Thank you..

❤ this man & Trekie! I want to write my books using my voice as it seems so natural. Even better than ✍️ . 😊

I have a question too: How do you get your feelings back after doing sales? My answer is do Poetry or some art. Would be glad to hear yours.

I like how she was real to the questions: how do you face rejections? Get some hype music or a bourbon tequila. 😂

Sharing this to my team

Two things I picked out. Just say YES. And how to raise price. I’ve started implementing YES, and that got us a call booking.

Thankyou Tracy for providing actionable and practical steps. Will apply them soon.

Wonderful

Good luck❤

She's amazing, great sale

Do you recruit start ups in Africa ?

Davis Betty Anderson Gary Thomas John

incredibly bearish of pear

Mohak mangal wale Attendance here 👇

❤

👏👏👏👏👏👏

Thank you for this...rich and insightful!

This is the first time a company/person offered to genuinely build with me rather than buying/initially sell.

Hi Pejman great discussion. I learned a lot. When I listen to this interview I question a few things about my own future path. I have a small interesting, novel idea and I have massively disruptive idea requiring a lot of resources to even prototype. Both related to environmental opportunities. I think about ideas, not businesses and am trying to develop that capability, habit, lens before I make commitments. My instinct is to follow the smaller idea that I think has a great opportunity to make impact, find its audience and practice, building a small business first. Any thoughts on this Pejman or anyone from the comments?

Very useful content. Thank you very much

Wonderful interview! 💚

16:10 Founder success traits

11:20 Going through the abyss 12:20 The typical entrepreneur is an engineering minded person. They know how to build product (technical founder)

7:20 Culture, compensation, atmosphere of trust 8:30 Act as if you’ve done nothing, Day1 shoshin mentality, what would we do to put ourselves out of business

5:00 Parental love privilege

3:45 USA as the land of opportunity

2:15 Temptation for founders is to sell early

An entrepreneur indeed 👍🏼

Lots of knowledge here 💯💯

2:00 For us, an IPO is not an exit. An IPO is just another day in the life of a company, and if we do our jobs right we probably. For founders, there's always a tendency to sell early. *Once you get the flywheel going, the real money's made, the real return. It's a lot tougher to go from $0 to $100 Mn in revenue than it is to go from $2 Bn to $4 Bn in revenue.* When we get a chance to find great founders in great markets, we plan on being shareholders for 20 - 25 years. 3:15 Italian immigrant coming to USA on a boat at 11 years old. Family was poor. Only child. 3 ways it shaped him: Hunger, self-selection, and a trained mind to be a little less hardwired than it otherwise might be. 4:55 The greatest privilege you can have is parental love privilege. If you have that you have a hell of a head start in life. 5:30 Bad experiences can be either negatives or competitive advantages. It’s what you make of them as an individual. One of the greatest opportunities in life is to turn negatives into positives (chip on shoulder, something to prove). You learn how to do that in life, and you have a great advantage over everybody else. 6:50 Culture is the invisible hand that causes people to do things. It’s the pull, not the push. Find people who are hungry with modest means, have something to prove, and teach them the "we" pronoun. You have to have the right culture that leads to the right culture and wrap it around with the right compensation, to create a trusting environment. Foster an atmosphere of trust. The right people, right payment, right culture, and trust. 8:25 You’ve gotta act as if you’ve done nothing. The greatest threat to the top dog is that everybody wants to take you down. How do we put ourselves out of business before somebody else does? 10:30 "We like people with project manager backgrounds." We look for people that can appreciate not just from the technology out, but from the customer in. 11:15 "Walking through the abyss." Being lost for 1 - 2 years, and then coming out of it. 12:12 The typical entrepreneur is a very engineering minded person. They know how to build products. So the first thing we teach them is product management. 12:40 Merchandising cycle = from product marketing (top of funnel) to demand generation, to revenue. Wherever that’s broken, it looks like you have a bad salesperson, temptation is to fire the VP of Sales. 13:50 Recruiting the first 5-7 A+ engineers is most important, because then the flywheel starts. 14:50 Getting to the point of healthy growth trajectory is a strategic imperative. In a changing world its necessary for survival. 18:00 Favor people with an inherent understanding of the problem who can articulate the problem (because they’ve experienced it for themselves, rather than whipped it up in a “think tank”). 20:50 Once in awhile doing nothing, and recognizing talent and letting them run is the best thing that you can do. (leave the founders alone) 23:50 Think about architecting your company the same way you architect your product. Reward seed investors for taking a shot early. Be very careful with your shares. Save your shares for engineers and for long term partners. 24:45 Be careful of all this “free angel money.” Be clear in what your roles are and split equity accordingly. Splitting equity equally is going to destroy your relationships among the co-founding team once its discovered you’re not all equal, and some members carry much more load. Figure it out and split the equity correctly early, leave the ego aside, because that will ensure rather than destroy the company’s longevity. 25:30 Don’t come in with titles of CEO, President, COO. Recognize that what you need is a leader of the band, someone to get the product out (engineering), someone with product management type of mindset. Those are the great founding teams. 24:40 Another problem is raising too much money. Raise as little as you can to get you to your next big milestone. Because your valuation is going to skyrocket after that. Don’t raise a big round and give up too much equity early on. It’s just nuts. You’ve got to defend those shares, because later on you’ll be arguing for half a point here or there of ownership, whereas in the beginning you’re willing to give away 30% as if it’s candy. 26:20 The same way you architect your product is how you want to architect your investors and your company. Use the same mindset. 26:50 “We are not in the business of making rich people richer. 70% of our clients, limited partners or investors are non-profits.” The other 30% are pensioneers - people that have worked their whole life and want to secure a retirement. Then some sovereign wealth funds (government). Seed fund, growth fund, late stage fund, public market fund.@ Snowflake is the “killer app” of the cloud. 33:12 Through confusion, there’s opportunity. 34:00 Waking up at 5am every morning. 63 years old. He’s paranoid about remaining highly productive. He “wants to leave it all on the field.” To make sure that there’s nothing left when he’s done. Has to be both mind and body. Works hard at staying in shape, and being at the razor’s edge of sharpness. Lifts weights for 2 hours on Mondays/Tuesdays. Then cardio and stretching. To stay fueled and young, fresh and crisp in front of the important founders. 35:40 Workout routine: Weight lifting 2 hours on Monday, 2 hours on Tuesday (Thursday?), done by Tuesday and then doing cardio and stretching. He does it to "stay fresh, crisp, young, and at the cutting edge of sharpness." 37:30 If you have an appetite for risk, then *TAKE THE SHOTS.* 38:00 Getting started cleaning toilets for a small business at 15 years old. He's always read that you "get your start by cleaning toilets," so he had the biggest grin on his face thinking that was his proper entry into the business world and moving onto bigger, better things. 42:40 We always try to meet the founders as early as possible. 43:15 If you can’t sleep at night thinking of the idea, thinking that you’ve got to start a business, that is the signal that you should start a business. Choose your partners carefully, guard your shares carefully.

It's a great thing that the company put the founders first. Not from a selfish perpective as some may want to insinuate, but from a enterprise level and vision perpective. I'm currently setting the foundation and building the framework of the company. I have many entities that I'm planning and that will be in operation adjacent to the parent company, CA Enterprise LLC, including a hospitality (restaurant included) entity. A goal is to turn research I conduct into product development which is why I'm heavily interested in AI technology. Data as discussed play a role and I like that the company doesn't seem to like to micro manage which is a good thing. Much of my educational learning and background was conducted online so that type of environment is well suited and I like that the company grows with founders as they move from stage to stage or series to series. I'm really excited about getting to know the Sequoia. I would love to speak with someone from the company.

Doug is so clear.

Sir what's probablm sequoia app not opinion

I am surprised that there aren’t more comments. I worked for Farhad and got to know his family: Nushin, and his children when Flip-a-gram was in that flat growth period. Farhad is actually an artist at heart, so his incorporating music into Flip-a-gram was brilliant. He loved Burning Man and still does which he so eloquently expressed why. His favorite saying that sticks in my mind, “Immortal, until proven otherwise!”.. Farhad is always ahead of the curve, so removing money from politics and providing a social media grass roots endorsement presence may run contrary to what is happening today with social media banning speech, but I would argue he is ahead of another curve. Not bad for a “bad” student. Peace to Farhad, Nushin, and his now grown children. Great interview.

Epic presentation, had a fast growing startup in the social media advertising intelligence vertical but never managed to get to the analytics database piece working, the best I managed was master slave replication so my SQL queries would not cause 10 minute delays for customers. It is so hard to keep all the plates spinning when you are in the thick of running a company 😂

such a good interview! feel privileged to be the 33rd viewer

Is Soundhound going to IPO? I would like to invest, great founder & technology

Quality stuff, I dive into tech stocks like cloudflare on my channel for those interested 👍

Thanks for sharing, great insights.

Incredible and invaluable insights. Thanks, Doug again and Pear VC - for walking us through these concepts in a concise and relatable manner. And why. Especially your life’s journey and as a leader. I saw your Stanford GSB interview/talk; that was such an eye-opener.

So underrated interview 😳

"Mani grandi e cervello fino"

Thanks Doug!

#Nasdaq50