Alfred Lin: preference

Transcript context

…What did the different operating teams look like, just so people get a sense of scale? They’re not very large, right? How big is the US early stage practice? The early stage team is about 15 people. It’s not a big team. The way we think about it is while there’s a lot of opportunity, each one of us is only going to make one or two seed investments or one or two venture events a year. The reason we keep it small is because what we enjoy is to partner with the founders as early as possible and help them and their companies reach their full potential. That is an enormous amount of work and we enjoy that part just as much as meeting new founders and thinking about the future. But once we make an investment, we want to bring the future to fruition. It’s not just about making the investment. We don’t really think about buying low and selling high. We think about helping founders reach their full potential. Bring the future that they envision to reality. The next thing I wanted to ask, in many ways, Sequoia’s history that has sparked me thinking a lot about this over the past year and the Apple investment that we covered so many times. That was an early example of buying low and selling high that, in the long run, probably served Sequoia. Not nearly as well as it could’ve. I think you guys made $6 million in net profit on the early pre-IPO Apple investment. How do you guys think about time horizon? Obviously, you need a long time horizon as we’re talking about that’s the way to compound capital. At the same time, you are a fund structure, a series of funds. You have limited partners, they want distributions at some point. When do you guys think about the right time to start to distribute out your investments?…

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