Sequoia Partner: George Robson

How many years have you been in supreme now?

Nearly five years.

So what are you looking for?

So when we invest at Pre Seed, we basically have two criteria. We basically look for an outlier team right on some of the four dimensions I mentioned earlier and something that we call like positive market dynamics, meaning you're building in a category that is on the right side of history. This is George Robson, partner at Sequoia Capital, who joined the firm when he was only 25 years old. He was also recognized for his achievements by being included in the Forbes 30 under 30 list. Prior to that, he honed his expertise at Revolut, a multi billion doll fintech giant where he was one of the first product owners. The winning edge, if it exists, is just the culture and the people. Your culture doesn't need to be for everybody, right? In many ways your culture is for somebody, right? It's some notion of a, of an employee or a team member or whatever it might be that you have in mind and it's for you to kind of set the rules and expectations of how you're going to work together.

What kind of businesses do you think would exist in the future?

It's a little bit intimidating to say this but like as an early stage business, I'd say the pressure on you to like future proof your company is actually as great as it's ever been because the world is spinning faster than it ever has. The reality is a lot of these businesses that are going from a million to 10 million of ARR, we don't really know whether they're going to have any revenue in three years.

How should startups think about equity?

We actually don't like 50 50. We think it's a negative signal. You and your co founder have 5050 equity. The reason for that actually is

guys, thanks a lot for coming. A few years ago I was also a student at Imperial and one of the things I noticed early on was the Enterprise Lab had some great advice, but that was the only part that I could find advice in Imperial. Then I could not actually see a lot of folks coming to the university to speak, having run startups, having built really big businesses. That's the reason why I'm coming back doing these events. For this one we have George from Sequoia. Sequoia is arguably the best fund in the world for the last probably 20, 30 years I believe. So thanks a lot for joining. I'll give an introduction. George studied in LSE and man, you did the classic group and you went to Morgan Stanley. So I want to ask you about that, joined Revolut, obviously everybody knows Revolut, right? One of the first product owners and then joined at age 25, the best fund in the world as the second person joining as an investor in Europe. So thanks for joining me.

Honestly, it's amazing to be here. My experience at lse I think was a little bit similar. I think London is this remarkable place where you have so many of the world's best universities who excel at one or two things. Right. But actually that connectivity, I think even on campus or within campuses is not trivial. And I think that I think about some of my experiences when I was studying it honestly shaped, and maybe we'll talk about this, but it very much shaped my trajectory going into Revolut and beyond. So make the most of this group. And honestly being here is definitely the first step.

I think the consensus for people when they leave Imperial is to go to investment banking. Would you suggest it's a good idea if they want to launch a company?

Yeah. So my trajectory as you said. So I studied economics and maths at lse. Really the thing that I think shaped my experience most there was I was part of this team setting up this program called Kickstart when I was studying, which was kind of founded around the inside of. I knew I wanted to build a business or be part of entrepreneurship, but honestly I didn't really know where to start. I didn't know how to find people that were similarly motivated, I guess as myself. But also to build a great company, you obviously need people that come from a range of different backgrounds. And when you're studying in a degree program in a relatively specialist university, it's not always easy to find that yourself. And actually when I was in my final year studying, I was on a panel representing that very small accelerator. And just by chance Revolut was on that panel with me when Revolut was a pre seed company just coming out. Who was it from, Revolut? Alan Chang, who studied here at Imperial actually once upon a time and ended up hiring me into Revolut and really setting a bunch of things in motion that changed my life. And I think that openness was kind of there. I think the rationale for going to Morgan Stanley at that time really was I didn't know any better options. I mean I perceived it as in tech. In London you could work at Google if you wanted to work at Google. I knew I didn't want to do that, didn't want to sell ads for ice cream companies, things like that. And. And I knew that I Wanted to kind of identify myself as someone who had a pretty high pain threshold.

Right.

And was willing to work pretty hard and try and identify myself. And at a time where I felt, I guess my CV was kind of naked, I didn't know where else to turn. The reality was I was there for about nine months. I was really in Canary Wharf. Revolut happened to be founded at level 39, which is like all of 80 meters away from Morgan Stanley's office. And I kind of kept in touch with Alan, seen how the company was moving and it just piqued my interest. So I always knew going into it that I wasn't going to be there forever. I think the thing, I would say that for people who are kind of considering a decision like that, sometimes people go into that because they want to understand how to think about businesses. Right. And how to describe good and bad companies. It definitely helps, gives you some of the terminology, but it's not the same thing. It's a little bit like the difference between, you know, shadow boxing or sparring. Right. It's a very different level of intensity of doing the thing you actually think you want to do long term, which is taking ownership, being inside a company and being accountable for its success. Being an advisor is not the same thing. So make sure not to mix them up.

What's the first product you work on in Revolut? And was that your first role?

Yeah. So I, I joined basically to do the same job that I did for the entirety of the time I was there, which was to build a consumer subscription business. So Revolut had this slightly contrarian bet, as a lot of consumer companies do, particularly those going into categories where you have a pretty big incumbent or a number of incumbents in that they knew they didn't want to make money from fx. Right. The original product was a multi currency account, a travel card. That was really the Act 1 of the business, but the Act 2 and the Act 3 of the business was to go much, much deeper into everyday financial services and to find a way to do that profitably, despite giving up a lot of the fees that banks typically charge you for in a very intransparent way. So the way to do that was this hypothesis of having an Amazon prime type product. That's at the core of the Revolut offering. I launched Alan Hydney to launch that business, take it from the uk, take it across Europe, scale it eventually to kind of hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, and by the time I left across 40 plus markets. And the goal was Always the same. Just to convince as many people, a high percentage of our monthly active users to be on these paid plans and to have the kind of full degree of flexibility in terms of how we achieve that.

How are the teams formed inside of Revolut?

So I think Revolut. Revolut's always been known for having a relatively intense culture. And I think that actually for me that was something I really wanted to seek out. I think that was the best bit of investment banking, to be honest. That stayed with me is that idea of just moving quickly and with purpose. And I remember when I interviewed with Nick, he gave me this line which was like, coming here is like going to the gym. If it doesn't hurt, you're not doing it right. And I was someone that kind of, yeah, you feel it. And I remember thinking, who would say that in an interview? But at the same time I knew that was the people for me. And it showed up in how the company was actually structured. Because what you basically had at Revolut is product is like a horizontal layer, right? Everybody reports up into product. That's a little bit contrarian because in lots of companies you'll have kind of engineering leaders, you'll have marketing leaders, you'll have maybe business development leaders and you'll have these people that own product and they typically only own product metrics. So like conversion rates, activation rates, you know, things like that. At Revolut there was this idea that if you just did that, people would never care about the business. They'd only care about, you know, pure product metrics. So everybody was really, they're in a product type role was really more like a general manager. They own some P and L for some business line. So in practice, what that means is I turned up as someone who wasn't technical by anybody's standards. I'd actually never worked with software engineers running a product. I'd never been a hands on designer, if I'm honest. I'd always thought design was like a dark art. It was something you were born with. I hadn't fully appreciated you could work away and work into that over time. And it was probably the most difficult still the most difficult one and a half years of my life when I joined making that transition. Because I turned up in this company that really valued product above all else and I knew I needed to be there. So basically Nick gave me that lease of trust. I invested my blood, time and energy in it. And it did hurt. Right as he said. He was right. But it was worth it because at the End of the day, I ended up running a pretty multifunctional team that frankly was way broader than it would have been able to find anywhere else. And the whole culture is built around this idea of you set goals every six months of what you want to achieve for that multifunctional team. You are not dependent on anybody else to do it because you have all of these different functions in house inside of your local unit. If you achieve that goal, your team grows and you get more responsibility. And if it doesn't, the team gets disbanded. Because effectively, the way to think about it is if you're running a seed stage business going out now, you have your 18 months of Runway, it's not that easy for you to always say to your investors, give me more time. The bar is always set in advance for where you need to get to. So Nick ran the business and still runs the business, really, with that focus and that precision.

Conceptually, that's very interesting in closing these teams. But how many teams did you see closing, though?

Honestly, all the time. Yeah. You live in this sort of suspended state where you need to keep moving forwards. And it's communicated to you directly by Nick, by, I'd say more generally in the culture. You see it in the arc of companies. I mean, Alan is a great example of people who've been able to consistently grow their mandate inside of the business. And I think it's a good reminder for me because obviously when now at Sequoia, we invest in businesses that are just coming out of the company formation stage, right. Pre seed and seed companies. And there's this notion of, like, when should we start to think about the culture we want to set in our organization? And the reality is on day one, Right. You should actually start to think about exactly that because a little bit to Nick's comment of going to the gym, if it doesn't hurt, you're not doing it right. I think you start to set these sort of virtue signals to the kind of people you want to attract. And then the goal is to obviously attract, hire and ideally retain those exceptional people. And you need to set those frameworks in place really from day one when you start. So, yeah, Nick really lives and dies by it.

I think at the time you are in revolut a lot of the things that were going and getting out. And I'm pretty subscribed to the same cultural elements, by the way. But you had so much going on from Financial Times, against Revolution, so on. You had so much. But press, how did you guys deal with it?

I think There was always a perception that things were way better inside the building than people perceive them outside the building. I also think it's easy to forget sometimes that when you're a founder of a company and you have to define the culture, your culture doesn't need to be for everybody. In many ways your culture is for somebody. It's some notion of an employee or a team member or whatever it might be that you have in mind and for you to kind of set the rules and expectations of how you're going to work together. And I think what was always interesting to me is we'd have lots of people that would drop out of the kind of employment funnel right when we were hiring these people because they felt the culture didn't align with how they wanted to work. When I first saw that, I remember thinking, wow, that seems quite scary. At Morgan Stanley we would never want that to be the case. Right. We want everybody to love it and then only to hire a subset of those people. But actually, Nick believe very strongly that you should be virtue signaling way earlier in the process to self select the kind of people that would go through it. And what it meant was actually a lot of people were there, were there for exactly that reason. Right. Like myself. So it kind of hurts when at the time you would read things like that. But I think the reality is that we had a whole bunch of competition as Revolut founded around the same time, plus or minus two years. If you look at the current size of the business, Revolut is more valuable than all of their competition in Europe combined, which is a remarkable statistic. And that's in financial services, where there's really no black magic. Like everybody roughly builds the same things. They build it in slightly different orders. And I would argue some companies, like a business with that culture, builds it much more quickly. So really I think the winning edge, if it exists, is just the culture and the people. And I think that's kind of indication for that strategy.

I remember this, there was this event that the CEO of N26 was there and Monzo. And it was a super weird conversation. But one of the things I wanted to ask you, it was very evident that Nick was super convinced, very, very focused on winning from that video. But why would you say that Revolut won at the end? Because if you compare Monzo today, it's a much smaller company with Revolut. If you compare N26, I think it's much, much smaller. So why did you develop Win?

Yeah, so that, that's a great memory. I Watched a live stream of that in our office and it was at TechCrunch Disrupt. It was probably in like 2016, 2017. He finished the panel with like a. It'd been quite a tense panel. And the moderator basically said, nice question for all of you. Which of these three companies would you want to run? And it can't be your own, which is just a freebie. And everyone else said the other business and how nice it was. And Nick concluded with, I don't ever want to run Revolut. I don't know what these guys are doing, et cetera. And you watch that and you actually feel quite proud, right? Because someone who is unapologetically himself runs a business that way. It was quite remarkable to watch. But I think to your question, firstly, the incredible thing about Nick is he never thinks he's won. If you see him today, he has exactly the same intensity as he did when I first met him and before that when he founded the company. I think what he did or what he's always been able to do very well is when you found an early stage business. When you come and pitch someone like us, you always have this balance between how do I articulate my crazy large vision for the world of something that is crazy ambitious with the reality today of being a pretty small team with no funding and no product. How do you bridge those two realities? And the way you do it is you sort of tell your business is like an arc, right? Where you have an Act 1 of the business and Act 2 of the business and Act 3 of the business. And Nick was always able to explain that like yes, we get it today the act one, we're like a multi currency account, a free travel card. We know that's a tough business. But the Act 2 is we're going to use that as a wedge to own an everyday banking relationship with our customer. That's sort of bank account. We're going to use that to go deeper into financial services, savings, investing, crypto, all these things. But the large vision, don't forget, the large vision is financial super app. And you'd always manage to anchor the reality of whatever the business does today with that much higher goal of a financial super app. I think that's why over time the company's money to attract exceptional people at the scale it is today, it's managed to keep expanding into different geographies and keep building new product because no one ever forgets that higher vision.

I have two more questions about Revolut before we go to Sequoia. The first One is Revolut always comes with these new products. How did the new products came out, the new ideas? Was it from the top? Was it from the teams internally? And I've seen, for example esim. Like how would you conclude into an ESIM question? Right, like, so how are these ideas generated?

Yeah, I think so. It's a combination. Nick today is effectively still CEO, CPO and head of design. There are people that own various aspects of that. But this is a company with nearly 10,000 employees where nothing is sort of approved at the design stage to go into development and then eventually released without Nick testing it on an Android or an Android and iOS phone. So he actually sees everything go out and there are releases every single week. So he's like an incredibly product focused CEO. And that's one mold of a CEO, but that's definitely his take. But in terms of how the ideas surface, again, it's sort of this very clear performance management. You set the KPI you're going to achieve every six months. You give people these cross functional teams. So they're small kind of self sufficient units and then it's actually for the teams to propose the roadmap. And really the main thing that he's focused on is he draws this distinction between kind of big bets and everything else. So I think he lives in this world of if you want to expect a meaningful change in the state of the company, there needs to be a meaningful change in the state of the product. Right. You can't just make these small changes and iterations. So the main way that he provides input on that is just to push you to think bigger.

Right.

And to be more aggressive and to be more daring. But actually a lot of that innovation is bottom up. The ECM product was actually something that was first kind of idealized, maybe in 2015, 2016 in Revolut, but the infrastructure didn't exist. It kind of wasn't possible at that point in time. So there's always this backlog of things across the company that are being restacked and resurfaced when they come to light.

And what are your learnings from Nick?

I think so. We all use this phrase to describe, I think exceptional founders about being relentless. And there's this concept of the consistent application of force that sits behind that relentlessness. Nick is just the ultimate extreme of that. If you look at his ability to squeeze the most out of people and also to not compromise on that. If people aren't delivering, if they're not growing at the rate that he expects, you know he doesn't shy away from conflict, so he doesn't shy away from telling you and sort of replacing you inside of the company if needed. And for a lot of people, you know, they might start building the business that way, but the reality is that's a very tiring way to live, right? To continue to sort of drag people with you, I guess, if you go along. But actually when you're replacing your like head of growth for the seventh time in six years, whatever it might be, most people at some point would just compromise. And Nick doesn't compromise, he continues to run the company that way. And you might have seen the financial results over the last week. The business has really managed to push back a lot. And they say, as you said, this could never be profitable. It would never be a company of that scale. And we've proven that you can do that. And I think you can do that out of London or in Europe and you can build a company that is as big as any fintech on the planet that's been built over the last few years. So it's very exciting for the future of this ecosystem.

And now there is this point in time that Revolut grows like a rogue achievement. You decide to leave the company. How did you make that decision?

Yeah, I think the nice thing about the Revolut culture is it kind of pushes you to have agency, I think, in what you do. And it was sort of 2020, it was just as Covid was hitting. Revolut was a much bigger business. It was maybe six or seven thousand people at that point in time. And effectively for me, I'd always thought about, well, I previously founded some very bad companies when I was studying at university and I felt like I had a lot more learnings at that point in time to go out and build again. And I went out right literally as Covid was hitting so February 2020 to raise seed funding to set up a business that was in the healthcare space. And not even Infantech, but somewhere that I'm very passionate about that was kind of focused on distributing personalized medication for chronic health conditions. And it was at that point in time actually when I intersected with Sequoia. Of course Sequoia didn't have an office in London. I'd heard of Sequoia, but I'd never met anybody from Sequoia. And we had a few investments in Europe kind of going back to 2007, 2008, companies like Klarna and Unity, but they'd always been long range efforts, if you like, from the US it was during that process that the team highlighted, I think why that business is an interesting idea but not the right size of opportunity to go after and sort of pitch this idea that there is a moment in time to come and join the team and be part of this story that Sequoia is building in Europe. And that was what convinced me. So it wasn't thinking about becoming an investor. Honestly I'd never invested in a company and I'd never really thought about it before I joined Sequoia. And I think there's sometimes a notion that you do need to do all of those things. You actually don't. You just need to be someone that's hopefully being busy, surrounded by hopefully interesting people and they're at the right point in time. So really it was that combination of those things and just a huge amount

of luck and then. But you just alluded to it. How do you, when you join a firm like Sequoia, how do you actually learn how to invest? Was there a process internally? I heard somewhere we discussing earlier that Duck is coming from the bay here to have discussions. How is that knowledge transfer?

So it was quite surreal for me because so when I joined it was like August 2020 eventually when I started and that is right in the middle of COVID the US borders were closed for like a year and a half of when we opened. We couldn't go and see our US based colleagues in person. It was basically my wonderful colleague Luciana and myself in our respective homes on Zoom, not traveling to meet founders. It was quite surreal actually building on top of the fact I'd never invested in a company. So I think the reality is when you work in venture, unlike working in a business, when you work in a business you have a lot of hands on experience. You get pretty fast feedback loops on the work that you do. You get a lot of feedback from people inside the organization. You have more experience than you is kind of how it works. The reality for venture is it's basically an apprentice based business. You have to sort of see stories play out to have existence proof of what the trajectory of these companies might look like. Again remembering that like unfortunately you know, there's only a handful of businesses founded each year that have the potential to be generational right in nature. So the reality is you got to hope if you're going to be training your algorithm if you like, on what those amazing companies look like, you're going to at least have the chance to see one or two to be able to appreciate that journey. So the way that works At Sequoia, I'd say is in two ways. One, we tell a lot of stories as it is it sounds. We literally had Friday story time for like four years where people would tell these stories of the different chapters or acts of these generational companies, how they changed and evolved, how the assumptions changed, how the founders look different at different stages of the company's growth. So the sort of power of storytelling. And then the second thing is we have this quite remarkable partnership at Sequoia where it's a relatively small team. There's only 20 people at Sequoia. Fun fact. But they all are very different. They all have very different roots to the firm and they frankly think about company building and investing in companies in very different ways. So you get a chance to sort of witness and be an apprentice to all these different styles. And yeah, someone like Doug, he spent a week, a month here for maybe a year and a half flying in, in the middle of COVID just to spend time with us. And it was just having breakfasts with him and meeting founders with him and learning about his approach.

Can we hear one of these stories?

Yeah, I think everybody has a slightly different approach to what they look for in a 30 minute meeting with a founder. I think some people really want to spend time understanding their strategic thinking on the market or their understanding of the market context or things like that. I would say for Doug that's important at the end. Of course those things are really important factors. But I think he really listens for two things. He spends a lot of time on founders kind of personal stories and if you like their founding moments, not at the company, but take me back, where did you grow up? What was your experience? Do you have siblings? What do they do? Why is what you do different to that? He wants to look for kind of evidence of agency, I think, and kind of grit and domain and functional expertise that's been built over time in these founder stories. And frankly he goes much further back and goes much deeper than the average person or certainly than I would have thought to have done without that experience. I'd say that's insight one and then insight two. He is someone who doesn't believe that he can sort of over intellectualize the world. He actually just wants to understand what do customers think. And for a lot of people, as an investor, you can sit there and hear a version of the story and you can kind of choose to think about it from first principles and go into the details, but in reality, who are you? Right? You're not the customer for the product you don't necessarily understand all the nuance of that. You can just speak to the customers. So Doug kind of anchors himself to the individual in their full founding story, their life path and yeah, the voice of the customer in that.

Well, learning all these stories and so I believe. How many years are you in Sequoia now?

Nearly five years.

Nearly five years. So what are you looking for? Say that someone approached you today from the audience. What would you be looking for?

I think that sort of my observation. I think the Revolut experience was helpful. You know, I'm fortunate enough that a few of the companies that I work with at Sequoia have become quite large. So like a business like pennylane and we just raised a bunch of money. A few weeks ago, I worked with this great team called Anterior that came out of London trade Republic, organizations like that. I think what is true in all of those founding teams, even though the businesses are totally different, is they all have an incredible amount of respect for their own time. The people that think that time is very precious, they want to move with speed and intensity and they have a sort of scale of ambition, which is a phrase that we use a lot internally that kind of matches ours. And we want to hear that articulation. Why is something you want to build going to be gigantic? It can be a generational company, but how do you sort of articulate the path to be able to get there? And I think really what we do to pass that is we look for kind of four components. I think one we want to understand. Do you have a domain expertise that is relevant to this company? Have you built a functional expertise or some technical skill set that is tightly correlated with the success of this business? Do you have evidence of being someone that has that perseverance and that grit, right. To be able to take you there? And then finally, the fourth factor, is there some element of luck or being in the right place at the right time, or the set of technologies kind of coalescing around this market opportunity today, that means that this can happen today where it couldn't have happened yesterday. And generally at that stage, if we're investing at seed and pre seed, it's probably 80% team. And if we go to precede, it can be even higher. Right. So reality is, we're really leaning on those four features. So find a way to tell your story that articulates that. And I would just really recommend that you practice it, I think, as particularly European and someone who's European. We just don't do that very often. People don't look in the mirror and sort of pitch themselves. It's not very un American, exactly, very unamerican. And I think that the reality is you need to learn how to do that and in a pithy way to be able to articulate why you're the person, the guy or the girl to found this company.

If you are a founder today, or maybe your advice to the audience, what should students work on?

I think I would generally recommend. There are absolutely some people who just go out into the wild and build a business. Firstly, I would recommend you to find mentors. It's a very special thing being a student. You have this incredible calling card where people respond to your emails, they pick up the phone, they spend time with you for free. I promise you that doesn't happen as easily later in life. So if you don't like squeeze that lemon, you're honestly missing a trick. And particularly in a place like London, where you have this incredible depth of specialized talent and most of that specialized talent just because of culture, I think in other things, they don't get asked all the time to be giving their help back and be spending time with people who are coming up. So I think point one, genuinely find mentors. I think point two, you can either decide that you want to found a business just to get through the machinations of founding your first company, right, which in some ways is like learning on your own time, right, how to be a better founder. I think option two is to learn on somebody else's time how to be a better founder and really just solve for getting close to founders that you think are exceptional. And by the way, like, that might be the individual, it might be their style of operating, it might be their intensity, it might be their taste, right? And their product intuition. In the perfect world, it's also the business, right? And the business can go on to be large and you might make generational money yourself, but if nothing else, surrounding yourself with people that you can sort of emulate, right, as you go through that journey, I think is really critical.

Let's get into a bit of trouble. What percent of investors in Europe do you think are good company builders?

I think in the US you grow up in a cocoon of startups from such a young age, right? You see it in the investor community, frankly, you see it in how prolific many of the angels are as well. I think the reality is, you know, Europe is just less mature and needs more work. I think that it's even different than that. I think that's what I said. This is an Apprentice based business. Your ability to help the next founder build a generational company is kind of a function of your ability and your life experience. And if you hadn't had an experience seeing one of those companies being built at scale, it's not easy to be calibrated on it. And I think it's why I'm excited to see more and more people coming out of these businesses that are unicorn plus type businesses becoming investors because they understand a little bit more and they have more empathy for how difficult it is, I think, to build a company.

You alluded to that a bit earlier, but how much do you expect the founder to have figured out the vision in the very early stages?

So when we invest at pre seed, we basically have two criteria. We basically look for an outlier team on some of the four dimensions I mentioned earlier and something that we call positive market dynamics, meaning you're building in a category that is on the right side of history. So the bar is relatively low at the precede, right. Those two components sort of said differently. Exceptional person building in a generally interesting space. Right. Those are the two articulations we care about. As you move from a pre seed to a seed, we add kind of one other layer to it, which is this notion that you have an authentic and compelling insight. The authenticity comes from the founder problem fit, right. That you may have earned. It may come from your domain expertise, your functional expertise, the curiosity you've shown, your ability to speak to customers. So it's authentic, right? It's justified in some way. And compelling implies better. Right. Than what exists in the world. So if you can combine outlier team, positive market dynamics and this authentic and compelling insight, then generally we're going to be excited about the business.

What have you seen from Revolut maybe and other companies that the good companies were doing in building great team cultures and maybe teams.

I think that there's this concept in game theory called shelling points and effectively it's like a coordination problem of if you're a smart person and you want to work on an impactful project, it's very difficult for you to tell outside in which those might be. But the best way to tell it is to look at other places where other exceptional people are already working, you want to co locate with those people. And honestly, I think the most important signal you can send to the market is this idea that you're attracting, hiring, retaining exceptional people. But the reality is again, to do that is exhausting. I think if you build that into your process, you can sort of have this funny, particularly for first time founders, this funny conflict where people perceive it as admitting failure. If they've hired people that are not great and sort of letting them go is stressful, it can sometimes be upsetting. It's something that you want to do right by those people. All of those things are valid. But the reality is if you can do that in the right way, it can actually elevate the culture. Because for the people who stay at the company, they feel like they're part of this elite team, a small, you know, small team of exceptional people building something great. So I would say that's kind of the most concrete learning. It's something we see. You know, talent density is sometimes underestimated, despite the fact that everybody would assume it's going to be important.

I think that's part of the creative process. It's like as if you start writing a document down and you start erasing so many things of the thing that you write. And team culture is pretty similar. You're going to do a lot of mistakes, but you have to always go back and erasing. How should startups think about equity?

So it's a good question actually. So sometimes people have this disconnect between kind of culture and performance management, right? And I would consider sort of equity in the culture of performance management because obviously compensation is the reward, right? For great performance. And what I would say is just make it consistent. We see a few methods of that. Sometimes we see solo founders who, because they're a solo founder, they have effectively a bunch of the ESOP or a bunch of the options they can redistribute among the team. Sometimes we see a preference for them having a relatively large number, not 100, but maybe five people who are very equity compensated, who are not co founders of the business, but they're more founding team members. The idea is they can build this squad who have this multifunctional skill set. I think that works well. But I think as a general comment, like I'm a big advocate for being generous with equity from a performance basis. But again, the equity vests and you understanding that there are clear expectations attached to that vesting and if people don't perform, then they won't be there to vest it. Because really what you're giving is an incentive, right? It's a reward, but it's an incentive for continued performance. So if you view it in that way, and again you have a performance culture consistent with that, it can work.

If we go earlier than that and you consider compounding equity, there is always this Kind of. Some people say 50 50, some people say something very different. What's your take?

Yeah, so we actually don't like 50 50. We think it's a negative signal if you and your co founder have 5050 equity. The reason for that actually is the reality is the team is unlikely to be that balance. The way you should actually think about it with your co founder is look at the business you want to build. You have some hypothesis for it. Write down almost each of you your set of core competencies that you think you can contribute today and in the future for that company. I say today and in the future because in some cases the first six to 12 months relying on one, maybe the second year relies on the second. Sometimes you see that in technical teams and then there might be a more commercial, go to market focused team. So timing is also important. And then you basically got to pitch to the other person why you think that skill set you have is particularly differentiated. Right. And the reason I call that out is if it's 50 50, what that kind of tells us is you didn't want to have a tough conversation about it because it is tough and it is awkward. And this is the person that you hope to be able to build a company with for the next 15 years. But honestly a lot of building a business is having tough conversations from first principles and being able to get through it. Right. And keep the team together and keep building despite that. So yeah, I would say we are suspicious when we see 5050 and we often ask people, why do you think that is? Right. And you're not shortchanging people. Right. It's actually, you know, it's a. And you can have someone by the way to moderate it if you think it makes it easier. Sometimes that can help. But it's just this idea of I know how to do these things, I am this good at these things and these things are that important and you should be pitching it in that way.

How should founders think about their right investors?

So I mean if you wanted a more like cynical view of like how can investor help you? I think basically investors can help you with hiring. In some cases they can help you with distribution, meaning understanding your customer, finding access to your customer, things like that. They can help you with brand to sort of elevate the brand of your business at a point where you are an early stage company no one's ever heard of and your investor may potentially be someone who people have heard of. Then I'd say that half point and I touch the half point because it depends Very much on the investor and it depends on your relationship and their expertise. They can genuinely help you with company building. Right. And the way to think about it is, you know, companies are millions of decisions made in a certain order that lead to a certain outcome. Right. There are maybe 10 to 15 decisions a year you make that are deeply strategic, typically irreversible, or at least have some level of path dependency. Right. And you really need people to help you identify those decisions as early as possible and then to get them right. And it's very hard to do that I think with investors where you don't have a high degree of trust because you're never going to feel like you can have a proper conversation about it. If you feel that they don't understand your market. Right. They don't have any insight into the dynamics of what is happening. They may not have seen businesses being built either of a similar scale, similar market intensity, whatever it might be. And I think that like at the end of the day you really need to like the person that you're working with as much as you like the firm. Because the reality is, you know, even if you work with some of the best names in the world, you will probably spend 80% of your time with that one individual or that, you know, that very small team. So I think if you're realistic about how important those different criteria are and you feel that there is that understanding and that trust, you should go for it. But if you don't, you should hold a very high bar and keep moving.

I think we, we now have this platform change with AI probably the Internet was, the first one was mobile. Now we have this new platform change. How would you advise people to be thinking about it and what kind of businesses do you think would exist in the future?

I think, I mean there are both a bunch of new market opportunities. There are also a lot of new ways to think about building your company. You can obviously achieve a lot more with a lot less today you can be way more capital efficient. You have these incredible stories of these four person teams getting to 10 million ARR and being able to push through. So that is an opportunity to maximize value from. So I'd say build that again into your culture and build it into your startup working. I think in terms of terms of the opportunities that exist, it's a little bit intimidating to say this but like as an early stage business, I'd say the pressure on you to like future proof your company is actually as great as it's ever been because the world is spinning faster than it ever has. So the reality is a lot of these businesses that are going from a million to 10 million of ARR, we don't really know whether they're going to have any revenue in three years. Right. And that's not like 10 years, it might be like three or four years out. And I would argue that's almost never been true. Right. There's always been an ability to somewhat extrapolate a little bit the curve for these companies because again, the structures of the market, who the competitors are, how competent they are, has kind of been relatively stable I think in some of the previous market cycles. So what I would say is you really got to make sure that you're being very thoughtful about all of those market dynamics, that you understand what is happening. If you're building an AI, for example, inside of the big labs, and if you don't know, you should be asking investors, trying to speak to researchers, getting a sense for their priorities, building an understanding of if you're building it again in AI, how much of the nuance comes either from the data set that you're using to train a model or fine tune a model versus how much of it comes from the nuance of the workflow. And if you have one or both of those, you're in a much safer space than if you're building in something that is very much square in the headlights in some of these larger research labs. So I would just encourage you really try and future proof your company in a way that will seem quite intimidating on day one. But I think it's very important

if we consider financial services and maybe in banking and we can get to your opinion about how AI is going to change them. What does it look like?

So the last wave of Fintech sort of 2016 onwards, effectively is a lot of it is the migration to mobile. Right. So building a mobile version of a service you previously got through desktop or offline, and I would put by that, you know, NEO banking, near broking, things like that and then two is providing much more transparency around fees because you have a lower marginal cost to serve the customer because you digitize the experience. So a lot of it was front end focused, you know, end customer focused and the like. The reality is if you look at the distribution of even market cap that exists in financial services, most of that is inside organizations that did not participate in the last technological cycle. So I would include in that, you know, wealth management as a whole, right. RIAs, you know, financial advisors. I would put insurance very much in that bucket for sure. I would Put alternative lending, that was something where there was a little bit of innovation but really didn't push as far as it could have done. And crucially, it was a lot of the cost base that was tied up in operating those very, very large incumbent banks in things like compliance and work like that. So a lot of what we're seeing today is it's a similar trend on the one hand of trying to reduce the marginal cost to serve a customer. That really matters in insurance and in wealth management. Or it's the fact that a lot of work that people do inside of banks is basically human API work. If you're a compliance person, you get some alert, you read some document, you compare it against some rule, and then you just make the plumbing work yourself. As a human being in tomorrow's world, you obviously won't need to do that. So I'd say now is the time really to be quite bold and really look at the structure of the revenue and the cost base. Choose a line item you like in that and then build a technology product to automate that process. And that is a very safe way to think about having a very well defined TAM for your business.

We didn't speak about the Sequoia ARK part. Should people think of this as a competitor to a combinator or how should we be thinking about it?

Yeah, so good question. So we launched a program called Sequoia ARC probably about three years ago now we run basically two cohorts a year of companies that are precede and seed companies we pull from the US and Europe. It's a pretty small cohort, it's typically like 10 to 12 companies. It runs for about eight weeks. And the way to think about that program is basically every single precedent seed investment we make gets invited to attend arc. So we just ran an application cohort like over the last six weeks and basically the goal is to firstly onboard you into Sequoia. You get to know a similar set of founders at a similar stage to you. You get to meet more of our partnership on day one of the business two is to really focus on this idea that storytelling really is a core competency for you. As an early stage founder, you tell three versions of the same story to your first investors, your first employees and your first customers. So it's really helping you get clarity on that and know how to tell that in the right way. And then finally for all these businesses, it's about building connectivity into our wider Sequoia network that might be to find customers in the US etc.

Etc.

So basically yeah, it's like a cool part of our business now. And, yeah, it's something that, like, any of you, if you're interested in building companies, would be eligible for the next cohort, I think will be later this year. But, yeah, something that we really put a heavy emphasis on.

How is this program run? Do you have some partners, for example, running it? Do you have people running it?

Yeah, we run it. It's run through Sequoia. So I was there last week in New York spending time with a bunch of our cohort. And, yeah, it's a big, like, team effort for the reason being that, like, you know, between our network at Sequoia, I think we have quite broad reach, and it's a great chance for you to be able to meet the whole partnership in a relatively short space of time.

I've seen that you're a big advocate about Europe. I can't debate you forever on that. But why? Is Europe the right place or is it the right place?

I think what Europe has in spades is, like, diversity of thought and culture.

Right?

We have an incredible density of technical talent. We have more engineers graduating from universities in Europe than in the States. We have an incredible history in different countries of different industries being very, very large. So you have these very nice flavors across European ecosystems. And the reason I like that is depending on what kind of founder you are, what sectors you're in, there is somewhere in Europe where you have an unfair advantage to build a company. From there, you have much more flexibility in how you want to think about building that. You have a potentially lower cost base for building your talent base. And we also get this question a lot from seed founders, where they say, hey, should I move to the US Should I build my company from San Francisco? And in some cases, that might make sense if the market's there or the customers are there. The reality is, if you can build in Europe with the same intensity you would have in a San Francisco, you can go further with less. You will face less resistance, less aggressive competition here. But that is a mindset thing. The reality is, if you also build from Europe and you don't push as hard, you will not move as quickly. You will probably lose the US Market, you will never be able to raise capital there, et cetera, et cetera. But it turns out that's up to you. That's not a structural feature of Europe. That's actually on you and your mindset and how you build your team. So we actually think for the right companies, coming from here can be a pretty unfair Advantage. It's why when we set up our fund here, I mean, it's the same fund family, it's the same portfolio across US and Europe. We don't really care where founders want to build from. And probably the teams I work with, it's kind of 50, 50, whether they ultimately choose to continue to be here or they choose to move to the US the nice thing is we're agnostic. But I would remember them that in the right cases, you can really unlock a lot by building from this part of the world.

I think for the last question I wanted to ask you, Sequoia sits on that pyramid of old venture, and it's on the top of it. What is Sequoia doing right, from your experience that others don't?

Yeah, I think that's kind. We have a pretty small team, as I said, Only 20 people. We make relatively few investments. So we're basically making about two investments, maybe two to three investments per partner per year. So implicitly, when we propose an investment to my colleagues, they ask me, hey, George, is this one of the 15 decisions you want to make that's going to define your career? Right.

Oh, that's a nice question.

Yeah, it's important. And that is obviously lower conviction than being a founder, right? Because maybe you get one or two or maybe three if you're lucky. But in the context of our business, that's pretty high conviction because there are lots of funds where you might make an investment a month or maybe an investment a quarter. So when someone asks you that question, you force yourself to focus on things that you think are truly exceptional and truly interesting in a way that, to be honest, is quite unnatural. There's not many other things in my life that are that important. And that's quite refreshing, actually, because it turns out we can invest in any sector, any geography, any stage. That's the problem statement. Find a business that will matter. So I think there's just something about that focus and that consistent focus on exactly that scale. Not one standard deviation, maybe two and a half, three standard deviations from the meaning. And I think that we hold each other accountable to exactly that quality standard.

Super. I think we have time for some questions. Who has questions? We have a microphone, by the way, the one here.

Okay.

I'll also say maybe a little bit differently for some other funds. So my email's on our website. It's just George at sequoiacap. So anyone we don't get to, you can just send me a message and I promise you I respond to everything

on that Let me ask you another one because students always bring this up. How should people actually approach you? So there is all this, I need a warm intro, I need this, I need that, what are the best ways?

So you know, warm Intros are great, etc. But if you can't do that, we get a lot of emails where it has a lot of text and it doesn't really say anything.

And again, here's a hundred years of experience in X. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, honestly. But the thing I would emphasize what I described earlier is like, you know, why us, right? Why us as a team? Why now? Why is this market interesting? How is it changing and what is our unique insight? And honestly, if you just map the contents of your email in very clearly laying that out, I mean there's two things. One, it makes it easier for us to process the information, but two is it kind of shows us that you get it, you understand that these things are important and ultimately are what are going to define your company. And when we get this big long text with all this stuff in it that doesn't really say anything. It's not just that we can't read it, it's actually that it doesn't indicate anything about the quality and the precision of your thought. So just be very precise and very direct.

We had a question here,

so I actually had two questions. The first one was in terms of the four dimensions that you mentioned, you mentioned about domain expertise and functional expertise. I was not fully sure of what the terminology is between those two. So it'll be great if you.

Yeah, yeah, so absolutely. So domain is like the market or you know, the environment in which you are going to build. And functional is like the skill sets that you have to be able to build in that market. And like to give you this extreme case, you might want to build a very technical, developer focused product that sells into software engineers. But you are not a technical founder and your skill set is not tightly correlated with the success of that business. So it helps us bridge the market opportunity and the. Why you, if you like. Yeah, absolutely. No. So domain expertise, functional expertise, grit. But really by grit I just mean tell us your story, like give us an insight into your own trajectory, your own path, where that agency comes from. And then the fourth, which we try and assess is more like the luck or the circumstance for the business. And really what I mean by that is it's like being in the right place at the right time. Right? And really like a lot of those unlocks might be about the technologies that are available today to enable that company or the why now?

Right.

It might be about regulatory changes that mean that this is something that's possible today. It might be about some consumer trend or some macro insight of something that's happening outside the building can be combined with those first three pieces.

And the, the second question is kind of linked to the first question. You mentioned something about the negative signal with the 50 50, 50% equity. I kind of disagree with that. I mean it kind of makes sense that it's a very hard conversation to have, but from a skill set perspective, yes, it might be the case that some individual has less experience in that particular industry, but the ability to learn might be much faster compared to the other person. So I wasn't really sure why it's perceived as a negative signal because.

So if we would see 50 50, we would always ask why. And if it's not 50 50, we infer that that conversation has taken place. And that's a very reasonable answer to that question, just to be clear. Right. It depends on the circumstance. What we want to see is people are not avoiding conflict, they're like appreciating the nuance because if that is true and that proves to be true over time, you will end up sharing responsibility and you maybe end up sharing responsibility. 50, 50. But I promise you of the times where we see 50, 50, 90% of the time it's because there's a massive imbalance in the team. But they didn't want to have a tough conversation. So there are absolutely scenarios where it makes sense. In most cases people have chosen not to have the conversation to avoid the conflict.

Thank you.

Yeah. Can we do that in front of you?

Yes. Thank you so much. I have two questions. So the first one is in regards to how you feel about solo founders and especially like even solo founders who then may be on board, like minority, like technical founders later along the line. And the second is in regards to the differences in traction points you see at precede stage in Europe versus the us because in my experience raising funds, what I feel is that kind of pre state is extinct. And the UK in especially, I mean in the European and UK market it's a lot about kind of like pre seed valuation but with seed traction points.

So on the surfina point, and it may be true that different funds have different attitudes to this, we, we don't have a problem with it, we just want it is easier to build a business with a co founder. Right. Because obviously it's a long journey, it can be lonely at times. It's important to have a sounding board around you in the team. That sounding board may come from another co founder, it may come from those founding employees. And by the way, sometimes we will see people, actually plenty of times we see people who are currently solo founders but they expect they will either hire the late co founder or they'll hire these co founding employees. So they set it up in the cap table. That's a very strong way to indicate that you like think about the world that way. And you want to really explain to your investors, these are the kind of people I want to bring on at this point in time. Because in some ways what you're just trying to show is that it's a conscious decision rather than I don't know who my co founder is, therefore I am a solo founder. That's different to saying I'm a solo founder and this is my plan to build a company. So that's point one and then point two just around yeah. So kind of traction points again, to be honest, I think this is probably a little bit firm specific because I think it's about risk appetite. And I would really emphasize if you are a pre seed company, you are a solo founder, you should be trying to speak only with funds that genuinely do precede. And I mentioned that as someone who was at Sequoia for multiple years before, I appreciated the difference between pre seed and seed in terms of expectations. I think doing pre seed is relatively rare. Doing seed is relatively common in Europe. So just calling that out, I think the thing I would really emphasize again one, what the plan with the team is to like at pre seed we don't expect any product, we definitely don't expect any revenue. We do expect you to have a pretty clear notion of how the market dynamics are playing out, how the structure is going to evolve, what some of the trends are, how the budget for your Customer, if it's B2B is increasing or decreasing, what are the catalysts for that? And that will inform your hypothesis of what you might want to build over the first 12 to 18 months. But in our mind that's all in square brackets. It's all subject to change once you start to speak to customers fully. But you want to indicate that you are de risking the positive market dynamics because people are very comfortable with a soft pivot of the product. They are less comfortable in most cases, particularly for first time founders with like a true hard pivot of hey, it turned out that we were just wrong about the market.

If I can just add a comment in regards to like I. I fully agree. Unfortunately for as someone who was speaking to most of the precede funds like out here, that's not the case. Like nowadays, if you want to raise Pre Seed in the UK or in Europe, you need a product and you probably need at least an unpaid pilot or a sort of form of partnership or some kind of like paying customers. So my advice to other founders who find themselves to deal with this is try to delay, like your fundraising as much as possible and just go and raise seed. You shouldn't take a lower valuation when you've done all the leg work, to be honest.

So, yeah, I think if you can get, you know, 250k or 500k from Angels to get the ball rolling, it helps. I think that's right.

Thanks so much.

So, firstly, I'm a member of Kickstart Global, so thanks so much for setting it up. And yeah, first of all, I fully agree with that. I was literally about to ask that question because I've officially told my team I've done a business for about a year already, made money, had a shit ton of users and I've officially said they are not investing at Pre seed. We need to have 100k coming in and then they'll give us 100k. So that's what I think at the minute. But my question is with Prop tech, so my business is replacing estate agencies across the uk. Investors do not like this industry, they absolutely hate it. But my question is, I still don't understand why they base their investments on the past when clearly everything is changing. There's a massive opportunity to replace certain things.

Yeah, I actually work with a company in Paris called Zephyr, which is we pivoted from like an iBuyer to selling AI workflow into brokers in France. And we have at times faced a similar issue. I think in proptech there's kind of like two in particular. I think there's two things you need to get right. One is it's always important to tell the acts of the business, but the reality is the acts of the business in Proptech generally start pretty operational and relatively low margin and then have some trajectory to that changing. So you need to show, firstly, that you understand that and you communicate that explicitly and secondly, that that path is something that is important. Three, though there's a bunch of narrative violations in proptech if you do the market work, there are a bunch of very high, multiple, very large companies who generate a ton of free cash FL but most investors have never heard of them because you can't Expect investors to have full context of every market, you know, globally. So you need to like showcase the best of your market in a way that you don't need to do if you're investing in consumer social or something like that, because people kind of get it. So I would just say point to that.

It's fun if I. There's an idea. I was just speaking with a guy called Simon Draper and if you know him, but basically I've decided now to maybe not even mention I'm proptech until I'm on a call and then actually just explain it to them. Because the moment I say proptech they literally.

I wouldn't use the word prop tech. I would say workflow automation software for both. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have a question regarding Sequoia Ark.

What exactly are you looking for in

terms of the companies that end up getting in? Yeah, I think so. They probably skew 50, 50 pre seed seed just to give you a sense of it. So it depends a little bit where you are in that, in that spectrum. But most of it, honestly like internally, most of it is the people. It's probably 70% of the people. So it's those dimensions I mentioned and we run pretty. And the way that the application is set up is there's a pretty big like the questions are all story based questions to be honest, about you and your co founders. So like lean heavily into that. And in some of it, if it's people that have applied multiple times, we're at a point where we've had people that got in that implied two or three times to arc. We want to see like velocity between the periods when they've applied because that's, you know, being able to draw that line is important.

Hello. What is deep tech supposed to do? Or people who want to develop hardware? Right. Because in the UK we don't have as much disposable income as the Americans do. We don't have garages to build cool things things. And when we apply for funding, even from universities, internal entrepreneurial funds, the feedback at least I've gotten is, oh, you need more validation, you need more traction. Cool. But I have no money for a prototype and that means the best traction I can get is, oh, that looks cool. Come back to us when you have a prototype. What, what am I meant to do?

So I'll make 2 comments I think one particularly for deep tech and for hardware, it is easier to raise from us investors I think in that scenario. So we are extremely, it's probably like for us about 15% of our investments are deep tech or hardware adjacent. So it's something that is like a pretty important piece of our business if you think about the full expanse of tech. So point one, I think it's important to be realistic and we do see plenty of case studies by the way of European founders going straight and raising from the US for their seed and then building the company from here. So we're not asking destroy your network, we're saying like you know, leverage the fact that there's a bit more depth of capital there. Point one. Point two is part of the reason for that is what you said of like there are these non linear de risking moments in your company when you're building in deep tech. You need to show again sort of virtue signal that you know that you understand what those milestones are. You have a sense of the risk attached to each of them, potentially the timeline attached to each of them and how that maps to some commercial viability of what it is you're going to sell. And everyone kind of gets that intuitively that's going to be important. But showing that you know it and it's there explicitly in your introduction for the business is critical.

Is there a specific way, I mean to illustrate that? So for example, from my master's university I went and did a course in the exact subject area of what I want to build. And their application process was literally a one pager and that was it. And I thought maybe the course might be good enough to demonstrate something. But is there any particular points to hit or ways to do it?

I think it's like, I almost think about it as like a time series, like a table with time series and then columns that show that you're. A row. Sorry, that show that you think about those dimensions. So like time is the first row I think. Second row, if you can show the stage relative to some commercially viable product and how far out it is and then obviously the funding gap that is required for each of those things and then the performance criteria at each stage relative to that commercially viable product. It just gives a sense of how the risk is distributed. And all the best pitch decks we see like that are exactly that way. So we as potentially non experts can now understand. Cool. We're six months out from something that is market leading or beat some benchmark or whatever the threshold is. Thank you. Last question.

Vanessa is behind you. Firstly, I'll just say thanks a lot for the talk today. Kiarkos and George, it was very good. Questions and answers a little bit more specific about building AI Especially in the financial services space. I know you gave your thoughts about, you know, wealth management, insurance being hard areas to penetrate and then investment banking being a slightly more ripe for AI renovation. What are your thoughts on what about building AI for the pe real estate, PE and family offices space?

Good question. So there are lots of. So there are lots of opportunities to apply automation software to end industries that make sense. Like on an atomic unit level, they make sense. It will make some process more efficient, it will save people time and money, it will drive their business. I often think about that cynically as like your PNL looks like something today. How will your P and L be structured differently tomorrow? Right. It's kind of like in case of P, it might be taking out cost or repurposing cost, but in some cases you can even think about it as you're a percentage EBITDA business today, how will your percentage EBITDA be different tomorrow? The problem is that's like an atomic unit of like an individual company. Right. You then need to scale that up to is this a venture sized opportunity? The thing I would really want to do the maths on there is, it seems very believable, having not thought about it for too long, that you can build a business that is tens of millions of error and if you crush it, maybe low hundreds of millions of error. And if you do that, you will be a company that could be pretty valuable. Right. You could be a 500-1-2 billion valuation business. Fantastic. The challenge is you will make money from that. Lots of investors will make money from that. If I'm one of you know, 10, 15 decisions that's going to define George's career. It's hard for me to propose that, if you see what I mean. Right. So that's the nuance where sometimes we will not be in business with companies that end up to being pretty successful purely on that basis of like is it a candidate to be on the wall in one of our conference rooms or is it going to be a nice company that we'd be very proud of and your parents will be delighted. And like that's the thing I would just get right is, is it the right scale of opportunity for you? And by the way, maybe you decide it isn't a business that can be worth 10 billion but you realize as a result the competition is way less and actually the risk reward is way greater. We see plenty of those opportunities that exist. I don't know where it is on that spectrum actually. There may be plenty, plenty of upside, but that's the thing I'd want to validate if I was you.

Yeah. Thanks a lot, Super George. Thank you so much.

You're awesome. Thank you, team. I would just reiterate my emails on my website. You can say hi if you have things you want to talk about.

Super.