Sequoia’s Doug Leone explains what he looks for in a startup founder

So I think entrepreneurs, like investors, come in different flavors. And I will tell you, and as I told my kids that if you're desperate, it's a great asset. If you have too many choices in life, it clouds your thinking. When you only have one way to go and that's forward, it's very easy. You just go, go, go. Failure truly is not an option. Now what we look for in entrepreneurs is people that have not followed the same people that have done quirky things, that have taken risks. We look for that. We look for people that have knowledge in the domain, not so much the best minded of business because they want to make some money. We actually look for people that are very interested in their product or service being used by the next 10, 20 million people. And we also look for people, a little secret, that solve a problem that they have. They don't know it, we don't know it, but they're the proxy for the next 20 million users. So Yan a WhatsApp understood privacy and low cost messaging. He had that need. He started WhatsApp. Well, the founders of Yahoo from Stanford couldn't find anything on the Internet, so they built a search engine, they built the yellow pages or something as simple as Zappos. The founder of Zappos couldn't find a pair of shoes. And so we look for people that are trying to solve problems that they themselves have and hopefully a new problem. And if we see that that's a little tell for us that we may be onto something because we may find our first beta site. The founder for the next generation.