Doug Leone: preference

Transcript context

…You’ve talked about in other talks you’ve given that we’ve listened to, that you do the Myers-Briggs test here at Sequoia. How did those combine into what your Myers-Briggs type is? I’m not sure those affect the Myers-Briggs but this is how I test it, early on and how I changed. People think of me as an extrovert for the simple reason that if I have to turn it on, I can, especially as I get older I went from insufferable to charming. It’s amazing at what happens. What I really am, I’m halfway between an introvert and extrovert (exactly halfway in between), and early on I was tested as a process-driven person, meaning my whole mind is a tree structure, there’s a lot of logic to it and so on. In 2012, with Mike Moritz’ step down and the relationship I had with Mike, he was the intuitive one. He was really the leader of Sequoia, I was 1A. I was the COO, if it helps. I understood that would not be a winning formula. I always thought that great COOs would make lousy CEOs. Now, I’m not the CEO here, but you get the point. I took myself completely out of my comfort zone and understood I had to rely on intuition. When I was tested in Myers-Briggs by a lady that tested me, she was shocked by the transformation. She said, “You and Michael Dell are the only two people I’ve ever tested that have made that change. ” When I hear people can’t change, I chuckle a little bit because I felt like I changed, I felt like I had to rely on my gut, and I can’t have all the answers in tree structure prior to letting people create. I can’t manage every inch. I just have to let terrific people do their thing. Well, I can totally imagine the things that we’re going to talk about that you champion here at Sequoia. Doing that is (I think) what led to a large part of your success. So, you finished high school. You must have been a pretty good student. You go to Cornell and then Columbia to study engineering, right?…

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