Matt Huang
speaker
205 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Matt Huang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
He had a very, very high clarity on what he was trying to build and why. I was recently rereading Elon's 2006 Tesla master plan. And if you read that document, there's just a tremendous amount of clarity on what the business strategy is. And Yiming had that for this personalized news idea. And personalized news undersells it.
I think he saw it as what it ultimately became, which is the global marketplace for attention and media. Like, could we get in front of you the most relevant thing that you're going to want to see at any given point in time instantly? Pre-algorithm, maybe you use social. Pre-social, you use newspaper editors to do that. But this was sort of the HFT version. of the media marketplace.
And he saw that back then. It took me longer to like fully grok it. But yeah, the clarity and the aggressive ambition. I think from day one, he was very focused on building an international business, which at that time, every Chinese company was a Chinese business, even Tencent, Alibaba. And so the audacity to even believe that you can do that
I have held most of it. Well, it's a weird thing where it was mostly e-liquid most of the way. So, I mean, in contrast to crypto, it's a lot easier. And I think by the time there were robust secondary markets and it was possible to sell, I wasn't comparing it to the basis. It's sort of comparing it to its future potential.
And at those points in time, it was always this could be on track to be the biggest company in China. As an investor, it definitely messes with your head, though, in the sense that, I mean, it's probably the best investment I'll ever be a part of.
I don't have the full adjusted for dilution math in my head, but secondary today is trading around $200 to $300 billion. The simple math is that's a 10,000x. Let's say it's a 5,000x. Pretty good. If a U.S. company had those numbers, it'd be worth $1 or $2 trillion. So it'd be worth another 10x.
It is weird. Yeah, I find I'm increasingly zen about it, but let's not pretend that it was some great act of skill. I think I had some intuitions and it was a good investment, but like a lot of early stage investing, it's saying yes once.
Yeah, I would say all of them except for crypto ones. Of course, yeah. And I think there, you know, there's the analog of the energy signature of the community or the meme or, yeah.
For some reason, I don't track this.
Yeah, exactly. If I had to guess, it would be ByteDance, Bitcoin, Ethereum. And these are personal or including the fund? Both. One I deserve no credit for is Uniswap, which we talk about more. And then there's some normal tech ones like Instacart, for example, as part of the seed round.
So I was sitting at Twitter one day and a random email appeared in my inbox, which was a recruiter reaching out about an opening at Sequoia. And I had no actually ambition or intention to become an investor or venture capitalist. So I actually initially thought the email was a spam mistake. Why would they send that to me? Wouldn't they be looking at
I don't know who feeds into, yeah, exactly, an investor or maybe like a banker or something that might feed into the investment world. I didn't have real understanding at the time of the varied backgrounds that end up in the space. But I was intrigued and ended up taking the call with Pat Grady, who I think you know. As he was telling me about Sequoia, I just started to get very interested in it.
And I met more and more of the team and I still think it's one of the highest quality teams and cultures on the planet. Again, I was interested in investing, but I wasn't sure whether I wanted to do it. But I decided to join almost purely based on the strength of the team.
It was definitely profound. I'd say the biggest thing is probably exposure to high standards. It's probably the highest standard place I've ever experienced, inclusive of startups that I'm involved in and inclusive of Paradigm, their ability to maintain extremely high standards. I think it helps to have the legendary history of Apple and Google and Cisco.
It's an impressive wall when you walk in there. Yeah. The logo wall. The posters and the S1s, the absurd statistic of 20% of the NASDAQ. So I think that helps. And when your track record includes those things, even something that would seem like a great success to anyone else would be small ball.
So there were many days when there were multi-hundred million dollar outcomes that would be kind of viewed as a mediocre success. I remember day two of me joining was the WhatsApp acquisition getting announced. And there was this very awkward champagne celebration in the lobby. They called everyone out there. There are all these glasses. Everyone raises a glass. Nobody drinks.
And everyone, five minutes later, goes back to their desk to work. So it's not a culture that celebrates often. But yeah, I think high standards is not just on the company or investment level, but on individuals, taste in individuals, standards for yourself. They aim to operate at such a high level that I think Tyler Cowen has a
blog posts on this of like one of the free lunches is raising the ambitions of the people around you. I do think cultures of high standards are this version of putting surplus out in the world. If you expose someone to that, you can permanently alter their standards for everything.
I mean, that question is somewhat framed in kind of the negative version of it, which is you're doing poorly, you need to do better. There's also another version, which is the positive flip of that, of you're awesome, we believe in you. And I would say Sequoia, Doug Leone in particular, was a big impact on me.
I think the first investment I sourced and brought to the firm and we ended up choosing to invest was when I worked on with him. And in that process, one, just getting to observe him work with that team, but then have him validate the opinions that I was having about the investment and what we should do with the company was a very ambition-increasing, confidence-increasing experience.
Showing 41–60 of 205 · page 3 of 11
← Previous
Next →