Roelof Botha

And it was much more of a cottage industry.

I think the industry is professionalized.

And really the founders are the ones who benefited from it because all these firms have built larger operating teams to be able to help those founders with talent, with go-to-market.

And so I think it's really helping founders.

That's probably the main takeaway I have from that.

We've decided to not build as big an organization.

Most of the operating teams we have at Sequoia help us.

So we have about as many developers at Sequoia as we have investors, and they're building products for us.

so that we are much more effective and productive than we might have been 20 years ago.

On my phone, I can pull up an app that if you give me any company name, I'll be able to tell you who my team last met at, how we rated it.

I'll give you data on what's happening with their hiring, how many vouched employees they have, how good do we think their engineering team is based on their history, their academic profiles, etc.

All this information is at my fingertips.

If we get business plan submissions, we have an AI system that will summarize it for me so I get a very quick read on the company.

A quick summarization of the quality of the team and a very quick analysis of the competitive dynamics and the other companies I should consider alongside them.

So these are just small examples of the things we do.

When we first went into China, it was 2007, I think.

The world was flat, was the moniker at the time.

China had gained admission to the World Trade Organization in, I think, 2001.

And we all believed that it would integrate into the global economy.

That premise proved wrong.