Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:03)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money.
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:40)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:05)
My guest today is Jess Lee. Jess is a partner at Sequoia Capital as well as their chief product officer. Before becoming an investor, Jess co-founded fashion app Polyvore and was an early product manager for Google Maps. Most recently, she founded All Raise, a nonprofit that is changing the gender balance in tech.
Our discussion ranges from Burning Man to Marvel to Sequoia's mobile app. And I hope that Jess's passion for delighting users rubs off on you. Please enjoy my conversation with Jess Lee.
Jess, I was thinking about an interesting place to begin our discussion today. And I tried to respect what's unique about you, which is this really interesting Venn diagram of product building and product thinking and investing. And so I thought maybe we'd begin right there at the intersection of those two things specifically around products that investing firms offer. So if you ask most people, especially at early stage, where Sequoia or private markets, where Sequoia focuses primarily when it makes its first investments, they would say that the product is capital. You're giving money to companies, you get a great team or a board member or whatever in exchange, and it's a very simple product, and that most investment firms work that way. Why do you think more investment firms, especially ones that make direct investing where capital is part of the product, why don't they have more of a product mindset, like actual products, like the ones that they're backing themselves when they're outlaying capital?

**Jess Lee** (3:30)
That is a great question and one that I found myself wondering as a founder.
I met so many VCs when we were pitching my company, Polyvore, and it felt like a lot of the firms just offered money. And then if you were lucky, you got capital plus a really great board member. And I just found myself thinking like, oh my God, I do so much as a founder. There's so many things I don't know about company building. I wish there was something else, something more out there. And so after my founder journey and I came to Sequoia, I found myself thinking about that a lot. I do think there's a way to apply the product mindset to venture capital and to investing. And if you think about Sequoia's customers, our customers are the founders. And if we want to be great, we need to be customer obsessed, just like our greatest founders are customer obsessed. And then you need to delight your customers, you need to be innovating, you need to be doing things differently, you have to have the better, unique, compelling value profits. So we think about that a lot. And actually, in addition to being an investor, where I spent about 70% of my time investing, I'm also our chief product officer.