Doug Leone: prediction

Transcript context

…You go public. But you can’t do that. You launch in the US. Six months later, you launch Europe. If you wait, by the time it gets to Europe, there’ll be 20 competitors, half of which want to come to the US. You’ve got to run fast, which means you have to spend a lot of money, which means it’s bigger and bigger rounds. We were seed and venture when we understood the companies needed more money. Keep in mind, we are the folks carrying the suitcases, we’re there from day one, we’re carrying the luggage, and we thought to ourselves, “Yes, we want partners, but why are we letting other people come in and dictate terms to our companies?” We were vulnerable and weak. So we got deeper into the growth business. We vertically integrated. Then, when rounds became even larger and we have this incredible portfolio today of maybe 5–7 companies, we launched a global growth. The global growth is a global vehicle to double and triple down in the best company in the Sequoia portfolio. And yes, we partnered it with other firms and so on, but we’re able to enjoy the full ride. I view those of being more tactical product versus seed being more strategic. That’s the most important one. Then, we also had a hedge fund because we realized that it’s way tougher to go from $0 to $100 million in revenues, from $0 to $5 billion in marketing cap than from $5 to $25 billion. 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.…

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