 Hello, Slush, Luciana, Andrew, such a joy to do this, and a huge thank you for joining us here today. Thank you so much. We're so thrilled to be here and to be able to do this in person. It's such a treat. Agreed. It's great to have you. So, as you just heard, we're here to talk about the deeply important announcement that was the Sequoia Capital Fund very recently. But before you get going, I thought we'd set the scene and perhaps break the ice a little bit. So, Luciana and Andrew, you're both partners at Sequoia. But how did each of you actually first make your way into the world of venture? So, I joined Sequoia about eight years ago, and I'm based in our California office. And for me, the drive has always been a general curiosity about business writ large and trying to figure out this dynamic mosaic of the world's economy and this era of accelerating change, how different founders and companies fit into it. So, for me, that's led me into all sorts of different directions on the investing side. So, I work with software companies like Figma and Loom, Product Board, Vanta, Source Graph, Zapier, FinTech companies like Robinhood, global internet companies like Bolt and Robbie. And the fun thing about this job is there's always some new thing to explore tomorrow. Absolutely. My story is a bit different. So, I'm from a small town in Romania, and I did not grow surrounded by technology or venture capital. And I have a fun fact. I was talking to a friend yesterday. I realized my mom still does not have an email address. So, just to share some background, I thought I'd teach math. And honestly for me, it was luck and serendipity. I started in venture, so I started investing back in 2009 and I started with later stage investing at a firm called Summit. And I started in venture in earlier stage a decade ago. Back in 2011, I was with Excel for eight years and I joined Sequoia almost a year and a half ago now. And it's been a treat to see how the European ecosystem evolved over a decade. And I was very privileged to work with founders that, in my opinion, really helped shape the ecosystem like Willa de Verru and Daniela de Waipath and Andrea Nero and many others. So, it's been a fun journey and it's changed a lot. But I'm sure we'll talk more about that. Absolutely. So, if we here in Helsinki sometimes feel like we're coming out of a fringe ecosystem, your story beats that out of the pond. But let's dive into the announcement of the Sequoia Capital Fund. And just to contextualize this for the audience, I thought I'd just explain how a venture capital fund traditionally works because Sequoia Capital Fund is different. So, many of you will know that venture capital is a private equity offspring. Which was created back in the 60s and 70s. And so, most venture capital funds are 10-year funds and they're closed-end funds. And what that means is that limited partners, that's the people they invest into venture capital funds, put their money in and then they're basically stuck for the next 10 years. Like, as the fund exits portfolio companies, they will start paying that money back and then they'll try and do that paying back over a total period of 10 years. But now, the Sequoia Capital Fund, the big news is that you have chosen to do a thing or structure yourselves differently. So, tell me, how is Sequoia Capital Fund structured? Sure. Before diving into the details of what the Sequoia Capital Fund is and how it works, it's worth describing the why. Because Sequoia has been around for almost 50 years. It's been, I think, 49 years since Don Valentine made Sequoia's first investment, which was into Atari, the gaming company. And for us to contemplate a transformation of our business like this, there's obviously a compelling reason that we found to do so. And it starts with our mission. So our mission at Sequoia is to help the daring build legendary companies from idea to IPO and beyond. And the backbone of the Sequoia Capital Fund is the legendary companies. So I think our history has taught us that these amazing and enduring companies can surprise any of us to the upside and compound for decades. Companies like Google and Apple and Cisco and Oracle and those sorts of companies. And in the context of those businesses, ten years is truly an arbitrary number. It's a nice number to do math against, right? But it could be 12, it could be 15 in any event. It is an imposition of our fund structure that's untethered to the way companies scale and operate. And we thought about different models and the reality is what we landed on was just to upend the closed-in fund structure entirely. And Sequoia Capital Fund for a little bit of detail on how it works is an open-ended fund that holds a selection of public positions in our most enduring companies. And beneath that are a series of closed-in funds. It's seed investing fund, early stage investing, growth stage, expansion stage. And the reason for those funds is, you know, we're not interested in being in the money management business. You know, we want to help the daring build legendary companies from idea to IPO and beyond, which means making the best seed investments we possibly can with a focused seed effort. And the nice thing about this model is as those companies scale up, you know, partner with Stripe at the seed or Airbnb at the seed, as those companies get really big, they can mature out of the closed-in funds into the open-ended fund. And for subsequent closed-in funds, those are fed by the open-ended fund. So it's a novel structure and it's one that we believe creates the first genuine crossover fund in our industry, starting with seed all the way to Publix. And it should be great for our founders, so we can be their longest-term investors, and also great for our LPs. Well, I think this is so important and fitting on the slosh stage. It's obviously the third tenet of our theme, entrepreneurial renaissance, is called Innovation Reborn, which is all about building incredibly, like taking huge technological risk, and often huge technological risk, what you might call deep-tech, you know, doesn't materialize within ten years. But Luciana, so like what does this announcement mean for founders? What changes for founders? From our perspective, we've always invested in the same thesis that we want to find founders who want to build iconic companies, want to build generational companies. So we look at the same type of companies, we try to invest early and try to invest with a fund, to work with our founders for the long run. The difference is exactly what Andrew said earlier. There is no deadline. We can start partnering with founders and think about a really long-term relationship. Again, especially when we invest at seed, building a generational company takes decades. So now we're able to be part of the journey for decades. Okay, very good. And then I want to put the question to you. Like, why has it taken 50 years for us to get here? Because as you mentioned, you know, Sequoia was founded in 1972. That's around the time when venture capital came to be. So, like, why was this the right moment for you to do this? I guess it's my question. I'm happy to answer this because I actually, since I joined Sequoia a bit over a year ago, it was, you know, a period of discovery and getting to know our culture. And one of the things that I find really impressive and really fascinating is a constant desire to reinvent itself. I think it's normal human psychology that when things are going well, you try to do more of the same. But the culture at Sequoia is not that. The culture is how do we break it down and then build it up again better? How do we change? How do we reinvent ourselves? And it's really interesting because it's actually something I look for in founders. It's a trade I look for in founders. So it's really nice to be part of a culture that thinks about the world this way. What I will say in terms of timing, we've always thought really long-term. Now, we actually change the structure to reflect that. But that was always our philosophy. And what I would add on that is, you know, this isn't the first time that Sequoia has done something novel or innovative or that people have called wacky. And, you know, you think back to things like spinning internationally, things like going from a seed-investing business to a growth-investing business to having a public-equities business, to having a scout fund. You know, these are things that Sequoia was, you know, the first scout fund was the Sequoia Scout Fund. And there's a question that Patrick Halston from Stripe actually posed at an offset we had recently, which is, what would Sequoia say if Sequoia were on Sequoia's board? Because with the companies we work with, we do try to push them to think bigger, be creative, be different. And we take that same approach to running Sequoia. Like, we are entrepreneurs at heart and want to take risks with everything we have. And I have to say, I think this really resonates with the founders that we work with and the founders that we want to work with, because after this announcement, I got so many calls and so many messages saying exactly this. Firstly, delighted to be able to work with Sequoia for the long term, but secondly, so nice to see that there is the same entrepreneurial mentality on the venture side to echo what Andrew was talking about. Absolutely. All right, so then I wanted to put a quote forth from Doug Leone, who manages Sequoia Capital. Doug has said, Sequoia is a team, not a family. So my question is like, how does the team at Sequoia make decisions together? What is your decision making process? And specifically, how does that change depending on the size of check or the sort of stage of investment that you are making? Yeah, so Doug, we have 10 tenants at Sequoia that define our culture. And Doug has mentioned this a few times. There are two that we talk about all the time. Number one is performance. And Doug likes to say, if you don't have number one, the other nine don't matter. Need to be a great investor, deliver great returns to our LPs and be a great partner to founders. And number two is teamwork. It's different than the way many venture funds think about teamwork. And to use some tired sports analogies, I think there is one version of teamwork which is like a golf team where you have a bunch of people who play their ball and at the end of the day you add up the scores and that's the score of the team. That's not how we think about teamwork. We think about it more like soccer or rugby or basketball where for any given opportunity we all try to work together to get the best possible results. So for a tangible example recently we invested in Bolt here in Estonia and that was an investment that was first nudged to us by Mike Moritz and it was Luciana who had the relationship and she and I worked together with a partner in us and I led the investment for Sequoia and that's kind of the way we do things. And yes, I'm in California and they're in Europe but we are one team and for us the teamwork a lot of it is in that decision making to figure out which investments to make but if you think about it over the last couple of years that decision making process has gone from weeks to days and with the Sequoia Capital Fund our tenure of working with companies has gone from years to decades. So the vast majority of teamwork happens actually after the investment and when companies go public we tend to sit around an internal email just say who's done what for the company let's make sure that we give proper credit and for a lot of these companies it's not uncommon for 20 or 30 people from Sequoia to have worked on the company between the moment we first invested at a very early stage all the way up through the point of the IPO and with the Sequoia Capital Fund the point of the IPO really is just a milestone and you can presume the same thing is going to happen many years into the future. So building on that let's perhaps switch gears a little bit here and let's talk about some of the sort of tectonic shifts molding venture capital at the moment and I think the most striking is just the hugely increased availability of capital so I think Europe is on track to specifically we're on track to 100 billion invested this year compared to 40 billion last year so that's two and a half times growth in just one year which is an exceptional pace. So there's more capital available than ever how should founders think about the fundraising market and capital in this new environment. I have to say having been in venture for a decade in Europe it's just absolutely wild how much has changed from many perspectives and yes absolutely availability of capital is one of them. I think it's two sides to the same coin on the one hand I think it's really positive for the ecosystem or for the many European ecosystems because it's not just one here I think it's great because founders that might not have had an opportunity before now do they have access to capital to give it a real shot and to build their companies so I think that part is great. I think on the other side of the coin is just being thoughtful about when to fundraise and who to fundraise with and trying to keep some discipline I really believe strongly that having some constraint when it comes to capital and in general keeps the mind really clear and really focused on prioritizing and what really matters and investing your time and your money in what really matters so our advice to our founders is always okay do you need the capital is the first question and let's have that conversation and the second question is is this a really value add new investor is this going to change your destiny or maybe that's too much to say but is it going to shortcut your way to success so those are the types of conversations that we have with our founders and I think that's staying sober for us investors, for founders in an environment that just moves so fast is really really important so I would say it's mostly good for the ecosystem but it's also important to keep the mind clear and keep some discipline I'm sorry if it's a boring answer but it's a genuine answer from the heart as opposed to go raise two billion dollars Let me continue on that actually and let me ask the same question from a capitalist perspective so your perspective so let's think about it in one year we're going to see two and a half times more funding in Europe it's probably or it's intuitively probably true that there's not two and a half times more good equity to go around and the end result of that is venture capital probably is becoming more competitive and you can take issue with the framing but how does that affect your work just the fact that there is so I'll give you European view and maybe you can share a bit from the US how about that I would say that actually there are a lot more wonderful founding teams today than ever before I think it's just a cultural shift Europe always had really strong education really strong technical talent but now people are willing to take the risk they're not going into corporates or into consulting or banking any longer they work for a startup they get some experience and then they're willing to take the risk and build their own company so I don't know if the number is two and a half times proportionate to the amount of capital increase but I will say on a daily basis I just get so many introductions really really strong founding teams much more so than five years ago in the European ecosystem so I would say that there is a balance between the number of great founding teams and the amount of capital available now on the other hand we try to just think about what happens within the building and we just try to what I said on discipline we apply that to ourselves as well we just want to find wonderful founders at seed and be really good company builders we think of ourselves as company builders not only investors and work with these founders for the long run and we just try to keep a clear mind every time we wake up every single morning and focus on this and we are not supposed to focusing too much on what is happening in the world around us I will say we each make two to three investments a year probably we don't each make we don't issue a term sheet a day I'll say that so I think that we pick and choose very selectively the companies where we really spend time and the companies where we invest and when we do we put the entire weight of Sequoia behind those founders I would just add when I started Sequoia eight years ago it was fairly common to see a new investment opportunity and have a week to do some market diligence do a few meetings talk to customers get a data room wave through that figure out what you think and the reality is is that timelines have just gotten compressed and you know founders often think of us as just the investor side of the table we work with each of us probably a dozen companies that are also raising money so we know how painful fundraising can be from the founder perspective and with the compressed timeline and greater competition that's really a wonderful thing and the era of being able to sit back and take your time to understand things that's gone you have to be prepared you have to move very quickly with a lot of conviction when you meet some of these companies and that's how we love to do business like we we are I think the founders we work with we tend to be very fast on email we tend to be willing to get on planes we tend to be very direct and straightforward when we're making new investments and I think in this new era it really suits the way we like to do business so I think from the US perspective yes it's more competitive but I think at the very least it's good for founders and I think it makes our job pretty fun too and what I will say is I say this to the founders that I work with I want to listen you are making a big decision as a founder you are choosing a partner for the following 5, 10, 15 years making the decision within 2 to 3 days might not be always a great idea of course if you build a relationship over time and you get to know the investors over time and then the actual fundraise happens in a short period of time that's a very different scenario but I also always try to have an honest conversation with founders and tell them by partnering we're not just giving you capital we're committing to you and to your journey and to be behind you for a very long time so let's take more than 2 to 3 days to get to know each other and to see that we think about the world in a similar way I think that's really important speaking about sort of compressed fundraise timelines which obviously for you imply you know compressed decision making timelines like with that being said I'm sure there are situations in which you do need to act fast because there are competitors who would and they'll take the deal if you don't so how do you as a fund ensure that you approach each investment with that same level of like rigor and analysis when you have to act faster than ever before I think it's not about learning about a company and making a decision 24 hours later like that is just not a great way to make excellent investments I think it's about having a prepared mind and being willing to do work whether it's building connection with a founder or understanding a market and a landscape before there's any sort of a fundraise so when there is the chance you can jump on it so I think that is probably the difference and in terms of how it affects our business like yes there are more rounds being done and more dollars being invested but as Luciana said each of us make 2 or 3 new investments a year it really is not a market thing as a company by company thing and we take performance incredibly seriously like it is our number one tenant and it's something that we look at and the reason for that is our limited partners are the vast majority are nonprofits and schools and we really take pride in delivering excellent performance for them because they're great causes and our performance really matters to them and I think some of this data is public which is quite a capital fund news one of the reasons we're able to do that is currently in our private funds we have $45 billion of public positions of which $43 billion are gains so on $2 billion to cost basis we have $45 billion of publics and that's not counting the private positions they're still in the funds and on top of that for the last 15 years we've been a net source of liquidity so we've distributed to them more than twice what we've invested and I think that general philosophy of just being extremely performance focused is I think the core of what Sequoia is and when it comes to things like making decisions on companies we don't view it as oh just another investment just in our company we view it as on an individual level one of the two or three new things we're going to do in any given year and on an aggregate level the only thing that matters is if I'm on the website if I'm a founder and I reach out to an investor and I say hey you have to decide within two to three days that's also for the investor I think it's a good test to see the reaction because if an investor thinks about this as hey I'm going to partner with you for the next 10 years if that's the mindset and I'm actually really going to work with you and I'll roll up my sleeves and I'll ask you if you're a founder if you're a founder if you're a founder if you're a founder see how investors react when you approach them with those types of timelines so one of the follow on effects of the general increase in speed in the ecosystem and the fundraising process is that funds venture capital funds are also being deployed faster so one of the questions I want to ask you is in this environment how do you think about your own kind of pacing and speed of how you deploy your funds so I don't think that those two things are equal meaning an increased pace in the fundraising environment does not necessitate an increased pace in our funds and I think I would echo back the comments I just made which is we are extremely focused on delivering exceptional multiple of money returns to our LPs and being great partners to founders that I think pace tends to take care of itself all right that's loud and clear we ask some discipline of our founders so we have to show some discipline on our side as well right absolutely switching gears once more it's quite interesting to or I think it's interesting to ask a question from you about the biggest failures the biggest misses as venture capitalists what was your big miss and how did that change or like mine set an approach as venture capitalists after that mine is a very my mind goes directly to one situation so this was back in 2014 and JustEat had gone public not long before and I believe it was about 3 billion dollars in market cap and at the time I mean 3 billion dollars is a wonderful outcome for any company and at the time it was really one of the few larger outcomes in Europe so it was really a big deal and one of my friends called and said hey I have this business school friend coming back to London he wants to start a food delivery company it was Will Shua Deliveroo and I didn't know how to get off the phone faster it was like another food delivery company I'm not gonna meet him anyway so I didn't actually meet him then and then I met him a bit later and still did not dream enough at the series A and you know you're gonna laugh but the question at the time was market size because Deliveroo was active in a couple of neighborhoods in London and I thought to myself you know affluent neighborhoods people who work a lot but have cash is this really going to become a mass market proposition is everyone going to want to pay the 2-3 pounds delivery fee and you know it turns out that convenience it really is a mass market proposition people appreciate the extra 20 minutes to spend with their family or to do work or to watch Netflix or whatever it might be people really appreciate that extra time and it turns out they are willing to pay that delivery fee across the world not just in London and I did fix my mistake at the following round and I worked with Will for several years and that was great but I think ability to dream around what a market might become is my learning from that we like to invest at seed we invest really early often times those markets don't even exist so being able to dream that a category might actually become something large I think that's really important for an early stage investor and you know it's something I learned over the years what was yours I'm curious I think for any anybody who takes this job seriously that question just brings up a huge list trying to sort it by market cap mist or aggregate gain mist or most painful mist what's the ranking mechanism you said your worst mist so the one that sticks out to me we came very close to leading the series to be a Peloton and it was personal for me because I was one of Peloton's first users I loved the product then I really believed in its future the exercise equipment market was littered with carcasses of extremely mediocre companies and Peloton was just this unique thing that did live classes and streaming video and hardware delivered to the home and it was really hard to figure out you know what might this business look like and you know you fast forward there aren't 10 Peloton ask companies in the public markets there's just Peloton and it's because it's a really special business and they thought about things from first principles and they're willing to be different and the sad thing now is I still ride my Peloton bike every day as a reminder of like hey but I think the last thing it's quite similar one of one companies exist and when you find something that's just a little bit different you take it more seriously not less and number two is as a consumer trust your gut like if you really think a product is special even if it is an exercise bike that was delivered to your house with streaming video from a New York City studio and what is that you know that is you know worth viewing as a real part of the mosaic I just want to say it makes a lot of sense that for Andrew is a fitness company and for me it's a food delivery company we'll leave it at that very good so we have a couple of minutes left and to wrap things up you may know that Harry Stebbings was originally supposed to moderate this session the host of the 20 minute VC podcast and recently founder of the 20 VC funds I think it is at this point so as an homage to Harry I thought we'd do a quick fire round which he likes to end his podcast episodes with so I'm going to say a short statement addressed to one of you and give me our immediate sort of snap thought so Andrew favorite book and why answer that we do have a little bit of time left I think on the topics of the Sequoia Capital Fund it was an immense effort and is an immense effort from a lot of people at Sequoia who just typically go unnoticed you know we have a small partnership of investors we have many more people whose fingerprints are all over that obviously the investment team and Rilof, Doug, Mike, Jim who are the inspiration for a lot of this but it's our operations team or finance team or compliance team or legal team or tax team or communications team it's a lot of people who typically don't get shout outs on stages like this so while we have a little bit extra time I just wanted to say thank you to those folks it's a lot of work still ongoing and I couldn't be prouder to work with them on the question of favorite book and why favorite book is Dune it was a book I read when I was much younger and fell in love with it and if you haven't seen the movie yet it's the first movie I've seen that does so it's a you know, it's a good book Super, let's be super rapid Luciana, what moderate quote do you repeat the most often? Okay so this is going to sound negative but actually it has a positive twist at some point very early on in my career I heard someone say that companies die by suicide and not by homicide and it sounds dramatic but I actually think it's a very positive message which is focus on what you control because actually as a founder and as a team you control your own destiny you know what matters is your speed of execution your product, how you hire how fast you move, how ambitious you are not what people around you are doing and of course your market needs to inform some of your decisions but really a lot of it is actually under your own in your own control so focus on that so I actually think it's a positive twist but it really stuck with me and I share it with my founders often keep going Andrew, what three traits would you want your children to adopt? so I became a father five months ago so this is congratulations kindness optimism and courage do you want to add one Luciana and let's end there I think being grateful it's something my mom always used to tell me whenever I got up in the morning she used to wake me up as a kid and she always said be grateful for every single day you have and I just think being grateful is really important I think it helps you go through life with a different lens with optimism I guess it goes hand in hand with that awesome well Luciana and Andrew it's been our exceptional pleasure to host you here thank you so much for your time thank you everyone in the audience for listening thank you so much for having us we're happy to be here