Interview with Roelof Botha, Managing Partner and Steward of Sequoia Capital

Roelof Botha has spent over 20 years building companies in Silicon Valley. He began within the walls of nascent PayPal, where he joined in March 2000 while completing his MBA at Stanford. He became CFO in 2001 and led the company through both its IPO in early 2002 and the subsequent acquisition by eBay. Roelof joined Sequoia in 2003 to help founders build enduring businesses. In 2017, he assumed leadership of Sequoia Capital's US/Europe business and became a Steward of the Sequoia Partnership. Roelof serves on the boards of several companies, including Block, Ethos, MongoDB, Natera, Pendulum Therapeutics, and Unity Technologies. Previously, he was a Director of companies that include YouTube, Tumblr, Xoom, Eventbrite, and Evernote. He also led Sequoia's investment in Instagram.

LDV Capital’s Evan Nisselson discussed with Roelof trends and early-stage investment opportunities in businesses leveraging visual technologies and AI. Here’s what Roelof said about our 10th Annual LDV Vision Summit: "It was fun to speak at the LDV Vision Summit and to dream about the future with Evan. I am always inspired by founders harnessing AI to create the next breakthrough in visual technologies." 

If you missed our 10th Annual LDV Vision Summit, this is your chance to watch the video or read our lightly edited transcript.

Evan: It's been a little while! You've got a different background! What's the rock behind you?

Roelof: This is a picture of the Sequoia’s entrance here in Menlo Park, and you correctly identified the rock. It's a cross-section of a fossilized Sequoia tree. It's a bit of a spoiler alert for those who haven't visited, but I normally ask people to guess how old this particular cross-section is, and it's not the age of the tree at death. You can count the rings, this tree was about 900 years old when it died. If you walk around the back, you'll see a little placard, and this tree was alive 38 million years ago. 

When this tree was alive, the Himalayas didn't exist because India had not yet collided with Asia. The Alps didn't exist. Antarctica and Australia were a single continent. And for me, it's a very powerful symbol of trying to build companies that last, companies that endure.

Evan: I would never have guessed that number of years, but it is a great context. Let's start. We'll cover a little bit of the past, present, and future. When you were at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, there must have been tons of startups that you could have joined. Why and how did you join PayPal in 2000 as head of Corporate Development and then later as CFO? How did you choose them?

Roelof: I didn't have many other choices. I'd come to America, the first time I'd set foot was when I came to Stanford, and I had a background of studying as an actuary, so I did a lot of mathematical finance, statistics and economics in my background. I did CS1, but I wasn't a programmer. I wasn't a software developer, but I was really intrigued by the idea of what technology in Silicon Valley could do to transform the world. I loved financial services, and so PayPal was one of these companies that was a combination of financial services and technology, so that was appealing to me.

I only had two other job offers. One was to return to the consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, where I'd worked before, and another was to work at Goldman Sachs in New York or in London doing banking. Every other place I interviewed turned me down. So it was a bit of a necessity. The other dimension was that I'd run out of money in my second year of business school, and I needed to make an income. Elon Musk had made me three different job offers, and the third one he gave me, I accepted, and I worked part-time for three months while I finished my degree so that I could have enough money to pay rent.

Evan: When you were at PayPal, what do you think is the biggest thing you learned then that still resonates with you today, that still kind of impacts your actions and your approach to working with entrepreneurs?

Roelof: There are so many things to learn from the PayPal experience. But to give you a sense, when I joined in March of 2000, we had, I don't know, 30-40 people. We had no revenue. We were burning 8 to $10 million a month. We'd just raised $100 million in financing at a $500 million valuation. This was a sign of the peak of the times. The NASDAQ crashed about two weeks after I signed my offer letter, which was terrible timing. We had to figure out how to build a business model very quickly. So by June of 2000, we started to charge transaction fees. The burn rate had grown to over $10 million a month. We had seven months of runway left. I remember Mike Moritz, who was on our board, drumming into our heads as a management team that we needed to focus on our runway so we could extend it.

We went from having no revenue to the teens that year to 100 million the next year to 240 million the year thereafter. When you think about that revenue growth rate, it was remarkable. But we had to get religion on cost reduction and figuring out a business model very, very quickly. In the meantime, we had to tackle the fraud challenges, the competitive challenge of eBay who had a competing payment service and was trying their best to kill us, the regulators who kept on trying to shut us down because we were sort of at the boundary of what was considered acceptable or standard practice. There were so many things to figure out along the way.

The thing that resonates most, to answer your question though, is team and culture. We had this team of pretty young people generally who didn't have a tremendous amount of experience. By the time we went public, I was 28. Max Levchin, who is the co-founder and CTO was also in his 20s. Peter Thiel, David Sacks and Reid Hoffman, and the rest of the management team, were maybe in their early 30s. We were a young team at the time, but we bound together and we were in it together. That was a very important part.

And then a related concept that I've used is favor slope over intercept. So imagine just visually intercept is sort of a reflection of your accumulated experience, but what's your slope? What's the rate at which you're continuing to grow? Ideally, you have both, but if I had to trade them off, I'd rather trade slope for intercept.

Evan: Tell us why.

Roelof: It's the rate of growth. It's your willingness to absorb new information and to keep getting better as opposed to saying, "Well, this is what I know and I'm not getting any better at it." And in many of our startup companies, there is no template. There is no, people have done it five times before and you can just leverage the experience. You're sort of figuring out new frontiers. 

Part of what I find exciting is investing in businesses for which there is no blueprint. You have to make it up as you go. And to do that, you need ingenuity and a willingness to learn.

Evan: I agree! Obviously, you mentioned several challenging ups and downs during the PayPal days, and similar to many startups that you invest in and partner with these days, but I guess in the late 20s, to you, what was the most challenging puzzle or situation that still gives you flashbacks during those days?

Roelof: About the PayPal experience? I'd say the thing that I reflect on is how we underestimated the company's long-term potential.

We faced a serious challenge because about 2/3 of the payment volume of PayPal in 2002 when we agreed to the acquisition was on eBay. The fact that the post-merger integration worked so effectively at accelerating both eBay and PayPal's payment volume showed how important integration would be. eBay had its own payment service, and they kept on not executing. 

Peter Thiel had this fabulous quote that I always remember, which is when somebody's shooting at you and they don't hit, you might conclude that you're bulletproof, but it may just be that they're a bad shot, and eventually, even a stray bullet could kill you.

If eBay had figured out how to compete with us, I do think it could have been very dangerous. I do think it was logical for us to have accepted the acquisition offer at the time. Maybe we could have figured out a long-term business deal. But what I underappreciated was the compounding potential of PayPal in the long term. I mean, PayPal today, I haven't checked today what their market cap is, but it's probably in the $60-70 billion range. It had touched over 100 billion at some point. PayPal has compounded its revenue by about 20% a year for 20 years after it was acquired. 

Evan: It's amazing! And obviously, the growth from the internet and the people online and everybody transacting with payments digitally continues to grow. So now it makes sense. But back then, I agree, I wouldn't have imagined it would've compounded that much.

Roelof: At Sequoia, one of the things I try to instill in our team and I try to be disciplined about is how do you think about that long-term? Because we all struggle with that imagination. My worst mistake as an investor is the failure of imagination. I try to remind people that I realize we're thinking a quarter ahead, a year ahead, maybe two years ahead, but imagine in 10 years, what might this look like?

Evan: I'm going to add those exact words to my future emails, Roelof, when we try to look for our next co-investments. But right then, when you were at eBay after the acquisition and they offered a chance to stay on as a CFO post-acquisition, you chose Sequoia. What was that? Both are exciting and different. Do you reflect upon that decision and what led to it specifically aside from Mike Moritz probably hounding you?

Roelof: I certainly don't think about it much these days.

Evan: No, of course not, but back then.

Roelof: Back then, I thought about it because of the opportunity to work at Sequoia... So Meg Whitman had offered me a position at PayPal with a certain salary and a set of options that would've transformed my life, way more money than I thought I'd ever have. When I joined Sequoia, they offered to match my salary and that was it. I was leaving an enormous amount of potential money on the table for this opportunity to work at Sequoia and to learn. That was a difficult decision, it's a trade-off decision you have to make. I think about the marshmallow experiments.

Can you trade off the potential for something much more valuable in the long term if you're just disciplined? That was a marshmallow test for me.

Part of what attracted me was the culture at Sequoia. Even though Sequoia had been so successful, it was clear to me that the partners here weren't resting on their laurels. The phrase that I kept on hearing through my interviews was, we're only as good as our next investment. That said a lot about the culture of the firm. I didn't interview at any other venture firm. I didn't contemplate going anywhere else. It was only here. I'd seen what Sequoia had done for us at PayPal as a board member and as an advisor. My choice was simple. It was only this one.

In venture capital, you get to learn about so many different businesses. Now, it's also humbling. You go from knowing a lot about your domain. I'm an expert in payments and I'm a CFO of a public company, and here I am, the person who knows the least about every new company that walks in. I don't know anything about these new categories. And man, that's daunting and intimidating, but it's also fun and challenging!

Evan: I remember back when I was an entrepreneur and I was fundraising for a startup that I had founded, and talking to everybody in Silicon Valley.

Roelof: Digital Railroad.

Evan: You remember it! I'm already getting flashbacks. We were talking to everybody and couldn't get a meeting at Sequoia. Finally, I got a cold call from Mike Moritz at 10:30 pm after I already had a whiskey, and he was hammering me with questions, and he said, "Okay, fine. Can you meet me tomorrow morning at 7:30 AM?" And that's when you and I met. Thinking back then when I was talking about photography and creative community, et cetera, creative content, creativity, and visual tech, from then to now, what aspects do you remember from that conversation? And as you've watched us evolve with LDV, what resonates the most in your mind?

Roelof: Well, there are two funny pieces, which aren't the most important business ones, first is you and I figured out that we both like Tom Waits’ music, which is fascinating. And then I think I tried to lecture you on your diet and try to encourage you to eat healthier in the morning.

Evan: As a friend, I appreciate that. I just transitioned from a coffee and banana to coffee and yogurt and nuts. I don't think about you every morning. I can't blow your head up like that! But it had a positive impact among other things in business.

Roelof: Although my daughter now tells me, "When you give people unsolicited advice like that, it's not a way to make people happy." I'm trying to do less of it.

Evan: I'm a glutton for punishment, so I keep on coming back for more.

Roelof: No, but more seriously, what I remember is you had this inkling about building a marketplace for photography, and what you had developed was sort of this marketplace for professional photographers to connect with those who'd want to consume those images on their websites. Back to the earlier comment about what PayPal became, I don't think we fully appreciated at the time how important those insights were, how important visual imagery would be, how big the internet would be, how much people would consume this, how important that was as a companion to the experience.

When I think about the investments we made subsequently, I know we'll talk about some of these later, but whether it's moving images or still images, the impact that that's had on so many of the investments we've made.

I think back to that meeting we had, and you had a vision for the future and the impact of visual, just imagery on consumer experiences was completely spot on.

Evan: It's always the timing and, as you said, people on a team and many other variables that go into building a business, but no regrets. Let's transition to the next topic! We were co-investors in Mapillary. We were on the board together, and I was always impressed with how succinct and valuable your input was, but how do you decide in these meetings when to share your thoughts and when to not? How do you measure and decide when to share input versus not?

Roelof: There is probably an internal monitor of what is my share of voice in a particular meeting, and if I feel like I'm speaking too much, I want to dial back to make sure that other voices are heard, so just in terms of an absolute level of how much am I contributing. And then, am I speaking because I want to say something or do I really want to further the conversation and help the entrepreneur think about something? There's also the temptation to show off, or to like the sound of your own voice or to sound smart. That doesn't help. 

Are you asking a question that helps the founder iterate on their idea or challenge them in the way that maybe gives them conviction that the path they've chosen is the right one, but they now have a stronger conviction because you've illustrated a different avenue, they've considered it and they've shut it down? Are you moving the conversation forward? I often think about whether I can get an entrepreneur – even in a pitch meeting but also in a board meeting – to open up a notebook and write something down based on what I say. Does it make them think? Does it make them reassess? And if I can't achieve that, then I'm not helping the conversation.

Evan: I agree. This is a topic that I think about a lot because from being an entrepreneur for 18 years and now an investor for 12, it's easy to talk, but it's hard to provide valuable insights and support to entrepreneurs to help them succeed at the right time. I try to be silent more often than not, but it's always challenging at the early stages. 

Roelof: One of the really important things is to ask questions and not to be prescriptive. I know this because I've been on the other side of the table where if you're inside a company, there's so much that happens on a daily basis. At PayPal it was crazy, we were working 100-hour weeks. We had management meetings on Saturday mornings because the week was too busy. Most people were there on Sunday afternoons. It was such a cauldron. A lot of changes happened between board meetings or even between conversations with board members. That can be an important insight that no investor will ever have the nuanced understanding and the full texture of what it's like inside a building of a company every single day. 

Be very careful about making statements. It’s far better to ask questions. Be Socratic in the way that you approach things.

Evan: We can dive deeper into the types of questions to ask later, especially as we discuss the personalities of investors and entrepreneurs. For now, let’s focus on the investment opportunities we’re both excited about, particularly those leveraging visual tech. In our pre-summit interview, you mentioned the healthcare industry—could you share more about what excites you in healthcare?

Roelof: So there's a company that I listened to recently being spun out of Stanford with the idea of augmenting the clinical decisions of a physician by leveraging the knowledge base that exists and doing so through a multimodal approach. It's not just by looking at the health records that have text information, but also looking at the images. Can you look at the history of previous MRIs and the associated diagnostic reports that were produced and combine those to be able to make much better clinical decisions at the point of care? That kind of an opportunity to me feels absolutely fascinating.

A lot of the MRI technology, for example, when people go for scans is relatively crude that you have this 3-D volumetric series of images of the scan, and yet you only look at it one slice at a time in 2D. When you look at how cancer changes, for example, there's this very rudimentary way in which they measure it. Why don't you use algorithms to do a full 3-D volumetric analysis of how tumors change and augment that with the risk of the clinical assessment? These sort of examples to me feel incredibly promising.

Evan: One of our investments is in Ezra, which you and I have discussed in the past, along with others. I believe the ability to augment doctors—and, more broadly, to augment humans across every industry with visual data and multimodal models—will be extremely valuable. The exciting part, as you mentioned earlier, is about the team and finding the right people at the right time. When you receive numerous pitches, what personality traits excite you more, and which ones make you less enthusiastic?

Roelof: I may have told you this one before, when I joined Sequoia, Don Valentine was still alive, and he pulled me aside one day in the first couple of months after I joined and he said, "Roelof, we invest in a two by two matrix of people, exceptional, not exceptional, easy to get along with, not always easy to get along with. We mostly make money in one of those four quadrants. Your job is to figure out which one it is." It sat with me for a while. The insight obviously is that founders are exceptional people, but they don't take the world as it is. They feel so frustrated by an opportunity they see or a problem that they face, that they feel inspired to go build a company with all the challenges that come along with company building, to go and change the world. They want to shape the world in the way that they see it, not just accepting it for what it is.

That, by definition, is somebody who doesn't take “no” easily. That comes in many different shapes and sizes in terms of what does “difficult” mean. Obviously, “difficult” isn't just being bombastic or rude to people, these are people who are smart, they think from first principles, and you need to embrace that and work with that. If you're an investor and you don't check your ego at the door, you're going to struggle.

Evan: I agree. We talked about healthcare. What are a couple other verticals that are exciting, aside from obviously finding the right people at the right time that are exceptional in the right way? What other verticals excite you?

Roelof: All of the above.

Evan: I knew you were going to say that!

Roelof: Maybe my background has been a little bit more eclectic than most. I'm on the board of Unity, which is a developer-focused company. MongoDB is a database company. YouTube and Instagram are consumer companies. Square is a financial services company. It’s now called Block. Natera is a genetic diagnostic business. These are all very different businesses. In each case, there was some other attribute that attracted me to the founder, the idea, the space. In almost all cases, there was no script for the business. There was no known path for taking said product or innovation and having a blueprint, as I said earlier, for how you build a go-to market. How are you going to charge for this? What's the business model for this? I'm open to ideas from anywhere because none of these were ideas that were in the general milieu. They were just, when you meet a founder and you go, "Ah, this totally makes sense!"

Evan: This is a perfect transition to the next question, as it relates to the core of our fireside chat title. It makes sense when you pursue it; there's no blueprint, but ideally, these companies become enduring. That doesn’t always happen, but that's the goal. What percentage of the time do those investments succeed? Did people ever say you’re crazy for pursuing them? For me, as you and I have discussed over the years, the majority of the time, they say I’m crazy. I just have to determine which of the contrarian views are right and which are wrong, as those can lead to very different outcomes. How do you figure out which side of right or wrong and being contrarian helps you make that decision to join and work with a team?

Roelof: Let me make sure people appreciate that our job is very hard. It may look easy from the outside, but if I look at Sequoia, the 22 years that I've been at Sequoia in our early stage business, which I define as seed stage and venture stage investing, between 30 and 40% of the time, we have a complete write-off. 30 to 40% of the time, it's a failure. I think we've got pretty good selection, and we obviously make poor decisions where we meet a company and we have a failure to imagine, and what could have been a successful investment, we fail to see and we don't capture it, so we get it wrong a lot. I want to make sure people appreciate that it's not as though we're batting a thousand, to use a baseball analogy here. We make a lot of mistakes.

When I describe it to somebody and they just get the one-liner or they understand it at a superficial level and dismiss it, but I know more than they do because I've double clicked and I've done the analysis to be confident about it. That is the recipe for what makes it interesting. 

When I was involved with the building of PayPal, I wasn't a founder, I didn't start it. People would mock us from the outside. I remember an article in 2001 that said, “Earth to Palo Alto”, making fun of us. I wasn't offended by the article because I read it, and thought, "These people don't understand the details of what I know is happening inside the business." That's the disconnect. 

Honestly, those are probably the most disruptive ideas from the outside where it sounds so superficial, "Really, you're going to build that?" But when you've met the founder, you understand the plan, you're helping them build the business. You know more than people superficially know from the outside. That's the gap that can give you confidence that it's something interesting.

Evan: I appreciate the background and the context. There are many write-offs in hoping to find the enduring companies in each fund. You remind me of how I usually get a good sense of the potential for an investment within the first few minutes or the first hour of the initial meeting. I met Synthesia early before the term “Generative AI” even existed. And they said, "We're going to build AI video, and it's going to be the future of synthetic content." The only difference is that I had already been thinking about synthetic media for years. We like having discussions about where the world is heading and hopefully finding the right person at the right time to partner with. Those are the types of opportunities we look for.

Roelof: Think about that idea for a second. I'm sure that when you started to tell people, "I'm investing in a company that auto-generates an avatar that looks like a human and speaks like a human so you could use this for these applications." I’m sure somebody was like, "You're crazy! That's not going to work!"

Evan: Absolutely! 99.9% said, I'm crazy. They're crazy. "Nobody wants to invest in deep fakes. There's no technology that's going to work, and there's no business that's going to work." When we're fundraising, people sometimes ask, "Do you take tech risks or business risks?" Well, either or, and sometimes both. And fortunately, sometimes it works out. The generative AI trend is exciting, but it’s just a step on the ladder towards more advanced AI. When you invested in YouTube, Instagram or MongoDB, what did people think? 

Roelof: Let’s talk about YouTube. People have tried video before. That's one of the dangers in venture by the way, if you see things and you become a curmudgeon. You need to be, in some sense, slightly naive. Yes, people have tried video before and they failed. There are good reasons why it is different now. You've got to rationalize about it. This isn't gambling. You need to think through the 'why now’? Broadband has reached a critical mass. Flash is available in the browser, so videos can auto play. You don't need to download RealPlayer, QuickTime or some other application to watch video. You have to think through the logic of it. But people thought that was crazy.

“Instagram, really, it's just pictures. I mean, how could you build a business around that?" But we had this idea that it could turn into a social service and that advertisers would want to use it. Back then, when we did our due diligence, we could see brands like BMW and many others already using Instagram to promote their products with beautiful imagery because images sell. That was an example of what we saw.

At MongoDB. "Really, no SQL? That's a toy document database? That's like a toy thing. No one's going to build a real application on this." Anyway, in each of these cases, there are naysayers, and you need a thick skin.

Evan: Figuring out the timing is crucial. As I’ve shared with you, in the 12 years since I founded LDV Capital, I spent the first five years hearing from many technical teams during our deep due diligence that “Evan, it’s technically impossible to do that.” I would respond, “But if it works, it’s huge!” This caused me to lose a lot of sleep in those early years. Then, over time, we shifted our perspective: if they don’t express doubts, we actually start to worry. If they say it’s easy, it might mean we’re not investing early enough, or that it’s not deep tech or leapfrog innovation. I have to be careful, as you pointed out, not to develop blinders and focus solely on those opportunities. It’s a balancing act that has become our sweet spot in what we do and what we know, so we stick with it. 

Now, on your LinkedIn bio, you mention that you love helping exceptional founders realize their highest ambitions. We’ve discussed building enduring businesses and various aspects of that. Do you think that, as you mentioned earlier regarding the compounding of PayPal, sometimes we don’t truly understand the highest ambitions until years later? How do you view that in terms of your personal goals?

Roelof: There are two things that I really want to help entrepreneurs with. Firstly, to be a shock absorber, not an amplifier. When times are tough, it's the job of a board member to help shore you up. Conversely, when things are going well, it’s to challenge you—to think about what you can do better, and to not become complacent, and to not suffer from hubris. 

The other piece of it is a question I often ask founders, which is: “What is the scale of your ambition? Do you dare to dream?’"

I was with one of the MongoDB executives earlier this week, and he reminded me, when the company was approaching $100 million in annualized revenue, and the team felt good about themselves as they should, I asked them the question, "What's it going to take and what is the company going to look like when we get to a billion in revenue?” It's not a question the company had focused on and it led to a bunch of changes in the orientation of the team because they set their sights on a very different 10x goal from where they were at the time and helped them gear up for where they are now as a business. I've had the benefit of seeing companies and seeing compounding, and I can bring that to bear and hopefully help people avoid the short-sightedness that I suffered from when I was at PayPal, when I didn't quite appreciate the long-term potential.

Evan: That's important for everyone. The biggest challenge for me in similar situations is that, with each year of a company’s growth, those ambitions and challenges evolve. Additionally, we have about 40% of our investments in Europe and the rest in North America, so the culture of each entrepreneur varies significantly. Adapting to these challenges while trying to be valuable and helpful is something I love but also struggle with. I wonder if that resonates with you, especially when it comes to balancing all aspects of our personal lives on a day-to-day basis, as you pointed out earlier.

Roelof: Look, it’s not for everyone, but the question I want founders to consider is a quote from Steve Jobs: “We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here?” If you want to, if you really want to dare to dream big and go for it, we'll be here to support you. If you don't, it's okay. This is your decision. It's not for me to judge. 

Unity is a public company worth $10 billion or so today, many years ago in 2016, we had an offer for the company to be acquired for $600 million. And obviously if the founders wanted to go ahead, we wouldn't have blocked them, but we encouraged them to keep going because we thought there was so much more potential in the company. So we said “no”. As a VC, it could have been a great win for me, it would look good, Sequoia would have a nice victory, but we just said, "We think there's so much more here. There's so much more potential. Let's keep going and build a much more consequential company." And we did.

Evan: That's great! Who inspires you the most every day?

Roelof: It’s the founders.I draw enormous inspiration from walking into a meeting and listening to someone describe their new idea. People talk about Tiger Woods in golf or Novak Djokovic in tennis. Djokovic talks about how part of why he’s so good is he loves to hit tennis balls. Tiger Woods loves to hit golf balls. Similarly, I love meeting founders. To me, it’s a great recipe – I draw so much inspiration from listening to people who want to change the world.

Evan: In 20 years from now, which areas of visual tech could you be most excited about—whether in 2030 or even further into the future? What excites you the most about its potential?

Roelof: I'm very excited about a different modality for how we interact with devices. I struggle to imagine that in 20 years we're going to have these small form factor mobile devices and screens we have today where we all develop these weird neck problems. I have a hard time imagining that that's our end state. If we want to think futuristically, is it a contact lens that helps you automatically display things to the back of your eye? Maybe that's too science fiction because you can't get enough power and performance in that kind of form factor. Could we be wearing spectacles that give you that kind of a visual experience that is always on, you interact with it with your voice? Not quite Vision Pro because that's heavier and much more of a dedicated experience. It's not an interactive experience, but that to me sounds really interesting.

Evan: I've been hoping for the retina cam for a long time. Historically, I envisioned it more as a tool for professional photography—where I could just blink and take a picture of someone. However, the whole concept of a retina cam or retina glasses sounds both exciting and scary, which is typical for emerging technologies. Now, for the last question: what’s one sentence of advice you would give to first-time entrepreneurs and our audience to help them build successful businesses?

Roelof: Dare to dream. I worry that too many people worry about the short-term risk of their own company, and they almost check their ambition and ideas for fear that people think that they sound crazy or stupid. To not be thin-skinned about that, and to dare to dream big, to go do something interesting and to not be intimidated.

One of the most beautiful things about Silicon Valley in particular, but I think this is one of our best exports, is failure is okay. So many of the great successful companies have come from people who had one or two failures before they got there. Max Levchin had two failed companies before he started PayPal, and now he's running a firm, another very successful business. Failure is not a scarlet letter. It is an experience that can accumulate. Even if this isn't the idea that takes it there, maybe the next company will. It's a repeat game. It's not a one-off game. Dare to dream. Go for it.

Hope you enjoyed this fireside chat as much as we did. Check out other sessions too!

We are thrilled to invite you to our 11th Annual LDV Vision Summit – a free virtual event on March 25, 2025! Since its inception in 2014, the summit has been the premier global gathering in visual tech and AI.

Over 15 fantastic speakers ranging from tech giants to under-the-radar startups, esteemed research labs and leading venture capital firms will be sharing their insights on state-of-the-art computer vision, machine learning, and AI solutions aimed at improving the world we live in.

Roelof’s colleague, Luciana Lixandru, will join us as a speaker. She is a Partner at Sequoia, where she focuses on enterprise and consumer technology companies across Europe and co-leads Sequoia's early-stage investment business. She is a Director of Pennylane, Robco, Stripe, Tacto, and Veed, and is passionate about helping founders unlock their potential and think on a global scale. Prior to becoming Sequoia’s first partner in Europe in 2020, Luciana worked at Accel for eight years, where she led investments in UiPath (PATH), Deliveroo (DROOF), Miro, and Hopin, among others. Luciana has also held positions at Summit Partners and Morgan Stanley. She has a B.S. in Economics and Mathematics from Georgetown, and resides in London.

Sign up for your free ticket!