Sequoia Partner & CPO Jess Lee: What Great Founders Do Early and How AI Will Change Consumer Apps

As a founder, you're almost starting a cult. Getting all these people to follow you on this journey that really doesn't make any rational sense. You're joining for the dream, the story. You like the person, you like the idea, you want to be part of something special. And so being able to tell a good story and be compelling, like, really changes your ability to run a company.

The Library of Alexandria was an attempt to capture all human knowledge. Fire and war destroyed it. Today we try again. Welcome to the Library of Minds, where you'll learn the frameworks and mental models of the world's greatest thinkers. And when our conversation ends, yours begins. Each guest has created a digital mind on Delphi that you can talk to anytime, anywhere. I'm Dara Lajevardian. Let's dive in. Super excited to have Jess here, early product manager at Google and then joined Polyvore as the first PM and then actually became CEO, sold the company to Yahoo, and now she's a partner at Sequoia and investor in Delphi and a friend. It's been really awesome working with her. So thanks for coming, Jess.

Thanks, Ben.

So I wanted to start in your early life. I'm curious if there are any experiences or things you consumed or learned that maybe inform some of the things that you believe today?

About frameworks?

Yeah. Like books, things you consume, TV shows. I know you're very much into comics, anime.

You know, I think one of the things that most shaped how I think about the world, interestingly, was this book called The Corduroy Bear. Have you read that book? It's like a kid's book. And in that book, the toys kind of like wake up And this, the story is told from the perspective of the toys. And I was like some little kid when I read this and I just remember thinking, oh, my toys might have feelings. And I think that book taught me about empathy. And then, and just like thinking about things from other people's perspectives. And then my dad, he worked for Lee Kwa-shing. He's like a very famous Hong Kong sort of tycoon. I didn't know he worked for him at the time, but he would come home at dinner and then constantly at the dinner table tell me these stories about work and they'd always be about people. And he kind of taught me that, you know, all problems are people problems, all solutions are people problems. He gave me the book like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. But I never read it till much later. I think I was 8. And he's just like, you need to understand people. You need to think about what motivates people, how to assemble teams. Like no great things can be done without teams.

People.

And so just over time, I think the lens, the primary lens and framework I use to view the world and figure out teams, to invest, any part of any job I've ever had has been through the lens of people. And then most recently, one of our partners at Sequoia, Sean Maguire, he shared this framework that he had that I thought was sort of perfectly summarized so many of the things that I've learned about people over the, over the years. And it's this framework of EQ and IQ, which everyone knows, emotional intelligence and intel, you know, intellectual intelligence. Then he added PQ, political quotient, and JQ, judgment quotient. So if EQ is how good you are with people one-on-one, then PQ is good, how good you are with sort of politics and the systems of people that govern things. You can be really good one-on-one and really bad at sort of figuring out how to work a system of people, like in an org or getting promoted, all that stuff. Then there's IQ. You could be super, super technically smart but have bad judgment about like business. Like you could be the smartest engineer and then join a series of very bad companies that, you know, don't amount to anything. And so he just laid out those extra dimensions for me and I just use that now all the time. I think he actually invented that frame. I've never heard it from anyone else, but it's like so apt.

Do you think it's worthy to try to be good at all of those or you should try to surround yourself with people who compliment you?

I'm a big believer, like nobody's good at everything. And so you just really need to figure out what you are really good at and then you assemble teams that compliment you and you know, I look for very spiky people that compliment each other essentially. Yeah.

Yeah. So you started as a PM at Google and every company is known for excellence in one area or another. So as you were at Google, as it was scaling, pretty rapidly. What were those excellent things about Google's culture that are still with you today?

Yeah, uh, I think being at Google in the era that I was there, this was 2004, um, before the IPO, I got really lucky to join and then join the Google Maps team, which was an acquired startup inside of Google. I think what I learned were two things. One was engineering excellence and what great looks like. These were, you know, at the time Google was recruiting the very best CS grads, the smartest engineers, and just knowing what quality looks like, that was a big part of it. And the system design was exceptional. And so anyway, that's one thing I think Google really spiked on. They needed that 'cause that, you know, not, not a lot of people know this, but the early days, like Google's wiring of the data centers and the little Lego, you know, bricks that they built to, to do all the computation plus search. Was what drove them initially. So they were just really good at engineering. The other thing that was really special about the company was ambition, both to the good and the bad. But there was always this sense of let's figure out how to make products that impact millions of people around the world and global ambition. And it was just very like, I remember when I joined Maps, we were buying data from all the data providers, like these people who drive. Cars in the world to collect street information to get the most updated street. Everyone just, all providers just relied, all mapping companies relied on buying this data. And then at Google, there was a project where they're like, hey, what if we made our own cars with special cameras that could capture all the photography around the entire world? And that just seemed insane, but that was the level of ambition. You know, let's go all the way, let's do the most audacious thing. And so, you know, I think that was, those are two defining things about early Google that I remember and, and keep with me.

Is there anything you think they did wrong in retrospect?

Yeah, actually ambition's a double-edged sword.

Mm-hmm.

And I think this is true of anything, like your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness. And so the ambition, I watched projects sometimes go off the rails. There was this one project where it was meant to be a classifieds competitor, like a competitor to Craigslist. And it got brought into review with Larry and Sergey. And Larry said, well, isn't this just structured search? Like a classified has a price and a, you know, value and, you know, just a bunch of structured fields. Why don't we just make structured search and we can put DNA into it and recipes and classifieds? And I remember thinking, Who wakes up and says, I want structured search today? Like nobody. And so it was just weird to see that project kind of evolve into this thing that nobody wanted, frankly, because the level of ambition was that classifieds was too small of a market. Yeah. I think this is why Google has not traditionally been great at vertical search. It's like each one of those, like shopping, how come Google never completely nailed shopping? It's actually because It was like almost, that's too small for us, which is a weird thing. And maybe another piece of that that Google was not great at was talking to customers at the early stages, 'cause you could have caught that very quickly if you just talked to a bunch of customers up front and say, do you have this problem of no structured search? People would say, no, I don't care about that at all. I don't even know what you mean, right? But what we would always do is we did a lot of user research at the end of projects. So we would build this complicated product almost to full, you know, production scale, and then we would put it in the usability lab and we'd have users come in and we'd say, please complete this task. And they click on it and they try to complete the task. But that's like much too late to be doing customer research. So I think we didn't have a culture of customer discovery upfront, and I think that's really, really important. And startups in particular need to be talking to customers all the time, constantly.

Totally.

And I think that leads to a question that I had near the end that I'll ask now, you know, Google was maybe a visionary company in a way. And so sometimes you may talk to customers and they may say they don't want something when maybe the thing you're building is more of like a horizontal enablement layer. Like, I don't want to post pictures online, but then I had Instagram. So how do you think about the balance between talking to customers and just saying we're going to define the vision for them?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think Delphi is such a good example of this because, you know, no one is out there saying yet, man, I really need an AI clone.

Some people.

Yeah. You'd be so surprised.

Yeah, no, no. There's a very specific subset of users where, oh, I really wish I could scale my time. So yeah, I think you really have to be careful to understand user problems, not user reaction to the specific thing you are pitching them. And then you just have to have a lot of faith, right? I think you in particular have this, I always say this about Dar, he lives like 5 years in the future and the rest of us are catching up. And so, you know, the idea for a digital mind or that we're all gonna be using Delphis in the future, like this seems so normal to you. And even things like how the demo works, like, you know, when you talk to Delphi and it replies back in the voice of the person is not even, novel to you anymore because you're so used to it. But to everyone who experiences Delphi for the first time, they say, oh my God, that's incredible. And that's the moment I've noticed that people really light up and they say, oh, I get it, I want this, or I wanna use this, I wanna talk to my heroes. And so yeah, I just think you have to be very, very, you have to talk to users about their problems. You have to have your own conviction And then you can get them to complete tasks like the usability research, but really it has to be about the problem, not about your product and their feedback on your product in those early days.

Yeah, totally. So let's talk about Polyvore. You joined as a product manager and then all of a sudden you were CEO.

Yeah.

How did that happen and why you over others?

Well, I actually started as a user of Polyvore. I was just obsessed. With the product and I wrote in to complain about it, but my complaints were neatly organized like a PM with problems and some of them had suggested solutions. And then that got me an email back from the CEO who I didn't know. I just cold emailed him. He said, hey, these are great. Why don't you just come work here and fix all this stuff yourself? And so I joined as an early PM and Being an early PM at any small startup is, it's a little bit of everything. You know, you're not really the classic PM, you just fill in gaps across the entire team, whatever needs to be done, however you compare with the CEO or the product visionary. And so I just did that and it just so happened that our CEO at the time had like, was really good at, actually really good at product and building and prototyping. And there was a lot of other stuff that needed to get done. And so I just kept volunteering to do those things. Everything from, you know, find the next office, uh, figure out the business model, talk to advertisers and figure out can we sell them anything. And so I just kind of became not really a PM, but just sort of this generalist fill-in-the-gap kind of person. And that also included hiring a lot of the people. So especially outside of engineering for a lot of roles that none of us on the founding team had ever hired before. Marketing, sales, I just became by default the person interviewing for those roles and then by default the person who those people reported to. And so after a while we had all of engineering reporting to Pasha, our CEO, and then pretty much everyone else reporting to me. My title was officially VP of Product, but I ended up, yeah, just running a lot of different things purely by volunteering. So I think the answer to your Overall question is just volunteerism. And then the role of the CEO changes over time, right? In the beginning it's all about product, product market fit. Then it becomes the product is not just the bits and the bytes of the product, it's actually the product is the company, it's the org chart, it's the people, it's how you run things, it's process internally. And so that just was more, I was just doing more of that than him. And at some point he sat me down, he said, hey, Why don't you be CEO? And so I was like, are you sure? And we just kind of made the switch and I was very nervous about it. But when we announced it, the team, I think a lot of teams like, cool, makes sense, let's just keep going. And I was like, oh, well maybe just kind of naturally evolved that way anyway. Um, and then along the way also the, the other co-founders came to me and they said that they wanted me to be an official co-founder and they actually gifted me some of their their shares, which is really special.

That is special. Does it take time for you to overcome that nervousness and imposter syndrome? Like, there's no playbook for being CEO.

Yeah, I know.

How do you know what to do?

Yeah.

Or is it just you embrace the chaos? That's just the way it is.

I don't know if I ever embraced the chaos, but I just sort of accepted it. I think in reflection, I had a lot of imposter syndrome because I did not I could not pattern match against any other CEO that I had met that felt like me. And so I was trying to take bits and pieces of different people's leadership styles, like try them on for myself. A lot of that didn't feel that good or was not very authentic. Uh, and so I just didn't have a lot of role models to, that I felt like I could learn from or copy from. And then eventually I met this amazing woman, um, Cheryl Dalrymple. She was at that time, she'd been CFO of AdMob. She later, after Polyvore, she became CFO of, um, Consulent. Um, she's very successful. And when she walked into our office, I just remember thinking, wow, this is a breath of fresh air. She's just 100% herself. She was very funny. She made self-deprecating jokes. She had this crew of people who would follow her from company to company. And that was like a little bit of a glimpse of what I wanted. I was like, okay, you can just, be yourself, not pretend you know everything you're doing, be really confident at your thing, but not have to, I don't know, I just, I just really related to her. And so we didn't even need a CFO at that time, but I just remember thinking like, I just want you around. And so I tried really hard to recruit her and she's like, I don't wanna be the CFO of your small shitty company. So I was like, what about consulting? And so I got her to join as a consultant for a few months and then wooed like crazy. Like, I mean, I've done crazy things to try to get candidates, but for her, she went on a vacation to Hawaii. She didn't tell me where she was staying, but I stalked her to figure out where. And I sent a huge bouquet of flowers and a handwritten note, like begging her to please join full-time. And it worked. And so I got to learn from, from her. And so I learned so much of how to manage people, run teams, like think about financials, like all the stuff I didn't know from her. And then actually from another guy as well who later became our COO.. But yeah, I think I just had a really good leadership team and good mentors. Yeah, yeah. Good mentors that I found along the way. Yeah. But anyway, there's many paths to Nirvana as a leader, and that's maybe the biggest lesson is there's lots of different styles.

Yeah. What's, what's the most painful mistake you made as CEO and how did you overcome it?

Yeah, it's ironic that today is the date of Figma's IPO and as Sequoia is an early investor, so we're very, very happy for them. That's, um, I think you said you bought 11 shares today that have since tripled in 3 hours.

$33.

Just, um, my biggest mistake was picking the wrong market and business model. And the reason I mentioned Figma is because early Polyvore, the actual product, was kind of like what Figma is today. It was an endless canvas in the browser where you can drag and drop and design things. And people were using it for art. You know, they were making designs and then some people were using it for fashion to make outfits and mood boards, and some people were using it for home decor. And I remember we had a very early conversation with the, the four founders and we're like, which path should we go down? Should we go down the design path or should we go down the fashion and home decor path? 'Cause that would be maybe easier to monetize 'cause there's revenue, you can buy things on the web. SaaS didn't exist yet. So, you know, we were like, well, who's gonna buy this weird design thing? And you know, is the web even powerful enough for, you know, that kind of tool? And I just remember I was like, I think we should maybe do design. But I wasn't like a, I don't think I was officially even a co-founder yet. So we made the decision to go down the path of fashion and shopping and then we became a social commerce platform. But at our heart we always had people using us because they love to create and design. And I kind of wish we had leaned into that.. Um, so I think, I don't think I had enough faith in the business model potential of the design path. And so two big lessons learned, mistakes made. Pick the right market and business model really matters. Um, different businesses have different kind of like laws of physics. When you are a recurring revenue business like Figma, You start every day with some revenue, you have a year to lose it, or maybe a month, and the cash flow is just better versus social commerce. What we were, we start at zero every single day. You start at zero sales, you pray to God those customers come back. But hey, most people only shop 3 times, 4 times. How many, how many shirts? You're not gonna buy a shirt every day, but you're gonna use Figma every day, right? Or every, every, every workday. And so it's just, it's just a, inferior business model, and I just never factored that in. And so that's something I definitely think about now as a, as an investor.

Enjoying the conversation? Got a question? You can ask Jess's digital mind. Just check the link in the comments or description. Okay, and in terms of how that affects the decision-making, the reason you guys chose social commerce, was it felt like a better business model at the time?

I mean, SaaS wasn't a thing yet. This was 2000, probably '08 or '09 when we had this conversation.

So there's a good lesson there in, you know, there's an unknown opportunity and you can optimize for revenue or you can optimize what you're passionate about or where the bigger opportunity is.

I wish I'd optimized for what I was truly passionate about.

Yeah.

And just, yeah, been willing to take the leap of faith on business model.

Yeah. And be okay with, it's not immediate revenue there.

Yeah.

What was the hardest cultural challenge that you had as CEO? You know, we've talked about product.

Yeah.

Talking about team and org structure. Yeah.

Again, going back to greatest strength is greatest weakness. I am very empathetic. I see the good in people and like what their spikes and strengths are. I think I did not hold the bar high enough on performance. Performance and did not fire fast enough because I kept wanting to believe like, oh, just a little bit more time, you're gonna be great. Like I see what the potential, and at the end of the day you, you were like, it's, it's about the outcomes for the company. And every time you don't make that tough decision, all the other great people are like, what are you doing? You're slowing us down. And that, that hurts the overall composition of your, your team and your, and your progress. And so I think I was not I think I needed to hold a higher performance, which is related to the other thing that is a strength and weakness. I'm super fine with ambiguity. I love creative, ambiguous, like unknown. Like I'm very comfortable in that space and I hate process, which is kind of correlated to that. And I did not institute much process in the team. I didn't want to have, you know, review processes. I didn't wanna have, a lot of measurement, and some of that actually ended up hurting because I couldn't then hold the team accountable. If I said, no, this is the target, this is what we're shooting for. If you have a number, you know, matters, you can actually performance manage better. But everything was just ambig— ambiguous. And so people couldn't even tell if they were delivering on the things that I wanted them to deliver on. So the combination of those two things was very bad for a period until I figured out how to fix them. Cool.

I read that Polyvore had a very committed and loyal user base. They were very passionate about the product.

Yeah.

What do you think that was a result of? High-touch customer support, your shipping speed, new features, less features that were very delightful. How did you build that sense of community?

Yeah, yeah. We just had a culture of talking to the customers all the time, and I think that began with me because I was a user. I was part of the community. I just talked to our users in the product, in the DMs all the time. I was constantly playing with the product, interacting, and making friends on the platform. And so I knew that that was important. So we kind of instituted that into the culture. We would regularly have meetups with our customers and we would, you know, they lived all over the country, but every once in a while we would hold a meetup at the office and invite people from, you know, top users to just come and hang out. I forced engineers to come to those and present, like everyone had to come hang out. We treated them like royalty, you know, we would take sometimes, You know, when we got tickets to Fashion Week, we would give them to our customers to go and attend. We would throw— and then we were like very high-touch customer service. He said that, that, that's something we did. We would, when you went, when you came to one of our meetups, our community manager would have gone through all your Polyvore sets and creations and found the one product that you— was probably quite expensive, you couldn't afford, but used all the time and we'd buy you that item.

Wow.

And so you'd open your gift bag, would have all the, you know, swag, all that standard stuff, and it would have that one item that you'd been sort of playing with in your Polyvore sets all the, you know, for a long time. And just the joy, the, like, I remember people were crying at our meetups out of happiness. Just like those little touches. Like people remember that. People remember, you know, there's that Maya Angelou quote, people don't remember what you said, They remember how you made them feel. And it was really important to us that our community felt really special and important and loved by us. And we also wanted the product to have that feeling as well. So we tried to bake it into the product and the little details and design touches.

And in those details, it obviously, it takes time to really care about the details and product, but also velocity is really important in product. So how did your org think about velocity and delight? Were there different teams for that? Were there different phases?

Yeah, yeah. I think products go through phases where in the early days, and maybe this is probably true here, you're like not sure if this is something that customers want yet. You're like not entirely sure. And so at that point you shouldn't build for scale as if it's gonna work forever and that this is the perfect idea. And so velocity's really important. I mean, velocity's important period, but you can lower, I think, a lot of times the finesse quality bar when you're still validating if anybody wants this thing at all. And so we did that. Um, but when we were sure, like customers would constantly request certain features, like I need this new feature in the editor, we knew that there was gonna be demand for that. So that better work perfectly out of the box the first time. And so I think we just cut different features and, and products that we shipped into those buckets and then had slightly different bars. Although one trick we did have was for a feature we knew everyone wanted, sometimes we would ship it slightly broken and then have the fix ready to go. So as soon as they complained, we would fix it. And sometimes we would also catch things that we hadn't thought of that we'd fix. And so the community felt, oh my God, when I talk to this company, interesting, Things happen, people reply. But it wasn't just like the thing we held back, but oftentimes we would discover like little, and just, you know, I went through every single comment on our blog and I would read it, we would tally them up and say, all right, what percent of people liked it, didn't like it? Like we were really, really customer obsessed. And I think that was just a culture that we set.

Yeah.

And so even when we screwed up, people were much more forgiving cuz they remember they heard about the time that the meetup happened or they, they had seen me. Like I think one time someone said something really mean about us on somewhere, some comment on the internet, and our community came out in droves and they replied in the comments and personally defended me because they knew me from the site. Yeah. I bet your customers love you.

Yeah. They come around.

Yeah.

So let's talk about you at Sequoia. You've obviously worked with a lot of founders. You run ARC. I'm curious, what are traits not just in founders, but in teams of early startups that you've seen be indicative of long-term success?

The number one is velocity.

Yeah.

Velocity. Yeah. So another wonderful coworker, Mike Vernal, he's now a Conviction partner, but he was at Sequoia and then before that he was a Facebook product VP. He likes to describe startups as like a turn-based game. You know, you play cards. And you turn over a card and it's very hard to be more right about the next card or get, you know, figure out like make every decision correctly, but you can certainly make decisions faster and flip more cards. And just getting more turns and more at-bats, you just find the answer, you get to the right place faster. And so that's the one thing you control is you control velocity and how fast you ship. Like that is really, really important to finding product-market fit. So that's like probably the number one thing and that's something I think this team is very good at and you in particular. I think one time we had like a one-on-one and I was like, maybe you should get a PM and like 15 minutes later you sent me like a PM job description, like after the one-on-one. I think you just make decisions I think quite quickly and then move on things and so, you know, you don't gain that much from waiting around, 'cause you're not, you're—

The best way to get data is just jumping in.

Yeah, yeah.

And moving from operator to investor, are there any things about your worldview that have changed significantly since joining Sequoia that maybe like before you thought something and then it's actually not the case at all?

Yeah, yeah. You know, I used to have this maybe more romantic notion that startups are just excellent teams and excellent products. And then I added excellent business to that. And that I just, you have to be brutal about. And it's exactly what I described before. Like some business models are just better than other ones. And at the end of the day, a business, a, a company is also like an engine for producing cash. At the end of the day, you have to be a self-sustaining cash machine. And there are a ton of metrics that drive that equation. And sometimes let's say you're a beauty business or a commerce business, a GMV business, like you just have worse repeat rates, uh, less recurring revenue. And then because of that, the dollar revenue that you produced is not created equal to the dollar revenue produced by another company. That's why SaaS has like a 7 to 10x multiple versus commerce companies have like a 3 to 5x multiple. It's just how the business works. And that is something that I've had to reckon with. I think I have invested in companies where the business model was like just inferior. And that just hurt us the entire time. No matter how good the founder was, no matter how great the product was, it's just very, very hard. And so now I try to factor that into my, to my calculus. But that's like a, you know, a big lesson learned.

Totally.

Um, or maybe the other thing, which is maybe not contrarian, is the importance of storytelling.

Sure.

Yeah. That's another trait I look for. Um, as a founder, you're almost starting A cult? It almost has to be like a cult leader. Like you're getting all these people to follow you on this journey that really doesn't make any rational sense. Like you could go get a job at Google and make like, I don't know, $400K. Why would you go to a startup and make a lot less? You're joining for the dream, the story. You like the person, you like the idea, you wanna be part of something special. And so the ability to tell that story in a compelling way is so important. And you're not just doing it to people of your team, you're doing it to your customers, you know, investors. And so being able to tell a good story and be compelling, like really changes your, you know, ability to run a company. And so that's, I think something I knew was important but became more important later. It has to be substance and story, but the story really matters.

Yeah, I've realized that as well. Do you have any really hot takes or controversial opinions that might be against the VC tech Twitter norms. Mm.

Um, I love consumer. I love this company because I think it's one of the, has high potential to be a massively adopted consumer company that today feels a little bit unusual or niche. Some, the best, the best consumer companies often start out that way. Remember Snap was this like obscure, like what, your pictures disappear? That makes no sense. Or Airbnb, like, I don't wanna stay on someone's couch. Like, that's insane. And then they became massive companies, right? And so I think this, this has that flavor. But in consumer, well, consumer has fallen out of favor for the last, I don't know, 10 years. Not a lot of great new consumer companies have been created, but I think we're in this like really fertile period. And there's two types of consumer, right? There's consumer utilitarian, think about DoorDash or Google Search. It's very utilitarian. And there's consumer entertainment, there's media, there's gaming, there's like social platforms. That is what I am drawn to. That is what I, you know, yeah, I will spend a lot of my career building. And I think within that, media is having a moment. At this point, all VCs say media companies are not tech companies. Like, media is dead, like, as a terrible business model. When I go on TikTok, what I see is I see a lot of what today is termed AI slop, right? Like bad, you know, fanfic AI-generated videos. But it is getting better and better and better. I saw this one that was Harry Potter crossed over with The Hangover. And so Draco and Harry Potter are like, "We can't find Ron. He's gone. Why is there a tiger in our bathroom?" Which is like literally the plot of The Hangover for Harry Potter characters. And it's actually pretty well made. I mean, character consistency is not good. The faces change slightly from, you know, for parts of the story, but it was really entertaining. And it would be very hard to make that any other way except with AI. And so I think we're going to see this with like what looks like weird niche fan fiction, and then it's just going to start to become AI short-form stories, AI micro-dramas, just full-on content. And I think there's a possibility of someone creating sort of the next YouTube or the next Netflix, but it's a lot— a new creator class, right? Because you could argue that YouTube will be that, but the people on YouTube are famous— like, they have a different skill set. They're famous because they're good at filming, because they're hot, because they're funny. This is a different group of people who are not showing themselves on camera, who are just have good ideas and know how to use the tools. Like that, I don't think will necessarily work right away on all the other platforms. I think there's an opportunity there. I think a lot of people write that off in the same way that they've written off the microdrama category. I don't know if you know this, but there's like a $2 billion microdrama category that's, you know, what Quibi tried to be, kind of. Yes, what Quibi tried to be. Instead, they should have focused on romance novel or romance or like short form, cheap, you know, I think it's filmed like by a lot of USC kids who are in film school and that has blown up. And now in China, that market is bigger than the Chinese film industry. So it's clear there is demand there. So I think though that the combination of these two trends is really, really interesting, but a lot of VCs and people are going to write it off because media is a bad business.

So you've alluded to spikes multiple times. And you mentioned like Dara's was, for example, like velocity. And recently I've been thinking about this as well. One of the people on your guys' data science team reached out to me, was like, talked about, like they wanted me to talk about people I know, but all I could say about them was what their superpower was.

Yeah.

And I found it to be a challenging exercise to do because I was like saying they're hardworking or relentless. Is that even a good superpower?

Yeah.

So something that you're thinking about as you're looking at founders is like what makes a good durable superpower for them? Because I think that could also be something that we use when we're interviewing people. How would I evaluate a superpower that actually is valuable? It's not something that's kind of out there and present in the market.

Yeah, I think what's really important in hiring is a sense of fit. And you know, there's also, there's always that's also culture fit, but like role fit, right? Because Different spikes are useful to different types of jobs, right? And so you really need to understand what's like the most important thing to get right on this team with this one for this job, right? Which may be different than a different kind of job. And so I think you just have to identify the fit. And then the other thing you need to think about is the team composition. So especially in the early days of Polyvore when like nobody knew who the hell we were and we couldn't hire like the very, very best, like 10x in all dimensions. Nobody's 10x in all dimensions. It was very hard to recruit great talent. So I would often just find someone who's really spiky in one dimension, but potentially like a little bit deficient or weird in another dimension that you would normally want for that role. But then I would just pair them with someone who was really good at that one thing, and then the team was able to produce the right output. A very specific example. You think about product managers. Product managers are supposed to be organized and project manage. But if you're working on creative, delightful products, sometimes you need to be really creative and out of the box. And sometimes creativity and organization do not exist in the same person that well. And so what— that's certainly, I think, that's true of me as well as a PM. And so I found this guy who was extremely creative and very bright and very high standards. Hopelessly disorganized. And usually a PM who cannot organize stuff is like dead in the water. But instead we hired him and paired him with a designer who's really, really, really organized and just project managed the project, right? And it's just a simple example. Put together a pod of engineer, designer, and PM where you just need all the bases covered, but they don't have to be traditionally good at the thing that they are supposed to be good at, right? And so that's like maybe a very small example.

So yeah, you went into an industry without really having like an investment background.

Yeah.

Also, I think you were the first female partners at Sequoia. Like, how did you navigate that?

Yeah.

And learn about the industry and—

Yeah, I had not done a single angel investment before joining Sequoia. They made me a scout for like a hot second at Sequoia and I didn't make any investments. So that what you said is true. I do not have sort of the, the, the background of having picked companies. But what was interesting about Sequoia, and I think part of what differentiates the firm is the ethos was like, no, no, your job is not like a capital allocator who manages the portfolio. You're not a financier. Your job is to be the consigliere to founders, to be the long-term company building partner, to like really get to know the team and the people and like help, especially in the crucible moments, which is what we call the like those inflection points where you have to navigate two big decisions. And that just really appealed to me because I remember what it was like as a founder. I don't think I necessarily had that person. And so I just kind of wanted to be that person. That said, I still very much identify as someone who likes to build things. And there are many Pasternavani, including at Sequoia. So really my role there, I'm our Chief Product Officer, which is like a weird title that I don't think I've seen at another VC firm. But what that means is I help run our product and engineering team. And our job is to like make the firm technology accelerated, AI first, help us pick, you know, great investments. Like we just did a hunting party this morning that I helped run where we're like, all right, We're going to scour our database and hunt for interesting robotics companies for one of the growth stage partners. And we use a lot of technology to do those things. And so I do— I spend a lot of time on that because I still actually just like building things and that's useful to Sequoia. But then I also help run Sequoia's ARC program, which is our seed and pre-seed stage program. And so Sequoia, I think, gets the best out of me, but it's also what I love to do. I just feel very lucky that I get to do that.

All right. Thank you so much, Jess. It's been great.

It's very fun.

Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode and want personalized advice from Jess, head to the link in the comments or description to ask her digital mind on Delphi.