Roelof Botha

I mean, you can't repress that spirit.

Well, we stick to our knitting.

The funds we operate today, our seed venture and growth funds today are no bigger than they were five, six, seven years ago.

We realize that there's money to be made for some people writing very large checks and very late stage companies, but our aspiration is to be the number one investment manager for our limited partners.

We literally want to be the best net IRR and net multiple for our LPs.

And we're not interested in maximizing fees or maximizing share of industry value creation.

That's the game we've chosen to play.

No, actually, we've structured ourselves to be a private partnership in perpetuity to the extent possible under California law.

We have the sense of stewardship at Sukhoi.

You have to leave the partnership in a better place than you found it.

Don Valentine didn't call it Valentine Ventures when he started it.

He handed the partnership over to a next generation with Mike Moritz and Doug Leone and Jim Goetz, and we're now part of a third generation, our team currently running the partnership.

We didn't have to pay to get the partnership from the previous generation and nor will we charge the next generation.

That's our motto.

So I think probably the most important characteristic we look for is an insatiable curiosity in the individual.

We look for people who are extremely driven, but they need to have a heart of gold.

So one of the things we talk about at Sequoia is we cherish individualism and teamwork.

You need an individual to be able to have a keen insight and propose an investment, but you've got to work with a team, and that whole teamwork aspect is really important for us.

So when we make investment decisions at Sequoia, it's a consensus decision.

which blew my mind when I first got there.