Introducing "Crucible Moments"

When you are our size and you.

Lose tens of billions of dollars in eight weeks, it's like you're an 18-wheeler and you slam in the brakes. Nothing good happens. I felt like I was the captain of a ship and it was just torpedoed.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have asked for the worst scenario.

We sort of went from this is a problem, let's address it, to this is a survival moment. And if we don't figure out how to destroy what fraud is doing to.

Us, it will destroy us instead. Welcome to Crucible Moments. I'm your host, Rolf Pottas. Succeed or fail, every startup faces critical tests that define their journey. Jack Dorsey, Brian Chesky, Julia Hartz, Max Levchin. Their names are synonymous with some of the most significant companies of our time. But Block, Airbnb, Eventbrite and PayPal only matter today because of how they navigated key inflection points that had an outsized bearing on their success. We call these crucible moments. Crucible moments clarify who we are, what we value, which path forward we'll take, and just as importantly, which we won't.

The classic advice was like, don't accept responsibility, don't apologize, you open yourself up to liability. And I said, screw that.

Everyone's reaction to SMB was consistent. Don't do it.

You had these two teams locked in this competition, and now they suddenly have to become friends.

There was an inflection point in that moment where on one path we could have built hardware and software, or we could expand the problem set and say it's about making the sale. It was super scary.

In this show, founders will take you inside the crucible moments that shaped their companies, from seemingly impossible security breaches and backstabbing clones, to the triumph of building a beloved product against all conventional wisdom, and of course, a pandemic that shut down the globe.

We honestly didn't know if the company would survive this. Those moments come with a lot of pain, a lot of conversation, a lot of tears, Stubbornness.

Lean in, get bruised but not killed by adversity, figure out how to get out of it, do it again, is a pretty good formula.

Disharmony leads to discovery. It is actually the case that crucible moments don't just test people's character in some abstract way, they can actually be the moment when a company comes up with a breakthrough.

Our lead director today said to me, you ready to be a wartime leader? You'll hear from founders like Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe, Hossein Rahman of Jawbone, and Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot, as well as those who work shoulder to shoulder with them: CTOs, designers, board members, and department heads, as they pull back the curtain on their decision-making. You'll learn how they strategized and weathered storms, where they got it right, and where they got it wrong. You'll hear what it's actually like to build a generational company from the ground up.

This will likely be one of the hardest decisions you make. And the fact that it feels difficult, it's because it's difficult because it is so impactful.

I said we will be defined by this crisis because we're going to become a great company. This is a crisis that we will not waste.

Listen to Crucible Moments hosted by me, Rolfe Buitelaar, a podcast from Sequoia Capital.