David Rosenthal: preference

Transcript context

…To be clear, investor in this sense was generally a public market investor or perhaps some other alternative investment, but not investing in startups. The Salomon Brothers, folks, probably looked at this more like gambling. What you're doing isn’t investing and you’re not a person that looks like an investor. What are we even talking about here? The irony of it all is it’s the exact opposite of gambling, it's building. 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, who 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 has learned is that sometimes the most amazing companies like Apple, like Cisco, they look crazy. You need somebody that's willing to see the potential behind the craziness and stand up for them. Oftentimes, that's not folks who are coming from Harvard business school. I believe the first partner ironically the joins Don at Sequoia does come from the investing world. In 1979, Gordon Russell joins Don. He had worked with Don at Capital Group. He comes from Capital Group, comes in and joins Sequoia and he built Sequoia's healthcare and biotech investing practice. 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. In 1981, we mentioned Pierre LeMond 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. Then, this is incredible, he moves to Khosla Ventures and joins Vinod over at Khosla in the mid-2000s and then he goes and he joins Formation 8. He is now, after Formation 8 and Eclipse, 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. That's the kind of folks that Don is looking for, is people who are literally going to die in the seat because their life blood is building technology companies. Pierre absolutely fits that to a T. Then, in the late 80s, two very important people joins Sequoia from interesting backgrounds. in the seat because their life blood is building technology companies. Pierre absolutely fits that to a T. Then, in the late 80s, two very important people joins Sequoia from interesting backgrounds. In 1986, a gentleman, a true gentleman by the name of Michael Moritz, now Sir Michael Moritz who was from the UK, comes 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. The Little kingdom, I think it was called?…

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