so it's not out of it but but it's not the first time let's just say yes i i'm pretty sure that was it so by the way we actually speaking of your seven trillion dollars market cap we have a promotional presentation before this talks and talks about the uh combined value of our companies i said i'm not going to do it before doug because whatever number i said he's going to be seven trillion dollars nobody can match so i just want to put it out there you know if you have apple that's 2 trillion right i have a lot of questions about sequoia but i think before that what always struck me is is your background as an immigrant you came to america on a boat when you were 11 years old can you talk about talk to our audience about how those days and those years and even when you got your first job shaped who you are today look there's two or three ways sometimes you come here because your iq is 150 and you self-select that is one reason it's not and then it shapes you that you self-selected out of wherever you came it could be you came from humble beginnings and you come here and boy you appreciate everything that's america as imperfect as it is what an opportunity you and i we're just talking about the ability to move town you don't like san francisco you can move to another town people don't understand that you cannot do that in most places in the world so that's another vector but then there's one vector not often talked about and that is the ability to look at a problem from different ways if you will my italian brain and my american brain if you come here during your formative years you are forced to shift your mindset on things and i think that gives you a great advantage when you look at the world when you look at situations so hunger self selection and a trained mind to be a little less hardwired than it might otherwise be are the three ways in which our shape i will tell you in my case it wasn't because i had an iq 140 i just want to get that out for the record it was just we just emigrated because we were poor it was no more complicated than that i was an only child we lived in a studio apartment with my mom and dad and you know if you want to talk about privilege i think the greatest one you could have is parental love privilege if you have that you got a hell of a head start in life uh and i had that i didn't have a lot of anything else but i had that uh and then you know you look around and you say i don't want the next 40 years of my life to be like the first 10 years from a financial standpoint and that's a driver that doesn't finish the last thing i'd say on this i had a tough high school and you know i've said i've talked about this in the past i didn't have a pleasant high school time i was made fun of us and i was an immigrant i was an immigrant who couldn't speak english and that created a bit of an edge so to think of this warm-hearted only child with this pissed off teenage years and i still have that so you know i'm now 63 years old i still think about those days the edge doesn't go away i don't think experiences like that ever go away and all those can be either negatives or competitive advantages and it's what you make of them as an individual and you have a choice we all have a choice what to do with our background and i think one of the greatest opportunities in life is to turn negatives into positives you learn how to do that in life boy you have a great advantage over everybody else oh great perspective um and i know after that you you attended you went to cornell and then columbia and mit moved to silicon valley worked for sign microsystem and joined sequoia i just want to do all the way fast forward till today and get your opinion as a leader of this organization why sequoia has been on top of its game for many decades so we're about to enter our 49th year uh and that seemed like a long time a few years back but it's not a long time uh i would attribute it to a number of things first of all culture i used to think culture was this thing only older people that have nothing else to say talk about and in reality culture is the invisible hand that causes people to do things it is it it is the pull not the push uh and our culture is to find people who are hungry of modest means of something to prove and teach them the we pronoun but in order to teach them that we pronoun you have to pay in the we pronoun way to say we've got a great culture where we and you have a head guy that makes 80 percent of the compensation of 50 percent of compensation that doesn't work so you have to have the right culture that leads to the height to the right people wrap it around with the right compensation and always talk about it always be willing to discuss it to build the trusting environment why is it that we have these quirky individual contributors whether the name arula bota neil shen alfred lin why is it that they stay with us we're together because we foster a a a circle of trust it's okay to be wrong it's not about being right it's about finding the truth it doesn't have to be your truth or somebody else's truth is the truth so we foster an atmosphere trust we pay correctly and we have a culture where i have where we have 10 tenants number one is performance number two is teamwork but if you're missing one the other nine don't matter and so the right culture the right people the right and payment and trust would be why we have continued to excel the other thing and the last thing i'd say is you've got to act as if you've done nothing because the greatest threat to someone like us is the fact that everybody wants to take us down if only for the fun of it not because they don't like us because what else you want to do you want to take the person on top the firm on top so we only have one place to go and that's down and so we do crazy things we have sessions on a regular basis that says how do we put ourselves out of business before somebody else do what would we do if we were a new firm if we were pair ventures and we wanted to take sequoia down what would we do and we go do it ourselves meaning we'll take apart things that are working because we know they may be working for now but they're fragile for the long term and so that is the mindset that we have that's why we don't celebrate the the the filing of two ipos last week uh because that's irrelevant that's work that was done ten years ago where we're we're very much focused on the founder we're going to meet this afternoon well i think this is very impressive actually one of my partners brought this question in regards to sequoia capital it just it seems you you get people who majority of them are not from an investment background or maybe but you turn them to an amazing investors including alfred alfred lin or hula botha how do you do it is in this special place everybody does the same thing or you have a training playbook how do you train these amazing investors who come not only stay with you for decades but they come exceptionally just mentioned that alfred lin has two ipos coming in in december and he's on the board of door dash and airbnb first of all we we need to appreciate that the way we are the principles are in pen but we do not have a menu and the reason for that i really want us to be a living breathing thing that changes through time it has to because the world is changing at a faster and faster rate so when you say train careful because train almost dictates menu we do not do that and there are no rules because i can tell you right now that we love people with product management backgrounds in venture for example but then look at doug leone he was a sales rep look at rule of bota he was the cfo of paypal or alfred lynn was the president of zappos or mike morris he was a reporter go figure uh and so what what we look for is people that can appreciate not only that technology out but from the customer in uh and we are we are very big in letting people learn by osmosis uh and we have let people struggle on purpose i i i call that walk through the abyss where they may be lost for one or two years and we purposely don't help them and we do that for a reason not because we're mean but because we know they're gonna come out of it we have a high confidence but if they pull themselves out of it boy they're going to be incredible uh and i went through the abyss for example and so we try to blend our teams with operating people along the dimensions that we think matters which are engineering product management product marketings and revenue that's where the that's where the core of the company is and sometimes we surround them with a couple investors but it's a combination those two teaching operating people i'd invest teaching investors how to be operating people and then watch the music happen always bring somebody new that's willing to teach us something but no rules no hard training programs i want to shift from sequoia to entrepreneurs and this might be an obvious question but i want to hear from you and the audience here from you how do you help entrepreneurs how does sequoia help entrepreneurs so there are many many many ways so the typical entrepreneur is an engineering-minded person they know how to build products so the very first thing we help them is with product management we make sure that within the the idea uh there's there's a product around it and we have people in the building that can do that then as the company builds a product we spend a lot of time in what i've actually named the merchandising cycle you've never heard that because i gave it a name i finally decided to call something and that is from product marketing to demand gen 2 revenue and i focus a lot about that because wherever that's broken it looks like you got a bad person you you you have to remove the vp of sales it could be you know you talk to the vp of sales it'll tell you not enough leads or she'll tell you like we don't have enough leads well i know to fix that go to the demand jump person invest a little more you have that conversation you find out well it's not really the leads it's the messaging it's not resonating whoa we have to go back to product marketing the the top of funnel the messaging sometimes it's the wrong product product management sometimes a product is not working engineering sometimes the vision is wrong oh my god we have to quickly do a change but you don't know that unless you're willing to debug that and we work very hard at debugging that with the founder and then we have other services like you know uh we'll help you find the first few customers we'll help you recruit executive the first few engineers we don't want to recruit 50 engineers we want to help you recruit the first five or seven eight plus engineers because then the flywheel is going we don't want to help you get 200 customers but we want to help you get the first five or ten because it's your con it's your core competency lately we've added another function which is the design function most founders if you give them 30 minutes they can tell you what what the product does but if they have to say it in three words can't say it so we've decided that in order to get the messaging right it would be helpful to go from 30 minutes to 30 seconds to three seconds and getting that right because that that leads the thinking of we want to be the company that's known for x and next has to be a three second exercise not a 30 minute exercise so we we help out all these strategic points to debug the system to get to the point of maximum healthy growth which we think in a rapidly changing world is a strategic imperative and i want to make sure you hear those two words it is not an option it is a strategic imperative not only for survive not only to excel but to survive and so our world is to remove these bottlenecks to help the founders get to that level and we have you know 49 years of experience we always have the tension between what we know and what we don't know because it's a new world and we're always very careful to blend those two you know what we've known through lots of experience but whoa whoa whoa it's a new problem which is why we prefer to deal with investors and founders and executives who have first principal thinking meaning you may have experience but you're going to break that problem down to its core and you're going to apply your experience not have the answer before you know the question we're very very big on that uh well thank you for sharing that speaking of entrepreneurs when you look at your career or what you have seen at sequoia last few decades is there any common characteristics among the best founders you and sequoia have ever worked with and can you share those even few with our audience take all the terrible adjectives that people throw at you founders irreverent don't listen think you can apply those to our best founders and by the way while you're at it you can apply them to us at sequoia because we are like you we hire people that are like you uh and so they're they're very clear thoughts we love founders who have first-hand knowledge of the pain for whatever reason they've experienced the pain either working for a customer working for a vendor there's so many types of example uh in new bank david velez couldn't get a credit card without waiting online uh in in in airbnb they needed money uh they didn't have so they rented out a room and their history through tech there are many histories cisco systems they they needed to uh to connect the departments at stanford with technology that's how the router was created take it further back sun microsystems andy bechtelsheim wanted to build a new type of computer for himself so he can do engineering work on it the yahoos couldn't find anything online blah blah blah so we'd like founders who have experience with the problem now there are always exceptions ebay was a masterminded business plan people got together and they decided to start a company but we get kind of nervous when we meet two or three people that said we wanted to start a company we got in a room and we started thinking where are the problems of the world where we should go look and we talk to customers because customers don't really know two steps away customers only know what's right in front of them as as jobs used to say no customer would have ever said that he needed an ipod or an iphone uh and uh so we like people with inherent understanding of the problem who can articulate the problem if you can articulate the problem we almost don't even have to hear about your solution because we know what the solution is oh um in speaking of that and you know the talk of town is always is product market fit and i was reading on your background and you talked about meraki this iraqis the company you got involved and correct me if i wrong cisco bought it for a billion dollar billion two billion two and and and what you mentioned was that this was a brilliant team great product for the wrong market and you spent the first two years really figure out what market to go after can you elaborate a little bit more at how often this happens or what suggestion you have entrepreneurs in that same situation so i want to give you the spectrum first i used to go to nasa i used to see something that vibrates 22 million times a second and they says look how great this is and i wouldn't touch that in other words you know that is one side of the spectrum on the other side of spectrum is something that is total product market fit where meraki was someplace in the middle they were dealing in the early days of wi-fi we knew wi-fi was going to be an interesting space and so it was already in a space we thought we could navigate but their model was to go to apartment owners and provide wi-fi to their renters free of charge so they could differentiate their apartment from other apartment owners and when we made the investment we said and they had a working product with a seed investment mit type of technology terrific founders world-class founders and so we said to know we'd like to be a partner but i can tell you that the apartment thing is not that ain't the plan uh and so we spent a year and a half trying new things and they not we they found the market that they care and if you talk to the founders of meraki and you asked them what was sequoia's value-add you might get an answer like they left us alone they applied no pressure they let us create i can tell you there was the genius board members who i will not mention right now who said let's take those guys out i'm thinking what you fire the founders you know like what are we left with the vp of production so i knew the only chance we had was to work with them i know that jim getz and i my partner we met with him on a weekly basis just to talk about products and markets uh and that lasts for about six nine months we talked about a lot of ideas they went away they created they tried a few things and we found the market that worked and that would give the founder 90 of the credit we helped for sure but 90 of the credit just leaving them alone once in a while doing nothing and recognizing talent and letting them run is the best thing that you can do fascinating i actually michael has a question here that might be related to this he says doug in your interview at stanford you said you have the ability to view a business from the customer in versus from the product out can you elaborate more and how do you do this so i grew up in sales meaning i have two engineering degrees but i'm not an engineer the most i can do is fix things around the house i have a wife who thinks i'm handy but that's as good as it gets but from the sales perspective i always understood the customer and what the customer needs now i would not let the customer product manage as i said but on the other hand if you come up with an idea i'm not fascinated by the technology how many times that thing vibrates i'm not fascinated but actually i don't really care i try to think about it what pain does the customer have that this can solve is this a customer with budget is this a product where my phd the vendor has to be smarter than the customer phd which means it's a long sales cycle is this a top down sale where 100 kpo turns into a 3 million kpo which means that po is not going to come in my lifetime or yours or is this one of these things that can meet the world from the inside out those are the things i think about from the customer standpoint the fact is great technology is a given but that doesn't make me want to write the check what makes me write the check is things from the customer standpoint like i said no hard rules once in a while there's a meraki meraki great founders working product a product at mit called the rooftop project and we knew wi-fi was going to be a huge market but we hadn't quite figured out how to play but most of the time when i think of a business plan i try to stay away from the muck the muck is something that requires a long sales cycle where you're selling to engineers and you've got to prove to them beyond the shot of a dow with two phds that the product works i try to stay away from those investments you know obviously every founder would like to come and pitch to sequoia capital and partners what are the common mistakes you have seen when people come and pitch to sequoia capital well first of all they don't come early enough we have a seed business new bank one employee uh airbnb seed stripe seed um i can come up with a whole uh i can come up with a whole bunch more if i thought about them just for a second so why do we want to be there early we want to help you shape the company all these founders take all these safes and don't and they don't realize that all those safes when you blend in pro rata rights proadorites are the right to invest more if a series a and i'll tell you what if sequoia invests everybody will want to invest more we see so many companies but after series a these poor founders have lost half their company it just breaks our heart so think about architecting your company the same way you architect your product go to seed investors if you want payers are terrific seed investors reward them with ownership for having taken a shot early come to us for seed investments but be careful of raising what appears to be this gifts of capital that is the most expensive equity you will ever raise keep in mind that the moment you have us in your cap table within a month you're going to get term sheets from people that want to preempt you simply because they think we know something we've had companies that are struggling being preempted and so be very careful with your shares save your shares for engineers for long-term partners like pair like sequoia and be careful of all this free angel money so that would be one issue second issue be very clear in what your roles are and split equity accordingly it's always kumbaya in the early days jimmy susan and i are splitting 33 points each of the company we're all equal well you're going to find out within 90 days that you're not all equal one of you carries a huge load and it's going to destroy your relationship among the co-founding team figure out early on who does what leave ego aside split the equity correctly because that will ensure longevity not destroy the longevity and don't come in with the titles of ceo president ceo recognize that what you need is a is a leader of the band someone to get the product out engineering someone with product management type of mindset those are the great founding team and the last mistake is raising too much money we want to raise a 20 million series a we never want to worry about raising capital for the next three years why would you do that what you want to do is raise as little as you can to get you to your next big milestone with a little bit of cushion in case you missed by a quarter or two because your valuation is going to skyrocket after that why you'd ever raise a big round in the early days is beyond me it is just nuts you got to defend those shares later on you'll be arguing for half a point here and there of ownership where now you're willing to give 30 points of ownership as if it's nothing as if it's candy and so i would uh think about those first step in the same way you think about your product the same exact mindset you architect your product you want to architect your investors and your company well i believe one of the misconceptions in silicon valley among founders is that they think bunch of rich people give money to sequoia and even pair and we make them richer but one of the astonishing things i notice when i come to sequoia office is every single conference room is named after a non-profit organization can you talk about that and your philosophy of getting your investors more non-profit we do not have a family office we do not have a rich family as our client we are not in the business of making rich people richer i want to make that crystal clear seventy percent of our clients are limited partners our investors are non-profits the other thirty percent of pensioners people that have worked their whole life so we wanna secure a retirement and then we have some sovereign wealth funds why do we have governments and the reason for it is we have built sequoia to to stay with you the founders for the next 20 years so we have a seed fund we have a a venture fund we have a a growth fund we have an eight billion dollar fund for latest stage we have a public market fund to ride with you for a long time and we do that in the us we do it in europe we do it in asia in china we do it in india and southeast asia so we can take you globally and we can stay with you forever and we have all these services i talked about earlier that requires a lot of capital we cannot get there with endowments and foundations only there's just not enough of them there are schools some of you have gone to that eight percent of the endowment is sequoia capital which is crazy i tell the chief investment officer are you out of your mind putting eight percent in sequoia capital they said it's the best investment that we could ever made which is great but i could not have gone to cornell if it wasn't for a scholarship i didn't have any money and i want to return the favor to other kids which is why we're mission driven first we take this very seriously on one side we have the non-profits on the other side we have you the founders and we're in the middle and think how privileged that position is for us and if you don't think we take that extremely seriously you don't know us founders are the head of the dog they come first without you the clients won't come founders are first limited partners are second we're third not because we're babes in the woods but because we know if we do right by the founders and we do right by the clients we'll do right by ourselves over the over the long term and that's how we run sequoia capital um so you have been for decades in india and china i've been very successful in recently opened office in europe what what triggered that so we went into china in 2005 in indian 2006 why do we do that we have the simple goal of being the largest outside shareholder not shareholder founders large outside shareholding in the most valuable companies in the world that is our goal in order to do that you have to go in the economies that are not only large but growing that took us to china southeast asia india and i'm a european i grew up in europe and i went looking in europe in 2005 it wasn't growing very fast 2010 again but over the last two or three years we started to notice that important market leaders are coming out of europe we are investors in four companies in europe whose market value is over 10 billion dollars uipath unity klarna and i can't remember what the last one is and so we've noticed more market leaders we do not care to be involved in a company goes public at a billion dollars that's not as unless it has a chance of being a very valuable long-term company as i said the ipo is just a one day we really don't care and what happens on that day but more and more market leaders are coming out of europe we decided to go to europe not with a separate fund like we did in india and china there those companies tend to stay local but with the same fund as the us because all european companies come to the us first all u.s companies want to go to europe so we don't want conflicting investments so we are in the process of moving all our services i mentioned the recruiting and otherwise to europe as well full-fledged we now have a team of three or four i spend a week a month in europe but it has to do with the market leaders that we see coming out of europe if we want to be invested in them we had to go to europe it's not pleasant it's a it's a heterogeneous economy uh different languages it's not an easy place to go you're always on planes but you have to do it if you want to be partnering with the best company and doug the model is the same thing starting from early seed all the way to growth we hired a lady from excel who was both venturing growth we hired a young man from revolut which is a financial services company a new fintech company was a product management person there you're starting to see the blend of investing and operating who's going to lean a little towards venture we're looking for a third person we're close to making an offer someone that's a little more growth and so we're going to span the gamut in europe as well we hired our first recruiter talent for our companies we have office space and we're off to the races i um i'm reading a question from rashfina um it's asking what are some of the most exciting innovations you're seeing these days especially with the pandemic sequoia will might back or any sector well in my mind just leaving aside the companies that just got a rocket behind them due to the pandemic such as zoom we're lucky enough to be invested in zoo uh and there's a number of them to me it what the pandemic has done it has forced the hands of many u.s corporation to invest more in technology than they had before they have a decentralized workforce so it's not about zoom is maybe the security aspects are not working from home so companies have had their hands forced in spending more on technology that is really the benefit of the pandemic uh and so we're seeing immense types of budgets we're seeing the whole uh thing of data you know starting with snowflakes which i think is probably the killer app of the cloud and how do you get data and how do you pull data out what do you do with that data how do you turn that data into business where does ml fit into that boy all that is creating so much confusion that we love through confusion there's opportunity uh and so to me the whole re-architecting of the enterprise that's happening ongoing constantly in real time is another fascinating opportunity and we have learned that these little products that almost look like utilities that get a toe in in these corporations tend to expand through time and so we've learned to keep an eye on for these uh for these things that maybe sell for 20 30k that they look like a point security product or something like that that that that spread over time we have seen that more more in the last two years than we've had ever before great um okay i'm gonna i'm gonna switch to your daily routine i know you wake up five a.m every morning what is a daily routine and why why are you waking up 5am every day well i think the why is more important so i am 63 years old and i'll be darned if when i step back from the leadership of sequoia and by the way i'm not the ceo of sequoia i'm a partner i don't get paid any more than other senior partners i just take care of i just make sure we all roll one way so i don't want to overstate my importance because it's really not there but i'll be darned if i'm going to be the person that people said he stuck around for too long didn't carry his weight i am believe it or not i'm paranoid i'm paranoid that i want to remain highly productive you know there's a saying in america i want to leave it all in the field yeah i do want to leave it all on the field i want to make sure there's nothing left when i'm done i think it's going to give me great inner peace and so in order to do that in order to perform on that level for me anyway not for everybody it has to be all throughout it has to be mind and body and so i work very hard at staying in shape i have a terrific family four children that all live in california how lucky is that they all live in the bay area a lot of parents are not blessed with that gift i am grandchildren and sequoia and so i don't have a lot of outside interests i picked up golf a covet because that's the only safe thing that you can do i completely stink at golf uh but you know i have a little new thing uh but i want to make sure i am at the razor at the razor tip top of sharpness and staying in shape and weight lifting two hours on monday and two hours on tuesday and be done by tuesday and then doing cardio and stretching and pushing and pushing and pushing so i can stay if you will young in front of you the important founders is what i really work hard at uh i want to stay fresh i want to stay crisp and then one day i'll just get out of the way but i'll tell you until i'm done with sequoia i'm going to be i want to be hungry as can be and i'll try to be as helpful to founders as i can be i i personally respect that a lot and i always learn from you when you when you say these words um what but this is another question what career advice you gave you give to your children doug well i think you have to understand the kids there are some people that do better in what i call parallel tracks there are you know i'm going to be a consultant i'm going to be a manager consultant and that's all i'm going to do and you're going to have a great lap being in my consultant there are people that want more chaos one more risk uh and so you have to understand the kid clearly the the the person i don't want my kid to be i don't want him to be the manager consultant who thinks they should have always taken the shot conversely i don't want him to take shots when their mindset isn't the same the other vector i think about is there are kids that know early on what they want to do i want to be a programmer from the age of five there are some of those kids or i want to be a piano a pianist from the age of seven but most people aren't like that and i told my kids create options don't remove options until about 25 26 27 and then remove options because keeping too many options open means you're not focusing on anything so experience and then narrow and so that was i i don't have any children that wanted to be a pianist nor a programmer from the age of five i think they're all at an appetite for risk and i understood that and i tell them take shots take the shots i have a son right now who's a vp of sales at a company he's talking to another company with eight employees he said boy they want me to go in as a rep i said who cares who cares you're giving me the first person there you're 33 years old if you're as good as you are you'll be vp of sales by 35 there as well take the shot well maybe uh maybe this is a good place to tell the story of how you got your first job and you heard that you start from bottom and when you got the job and you said okay i've already made it i'm in business i love that no it's a true story on day one i was 15 years old working for a a a small business and the owner a little tiring but i loved him told me to go clean the toilets and i went to toilets with the biggest smile on my face because you read your whole life you start cleaning toilets and i said it's true and i thought i was cleaning those toilets you son of a not him but you the whole world i now got you i got you because you let me in you know now you have to deal with doug leone for the rest of your life so i had the biggest grade now i wouldn't want to clean well i cleaned toilets for a summer basically i can't tell you that by the fifth time i had that big smile on my face but that first day i had a big smile on my face well i love that i don't know you have anything else to share um um dawg this was an amazing conversation uh if not i just wanna i mean close uh close with the story of how you and i met and how this relationship has been for over two decades so for those of you obviously you know that i started my career to sell persian carpet very expensive ones here in palo alto and um over 20 some years ago doug walked into our showroom and they said i'm looking for a carpet in my dining room this is the size i need so the next day which was a saturday morning i remember i packed the entire truck with like 50 carpets or 60 carpets to his home in atherton and in 10 minutes into showing this carpet was just very obvious this man is just heart negotiator is hard to please and it it's just i just i don't think i can sell a rug so anyway after a couple of hours working over there when we ended up and he didn't buy anything from me i said dog and this was a time that i started to invest as an engine investor this is late 90s it wasn't really fashionable and i said doug i'm an engine investor i can help sequoia capital and i just want to really think for a moment if you're a doug leone a senior part of sequoia capital the rug salesman come to your home and i said i invest in tech companies and i can help sequoia capital normally what would be the the the kind of expected in their mind that this guy's out of their mind imagine if i was in hollywood i go to sleep steven spielberg's home and at the end he said mr spielberg i make movies and i think you and i should make movies together um it's kind of the crazy but but but doug paused and i said i come monday morning 7 a.m to your gallery and you know gallery opens at 10 30. so i made made my life mission and i go over there 5 a.m and matey he came in said good morning you told me you're going to help sequoia capital how i said doug you know i know every single iranian phd founders at stanford and i think there's something there i said okay let's do an event together so two weeks after he brought the entire senior partnership you know mike moritz was on the board of yahoo and google he brought him he brought mike morris himself jim getz and other people and i brought like 100 iranian phd founders it was an amazing night nothing happened that night but fast forward after 20 years that his trust in me one gave me the courage and confidence that if i can have this conversation with sequoia capital i can play a role in this ecosystem i might not be the best person to provide product feedback but maybe i can be the best agent in this town that i can connect people and as a result you know we ended up together when i called him about dropbox and and other companies we ended up investing together in seating companies like dropbox garden health and outdoor that so doug i just want to thank you so much for for for believing in me 20 years ago and i did that for so many other founders and so many other people you brought to sequoia to become an um investor so i just want to thank you on behalf of the whole ecosystem you all aspire to be sequoia in our lives so thank you for those words i will say a couple of addition and a correction one i did buy carpets from you you sold me yes since the carpet from san francisco where it didn't fit i said cut it and you were appalled by the fact i used to cut it uh one two for those of you being buying carpets i made the simple math if if the price what they are in one of these stores they're holding 400 million of inventory and i knew they could not be holding 50 million inventory so i knew these prices had room in them so that was a second and look uh yes we always try to meet the founders as early as possible i remember the event that we attended you called the iranian indian event and i convinced you to call it the iranian indian and italian italians yes but it was remember and i remember you brought the italian mafia of cisco i i forgot he was a cto that's very vulnerable mario over there so yeah we call it ti thank you for your words i want to tell all the founders uh that if you can't sleep at night thinking of the idea thinking got to start a business that is the signal that you should start a business choose your partners carefully guard your shares carefully and if you ever want to reach out feel free to email me uh and i'm happy to follow up uh and mention the pair uh meeting and or feel free to reach out to pagemon we work with one another very well and we make a great team so thank you very much thank you doug very much really appreciate it have a great day thanks everybody thank you

Channel: Pear

Views: 4,486

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: ZzLctAmRs48

Length: 44min 1sec (2641 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021