Acquired - Sequoia Capital (Part 1)

Episode Date: September 26, 2019

Acquired dives into the history behind storied venture firm Sequoia Capital and its legendary founder, Don Valentine. Part 1 tells Don’s story, starting from humble beginnings born to uneducated parents in Yonkers, NY, through shaping the fabric of Silicon Valley first as head of Sales & Marketing at both Fairchild and National Semiconductor, and then for generations to come via his pioneering concept of “company building” at Sequoia Capital. No matter where you sit in the ecosystem today, Don and the companies he helped build laid the foundation for nearly everything technology has become over the past 60 years.Sponsors:ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acqsnaiagentsHuntress: https://bit.ly/acqhuntressVanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvantaMore Acquired!:Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the SlackSubscribe to ACQ2Merch Store!Links:Silicon Valley’s “Traitorous Eight”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eightDon Valentine’s lecture at Stanford GSB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKN-abRJMEw&t=2555sBerkeley’s oral history with Don:  http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/valentine_donald.pdfCarve Outs:Ben: The Business Roundtable on The Daily:  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/podcasts/the-daily/business-roundtable-corporate-responsibility.htmlDavid: Amazon Music on 25 years of “Ready to Die”: https://youtu.be/Dsna1nIZzB4Sources:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Silicon-Valley-Shockley-racist-semiconductor-lab-13164228.phphttps://signallake.com/innovation/Valentine101409.pdf http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/valentine_donald.pdf https://www.amazon.com/dp/0875849385/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_ZB8IDb7NNAFAH https://www.amazon.com/Troublemakers-Silicon-Valleys-Coming-Age-ebook/dp/B06ZZ1YDTX/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=https://www.scaruffi.com/svhistory/arun3.htmlhttp://www.ianhathaway.org/blog/2019/7/31/vc-an-american-history https://www.axios.com/sequoia-capital-shakes-up-leadership-1513300220-7d255e34-f4bf-4178-af62-ec68023726e3.html https://www.slideshare.net/lebret/a-history-of-venture-capital-lebret-vers-11https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=47240https://www.inc.com/magazine/19850501/7289_pagen_5.html https://www.amazon.com/VC-American-History-Tom-Nicholas-ebook/dp/B07QV2YM3X/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKN-abRJMEw&t=2555s

I love it. You know, I've been intending to upgrade them when I was in New York. I was like, oh, I'm going to go to the flagship Nike store and get like the latest, latest model. They don't make them anymore. They don't make the Flyknits anymore? They make Flyknits, but they don't make the free Flyknits. Oh, crap. The Nike free Flyknits.

So I think this might be the last model. We'll have to stock up. Yeah, I know what I'm doing this weekend. Welcome to Season 5, Episode 4 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and early- stage venture fund in Seattle. And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am a general partner at Wave Capital, an early stage venture fund focused on marketplaces based in San Francisco. And we, as you know, are your hosts. Today, we are talking about the absolutely legendary Sequoia Capital. And because it would be inappropriate to try to cover Sequoia's immaculate history in just one episode, this is only part one. And typically, I try and throw out

some stats in this section about why the company that we're covering on this episode is important. Well, today, I'm only going to throw out one. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has helped to catalyze companies that now represent $3.3 trillion of public market value. And for context, the entire NASDAQ is $10 trillion. It is frankly, absolutely unbelievable that a single firm can be responsible for helping to create so much of our modern economy. David, this is bananas. Yeah. For comparison's sake, what did we say? Next, which is one of our A pluses, we said generated a trillion dollars in market cap value, the next acquisition. So here we are talking about $3.3 trillion. Now, obviously, it's a venture firm, not a company, but this is one of the reasons I've been so excited to dive into this

new category here on Acquired and can't wait to tell this history of Sequoia Capital. Absolutely. Okay, listeners, now is a great time to tell you about longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. Yes, as you know, ServiceNow is the AI platform for business transformation. And they have some new news to share. ServiceNow is introducing AI agents. So only the ServiceNow platform puts AI agents to work across every corner of your business. Yep.

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so that your teams can actually focus on what truly matters. Ultimately, ServiceNow and agentic AI is the way to deploy AI across every corner of your enterprise. They boost productivity for employees, enrich customer experiences, and make work better for everyone. Yep. So learn how you can put AI agents to work for your people by clicking the link in the show notes or going to servicenow.com slash AI dash agents. So lastly, our limited partner bonus show this week was kind

of a fun flip for me. David interviewed me on what is a startup studio and how does it work? And I dove into our process here at Pioneer Square Labs. If you want to listen and become a limited partner, you can get started with a seven day free trial and listen right here in the podcast player of your choice by clicking the link in the show notes or going to glow.fm slash acquired. I promise it's very easy. I like that. I like that. Yep. All right, David, it's time. It's time. Let's do it. So one thing that is oft forgotten these days because it's just a name and is like, you know, reminds me of the quote about fishes and water, where, you know, you ask a fish, like, how's the water? And the fish says, what's water? And that is that Silicon Valley is called Silicon Valley because of silicon, even though it is mostly software these days and the internet. So to set the stage for

this episode, we need to rewind back to the origin of Silicon Valley and indeed silicon. So we go back to 1957 when, and this is really the moment I think you could argue when Silicon Valley, as we know it both in terms of silicon and in terms of the concept was born. And that was when a group of eight employees leave a company called Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory and start a new company that ends up being called Fairchild Semiconductor. And this group of eight employees goes on to be known as the Traitorous Eight. And we'll link to in the show notes to this amazing photo, we'll link to the Wikipedia page of these eight individuals. It's just so great. So 1957 in all the best ways. Why did these eight folks leave Shockley and start their own company?

This was a radical thing to do at the time. Well, Shockley Semiconductor was started by Bill Shockley. And Bill was a genius. He was the co-inventor of the transistor that he helped invent when he was at Bell Labs. And for that, he won the 1956 Nobel Prize. I mean, he literally helped invent computing. But he did have a dark side. And that dark side was that he was a terrible manager, and people hated working for him. And to help you kind of get the picture at this point in time, and then for kind of the rest of his life, he became a white supremacist and was a proponent of eugenics. So this is the sort of person we're talking about that would prompt people, as brilliant as he was, and as amazing as the innovation that was happening at Shockley would be prompted to maybe leave and do something

rash. So who are the traders eight? Well, among them, there are some names you might recognize, starting with Gordon Moore of Moore's Law and Bob Noyce, who of course the two of them would go on to found Intel, although that's a story for another day. And Eugene Kleiner, who would go on to help found Kleiner Perkins, which is another venture firm story for another day. But what was interesting is when they left and they started Fairchild, it wasn't actually a startup in the way that we think about it today. It wasn't an independent company. It ended up, they had a really tough time getting it financed. And so how it ended up being organized was as the West Coast Semiconductor Division of an East Coast company called Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation. So Fairchild was located back on

Long Island in New York, and they owned the company. So funny. I always assumed that Fairchild was like one of the Trader S8. No, not at all. Yeah, they didn't actually own the company. I believe they had equity in it, but no. So how did this happen? A man named Sherman Fairchild, at this point in time, who lived in Long Island, was the largest shareholder in IBM because his father had helped finance Tom Watson in forming IBM many years earlier. So when the Trader's Eight were trying to get their new company off the ground, they intersected with a man named Arthur Rock, who's going to come up again in a minute here, who was one of the early proto-venture capitalists in California. And he was a former investment

banker and he was trying to get financing. It was really hard. And so he ended up going to Sherman Fairchild because he knew Sherman was the largest shareholder in IBM. He was interested in technology. And Sherman agreed to set this up as a division of his camera and instrument corporation. Wow. Creative. Yeah, which is crazy. So the way it happened, they loaned $1.5 million to the company in return for which they got an option to buy all of the stock of the company for $3 million.

Imagine if VCs structured deals that way today with founders. It wouldn't quite set up the right set of incentives. No. But you got to crawl before you can walk. Yeah. Fairchild would lead to many, many including of course intel and we'll get into that a little bit later i mentioned arthur rock so what was the financing environment for quote-unquote startups in in california at this point in time knowing how markets work i think we can assume that there wasn't much of it given the terms of that other investment that you just mentioned.

Indeed. So as you might guess from how Fairchild was financed, the quote unquote venture capital industry or the proto venture capital industry that existed in California at this time was pretty much nothing like we know it today. For one, it was so small that the individuals who were doing it, all of them in California, they would meet for lunch once a month at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco at a table, a regular table, and they would sit around and talk about the various companies that they were working on. That was it. That was the entire industry. And for two, none of them actually came from a technology or a startup or company background. So Arthur Rock, who we mentioned, he was an investment banker. And a few other folks that were kind of instrumental at this point in time,

Pitch Johnson and Bill Draper, the name Draper might ring a few bells for folks. They had worked in the steel industry and come out to California and started financing companies. There was another gentleman named Tommy Davis. He was a real estate developer who developed an interest in this sort of thing. So that was really the state of things. And as evidenced by Fairchild, here you have eight of the most talented scientists and engineers working in the highest growth industry in the world. And it's literally impossible to finance them. They have to get essentially bought by an East Coast company to even get their company. It's wild. It's so interesting. Venture capital

falls under the broad asset class today of alternative investments, which always seems a little funny given, you know, how much, especially today with all the late stage money coming into startups, how much money is really invested there. And it's silly to call it alternative. Now, when you look at it in these days, it's very much, you had to be a very alternative counterculture person to believe that this was the best way to go and invest your money. So it's right at this moment in time that a quite a maverick, one might say, individual comes on the scene and basically, basically single-handedly writes the playbook of what modern venture capital and alongside it, what a modern startup would look like. And that man's name is Don Valentine. So Don, of course, goes on and starts Sequoia Capital. And we're going to

tell this story here. I cannot recommend highly enough anyone, whether certainly if you work in or are interested in venture, but even if not, if you're just interested in technology and startups, go do two things. One, watch the YouTube video of a talk that Don gave at the GSB at Stanford in 2010. And two, read this wonderful, wonderful oral history that Berkeley did as part of the history department there with Don. And you will get a sense for what an amazing character this guy is. And a lot of this show is a lot of the history of this show is taken from those two documents. Yeah. And listeners, the way to think about part one, part two of the Sequoia story, part one that we're going to focus on here, this is really Don's story. Yeah. And it's really cool. Actually, the talk that he gives at Stanford, he holds up towards the beginning of it, the resume of an individual who had just joined Sequoia Capital that week. That individual is Alfred Lin, of course, friend of the show and former guest.

It's kind of amazing. He printed out Alfred's resume and brought it to this talk. I also love that Alfred had a resume at that point. He was COO and chairman of Zappos that had just been acquired for over a billion dollars, but always hustling. Okay. So who is Don? So he was born in 1933 in Yonkers, New York, uh, back on the East coast. His father was a teamster. Um, so a delivery truck driver and a union member, uh, if you can imagine it, which, um, Don took a, ends up taking a very, very different path in life. His parents were completely uneducated, both of them. Neither of them had finished grade school. Wow, so not like hadn't gone to college,

like hadn't finished grade school. No, literally like had not finished elementary school. But in good Catholic fashion, they do value education and especially Catholic and religious education. And so Don grows up in New York going to Catholic schools. And then he ends up going to Fordham University, a Jesuit university, graduates in the early 1950s, and promptly, as most folks did back then, at least most men, gets drafted

into the army. This is, I believe, either during or right before when the Korean War is going on. According to Don, he, quote, had a terrible attitude about the military. He didn't like and doesn't like regimentation. And this is going to become very clear. Don does things his own way. But one thing that he loves is electronics and technology. And he ends up getting put in charge in the Army of, in his words, trying to teach senior officers to use modern technology instead of the way that they were inclined to fight wars, which was with horses and cavalry. All that said, the army and Don still don't really mix. So he transfers to

the Navy. And this is a major, major moment for him because he gets stationed in California. He comes out to California and he steps off the boat and he's like, I have reached the promised land. It doesn't snow here in the winter. I'm never going back to the East coast. I love this place. His goal is he wants to find employment at a West coast electronics company. Um, so he gets out of the Navy. Uh, it ends up taking a little while. He first gets a job at Sylvania Electric, which was actually based in Pennsylvania. I believe he was working for them in New York. Is that the vacuum cleaner company? Well, it's the vacuum tube company.

So this is how he gets into technology because this was still, you know, the semiconductor, I believe, had been invented by Shockley and others at this point. Most computing such as it was, was being done with vacuum tubes. You know, remember the ENIAC? And like, this is what we're talking about back in these days. Yeah, I guess I know Sylvania is a lighting company. I think, do they make light bulbs? I've like seen the logo around like Home Depot.

Yeah, I think they make light bulbs now. I mean, who knows what the corporate structure of the company is these days. At the time, they were making vacuum tubes and selling them as computing components, mostly to the defense department. And of course, Don had come from the military. So Don ends up jumping ship to Raytheon and moving to Los Angeles. So here he is. He's finally, he's achieved his goal. He's living in LA, out in California, loving life, surfing. He was a big water polo player.

And he's working in what at the time was the high technology industry selling computing solutions to the Defense Department and the military. He starts taking part-time courses at the business school at UCLA, focused on sales and marketing, because he was really interested in, of course, sales, which is his job, but also the marketing component, like who are we selling to and why? And he has a great quote. He says, where is the decision-making process in a great company? The answer is it's in marketing. In a well-run company, the marketing department, in conjunction with the science department, science being engineering at the time, decides based on what their capabilities are, what the problems they can solve, what sequence they should solve them in,

and how much money they can spend on building that product and how big is the market, who's going to buy this stuff. And all that happens within marketing in a primary position. This really becomes Don's life passion. And that ethos ends up informing everything he does and everything at Sequoia Capital, as we'll see. So after a short stint at Raytheon, he ends up getting recruited to move up to Northern California and join a fresh startup in a really hot semiconductor company up there, Fairchild Semiconductor. Was Fairchild independent at this point, or were they still a part of the bigger umbrella? No, this was still very early. They were part of camera and instrument, as we'll see. So Don joins, he's not part of the Trader's Eight, but he joins, he's like employee number 40 or 50. They're doing a couple million dollars in sales, but still really small. And at first, they put him

in charge of selling Fairchild Summit conductors to defense firms back in Southern California. So they sent him back down to Southern California. Which is kind of funny. It's exactly what he's doing in the Army, right? It's educating about modern technology to people who had been doing things an older way and trying to basically do a very complex sale. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of amazing that like, you know, Don's history from Yonkers, New York, everything basically, you know, sets him on, it's like the Steve Jobs quote of like, you can't connect the dots looking forward, but looking back, everything you've done, you know, prepares you for what you're doing now. Don, you know, basically, uh, knocks it out of

the park, uh, selling, selling to defense contractors down in LA. He takes the company from this couple of million dollars in sales when he joins to over $150 million in annual sales, uh, in just a couple of years. And, um, and it's over that time he gets promoted, ends up running all of sales and marketing for Fairchild. And he starts using everything that he's learned in his passion for marketing to tap into like, hey, maybe we should be selling to other markets too. And which other markets should we be selling to? And are there things that we can do to customize the chips that we're making to make them more applicable to these other applications and other markets?

The quote he has here is, business was so good. I mean, this was like, God, to be at this moment in time, it was like to be there in the mid-90s when the internet was taking off or the mid-2000s when Web 2.0 was taking off. And it was literally just like, you could see the roadmap of what all the applications were going to be. And it was literally just like, you could see the roadmap of what all the applications were going to be. And it was just you know, that now we sort of like take it for granted. Actually, we're in this phase where we're sort of moving forward from IT departments into, you know, companies that don't have IT departments, but this was the development of IT. You know, this was every company that was starting to embrace technology would use something with semiconductor products in it. Yeah, I mean, we're going to see this here in a minute with

the personal computer and Apple, but then with the internet, then with web 2.0, then with mobile, like you have this tectonic shift and then it's like, okay, we know what the applications are. Let's go build the applications. And Don is really the first person in technology to recognize that this is the dynamic of how the broader technology ecosystem works. So he says, business was so good that we had more opportunities than we had engineers. And we devised a bit of an ad hoc technique for evaluating different companies, companies that Fairchild could potentially work with and sell to before we would commit our engineering resources to work on them on a specific project. We had to understand the nature of the application and understand the

size of the market. There are a number of kind of highlight things that we did before we committed engineering. And you can think about that and think about like, gosh, man, that sounds a lot like writing an investment memo for a venture capital firm. It's also what an incredible privilege to be in a position where you get to pick your customers based on who you think is going to be the most successful with your product. Yeah, yeah, totally. So remember, though, Don's working at Fairchild. He's taken them from a couple million in revenue to over 150 million in revenue. And this is like, you know, the early 19s, late 50s, early 1960s. So 150 million wasn't just 150 million back then. Remember, though, Fairchild, you know, the early 19, late 50s, early 1960s. So 150 million wasn't just 150 million back then.

Remember, though, Fairchild, you know, it isn't an independent company. It's a subsidiary of this Long Island based East Coast, you know, conservative camera and instrument corporation. So every time that Don is, you know, working on building, you know, a new customization and application new market that Fairchild wants to enter, he has to go to the board of the company and get their approval for what they're doing. And Don starts, you know, that goes well enough. Like incentives are aligned.

Of course, Fairchild wants the company to grow and do well. But Don gets this idea. He's like, you know, we could really accelerate our market and our partners that we're working with. A lot of these applications companies are new entities that are integrating our technology into a full solution for a given industry. They're getting off the ground. We could really accelerate things if we invested in these companies and helped them build themselves because the bigger that they get and the faster that they get bigger, the more sales they're going to have, the more

sales we're going to have. Right. It's this ecosystem mindset. We need to help invest to build the ecosystem around our products. Totally. So he thinks this is brilliant. He takes this idea to the board and the board is like, absolutely not. That's a crazy idea. Whoever would want to do that? So Don, in typical Don fashion, he says, well, screw it. If the board's not going to do this, I'm just going to start doing this on my own with my own money. When he would be working on the technology and marketing roadmaps for Fairchild and working with startups to help build applications, he would just start investing small amounts of money personally

in these startups that he knew that he was going to make them into big companies. The only problem, though, is he's doing this personally. He doesn't have enough capital to really get these companies all the way to working. It's so funny how we joke here at Wave that you're raising money for a new startup. And even today in 2019, the answer for how much capital you need always comes back to

somewhere between one to three million to get off the ground. And that was the case even back then. This is totally amazing. This is one of my biggest tech themes, but it is crazy looking at their first five investments. Two of them were at 2 million and one of them was at two and a half million. And it, like it is today's seed round. And yet what they're doing is they're building freaking, you know, semiconductor physical applications. Like they're, they're using semiconductors to make another product physically manufacture it. Like it is nuts to me. Yeah. They're setting up manufacturing. Totally. Yeah. So even back in the 60s, a couple million back then was a lot more in today's dollars,

but you had to do all this really hard stuff. Don starts doing this. Fast forward to 1967, and there was another company in the Valley that had been around for a long time and was kind of foundering called National Semiconductor. And National makes a big play. They're already a public company, I believe. They poach a number of people from Fairchild, including Charles Sprock, who becomes the CEO of National, and Pierre Lamond from a name that's going to come up again very soon, Pierre Lamond from Fairchild, who becomes to come up again very soon, Pierre Lamond from Fairchild,

who becomes the chief chip designer and head of engineering there. So Charlie Sprock, as CEO, he does a couple really interesting things. First is, so everybody in Silicon Valley at this point, remember, it's called Silicon Valley because they're making silicon chips. They're making the chips there in Northern California. Fairchild's producing them there. All these companies that Don's investing in, they're doing manufacturing right there. Charlie at National, he offshores chip production to Asia. And he reasons that like, hey, the intellectual property that we're building here, we can just do all the design and building here and we'll just outsource the actual production of these chips of the silicon as a commodity.

So that creates a huge price war in the industry and massively lowers the cost of silicon, which then ends up enabling all the things that come shortly thereafter, including the PC. We should also say that the incredible growth and demand for silicon is Fairchild's fault, because Fairchild was the one who pioneered the idea that silicon was actually the most effective material to use for semiconductors. That wasn't the case before. I believe before Fairchild, people were using germanium to make semiconductors, which is a rare precious metal. Yep.

National would actually go on later to acquire Fairchild and uh ben do you know who would ultimately become the ceo of national semiconductor uh this is you know this is like the beginning of the valley being a small place and uh and all of these dynamics enabling the personal computer gil amelio oh what yes of apple fame yes future ceo of apple uh his first i believe floundering Oh, what? Yes. Of Apple fame. Yes. Future CEO of Apple. Future floundering CEO of Apple. Yeah. I believe his first CEO gig was taking over for Charlie as CEO of National. Yeah.

So all of this is going on. Fairchild is on the ropes. In 1968, Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce leave Fairchild. So Don Valentine's still there at Fairchild. And they start Intel. And Don sees the writing on the wall and he's like, oh man, Fairchild is cooked. Brain drain. Yeah. Brain drain. I mean, it's just like Silicon Valley today. These things start happening. Like the key leaders and really smart people start leaving, you know, the writing is on the wall. He leaves. He moves over to National as

head of sales and marketing at National. Now, this is where serendipity completely strikes. If Don hadn't made this move, I'd seriously doubt that there would be a Sequoia Capital. And there may not be a modern venture capital industry as we know it today. So Charlie is obviously brilliant. And this move of outsourcing production of chips is revolutionary to the industry. And quite prescient. And quite prescient. But there's one thing that he's absolutely terrible at, and that is public speaking. And that's one thing that Don is not afraid of. So remember, National is a public company, and they have to do earnings calls with Wall Street, even back in 1968.

Charlie's terrified of this. He doesn't want to do them. And so as soon as Don shows up, he says, great, Don, you're head of sales and marketing. You lead the earnings calls. Whoa. Which would be unheard of today. I mean, it's your CEO and your CFO basically without exception. Yep, yep.

And you have other executives on there from time to time. Sure, but not leading it. Don starts leading the earnings calls. Through that, he gets to know a lot of the shareholders of National. And it turns out that one of their largest investors is an enormous public investment fund based in Los Angeles, back in Don's old stomping grounds, at the time called

the American Funds. And that was part of this institution called Capital Group, which I think a lot of people don't know about. But Capital Group still today is one of the largest mutual funds and pools of mutual funds and money managers in the world. I believe they have well over a trillion dollars in capital under management across many, many funds. Capital Group, they had been seeing what was starting to happen up in, you know, the new proto Silicon Valley. They'd seen the Intel IPO that had happened, which had, you know, was the first and Intel was the first true venture backed company that had gone public and all the wealth that had created and who originally backed intel uh i believe it was arthur rock arthur rock

organized a syndicate that backed intel with equity uh well it was a convertible instrument it was like convertible debt i believe uh a story for another day so capital group they'd seen this and they actually funded amd uh. And AMD also came out of Fairchild, which I didn't know until doing research for this story. So yeah, both Intel and AMD, both were Fairchild alumni. I mean, really all goes back to the Trader S8 and this legacy of leaving dying companies and starting new ones out of them that propels Silicon Valley to this day. That is so much like all these other industries we've talked about. I mean, Verizon and AT&T basically both coming out of the original massive AT&T company. It feels like chip companies are not

unique in this characteristic of both modern giants coming from the same source. Yeah. Yeah. So Capital Group, they've invested, they've privately funded AMD. They're a big investor in national. So they're like, you know, especially as a public investment vehicle, they're at the forefront of being, um, investing in Silicon Valley and its growth. They get to know Don and they learn from Don about all this private investing he's doing. And so they approach him with an offer. How about he do this full time, leave national and come and start working with them at Capital Group. They'll give him, you know, certainly capital and they have more capital than probably just about anybody in the world at this point in time, uh, or access to capital and take him from, you know, the couple thousand dollar personal checks that he's able to write to finance these companies up to enough that he can actually support them to get to, uh,

get to a public offering where they need to get to. Um, so Don jumps at this chance. Uh, you know, this is his true passion. He loves this. And this is a chance to, um, you know, take all of these roadmaps and marketing and market analysis skills that he's developed and just have this be his full-time job. This is of course the birth of the illustrious and, uh, and name we all know today, capital management services, Inc. Yes. Well, it was part of capital group. So we'll get into the structure in a second. I want to throw in a few great quotes from Don here. He talks about why he had the courage to think that he could do this full-time. And this is crazy. Nobody is investing full-time in private technology companies at this point in time. It's a bunch of folks who made money in other industries having lunch at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, remember? And Don is going to

make this his full-time job. So he said, I had a sense that my system of selection would work far more than it wouldn't, but I didn't have the resources personally to play Texas Hold'em and put up more chips. The opportunity to have a large discretionary pool of money to continue to support the investment ideas was the difference in the environment I was in and the environment I was interested in going to. And after 12 or 13 years in the semiconductor business, I had a very high profile reputation in this community. And again, he was already doing the investing privately.

So he says, so people who are interested in starting companies often gravitated to me to help them start their companies. From their point of view, I had some money. I knew how markets worked, and how to help them position their company in the market. So I had a bit of an unfair advantage in those two respects. But the most unfair advantage I had was I knew what the future was. And very few people knew what the future was. Nobody else, nobody else in the venture capital industry at this point was from the semiconductor business. Nobody else knew marketing and nobody else knew the microprocessor. So it's kind of amazing. Like Don has this, as we've talked about- It's three pretty valuable things to be good at,

at this point in time. Exactly, exactly. So like, if you think about what he's saying, so it maps pretty exactly to the core functions of a venture capital firm. So on sourcing, he has a network of super talented technical people and scientists with the right experience to start technology companies. You know, he is, I mean, his name is Don. It's perfect. He's like the original Silicon Valley mafia Don. That's one, that's like top of the funnel, that's sourcing. But then two, he has this unique experience that he knows all the roadmaps of, you know of Fairchild and National and the whole semiconductor industry. He knows what markets to attack. So he has the selection judgment of which founders and ideas to invest in. And then he has the ability to actually help them, unlike anybody else in the industry at the time, actually help them build their companies through certainly recruiting management teams, but also strategy and decisions in the early days, because he's lived through it. So he can help them build their companies. And now finally, through Capital Group, he has access to essentially an unlimited pool of capital, which again, nobody else in the industry had. People were having to go

back to the East Coast at Fairchild to finance their companies. So David, you're saying an unlimited pool of capital. How does that really break down and how much money from the Capital Group could Don really invest in startups? Exactly. So this is 1972. Don leaves. He starts working with Capital Group and Capital Group sets up a new $5 million fund for their clients who want to invest in this high risk, high return startup in the semiconductor industry in Northern California. And Capital Group calls it the, quote unquote, Sequoia Fund. And this is the beginnings of the Oh, Capital Group came up with the Sequoia name? Well, I don't know if Capital Group or Don did, but it is within Capital Group. This 1972

$5 million fund is called the Sequoia Fund. And so Don starts working on this on behalf of Capital Group and Capital Group's clients. But again, Don's kind of like a maverick and he does things his own way. He's not super interested in just working for Capital Group forever. He really wants to do this himself. And Capital Group totally supports him in that. So he starts making investments on behalf of them, but he also starts working in parallel on creating his own fund and own firm that he's going to call Sequoia Capital and raising an outside fund. And you would think this would be easy, right? I mean, Don has this amazing track record. He has a brilliant strategy that nobody else can replicate.

He knows what's going to work. He has the... He says that there are no LPs. Well, he has the stamp and imprimatur of Capital Group, one of the most storied money managers in the world at that point in time. And Don, he learns a lesson that generations of people who start new firms have learned again and again. We learned at Wave, which was that even with all that, starting raising a first time fund is really freaking hard. Like really freaking hard. Yeah. And what Don was doing was raising a first time fund for an asset class that didn't yet exist. So for Don, there weren't a group of investors who were used to putting money in this risk return profile, it was going

and convincing them, hey, like there's not really historical data on this, but you should take a flyer not only on me, but on this entire concept. Yeah, totally. I mean, you got to remember, this is pre, you know, for listeners who know about David Swenson at Yale, the chief investment officer at Yale, he really pioneered this approach that large pools of capital, especially tax-exempt nonprofits pools of capital, should put a lot of their assets in alternative investments where they can get extremely high returns over a long time horizon. And because they're tax-exempt, they can compound those returns at a much higher rate than ordinary

folks. This concept didn't exist. So most pools of capital, you know, university endowments, foundations, family offices, and the like, you know, all of capital groups. It's bonds, it's treasury bills. Yeah, it's fixed income. A little bit of stock. Yeah. They're investing in, you know, and these folks, they're targeting across their investments a 10% IRR, which is great and better than the average

market returns. But it's nothing like what Don thinks he can generate and what the venture capital industry promises. So he goes out and he makes this pitch about like, hey, I think I can at least double 10% IRR. And if you look at my personal track record, it's much more than that. And indeed, Sequoia's first few funds would be well, well above 10% IRR, many multiples above that. The reception he gets is like, well, this doesn't sound like the investing business. This isn't fixed income. And Don's like, yeah, you're exactly right. This isn't the investment business. This is the company building business. I'm in the business of starting and helping build great companies. And he's so right. I mean, that is what true early stage venture is. It's not, you know, investing,

allocating money and seeing what happens. It's really digging in and helping start something from scratch. And that's where to this day, you know, the deep, uh, the, the true outlier returns are. Um, but the LP community is just like, they don't get it. So Don tells this great story. He goes to see Solomon brothers in New York, the story to investment bank, which, uh, I believe it was Solomon brothers. That was the subject of a liar's poker, Michael Lewis's first book. And, um, and he sits down with the folks there. He gives them the pitch and they say, uh, I see that you didn't go to Harvard business school. And he says, right. I didn't go to Harvard business school. I went to Fairchild semiconductor business school. And, um, they didn't like laugh at all. And they're like,

we're not going to invest with anybody who didn't go to Harvard business school. Uh, so it ends up taking him almost three years while working with Capital Group to raise the first independent Sequoia fund. But finally in 1975- And even that, that was like single digit. How big was that fund? I couldn't get the exact data. Well, I saw a couple of conflicting sources, but I believe it was somewhere between three to 5 million. So quite, quite small. And that's with three years of work on it. Just think about the tenacity. I mean, most people would give up. Yeah, totally. Think of Sequoia capital today and then think back to

the early seventies and one man, you know, Don Valentine scraping together for three years, just cause he believes so deeply in this vision of the future to put three to five million together and start investing. It really just tells you a ton about, you look at their ethos today, and this is where it comes from. Once he gets started, he sets what he calls a few ground rules for investing. So this is the original Sequoia Capital investing checklist. One, must be in a very big market, the potential investment. Two, must be in Northern California. That's changed. Three, must be in advanced technology. Four, must have high gross margin ability. That is also changed. And five,

must have the potential for Sequoia to make $100 million on the investment. I mean, that's incredible, like a $3 to $5 million fund, and he's still like he's only aiming for shooting for the moon, but Sequoia alone could make $100 million on these investments. Which is basically by today's standards saying it has to be a unicorn because in general, an early stage, call it a series A investor is going to get diluted to around 10% ownership by the time there's an exit is sort of the finger in the air way you would think about this stuff. Sequoia has had some examples where they've bought up more think Dropbox. And there's also examples that we're about to go into where the terms were much different. And you didn't just buy 15 to 20% of a company. You bought much more in these early days. Well, and these companies, most of them

weren't raising multiple rounds. So Sequoia was financing. That was the only private capital that they were raising. And then they were achieving profitability and going public. But still, you think about today, people talk about a VC investment, you got to underwrite to 10x returns. Even from day one, Don's underwriting to 20x plus returns. And if he doesn't see that, and still to this day, I mean, I think one of the things Sequoia is really known for is they will only attack markets that truly have the potential to be large, like a billion dollar market is not enough for them, you need a multi billion dollar, you know, ideally 10 plus billion dollar market, because again, like, they're aiming for each of their investments to make 20x plus.

And then the final, I love this, the final item on the checklist for Don's criteria for investing is, must be positively responsive to our active participation. You know, which is great. And, you know, obviously Don develops quite a reputation as we, as we talked about with Trip on the episode, being very active and being very active, not only governance, but influencing management of the companies. This is really critical. Like, Don, he has the credibility to be very active in these companies because he has helped build the previous generation of, you know, of defining companies that are setting the roadmap for

everything that's going forward. The other thing that he develops is a methodology for kind of assessing entrepreneurs. David, but before diving into the entrepreneur side of things, the thing that struck me on these ground rules, and as we've danced around a couple times here, Don plays by his own rules. And he sort of has this ethos of this early stage investment business is a subjective business. It's not a highly analytical data-driven business. Like it's a feeling business. And yet in these ground rules, it's interesting to see what hard and fast financial things jump out so even in this high area of subjectivity and gut feel must have high gross margin ability

is in there as one of these precious few rules you know as an early stage investor that's that's like really ringing home to me and and thinking about how important that is in the ability to sort of, of course, scale a company, but generate outsized returns. The only number that you see in here is that 100 million. And then the only other thing that sort of close to resembles a number is high gross margin ability. It's interesting to think about what makes the cut. Yeah. Well, this also leads into his methodology for assessing entrepreneurs. But Don, as so many other things in pioneering the venture capital industry, I don't think he would put it in these words,

but he recognized that this is a business that is both art and science. And that is what is so incredibly awesome and fun and rewarding about working in this industry and early stage venture capital. But again, you know, if you think back to the folks that were doing this before, it was all art, you know? And if you think to a lot of the entrepreneurs who were starting companies like the Trader S8, it was all science. Like they weren't thinking about the art of like, oh, how do we make this into a huge wealth generating vehicle for ourselves and for the ecosystem? It was like, no, we just want to go do science and let's find some way to do science. And Don is really the first person, I think, to bridge this gap.

The methodology for assessing companies and entrepreneurs, he kind of goes back to, and I assume he was doing this while he was working at companies too. Remember, he has this Jesuit education and Catholic school upbringing background. And he goes to the Socratic is such a key to being a great VC. One thing that I struggle with a ton is like you can, the temptation is always to insert yourself into what's going on. Don recognizes that like what you need to do is listen to what the entrepreneurs are saying. You may agree or disagree or like understand or not understand, but like you need to understand how they think

about things, not how you think about things. Yeah. And it's, and it's not about their answers, but why they're thinking that answer is the right answer and how they arrive there and what the thought process is. Yeah. And so, you know, Don talks a lot about, uh, and if you watch the, the YouTube video of, of, of him at Stanford, how formulating a question he believes is the most important thing in his business. And so he has a rule that questions can only be 20 words or less. And when he solicits questions from the audience at Stanford, he says, 20 words or less or I'll kill you. It's great. But that's how he approaches things because he's really interested in the storytelling technique of the entrepreneurs,

because he says it's about the building of the idea, the size of the market, the degree of technical risk to get this product finished, who's going to care, and explaining that in a very simple way. We can tell that that person who can do that, explain it in a very simple way, is somebody we want to be in business with. People who are instead complex, rambling all over the place, they're not, you know, Donna's realized that the value, the only competitive advantage that startups have is focus and speed and stealth. And so if you're all over the place, you're not going to be able to execute on those things. And that's still true today. So, David, how do you square all of this with Don's sort of offstated principle that he invests in markets, not founders? Yes. How does this assessment of founders fit into that notion? Well, you know. And I'm asking you this as technology historian,

not yes, obviously, you're not in Don's head. Exactly. Well, I think, of course, they're interrelated. And like, all investing it is it is early stage investing, it is about both the market and the team. But I think that's this is the key is like, the market is the important thing. But you need a team this gets back to Don's last point on his checklist of must be receptive to our active participation, you need a team that's going to be focused and able to quickly get the right solution into the market. And so he has this this really great quote that I think encapsulates this says, So our view has always been preferably give us a big technical problem,

give us a big market when that technical problem is solved so we can sell lots and lots and lots of stuff. Do I like to do that with terrific people? Sure. Are we willing to invest in companies that don't have them? Sure. You can augment management. You can help them with more people that are highly qualified. We invest in the size and the dynamics of the market. I don't care if Genghis Khan is running the company. We'll give Genghis Khan some help. Give me a giant market always. But I think, you know, Steve Jobs is going to come up in a minute here. But I think, you know, his point about Genghis Khan is that Genghis Khan may be Genghis Khan, but he was focused on, you know, winning and speed and conquering. And that's what they're looking for. And that to just beat this metaphor to death and that Genghis Khan also has weaknesses

and therefore must have a team that surrounds and compliments. And I think Don has some quote, I don't have it exactly, but about how the most critical thing for an entrepreneur when sort of listening to these questions, what are you listening for is really this self-awareness of what they're good at and what they're not. And exactly point number six, how receptive they're going to be to being helped with those weaknesses. Yeah. I mean, again, think back to this moment in time, the people that were starting these companies, they were engineers, they were scientists by and large. And Don's superpower was he was able to augment these companies and these teams with folks like himself who were able to do sales and marketing and go to market. And then Sequoia could help

augment with finance and accounting and everything around that and the outsourcing of all that. What he couldn't have was folks who thought they knew everything. So what actually do they end up investing in once they close the first Sequoia Capital Fund in 1975? So it turns out Don makes his first investment in indeed a quite giant market enabled by semiconductors, but one a little off the beaten path and certainly different than the defense contractors that he started his career selling to. And that was Atari. And we're going to talk much more about Atari later in the season here on Acquire. But it was the very first independent Sequoia Capital investment. Don invests $600,000 in the company in 1975.

And the very next year, the company ends up getting acquired by Warner Communications for $28 million at Sequoia makes a quick 4X return, which is great, great IRR, but does fall short of the 20X that Don is hoping to underwrite to. Did I find a different source on that? I thought it was a $2 million initial investment. Or was it, did he do a follow on for $2 million? I believe the initial investment was $600k. Now Atari had also already been around for quite a while. I think three years they had gone before raising.

Yep. And Don had known Nolan Bushnell, the CEO, for many years. So I have to assume this was one don had known nolan bushnell the ceo for for many years so i have to assume this was one that he had kind of waiting in the wings uh until uh until he closed the fund which which every good uh venture capitalist should have when out raising their first fund is who's going to be your first investment oh man we did that too wave it's amazing it's amazing how much the industry is still the same. So then in 1977, Sequoia makes what could have been perhaps their biggest and most important investment ever, and unfortunately becomes perhaps their biggest and most important lesson.

Just to pile one more thing on before the big reveal, which everyone probably already knows, is responsible for about a trillion of that 3.3 trillion number that I quoted of public market value today. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's a good thing they still have another 2.3 trillion that they're part of. So in 1977, as Trip alluded to on our EA episode, Sequoia invested in another little company that was founded by an early former Atari employee, and that was Apple Computer. So Steve Jobs had worked for Nolan Bushnell at Atari, and Don had gotten to know him a little bit then. So Jobs and Woz had started the company, and they brought on Mike Scott as the first president of the company. Yeah, we should say Doug got to know, uh, jobs a little bit at that company,

but did not have the impression that this was a venture backable guy at this point in time. I believe his quote on Steve jobs was that he looked like Ho Chi Minh. Yes. Uh, and, uh, so Mike,

uh, the, the two Steve's had brought on as the first president. And it turns out Mike used to work for Don back at Fairchild and National. And so Don gets wind of the company, he meets with them. And Don also knew a very important guy in Apple's history, Mike Markkula, also used to work for Don back in the semiconductor days. And Don, quote unquote, sends him to the company with the intention that Markkula is going to replace Mike Scott as the president and run the company. Ultimately, though, as Tripp talked about, Markkula makes a brilliant decision and says, you know, I don't actually want to run this thing day to day. I'm going to be the chairman and really help these guys. But regardless, this is a kind of perfect example of Don's company building at work and management team recruiting.

On the back of this, Apple raises their first venture capital round of just over half a million dollars. Interestingly, the lion's share of the capital comes not from Sequoia, but from Venrock, which does a little over $250,000. Don and Sequoia do $150,000. And Arthur Rock does the balance. So Apple is off to the races and they really, you know, as we've chronicled many times and will continue to chronicle in the future, really invent the personal computer and usher that wave of technology in. Two years later though, and this is, this is the... David's sigh there comes heavily. This is just so painful, so painful and clearly has left its mark on Sequoia.

Two years later, I couldn't find all of the circumstances around this, but to the best of my understanding, so the first Sequoia fund did not have only tax exempt nonprofit LPs in it. It also had, I believe, individuals and maybe corporations and not Solomon Brothers, but other folks like and certainly Capital Group. As a result of that, those folks needed to pay taxes. And apparently, some of these LPs were encouraging Don to make a distribution of some of the gains in the fund so that they could pay their taxes on the gains. And so Apple had grown quite a lot. It's now 1979. And Don, before the IPO, sells Sequoia's stake, which they had invested $150,000 for $6 million to make this tax distribution to LPs. Now, that's an enormous return. It's a phenomenal return, yeah.

Phenomenal return, but oh my goodness, $6 million compared to what Apple would shortly become, and then ultimately in the long term, of course, become. And it's this lesson that drives Sequoia in subsequent funds to take their capital only from non-profit tax exempt sources, which becomes really not certainly the norm across the industry, but a goal and the lion's share of money that moves into venture capital ends up being university endowments, foundations, folks that are super long-term and patient and aren't going to force VCs to make these terrible decisions like this. Yeah. And another, you can sort of check me on this, David, but my understanding is Sequoia, more so than your average venture firm, holds the stock in companies longer

after they go public and often sticks with the companies for a very long time, I think probably also inspired by this lesson. This and others that we're going to talk about here in short order, we're going to talk about Sequoia's playbook in a little bit. But one of the key lessons that they learn is when things are going well, go long. Value creation in these companies that are building and creating enormous markets takes a long, long, long time. I mean, just look at, you know, Airbnb, look at Google, look at, you know, look at Apple. You know, you can still be getting enormous, enormous value creation a decade plus after these companies are founded, regardless of whether they're private or

public. Yep. So it's fascinating to think about, you know, the first couple of investments or first two out of a handful of investments being Apple and Atari, in total, returned a profit of about $10 million or a max of $10 million. It is wild to think that that is the sum total of Sequoia's return on those two companies. I know, I know. But at the time, I mean, like even, you know, pulling it into context today, like if we within, you know, two to three years of starting Wave,

if we could be sitting on 2x cash distributed, like I would feel great about that, you know? But the lesson here is like, that's not the game where the business we're in or the game we're playing. The game we're playing is like 10x plus cash distributed. And to do that, you really need to be in it for the long haul, especially when you're investing early. Yeah, the other thing to know here, and David, as you, as you foreshadow, and you'll be smiling a little bit, we will get

into this much more later this season. But with Atari, the Atari boom that we all sort of know of in the 80s was after it had sold to Warner. And so, you know, Sequoia didn't even have an option in participating in that upside unless they were going to block the sale. Yeah, yeah, totally. And that also leads to another part of the Sequoia playbook, which is like when things are going well, really try and convince these companies to stay independent and not sell. I mean, look at Instagram, right? Selling Instagram to Facebook was a terrible, terrible mistake by the founders and the investors,

even though it netted them great returns at the moment. And what's interesting, Sequoia ended up investing right before that deal happened. That is a debatable topic but we can you think that's debatable i think if it had gone a lot longer than facebook would have had to pay a lot more like in the dozens of billions of dollars to acquire purely because there is a very very high user count uh social network that is a threat to them however do i think that instagram would develop the business that they have today that is billions threat to them. However, do I think that Instagram would develop the business that they have today that has billions of dollars of revenue flowing through them by

advertisers? Maybe, but that's not a sure thing. I mean, that's all a lot of that is because of what Facebook had done funneling all their existing advertisers there. I think that's true. And certainly they helped accelerate it, grow it more quickly. But at a minimum, Instagram should have waited, you know, longer and then had a WhatsApp acquisition at a bare, bare minimum. Um, you know, I get, it's so hard to, you know, it's easy to armchair quarterback this now and hard to be sitting in the seat of, you know, Kevin and Mike when they have a billion dollar offer in front of them. Um, but this is the value. I mean, Sequoia has learned these lessons

over so many decades and seeing it time and time again. So the other lesson that they take from Apple is what Don and Sequoia call an aircraft carrier approach that they start taking to these big markets. Don realizes that Apple has created this PC market. And it's not just going to be Apple that's going to succeed in the PC market. And it's not just going to be Apple that's going to succeed in the PC market. They're going to usher in all of these other enabling companies that you need around the PC. So like Apple is the aircraft carrier, but you need all the destroyers and the, you know, the ships around

it and like all the planes on the ships and all that stuff. So they start financing component companies around the PC industry. Apple and Don helped start a company called Tandon Corporation that makes disk drives. They are first investors in Tandon. Tandon goes public after a couple of years, reaches a market cap of over one and a half billion dollars. This is in the early 80s. A company called Printronics that makes printers, a company called Priam that makes disk drives, a company called Dyson that makes magnetic disks for the disk drives. All told, I believe Sequoia ends up making about 15 investments kind of in this aircraft carrier strategy around Apple. And it drives much of their returns in these early funds. Some other notable investments that they make during the

70s and 80s. In 1981, they invest in a company called LSI Logic, which makes, again, around PC and computing. They make storage and networking products. In 1983, so just two years later, LSI goes public in the largest IPO on the NASDAQ in history at that point, raising $153 million in the IPO, which is, I mean, $153 million. That's like a solid, you know, soft bank size around today. This is two years after Sequoia invested in the company. And yeah, inflation adjusted. I mean, that's in the sort of 500 to a billion range in the way to think about how much they raised. Totally. 1982, as we chronicled, they invested in Trip and Electronic Arts or amazing software in the beginning. They also invest in 3Com in 1982. Folks might remember

3Com, which made networking gear and eventually bought Palm and the Palm Pilot. 3Com, I didn't realize, came directly out of Xerox PARC. So that's the other thing that Sequoia on the back of Apple starts doing is they start raiding Xerox PARC and IBM's West Coast division and all of these old school East Coast companies that had been training these technologists and developing, you know, advanced technology. And they just start commercializing them left, right and center. 1983, they invest in Oracle and also Cypress Semiconductor, both of which become massive successes. And then in 1980s... One point I want to make on Oracle before breezing, because we, of course, we need to do an episode on Oracle and Larry at some point.

But there's a crazy thing here that Oracle went six years before raising money from Sequoia. And I think they had bootstrap off of two thousand dollars and if you think about it like oracle is really one of the first true software companies they were wildly capital efficient and larry was very outspoken against you know pushing back against this rising venture capital industry and uh speaking all kinds of uh ill tongues of of the venture capitalists and what they do and come in and try and control companies and raid them, all these things. And of course, ends up partnering with Sequoia six years in, but a very different start than a lot of these other companies, which required much

more capital to get going. Yeah. And the reason I didn't want to dive too deep into it is that I might be speaking a bit out of school, not having done the deep dive on Oracle and their history yet. But to jump in and speculate a little bit, I think part of the reason why Larry... That said... That said, I'm going to speculate wildly. I think part of the reason why Larry was so anti-VC was VC was anti-software and anti-Larry. This was like, they didn't understand. Don didn't understand software. He was a semiconductor guy. All of these companies we're talking about, with the exception of EA, are hardware applications companies. And so I don't think Oracle could raise venture capital when they got started. They were the first real software company.

It's the highest gross margin of them all. I know, I know. It fits that thesis so well. The venture world hadn't woken up to that just yet. They would. They would. And Sequoia would too, of course. But so much of the DNA comes from this hardware world. The last kind of great, and for Sequoia, certainly the greatest hardware investment that they make is in 1987. Don invests $2.5 million in a little company called Cisco for 30% of the company started on the campus, uh, actually at the GSB at, at Stanford started on the campus of Stanford, Sandy and Len were, um, I can't remember which was which one of them was the IT administrator

for GSB. And one I think was, was elsewhere on, on the campus and networking was just becoming a thing and they were married and they were sending messages to one another. And this is this amazing romantic story that they had had jerry-rigged the network to be able to send messages to each other at work. I know. And that turns into Cisco. And that turns into Cisco. I mean, it just goes to show you how these companies start. And Don, having learned the lesson from Apple of like, hey, we'll finance Genghis Khan. He doesn't care. Most VCs would look at this team and be like, we're not going to finance this team,

but he cares about the market and the application. At the time, there were no routers. So local networking was just becoming a thing, but networking networks was impossible. And so Sandy and Len developed the first router and just such a brilliant... Sequoia still uses this example today of the very, very best, most elegant expression, simple expression of what a company does.

It's three words for Cisco. We network networks. That turns out to be not just an enormous, enormous market, but really the enabling technology for the internet. Cisco stock was the tracker for the internet hype in the dot-com era. I mean, it was like, if you wanted something that was emblematic of people's excitement about this new technology, it was Cisco. And so now we're in 1987, we're 12 years after the kind of independent constitution of Sequoia Capital. Don has learned all these lessons. He's not letting this one go. So not only does he fully finance the company upfront with $2.5

million, gets 30% of the company. The company then goes public shortly thereafter. I believe they raise 160 some odd million in the IPO. Don stays on the board. Don doesn't distribute the shares. He remains chairman of the board, I think until the mid nineties and they ride Cisco up and make enormous, enormous returns on this company. And that is, that really becomes the playbook for, for Sequoia capital going forward. Amazing run. Also just such a great example of like Sandy and Len weren't thinking about the internet. Nobody was thinking about the internet when they started Cisco, but, uh, things just kept the market kept evolving and kept getting bigger and expanding. And Don, again, you know, in Sequoia being so focused on the market, they knew that like, even though this

company was public, there were still enormous returns to be had because the market was nowhere near penetrated. So alongside all these investments that they're making, the funds kind of steadily grow in size from that first fund of $3 to $5 million. It stabilizes at around $150 million per fund in the 1990s that Sequoia. You have to build the firm. You can't invest in all these companies and give them the time and attention that you need to do true early stage company building alone. So Don starts adding partners to Sequoia. And he talks about the process of doing this. And again, remember, back when they started, the number one requirement for being an investor, quote unquote, was going to Harvard Business School, not Fairchild Semiconductor Business School. To be clear, investor in this sense was generally a public market investor or perhaps some other alternative investment, but not investing in startups. I mean, the Salomon Brothers folks probably looked at this more like gambling. Like what you're doing isn't investing

and you're not a person that looks like an investor. So what are we even talking about here? You know, I think that the irony of it all is it's the exact opposite of gambling. It's building. Yep. But yeah, so, okay. So, so Don has this great quote. He says, adding new talent was and remains a continuous process. Conventional education was never a high priority. Plenty of folks have gone to Harvard and Stanford Business School, worked at and work at Sequoia, but that's not what they look for. We look for people with functional experience in a startup, i.e. design and application engineering, product marketing, sales, aspects of outsourcing manufacturing.

Our investment decision-making process requires very self-confident people able to be challenged publicly. I look for people that are as far different as possible than I am because we do things here on the basis of consent among the partners. And I don't like having a homogenized set of opinions. Don wants people to be, he says, I want as much confrontation and different thinking as possible. And he wants people that are going to be confident and comfortable enough to put their thoughts out there and debate as part of the group. One of these lessons that Don's learned is that sometimes the most amazing companies like Apple, like Cisco, they look crazy. And so you need somebody that's willing to see the potential behind the craziness and stand up for them.

And oftentimes that's not folks who are coming from Harvard Business School. I believe the first partner, ironically, that joins Don at Sequoia does come from the investing world. In 1979, Gordon Russell joins Don. He had worked with Don at Capital Group. So he comes from Capital Group, comes in and joins Sequoia, and he builds Sequoia's healthcare and biotech investing practice. So kind of in parallel, even from the 70s back in Sequoia, they're not only investing in technology and hardware and semiconductors, they're also investing in healthcare and biotech. But of course, it's technology that the firm finds its true success in. And in 1981, we mentioned Pierre Lamond earlier, Don convinces

Pierre, already had an amazing storied career as a chip designer and architect at Fairchild and at National, to come in and join him at Sequoia as a partner. And Pierre has an amazing run. He stays as an active investing partner at Sequoia for almost 30 years. And then, this is incredible, he moves to Cosla Ventures and joins Vinod over at Cosla in the mid-2000s. And then he goes and he joins Formation 8, and he's now, after Formation 8, he is still an active general partner making and leading investments today. He just turned 89 years old. This is incredible. He was born, I believe, in 1930 in France. He is a true legend in the industry. But that's the kind of folks that Don is looking for, is people who are literally going to die in

the sea because their lifeblood is building technology companies. And Pierre absolutely fits that to a T. So then in the late 80s, two very, very important people joined Sequoia from interesting backgrounds. So in 1986, a gentleman, a true gentleman by the name of Michael Moritz, now Sir Michael Moritz, who was from the UK and had come over to America and had become quite a famous journalist for Time Magazine. I believe he wrote a book on Apple while he was still at Time, right? The Little Kingdom, I think it was called. Sounds right. And that's how he gets really interested in Silicon Valley and technology and sort of the

people behind Apple and venture capital. He leaves time and he starts a VC newsletter with the goal of he wants to break into the venture capital industry. I remember... What's old is new again, baby. I know. Mike has never, other than this VC newsletter company, he's never built a company or worked in technology in his life. But remember, Don's looking for these mavericks and he has a soft spot for people that kind of do things their own way. Don decides to take a chance on Mike and invite him into Sequoia and to join the partnership. And that ends up being just an incredibly, incredibly prescient decision that leads to Yahoo and Google and many, many other companies.

Does this count as how to hack your way into VC? Is this the first example of... Start a VC newsletter. That's so insane. Yeah. That actually probably still works today. Yeah. I think there's a quote about Moritz, which is, he had the journalist instinct to go for the jugular and not hold back. And a friend said that about him. David, we've started a podcast and have a love for media, but I have this sort of reverence

for really good journalists who not only are able to really tell a great story, but sort of get the truth out there. You know, it's a special talent for someone to be able to cover an industry and yet have their respect in this way. You know, we talked about the Socratic method of questioning that Don holds so dear. And I think this is what he saw in Mike. And we'll save a lot of this for part two of our Sequoia journey here too. But that's what Mike was so great at as a journalist. And Don actually says, you know, he says the two people that he's met in his life who are the

best questioners are Mike and Steve Jobs. High company. The other very important person who joins Sequoia Capital in the late 80s is a relatively young, brash sales guy who comes from Hewlett Packard and Son that also is an Italian immigrant, decides that he wants to work in venture capital. He just calls Don up one day, cold calls him and says, Hey, I want to join Sequoia. And if you know anything about the person that we're talking about, this is exactly in character. And this gentleman is Doug Leone, who today, of course, runs all of Sequoia and all of their operations globally. And I believe would be the person that ultimately advocated for and took Sequoia into becoming a global firm. We're going to talk much more about both Mike and Doug next time on part two. But just to wrap up

part one, which again is really the story of Don. I mean, you can't extricate Don not only from Sequoia, but from venture capital and the whole industry in total. In 1996, after it had become clear that Mike and Doug were amazing investors, and not only amazing investors, but had internalized all of these things that it meant to be Sequoia and then built on them themselves, Don does something pretty amazing. He literally hands the keys of Sequoia over to Mike and Doug. Doug talks about this in an interview with Dan Primack and Axios that, I don't have the exact quote here, but he says, Don, one day in 1996, invited Mike and Doug into a conference room and he sat them down and he said, I'm giving this firm to you. And there are three things. One, you're going to run the firm. I'm not going to run the firm anymore. Two, you get to decide what I do. You can keep me around. I can continue making investments or I cannot. It's completely up to you. And then three, if you do want me around, here's the things I'm willing to do and not willing to do. But one of the things I'm not willing to do is run the firm.

So like you guys make all the decisions about what's going to happen from now on. And that's just like, even today, that's so rare. I mean, this is the first very successful, well, not the first in the industry, but the first successful generational transfer at Sequoia. Most venture firms and most founders of venture firms don't have the ability to do this. And it's so hard. I mean, Don created all of this, and he's willing to say, you guys are the future. Change is part of not only what we invest in, but part of the venture industry too. And you guys are the people that are going to lead the change. It takes a lot to do something like that. It reminds me a lot of another great venture firm that we may also cover, Benchmark. It was a lot to do something like that. It reminds me a lot of another great venture

firm that we may also cover, Benchmark. It was a very different way of doing this. Very different, yes. But equal partnership, there's a great sort of interview with Andy Ratcliffe and Patrick O'Shaughnessy on Invest Like the Best, where Andy talks about how at the peak of their power, the original partners handed us the keys. And I think it's well done very differently. it's the firms that do this well, the firms that don't make the transition. And Don has a great quote about this. When Sequoia was started, the positioning to LPs was, we're going to deliver vastly superior returns to anything else you can get out there. And that proved, well, we'll talk about it in grading, but I think that proved true. But the positioning of Sequoia is now two things. And he says, it's the stability that comes with generational transfer. He says, the stability is part of why we have had the same limited partners for almost 40 years,

when Dan was saying this, now almost 50 years. Stability and returns is how Sequoia is positioned. For the type of LPs that they're trying to attract, which are patient, very, very long-term capital, you actually need both of those things. Returns isn't enough. You need the stability that accompanies those returns so that people will have confidence that like, hey, you can get great returns, but if the firm blows up, then you're useless to me. All right, listeners, our next sponsor is a new friend of the show, Huntress.

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So if you want cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions backed by a 24-7 team of experts who monitor, investigate, and respond to threats with unmatched precision, head on over to huntress.com slash acquired or click the link in the show notes. Our huge thanks to Huntress. Do we want to go into what would have happened otherwise? Yeah, let's do it. All right. So listeners, the way that we want to do this section on this unique episode is, what would the world be without Sequoia? And there is a very Sequoia centric

view of the world, which is all of the technology industry looks very different. And without building this sort of aircraft carrier strategy around Apple, and financing all of that, in a very scarce capital environment, like there was then, we may not have, you know, the Apple that we have today, we may not have some of the other tech giants that we have today. There's a alternative view that you could take to that that says, look, capital is capital. And the 99% of the value or maybe 110% of the value that comes from receiving investment from a venture capital firm is the capital itself. And everything else is either hullabaloo or value detraction. And capital will always expand to fill all attractive opportunities.

Exactly. Exactly. That we, despite some friction points, we live in an efficient market. And if it's truly a great opportunity, then capital will flow to, to go and fund that thing. And so, the world would look no different today if, you know, if there was no Sequoia. I think I fall slightly toward the former part of that scale. And I'm not willing to say that we, you know, we wouldn't have some of these amazing technology innovations without Sequoia. But I do think in just pouring over the hours and hours of reading that, you know, that we found about Don and really learning about the history of this firm, Don played a very active role in

building a lot of the companies that they invested in and deserves a lot of the credit for that. Well, listeners, let us know how you like this type of episode focusing on venture firms. We, of course, love it as venture investors ourselves. But we've been talking all about Sequoia on this episode. There is really along the exact same timeline, there is a perfect example of what would have happened otherwise, and that is Kleiner Perkins, which an episode on Kleiner, their philosophy was quite different and was a lot more interested in the entrepreneurs and the backgrounds of the entrepreneurs than necessarily Don and Sequoia were. So I think to my mind, what would have happened otherwise, of course, Silicon Valley would have happened. Of course, the modern technology or modern venture capital industry and startup industry would have happened. You know, even though Don helped

catalyze all of it, somebody would have, and certainly Kleiner would have and did. Kleiner Perkins would have and did. But I don't think there would have been as many chances taken and opportunities given to, you know, the quote unquote Ho Chi Minh's out there that Sequoia was willing to fund. And, you know, it wasn't just in those's out there that Sequoia was willing to fund. And, you know, it wasn't just in those days. I mean, look at Airbnb in the early days and Sequoia's extremely prescient early investment in, you know, the three Airbnb founders. They didn't look like what, you know, a prototypical founder looked like at the time, far, far from it. You know, I think it's Sequoia and Don's DNA coming from a true, you know, incredible marketing background and markets focus that, you know,

maybe wouldn't have developed in the same way without Sequoia. Yeah. And one way to look at this is like, if you're the Kleiner Perkins in 1978, you know, you are backing founders and outsourcing a lot of your judgment to them. And you're just saying you run, you know, obviously they weren't hands off, but you run the company. And the reason I'm investing in you is because I trust you to, you know,

figure out how to run this company. And what Don was looking at is you're really onto something in this killer market. We're going to go build this thing together and I'm going to help you do that. And the downside to that that we haven't painted yet is if you're a founder that believes that you need to be the CEO of that thing forever and you're in a market that deserves a team to really go and value maximize the way to tackle that opportunity. The terms of these investments, especially at this time, were that,

you know, often firms would own 33 to 51% of the company, they would have the right to buy the rest from you, they would have the right to replace you, they would have, I mean, all these rights. Of course, much of this still exists today, the job of a board is to hire and fire the CEO. But it was much more prevalent back then, especially within Don's view of the world is that I'm building this company with you right now. And like this company may outlast your leadership. Well, the unspoken words in Don's, you know, quote that we said earlier about management can be augmented is management, of course, can also be replaced. Now, you know, there's upsides and downsides to that,

right? Like if you're focused on, if your focus is building a great company, sometimes that's the right thing to do. Uh, and, um, you know, sometimes of course, Don and Skoya would get that wrong, but sometimes it is the right thing to do. Thinking back to our conversation with Trip and what attracted Trip and EA to Don was this knowledge, you know, you were getting what you saw with Don, and he was going to force you to build a big company one way or the other, you know, with you or without you. All right, we are in tech themes now, but to officially call it that and move through it here. The thing that really jumped out at me, and of course, you know, being in this industry, knowing folks funded by Sequoia, knowing folks at Sequoia, you know some of this tangentially, but it's worth taking a fresh look when preparing for these episodes to really ground

yourself in what assumptions am I making. The thing that jumped out at me was Sequoia and all of their copywriting never says investment, but rather partnership. It's not we led an investment. We decided to partner with that company. And they have a statement on their website called their ethos, which says, we're serious about our work and carefully choose the words to describe it. Terms like deal or exit are forbidden. And while we're sometimes called investors, that is not our frame of mind. We consider ourselves partners for the long term. It immediately jumps out at me as, David, you so often say company builders. We are partners,

and the way that we do that is we've got this huge fund that we manage that, of course, we have a fiduciary responsibility to our LPs to maximize the value. The way that we decide to partner is through investing in you, but we are your partners in this business. Five, six, seven years ago, I always thought that was, when I heard, we were so excited to partner with this venture firm on this thing, I was like, oh God, here it comes. They invested money in you, just say it. I finally am sort of like seeing, I think, what firms like Sequoia, and you can't really say firms like Sequoia because there's no firms like Sequoia, but what Sequoia means when they say partnership rather than investment, it is a very different

frame of mind. It's not, I'm looking for opportunities to get a multiple in my cash. This looks pretty good, so I'm going to throw it in and hope that I get a multiple out of it. It's, for some reason, I believe that this is going to be a society defining company in the next, you know, coming decades. And I'd like to be a part of that with you. Well, it gets back to, I think I've talked about on the show before. But when we were starting, if one of the first people we talked to was Greg McAdoo, who was a longtime partner at Sequoia and led their investment and initial investment in Airbnb

and was on the board for many years and was a big part of the reason why my partner Riley joined Airbnb. And he said to us, something that always stick with me, he said that doing venture extremely well and at the highest levels, early stage venture, it's all about alignment. And I think this is what, you know, through this history, we've told how Don and Sequoia came to understand what this alignment meant. The alignment is around building long-term, big, great companies. And so if your focus is that you need LPs, unlike the original set of LPs who wanted a tax distribution and forced them to sell their stake at Apple, you need LPs who are willing to sign up for an essentially infinite, not infinite, but decades to multiple decades

long time horizon. Because when there's true opportunity, the lion's share of the value gets built at the end. Think about the run that Amazon's had or even Apple's had in the last 10 years in their market cap relative to the first 10 to 20 years of the company. So that's the LP aspect. But then to this company building aspect, if you're truly aligned around that, you're optimizing for those outcomes, which means you aren't just sitting on the side and letting things play out. You are helping make the decisions and build the company and build the culture that is going to enable a super long term, great company to be built like that. And I think that really is their ethos. Now, that's, that's not the only way to do

investing. And we'll we've talked about and we'll talk about many more on this show. But it's a really, really unique one that I think it's been cool doing this episode to see like exactly how this was developed. All right. My second second tech theme is that it's called Sequoia, not Valentine Capital or Valentine and Co and Valentine Perkins. Exactly. The way that Sequoia thinks about themselves is that Sequoia exists behind the founders. It's not about Sequoia. It's about the founders. Or it's more importantly about the companies. Yeah, not the founders.

Right, right. And even more so, it's not about the person, but it's about Sequoia. So even when you pop up that one level, it's not, hi I'm Don. And, you know, I'm, you know, extremely public and loud and writing op eds all the time and doing all this. It's if you want to talk about the investment company, let's talk about the investment company. And that's Sequoia. And I happen to be a part of that. But you know, it's, it's not all about me all the time. And it's interesting, you know, you talk to people and you say, do you think Sequoia is low ego? And people would say, no, absolutely not. Like that is not the way that I would use to

describe them. But I think you talk to folks at Sequoia, you talk about companies that have been funded by Sequoia, and they do take that very, very seriously where we're one of the best firms in the world. But it's at this level, it's about the firm, not the partners. Well, I think it all comes back to this super long-term orientation. Does Sequoia have ego around that? Of course they do. Go look at their website. But it's all about long-term. It's not about, look at this deal we just did. It's about, look at this company that was built over decades that we were part of, and look at all of these companies, and look at Sequoia itself, which we're going to get into much more in our next part of this series here. So I tried to, for this section, kind of catalog and crystallize like what are the elements of if you had to distill the Sequoia playbook from this history and from Don's experience, I think these are the points that I would put in it. One, first and foremost, of course, is focus on the market,

both the size of the market and whether the dynamics of the market will lead to rapid adoption by a new entrant. Second is that change equals opportunity. This also didn't make it as much into the history and facts, but Don has this great, great quote about this. So he says, one of our theories is to seek out opportunities where there's major change going on, a major dislocation in the way things are done. Wherever there's turmoil, there's indecision. And wherever there's indecision, there's opportunity. When it becomes obvious to anyone who reads Time Magazine that it's useful to have a disk drive on a computer, then it's already too late in the cycle to invest in disk drives. So we look for the confusion phase

when the big companies are confused, when the other venture groups are confused. That's the time to start companies. The opportunities are there if you're early and you have good ideas, which I think that is just like such a perfect way to frame it. So hard to do in practice, but a really perfect way to frame it. Next, I do in practice, but a really perfect way to frame it. Next, I think is when you find one of those opportunities, don't get caught up in overly focusing on the team. Like, of course you want the team to be great, but like if the team doesn't look like a traditional team that you would pick from central casting to do this, like, don't worry about it. You better to pursue the opportunity and you can augment the team if they're receptive to working with you on it. That gets to the next

piece, which is be a company builder, not an investor. To really do this at the early stages, you've got to dedicate the time and effort. You have to have a partnership with people made up of people who have actually built these companies, whether that's in their career as investors or their career as operators, but people who really know what they're doing and can help the companies make good decisions and recruit great management teams around them. Related to that, you can only do that at the early stages. Sequoia now, of course, and we'll talk about this much more, invests at all stages of a company's life cycle. But this type of company building investing that we're talking about, you can really only do it at the outset. Once the DNA is set, and it's interesting,

I think Sequoia used to have one of these quotes on their website in their ethos section. I don't think it's on there anymore. They believe that the DNA of a company is set within the first 90 days of operation. And after that, it's really, really hard to change it. And having lived through that and now making the whole focus of my investing at that stage of the market youtube and like i completely agree with that just reflecting on how crazy it is that this asset class exists we all take for granted that there's early stage fundraising that like in mass a couple million dollars are going to get deployed into ideas hundreds, if not thousands of times per year. And that there's a whole asset class of investors that are willing to do that. And now it makes

sense because we've seen the handful of those become so, so valuable that, you know, you index the whole asset class and like sometimes it over and like, sometimes it overperforms, sometimes it underperforms, but like it, it sort of tracks other asset classes in terms of, of a risk adjusted return. It's a pretty special thing that it exists. And this is, this is probably an ethnocentric statement, but that it exists in our country. Like if you think about the impact that it has had on GDP, the access to early stage capital from a large group of people who it's their business to take a flyer and their business to underwrite a tremendous amount of risk by, you know, having a 20 plus company portfolio.

I think it's a really good thing that this system got created and that this type of capital is is available today and surely it is not deployed in the best way that it could or certainly the most fair way that it could but the fact that it exists at all is is intensely value creative and and we take it for granted that it exists today and it's it kind of mind boggling how difficult it would have been to convince people at this point in history that they should plow money into it. I mean, gosh, remember the Solomon Brothers meeting that we talked about that Don had? One of the other reasons I was so excited to do this episode is we deeply believe it wave something that I think Sequoia also believes in this history shows, which is, you know, you mentioned this asset class exists now and it, you know, you can have an index on

it and it works because like, you know, a few companies out of these, you know, many, many seeds of small companies will get built into, you know, giant Sequoia like trees. That's true. But I think there's a, there's a, a faulty logic conclusion you can draw from that, which is that we should have an index fund on this because what this history illustrates is that that defeats the whole cycle. Like the reason that, you know, Sequoia size trees get grown from seeds is because of, you know, careful watering and feeding of them from people who are experienced gardeners who really know what they're doing. You know, I really want you to change your Twitter bio to experience gardener. I love it. Uh, experience forest keepers. Let's put it that way. You know, that's a big part of,

you know, a change that we, and I think you guys too, like hope to be in the early stage ecosystem now is getting away from this, like watering a million seeds and into like tending a garden. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we thought long and hard about that with, with PSL when we were first getting started. And I think, uh,

should we be doing sort of more companies, you know, should we be doing this in like an accelerator style way? And, uh, I mean, we talked about the studio model on the LP show, but it's,

it's very different and it's, it's much more concentrated bets. And I think Sequoia is a great example of, especially in the era that we're talking about it, of incredibly concentrated bets and a lot of work into them after the investment. Yeah. Okay. So my last two for the Sequoia playbook are, you know, one, let your winners run everything we've been talking about. Like if you, if you've got something that's growing into a Sequoia size tree, like the most of the growth is going to become after, you know, decades plus into the company, let your investment in them run. And

then the last one, you know, which is what Don did that we ended history and facts on, which is hand over the keys before you fall asleep at the wheel, you know, if you're running a venture firm. So much easier said than done. All right, should we move on to value creation, value capture? Yeah, let's see. What's the best way to do this one? Well, one thing we talked about is we don't have the exact data on the returns of Sequoia's early funds. We have a general sense from a few sources that we can talk about, but compare that to how the NASDAQ performed over a similar point in time, which is kind of the closest you could come to approximating this type of investment as an investor at this point in time. Yeah. And I guess what we're doing here is we're sort of rolling together value creation,

value capture, and grading. To touch on what we do in the section with value creation, value capture, normally when we're covering a company, we say, you know, hey, Shopify enabled $250 billion of sales or something like that. I can't remember the number last year. How effective were they at actually capturing that value that they sort of created? I would say Sequoia has been surgically good at capturing the value that they create in the world with, I think, few misses. I don't think Don had any trouble capturing the value he created in the world. Well, I would say yes and no. Certainly no in Sequoia today. No. But I think it took them many years to learn, you know, how to do that, right? Even Don coming from the background and the personal investing he did.

I mean, you know, the Apple decision was such a huge mistake. You know, Sequoia captured $6 million of value from Apple and, you know, lost out on dozens to hundreds of billions. So, yes, I think they think they- I said few mistakes. Few mistakes. One very costly one. But yeah, I think that's fair. The real testament here would be to ask the entrepreneurs that Sequoia worked with, do they feel, the successful ones, that the value that Sequoia and their limited partners captured from the value that was created at those companies, did they, as entrepreneurs, feel that it was worth what they got in return? Acquiredfm at gmail.com, if anybody wants to email us.

Well, I think we didn't ask Trip that directly in the EA episode, but I think he probably would have said yes, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was my, I mean, that, that, that was definitely the sentiment I got from him. Good point. We were mixing grading and, and value capture and value creation. Should we move on? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, grading the way that we traditionally do it for folks that are new to the show is a big company buys a little company and we have history as our guide. Was that a good use of capital by big company to buy a little company? Dave and I were talking before the show on how to think about grading for this

episode. And I guess the way we sort of landed on it is opportunity cost for LP capital. So what, you know, if you had just put money into the NASDAQ to try and do some technology investing, you know, from 1975 onward, sort of how would that have looked. Just interesting to know the NASDAQ between 1975, conveniently when it was created, and 1990 grew about 6.5x with a couple of pretty serious hiccups in the middle where it lost 30% of its value and then took a long time to to creep back up so a stock market like any other and so that's sort of the basis that that we decided to compare it to david how do you think sequoia sort of stacks up against um you know that that public market accessibility it's hard to compare exactly because we don't know the returns for any given fund let alone all the dollars in

aggregate but i believe based on some quotes from Don and some of our research and other data we have, that Sequoia was probably averaging a 50 to 60% IRR on their funds during this period. So if you look, I actually haven't done the math of what that would be over 15 years, but it's well, well, well above 6.5x. And so now if you assume Sequoia is taking as carried interests, probably in the early days, 20, I believe now they're at 30% carried interest that they take on their funds. So taking that out of the returns, I still believe that you're performing well. I believe you're performing much, much better than that. And there's a great quote. There was a Forbes profile that they did on Sequo entire portfolio for the last 30 plus years.

And that is across all asset classes, which is pretty incredible. Wow. Okay. So how do we assign a letter grade to this one? Well, I mean, clearly it's an A, right? Like, I think the question is like, is this an A plus? I think it has to be an a plus right like if we're looking at a whole bunch of funds bundled together is like too difficult to like assign a single letter grade to you know i think like were we looking at one that had it was of significant size and had the highest irr of all time, then we could go, oh, that's an A+. But it feels reasonable for me to say that the first 15 years of Sequoia's existence were

an A relative to other venture firms. I mean, yeah. The reason I make a case for an A-plus is twofold. One, how much Don really was a part of inventing so many things about the way the whole, not just venture capital, but startup ecosystem works today. And two is that quote from Notre Dame. Now, maybe there are other great managers that Notre Dame is not invested in. But man, to be the single best performing manager over 30 plus years in a marquee endowments portfolio. Like it's hard not to, uh, hard not to assign that an A plus. All right. I'll go with you. All right. Well, with that, this has been a blast for us audience. Hopefully you guys have enjoyed it too. Certainly hit us up in the Slack or acquiredfm at gmail.com. If you have stories to share, thoughts or other areas you want to see us dig into,

especially on our continuing saga of telling the story of Sequoia from Doug and Mike, well, their generation when they were coming up, then taking over and taking Sequoia into the now $12 billion plus global growth behemoth that it is today. Yep. Would love your feedback. All right, carve outs. Carve outs. Let's do it. You want to go first?

Yep. Mine is an episode of The Daily, the podcast by The New York Times from a few weeks ago called What American CEOs Are Worried About. They report on an event that happened last month where nearly 200 executives got together at something called the Business Roundtable, which I didn't know was a thing. It's not like a governing body of any sort, but it's like 200 of the Fortune, I don't know, 1,000 CEOs that get together and make proclamations. And one such proclamation that they made this year was that they are going to not just think about their stakeholders, their only stakeholder as their shareholders, but also their employees, their customers, their community, a broader set of stakeholders. And in my head, the thing that first occurred to me was, well, that feels like illegal in some way. It feels like the purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value. And I've just have taken that at face value, call me a capitalist, but like that, that is my understanding of, of, you know, it's a relatively recent phenomenon. Yeah. And I didn't realize,

and like, it got me thinking, cause I've always thought like, well, you should do all these other things, you know, that's bending the rules of the company to, to potentially sacrifice shareholder value to go and, and, you know, um, do things that you don't think long-term will accrue to shareholder value. So obviously like you should be active in your community and you should take care of your employees. But I always thought with this lens of like, oh, companies do that because it's going to accrue to shareholder value at some point. And it's fascinating to, number one, listen to this proclamation, and then they dive deep into exactly, David, what you were talking about, the fact that it's a relatively new phenomenon, one that sort of grew up in the 70s and 80s in the sort of professionalism of Wall Street and companies changing their bylaws

to basically say, we exist to be a publicly traded security and then we are at the sort of mercy of that. It's this interesting, if we actually drift this direction that they brought up, it's much more of a return to sort of the business

as a pillar of the community from the sort of early 1900s. And I'll be very curious to see if this sort of comes of anything and if this stirs more, more sort of similar sentiment. Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting. Well, and, you know, definitely reflective of the times we live in, in terms of corporations and the world at large. So I hope things go more in that direction. It's interesting to see we have one of our five portfolio companies is a B corporation. Do you guys have any B corporations? Oh, awesome. We don't yet, but we're super, yeah, super supportive of that.

Yeah. It's been really cool to see that, you know, emerge as a way to institutionalize some of the governance rules around this idea. We invest in B corporations as in C corporations, but no preference necessarily for one or the other, but we're, we and many other VC firms are super open to it and supportive of it. Okay. My carve out as listeners may know, for some reason that I even, I don't understand. I use Amazon music instead of Apple music or Spotify. I'm actually, yeah, I'm definitely going to change that because Amazon does so many things. Great.

But music is, is not one of them. But one thing that popped up on the homepage of Amazon music last week, which maybe is worth the whole thing is I had no idea. Last week was the 25 year anniversary of notorious B.I.G.'s first album, ready to Die. So like speaking of Mafia dons on this episode, man, Biggie, it's so good. And so Amazon did this cool thing where they have a bunch of tracks from the album. And then in between each track, they have like a commentary from, you know, journalists and people that were there, producers, Puffy, you everybody part of making uh making biggie's first album just listening to it all again just man right like it's so good like you

know maybe some of the content and uh language he uses uh you know haven't aged too well but um but like he was so good like i've never heard anybody that can rhyme like biggie and just the music and the tracks and like what did he did producing it. Like it was a really cool to rediscover and be listening to that over the past week. David, I love the incredibly eclectic collection of carve outs that you have. It's this like, you know, crazy place in France. It's this really hard to get through, you know, thousand page book that like, I will never have a prayer of actually go. And then, oh yeah, well, it's this, you know, it really takes me back to when I was really into Biggie, you know? Well, the secret is I keep a little note in my Apple notes

of anytime something strikes me, I just put it in there as a potential future carve out. So. Oh, that's awesome. It's a good idea. We want to thank our longtime friend of the show, Vanta, the leading trust management platform. Vanta, of course, automates your security reviews and compliance efforts. So frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance and monitoring, Vanta takes care of these otherwise incredibly time and resource draining efforts for your organization and makes them fast and simple. Yep, Vanta is the perfect example of the quote that we talk about all the time here on Acquired, Jeff Bezos, his idea that a company should only focus on what actually makes your beer taste better, i.e. spend your time and

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Vanta's CEO, all acquired listeners get $1,000 of free credit. Vanta.com slash acquired. All right, listeners, thank you so much. Thanks to all the great sources that you can find in the show notes for helping us research and put together this episode. And if you would like to either join the Slack, you can do that at acquired.fm or become a prestigious acquired limited partner. You can do that at glow.fm slash acquired and it comes with a seven day free trial. Yeah. One quick note on the Slack. We've had a couple of questions about this recently.

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