VC Spotlight: Sequoia Capital
In 1972, Don Valentine didn’t just walk into venture capital, he rewired its circuitry. While most investors chased pedigree, Valentine hunted markets. He launched Sequoia Capital with $3 million and a mandate sharper than any term sheet, back the revolution, not the résumé. It wasn’t intuition, it was pattern recognition, coded from years inside Fairchild - now part of ON Semiconductor and National Semiconductor, watching how infrastructure, not individual charisma, dictates empires.
That philosophy didn’t just fund companies, it engineered ecosystems. Atari and Apple in the ’70s. Cisco and Oracle in the ’80s. Yahoo and Google in the ’90s. YouTube and WhatsApp in the 2000s. Stripe and Nubank in the 2010s. Now, it’s Hugging Face and Scale AI pulling the torch into the AI frontier. Each one a signal, each one a system shift.
Under Douglas Leone, Sequoia went global before going global was trendy. Now those offices breathe on their own, Peak XV Partners and HongShan Foundation, not just spinouts, but sovereign engines with a Sequoia spine. Michael M. took the long view, betting on Google when search was a joke and PayPal when payments were a punchline. Roelof Botha, now steering U.S. and Europe, has board seats that read like a tech index fund, Unity, MongoDB, Square.
And while some firms post about their “first female partner,” Sequoia just did it. Jess Lee, ex Polyvore CEO, didn’t walk through a door, they built one with her name on it. Alfred Lin scaled Zappos to Amazon. Now he scales founders from Series A to IPO with the operational discipline of a Navy SEAL on deadline.
This is a firm that prunes 20% of its portfolio every year, not out of fear, but fidelity to the thesis. This is a firm that replaced the 10-year fund cycle with an evergreen model. Airbnb and Snowflake aren’t just exits, they’re assets. And when COVID hit, Sequoia wasn’t drafting a memo, they were already inside 89 portfolio companies with a playbook ready to go.
Today, 68% of Sequoia’s capital comes from nonprofits. Think Ford Foundation, Boston Children's Hospital’s. They’ve funded 47 open-source fellows across 12 countries. One-third of their U.S./Europe partners are women. Forty-one percent of recent deals? Led by immigrant founders. That’s not a stat, that’s a strategy.
Sequoia’s portfolio companies are hiring, 23,000 roles across engineering, GTM, and product. The next generation isn’t just being funded, it’s being built. Explore the future, link in the comments
NVIDIA https://nvidia.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/NVIDIAExternalCareerSite
Youtube https://www.youtube.com/jobs
Apple https://www.apple.com/careers/us/
AIrbnb https://careers.airbnb.com/
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