[EXCERPT] #31 - George Robson (Sequoia Capital) - Sequoia’s growth in the European Tech forest

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Sequoia's growth in the European tech forest. George Robson, partner at Sequoia Capital.

It's an active community of people that exist outside of Sequoia but are out there in the world as founders, executives, operators in their own right, building relationships with potential founders and really just helping contribute to that company building journey. We don't disclose a huge amount about the individuals in the program here in Europe. Many of them are busy with their day jobs. We want to protect their time a little bit. But there are some exceptional scouts out there building portfolios in their own right. I'm sure you know Roxanne Vassar, you know, Dash on F, who's doing an incredible job in her day job, but also managing to work with early stage founders. I think the way we think about it is it's a good way to help us learn from them, learn about what these future entrepreneurs care about. But likewise, it's a goal to bring people together who have different backgrounds.

After extensive searching within Sequoia, I finally connected with George, who generously shared his insights into many, many subjects. He joined me for an in depth discussion on Sequoia's growth in the European tech sector. We dive into a range of topics starting with the structure of Sequoia and exploring the reasons behind its decision to expand into Europe. The conversation then shifts to current and Future Trends in FinTech, highlighting their focus in this area. Particularly noteworthy are our discussions about two significant deals, Trade Republic and PennyLane. These examples provide a glimpse into Sequoia's investment strategies and successes in Europe. We also touch on the Mafia phenomenon in Europe and the emergence of the companies originating from European scale up mafias. Finally, we covered the Sequoia Scouting program with a special focus on the R program. This initiative supports Pre Seed and Seed Stage Fund who are in the early stages of developing their ideas, products and companies. Enjoy the show.

Hello everyone.

Hi George, thank you for having me. It's so good to be here.

Yes, thank you very much. Listen, I just wanted to say a huge thank you to you because it's been a while that I've been discussing with several people from Sequoia Capital and it's such an iconic VC firm. So I'm really happy to have you on the podcast. It's a great honor for me.

Yeah.

So I'm eager to cover many, many different things with you. First, know more about Sequoia Capital from the Insights. Have a few words about your scouting program, but of course concentrate also on the ARC program that you recently launched. Can you maybe start by introducing yourself and explain who you are, what you do, where you come from?

Absolutely. I mean, for those who haven't spent time with us at Sequoia, just a little bit of background there. I mean, Sequoia's been around for 51 years now, working with early stage founders across the globe. A little bit more recently we set up an office here in Europe, which is when I joined Sequoia about three and a half years ago. And we work with founders from Pre seed, Pre idea to IPO and beyond, across sectors, geographies and stages. I joined from something a little bit different. Previously I was at a company called Revolut. I joined basically to launch and build the consumer subscription business. So something called Revolut Premium. A lot of the retail plans, the insurance business, the gifting business, things like that. So I'm very passionate about consumer product design, monetization problems and obviously scaling because Revolut is now a company that is in not just European markets, but across the globe as well. And now at Sequoia, I work with a whole mix of early stage companies, many of which are at Seed and Pre Seed. And yeah, I love bringing some of that energy and some of those, hopefully some of those learnings from my experience at Revolut to working with early stage founders.

Perfect, thank you very, very brief overview, thank you very much. But we will dive again into Sequoia Capital. What is interesting for me is that you gave us a brief overview of Sequoia's journey into the European market and what prompted that expansion that you were mentioning earlier.

I mean, I think simply put, the level of ambition for founders in Europe has just never been higher. I think for a long time, you know, market leading companies were founded and built in the US I think what you've seen over the last 15 years in particular is Europe has taken a leading charge, starting in sectors like Fintech, but increasingly because of the quality of the research universities here, the size of the talent pool, the level of harmonization of things like regulation and funding coming from governments as well as private companies has really started to spur this ecosystem. On the other that is, is that the Level of ambition, as I said, has never been higher. But also the ability to found companies across a whole mix of different sectors, not just in Fintech, but beyond Fintech as well, has really meant that it's a fantastic time to be building companies here. So obviously at Sequoia, I mean, we made our first investment in Europe, I think back in 2007, 2008, of course, in Planner, and since then we have a bunch of investments like companies like Unity and uipath and the like. Since we opened the office here, we've been able to find companies much earlier in that journey and hopefully share some of the learnings from the last 50 plus years of working with these founders to make sure we help the next generation of companies to be successful. So it's early days, but we're very excited about that. We've been able to double our level of seed investments in Europe from 2021 to 2022. We announced a new seed fund, I think it was late last year, earlier this year, and really being able to think about the long term relationships you want to have with these different founders. Starting from Europe, but building with global ambition.

Great. So Sequoia Capital has a wide presence, worldwide presence. You have a lot of operating partners, people that are supporting portfolio companies. How do you leverage this global presence and all that support functions to support the European ecosystem?

Very precisely, I think in many ways companies have millions of decisions made in a certain order that lead to a certain outcome. If you think about it, what is often unique about companies is the sequencing of those decisions. But actually, if you look at those individual decisions part by part, generally there are people out there that have made those high conviction calls previously. A big bit of what we're doing is leaning on obviously the expertise inside of our partnership, but also founders that exist in our portfolio across different geographies, but also different levels of scale to really help the next generation of companies coming through. So in practice, what that means is, you know, we work with these different founders very much as a team across US and Europe, translating learnings from what we've seen in some of these markets and business models in the United States, but making sure we can bring that to European founders.

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