Jeff Wang
speaker
190 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Jeff Wang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think Doug probably has a better nose for enterprise talent and Michael for consumer talent. Good hedge. Sorry, I interrupted you. And so, so quick story about Michael and an important lesson that he taught me somewhat indirectly. So when I joined SEG, he obviously had to interview with Michael. It was intimidating interview.
So Michael back then had an office where he actually literally had the wall and door removed from one side. three walls, but one opens up to the entire floor. So I think he meant it as the ultimate open door policy. So some people have an open door policy, he had an open wall policy, right? But that meant that everyone on the floor could hear everything that was said in his office, so i.e.
my entire interview. So I walk in, I'm in my suit, Michael's peering over my resume, and the first thing he says to me, and by the way, don't forget that the only thing that I've done up to this point is really technology buyouts. So he says to me, do you think private equity has poisoned you? Yikes, right? Like the interview did not go well.
I tried to answer the best I could, but it was not a good start. And I'm sure that people around his office within earshot were cringing for me. What did you answer? I don't remember. I don't think it was a good answer because I had to interview with Michael again. But I think his point, and it took me a couple of years to understand it. was that just staring at the numbers isn't enough.
Too much focus on EBITDA multiples or financial leverage isn't healthy. You have to have the dream gene and you have to be able to dream about what a founder or a company, a team can become over time. And it's just not static. And so I deeply appreciate that lesson. And I'm not even sure that he intended it to be a lesson.
Yep. I love how Ruloff has forged a new path to take Sequoia into the next 50 years. First, it's not easy to transition from great investor to great leader, as you know. It's also not easy to take over for a legend like Doug. Doug led the firm from 2012 to 2022. The venture world was very different back then. Ruloff led the development of the Scouts program.
He supported the product team, data science team, Arc. The Sequoia Capital Fund is a good example of his long-term thinking. I'm also impressed by how focused he is on team and culture. So at our semi-annual, what we used to call these steward council meetings. So it's like a management group. We provide business updates to each other.
So everyone else, myself included, would come in with these long PowerPoint presentations. But Ruloff would walk in with this two-page Word document. And yet somehow he always put the most thought into the talents of both the investors and the functional leaders on his team and how to put them in the best position to succeed.
And then at events like our holiday party where he makes a speech every year, he makes it a point to remember every single person within all of Sequoia who had a baby that year and the name of their child. He memorizes it, no cards. He's also super comfortable with the process of becoming excellent. So the idea that it takes time, obviously that applies to Sequoia, but it doesn't happen overnight.
He doesn't get frustrated by it. Sequoia and all the initiatives, but also applies to his personal life. So I've obviously got to know him a little bit personally, played ping pong with him, pickleball with him, golf with him, golf actually just last week. I've been playing the game for a lot longer than he has, Harry. As you probably know, it is a tough game.
He is frustrating that he does not get frustrated. It's because he's hyper-focused on that process of improvement. It's everything he does. It's from investing to pickleball, from leadership to golf. So it's... It's frustrating that he doesn't get frustrated.
I think that optionality is the most expensive thing you can buy. So both financial options, but also more importantly, life options. So too many young people spend too much effort focused on preserving optionality in lieu of actually making decisions. So I find this problem to be most acute, the more accomplished you are because your talent opens so many doors.
And a lot of folks just waste too much time and effort keeping those doors open as opposed to just choosing one to walk through.
I think on the venture side, I'd probably say Brad at Altimeter. He's also got the public-private strategy. I think he's a little bit heavier than us on the private side. But I love the way that he can connect dots across stage, industry, especially because he will go pretty early sometimes. And I think that flexibility of mindset is impressive.
I think nothing comes close to the 2016 transition, but certainly there are moments in time where, you know, performance is down, you question your process.
How do you rally a team in a down year? It is hard. It's really hard. I think, so we do these surveys. It's every six months just to get a sense for how, and they're anonymous, for how the team is doing. And man, the initial, I'd say right post-COVID, the surveys were very positive. You know, everyone's super happy, you know, everyone's feeling fulfilled, they're doing good work.
And then you can see the surveys is getting worse and worse. And then in 2022, they're just downright awful. I think one of the things that I've learned is that your mentality is so dictated by performance. And that's just, you can't live that way. You can't manage your business that way. You can't actually go make decisions that way.
You have to stay even keeled and say like, what about my process is not working? Let me go fix that. And this is the discussion about greed when others are greedy, fear when others are fearful, right? If you actually let that impact you in that way, you are going to make the wrong decisions.
And so I think those surveys are actually quite helpful because it gives you a sense for the team's mindset and how it's impact. You could probably almost draw a line on, you know, the NASDAQ and the team survey.
probably not taking Google more seriously. So I was at Stanford at the time of its founding. I was even a section leader for Marissa Mayer for a computer science class where she was a lecturer. And so I heard about it from her too. And I just thought to myself, you heard of Yahoo? You heard of Infoseek?
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