I'm Ben Gilbert and I am the co founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and venture capital firm in Seattle.
Oh, that's me, David.
And I'm David Rosenthal.
Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.
I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and venture capital firm in Seattle.
And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.
And we are your hosts.
Sequoia Capital needs almost no introduction.
When we did the comprehensive two part series on their history, we noted that they had invested early in companies that went on to be worth over 3.3 trillion doll.
@ the time, the market cap of the entire Nasdaq was about $10 trillion.
I'm sure both of these numbers are dramatically higher right now as we record this in January of 2021.
At the end of last year, we saw a Sequoia double header in the two enormous IPOs of DoorDash and Airbnb.
Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia, sits on not one, but both of these boards.
And as pointed out by Dan Primack at Axios, these were his first two IPOs after his decade at Sequoia.
It certainly pays to be patient.
So after that we couldn't help ourselves but reach out to Alfred to have him back on acquired and ask the questions, how does Sequoia identify these investment opportunities?
What is the internal playbook for creating their famous prepared mind to evaluate such opportunities when they come along?
And today we dive into what this all means in practice at Sequoia, and we take a few lessons from what they've Learned in over 49 years of finding and building great companies.
So David, who is Alfred?
49 years.