Inside Sequoia’s Steve Jobs strategy: How the fabled VC firm sniffs out unconventional diamonds in the rough

Inside Sequoia’s Steve Jobs strategy: How the fabled VC firm sniffs out unconventional diamonds in the rough.

Transcript

00:00Well, I think the characteristics we look for in founders have been the same for 50 years, consistently.

00:04And a lot of that is looking for the quality of the idea and the unique insight that the founder has.

00:10And the founders we back really come in a variety of shapes and sizes.

00:13Steve Jobs originally was not funded by other people on Sand Hill Road because he wasn't wearing shoes

00:18and was unconventional, and yet Don Valentine saw through that because he saw the quality of the idea.

00:24And I think to this day we invest in people who dropped out of high school and people who have PhDs.

00:30We have some of the companies we're backing in AI specifically are some of the world's leading researchers in a particular domain.

00:36You know, the Robotics Foundation company we invested in, two professors at Carnegie Mellon,

00:40truly world experts at what they do, many research papers that they've published.

00:45But then we listen to a founder who has a bright idea for an application,

00:48they're fresh immigrants, they're a team of three, and they have no academic credentials that we can easily verify.

00:53But the idea is interesting and they have customers that can reference the quality of what they're producing.

00:58And so our job is to not to look at the surface level of what people have accomplished,

01:02but rather to look at the quality of their idea.

01:04And we often want to focus on the Eureka moment.

01:08When did you come up with this idea?

01:09How did you come up with this unique insight?

01:12Tells us a lot about the founder, why this idea has legs.