Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
32 published records
01 / evaluation
“Sometimes, of course, Don and Sequoia would get that wrong, but sometimes it is the right thing to do.”
02 / belief
“” If you know anything about the person they we’re talking about, this is exactly in character and this gentleman is Doug Leone who today of course runs all of Sequoia and all of their operations globally, and I believe will be the person that ultimately advocated for and took Sequoia into becoming a global firm.”
03 / belief
“” Don is really the first person, I think, to bridge this gap, the methodology for assessing companies and entrepreneurs.”
04 / belief
“National makes a big play. They’re already are a public company, I believe, they poached a number of people from Fairchild including Charles Sprock, who becomes the CEO of National and Pierre Lamond, a name that's going to come up again, from Fairchild, who becomes the chief designer and head of engineering there.”
05 / belief
“I believe the initial investment was $600,000. Atari had also already been around for quite awhile.”
06 / belief
“When Sequoia was started, the positioning to LPs was, “We’re going to deliver vastly superior returns to anything else you can get out there.” Well, we’ll about it in greeting, but I think that proved, too.”
07 / belief
“I think that's true and certainly they helped accelerate it more quickly, but at a minimum, Instagram should have waited longer and then had a WhatsApp-like acquisition at a bare minimum.”
08 / belief
“I would say Sequoia has been surgically good at capturing the value that they create in the world with a few misses.”
09 / belief
“You can check me on this David, but my understanding is, Sequoia more so than your average venture firm, holds the stock in companies longer after they go public, and often sticks with the companies for a very long time. I think probably also inspired by this lesson.”
10 / belief
“I think Don has some quote, I don't have it exactly, but about how the most critical thing for an entrepreneur when listening to these questions, what you're listening to is really this self-awareness of what they're good at and what they're not, and exactly point number six, how receptive they're going to be to being helped with those weaknesses.”
11 / belief
“I think Sequoia used to have one of these quotes on their website in their ethos section.”
12 / belief
“I think I fall slightly toward the former part of that scale and I’m not willing to say that we wouldn't have some of these amazing technology innovations without Sequoia.”
13 / belief
“I think to my mind what would have happened otherwise, of course Silicon Valley would have happened, of course the modern venture capital industry and startup industry would have happened even though Don helped catalyze all of it, somebody would have and certainly Kleiner Perkins would have indeed.”
14 / observation
“The downside to that that we haven’t painted yet is if you’re a founder that believes that you need to be the CEO of that thing forever and you’re in a market that deserves a team to really go and value maximize the way to tackle that opportunity, the terms of these investments, especially at this time were that often, firms would own 33%-51% of the company.”
15 / belief
“I believe before Fairchild, people are using germanium semiconductors, which is a rare precious metal.”
16 / uncertainty
“I don't know if Capital Group or Don did, but it is within Capital Group, this 1972 $5 million fund is called the Sequoia Fund.”
17 / observation
“The only problem was, he's doing this personally, he doesn't have enough capital to really get these companies all the way to working.”
18 / belief
“I believe his quote on Steve Jobs was that he looked like Ho Chi Minh. Mike, the two Steves had brought on as the first president and it turns out Mike used to work for Don back in Fairchild and National.”
19 / belief
“We learned at Wave, which was that even with all that raising a first time fund, is really freaking hard.”
20 / observation
“Inflation adjusted, that's in the $500,000-$1 billion range and the way to think about how much they raised.”
21 / belief
“One very costly one. I think that's fair. The real testament here would be to ask the entrepreneurs that Sequoia works with.”
22 / belief
“One of them was the IT administrator for GSB and one I think was elsewhere on the campus and networking was just becoming a thing and they were married.”
23 / prediction
“We could really accelerate things if we invested in these companies and help them build themselves, because the bigger they get and the faster they get bigger, the more sales they’re going to have, the more sales we're going to have.”
24 / recommendation
“I cannot recommend highly enough, anyone, certainly if you work or are interested in venture, but even if you're not, if you're just interested in technology and startups, go do two things: (1) watch the Youtube video of a talk that Don gave at the GSB at Stanford in 2010 and (2) read this wonderful oral history that Berkeley did as part of the history department there with Don.”
25 / preference
“Okay, my carveout is as listeners may know, for some reason that even I don't understand, I use Amazon music instead of Apple music or Spotify.”
26 / evaluation
“Two years later, I couldn't find all of the circumstances around this but to the best of my understanding, the first Sequoia fund did not have only tax-exempt nonprofit LP's in it, it also had I believe individuals, big corporations, not Salomon brothers, but other folks in a certain capital group, as a result of that, those folks needed to pay taxes.”
27 / prediction
“Knowing how markets work, I think we can assume that there wasn't much of it given the terms of that other investment that you’ve just mentioned.”
28 / evaluation
“Now, when you look at it these days, you had to be a very alternative counter-culture person, to believe that this was the best way to go and invest your money.”
29 / preference
“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.”
30 / prediction
“I think if it had gone a lot longer, then Facebook would have had to pay a lot more in the dozens of billions of dollars to acquire purely because there is a very, very high user account social network that is a threat to them.”
31 / evaluation
“” Steve Jobs is going to come up in a minute here, but I think his point about Genghis Khan is that Genghis Khan may be Genghis Khan, but he was focused on winning, speed, and conquering.”
32 / evaluation
“” Even from day one, Don’s underwriting to 20X plus returns. And still to this day, I think one of the things that Sequoia is really known for is they will only attack markets that truly have the potential to be large like $1 billion market is not enough for them.”