#1: Sequoia’s Doug Leone: Trauma, Hardship, Purpose, and Silicon Valley’s Top Firm

**Doug Leone** (0:00)
Making mistakes and learning from them, I think that's what keeps you alive. I think the moment you have the answers and you've made it, that to me is equivalent to being dead.

**Derek Andersen** (0:14)
Welcome to Divot, a community for people trying to make their mark in the world. Where each week, I'm interviewing the best minds in business, tech, sports, and entertainment to learn how they made their mark. Go to divot.org to see all the episodes, or you can watch us on X, Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.

**Doug Leone** (0:34)
Divot.

**Derek Andersen** (0:36)
This episode is brought to you by Google Cloud and Notion.
Since its founding in 1972, Sequoia has provided funding for some of the very best startups and entrepreneurs, from Apple to Oracle, Google to Atari, WhatsApp to NVIDIA. Before joining Sequoia in 1988, Doug held sales positions at Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, Prime Computers, and he holds degrees from Cornell, Columbia and MIT. Doug Leone is seen as one of the great venture investors of the industry. For nearly 30 years, he helped lead Sequoia while investing in companies like ServiceNow, Wiz, Nubank and Aruba Networks. I hope you enjoy it. Genoa? Am I saying that right?

**Doug Leone** (1:16)
Genoa.

**Derek Andersen** (1:17)
Genoa.

**Doug Leone** (1:18)
Genoa.

**Derek Andersen** (1:19)
Okay.

**Doug Leone** (1:20)
There's no salami in Genoa.

**Derek Andersen** (1:22)
Okay.

**Doug Leone** (1:23)
Just to be clear.

**Derek Andersen** (1:26)
There must be.

**Doug Leone** (1:27)
No. I mean, there is, but it's like saying there's pumpkins in California, you know.

**Derek Andersen** (1:33)
It's seasonal?

**Doug Leone** (1:35)
No. It's just not known. It's not known for salami. Only in America.
It's a marketing thing.

**Derek Andersen** (1:40)
Yeah.

**Doug Leone** (1:41)
Some company decided to call it Genoa Salami and it hit.

**Derek Andersen** (1:44)
Did they lean into that or is it offensive?

**Doug Leone** (1:47)
They don't even know about it.

**Derek Andersen** (1:48)
What part of you do you think is still Italian? How much?

**Doug Leone** (1:52)
The telling like it is is a very Italian thing.

**Derek Andersen** (1:54)
Yeah.

**Doug Leone** (1:56)
Very Italian thing. My mother and I used to talk and my wife was convinced we're having an argument where we were just talking.

**Derek Andersen** (2:06)
You and your mom?

**Doug Leone** (2:07)
Yeah. My mother was just talking normally. Why are you guys fighting? We're not fighting. We're talking.

**Derek Andersen** (2:14)
You moved to Mount Vernon, New York when you were 11 You came by boat. You had a good, great family. But you didn't come from, you came from a pretty humble circumstance. Can you tell us a little bit about what you remember from that?

**Doug Leone** (2:30)
Yeah. I'm not sure I had a great family. My father left when I was 11 to come and work in America. We went online for two years. I was raised by a loving mom and three aunts, none of whom for different sets of reasons had children. So I had a strong female upbringing influence. And so I was what you would call a very sensitive, sweet kid with a strong maternal influence when I came to America. And so even that into itself wasn't a balanced upbringing, because I was missing the male figure, the strong male figure such as let him make mistakes, keep him independent versus the nurturing, the loving nurturing of a mother. And I came to America at the age of 11 And I would say from 11 to 17, I would clearly state that I experienced trauma. There's no other ways about it.

**Derek Andersen** (3:32)
What do you mean?

**Doug Leone** (3:35)
The things I was put through during those tender formative years as a sweet, tender, innocent kid where we're extremely painful.
Let me give you a couple of examples. Maybe in Italy, you don't take a shower every day. You don't learn to do that. And to be accused of smelling, that is devastating. America tends to be a very physical society. The sports are physical. I knew how to kick a ball. I didn't know how to throw a ball or catch a ball. I couldn't imagine being punched in the face as a little boy in Italy. I was just not part of the culture. I got punched in the face multiple times and simply didn't know what to do about it. I was frozen. And the list goes on and on. I wrote a letter about a year ago of young Doug to old Doug, asking old Doug for help. And writing it wasn't easy. Writing it, sorry, was easy. Reading it was devastating. Why is that? Because it brought back all the things I had forgotten about. And what that caused was a lack of development, emotional type of development for a number of years.