Doug Leone: evaluation

Transcript context

…We talked about this a lot in part one of our Sequoia history. The vast majority of the magnitude of gains of returns happen post-IPO. We learn to distribute shares to our clients carefully, not the week after the IPO or the week after the lock-up. We learned that a public investment vehicle would help us in many ways, including how to look at these companies retrospectively. If you’re in the hedge fund, you look back to youth and you explain how youth can grow up. Most of us that invest in seed and venture lookup. We look from zero to something. The hedge fund guys look from a lot to something. We were able to have deeper conversations about companies and what companies could become, dare to dream of what companies could become. We found that to be quite useful. Then we launched the heritage business which is to make it easier. It’s a family office endowment style. The reason for that -- we have founders and friends at Sequoia who had done quite well, and wouldn’t that be a terrific way to maintain a relationship for another 30 years? That’s why we did it. These were just to try to build a global powerhouse, which is what we want, where we can serve founders, from idea to IPO and beyond to personal needs. I’ll go so far beyond, when to have the personal needs so we can have these relationships that would last a lifetime. We all take an equal percentage of our profits. The venture group is walnuts. China is peanuts. The heritage funds are cashews. We blend them and then we redistribute them so that we all get a share of mixed nuts but no one gets more nuts. It’s just different kinds of nuts that financially intertwine us. I see.…

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