20VC Exclusive: Sequoia's Luciana Lixandru Unveils Sequoia's New 8 Week Accelerator, Arc | Biggest Takeaways from Working with Doug Leone and Roelof Botha | The Journey From a Small Town In Romania to Partner @ Sequoia

**Harry Stebbings** (0:00)
Welcome back to 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I'm so, so excited for the episode to stay, as we have some special news from our guest, which is incredibly exciting, but I'm not going to spoil it, and so I'm going to leave it to them. But I'm thrilled to welcome one of the greatest investors of the last decade, Miro, Hopin, UiPath, Deliveroo, to name a few, an unparalleled track record, and one of the most authentic and wonderful people as well. And so with that, I'm thrilled to welcome Luciana Lixandru, partner at Sequoia, one of the world's most renowned and successful venture firms. With, check this out, Sequoia-backed companies, accounting for more than 20% of Nasdaq's total value. Incredible stat there. As for Luciana, at Sequoia, she's led investments in the likes of Penny Lane, Central, Veed, and Ledgy, to name a few. And prior to joining Sequoia in 2020, Luciana was a partner at Accel in London. Also, I have to say, Luciana's is one of the most inspiring and wonderful stories. I was so pleased to really dive into its day. And I also cannot thank Doug Leone, George Robson, Pat Grady, Ravi Gupta, Sean McGuire, and Robert Visionaries enough. Such immense help with the questions, and I really do so appreciate that. But before we move into the episode today, Harvard Management Company is constantly seeking out the next generation of great investors and entrepreneurs. HMC has managed Harvard University's endowment for nearly 50 years, and was one of the first institutional investors in Venture Capital. Their experience in long-term investment horizon makes them ideal partners to get world-changing ideas on a path to viability and success. They work as a true partner, providing insightful perspectives to help managers succeed. I personally have had the pleasure of working with the HMC team and can say that they're truly exceptional partners, people and incredibly savvy investors. Whether you are launching your first fund or your fifth, HMC welcomes the opportunity to partner with both developing and established managers. Have an idea you want to share with the team? Just send it to ventureathmc.harvard.edu. And speaking of amazing partners with HMC there, Mercury is building full-stack banking for startups. Apply in under 10 minutes from anywhere. For FDIC-insured bank accounts, physical and virtual debit cards, domestic and international wires, and integrations with Gusto, Stripe, QuickBooks, Plaid, and basically every other tool your startup uses. They also offer unusual features like API access, custom team management, and their newly launched Mercury Treasury, a cash management product for high-growth startups. They'll even help you build your startup with Mercury Raise, a program to connect you to Silicon Valley's top investors. Head over to mercury.com forward slash sign up to apply. And finally, Sprig. User researchers want their product teams to build amazing experiences that are informed by user insights, and product teams want to ship products quickly without having to wait for research. With Sprig, both teams can get their own way. Sprig is a user research platform that lets you ask bite-sized questions within your product or existing user journeys. Companies like Dropbox, Square, Open Door, and Loom all use Sprig's in-product micro-surveys and concept tests to understand their customers at the pace of modern software development, so they can make every product decision a customer-informed product decision. And if you want to obtain rich insights from users at the pace you ship products, then give Sprig a try by visiting sprig.com. Again, that's sprig.com, sprig.com. But that is quite enough from me, so now I'm very, very excited to hand over to the one and only Luciana, partner at Sequoia.
You have now arrived at your destination.
Luciana, I'm so excited to do this. I can't believe it's taken me so long and you so long for this to happen, but I'm so excited. So thank you so much for joining me today.

**Luciana Lixandru** (3:34)
I am delighted to be here and I am thrilled it's finally happening. Thank you for inviting me.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:39)
And not at all. I mean, to be fair, this was such a team effort on the schedule. I got calls from Doug, I got calls from Pat, I got calls from Ravi. It was fantastic. I almost had to do no work before this one. But I want to start with the intro. And it was from Mr. Grady who said, you've started small town in Romania and now you're a partner co-leading Sequoia's early stage and leading Europe. How did you make the transition into Venture and how did you come to Sequoia?

**Luciana Lixandru** (4:01)
That's a long story. And I will try to keep it relatively short. I was born and raised in a small town in Romania, a hundred thousand people. I joke, I think it's the 18th largest city in Romania. And when I was 16, I had this idea which at the time seemed crazy. And the idea was that I wanted to go to the US. And it seemed crazy because this was 20 years ago in Romania, people did not study abroad very often. And I just went for it and I got very fortunate.