Great chefs find things in the style, presentation and technique used in a meal that the ordinary diner never sees. Great musicians hear things that casual listeners completely miss. CEOs evaluate other CEOs much differently than the popular press or the general population. In mainstream thinking, the absolute success of the company determines the CEO’s…
More »Shortly after we sold Opsware to Hewlett-Packard, I had a conversation with the legendary venture capitalist Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital. He wanted to hear the story of how we went from doomed in the eyes of the world to a $1.6B outcome with no recapitalization. After I took him through the details including several…
More »When my partner Marc wrote his post describing our firm, the most controversial component of our investment strategy was our preference for founding CEOs. The conventional wisdom says a startup CEO should make way for a professional CEO once the company has achieved product-market fit. In this post, I describe why we prefer to fund…
More »[This blog post was originally published on All Things Digital on March 17, 2010.] Much has been written and said about the current economic downturn and the resulting lessons on how to run high-technology companies. Quite famously, Sequoia Capital, the premier venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, held a mandatory all-CEO meeting in fall 2008…
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