Sequoia Capital Part II (with Doug Leone)

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
Hey, Acquired listeners. Instead of a cold opener, we want to use this space to dedicate today's episode to the late Don Valentine who passed last year.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:08)
We are excited to be working with Sequoia today to bring you something really special for Part II. And with that, on to the show. Welcome to Season 6, Episode 2 of ACQUIRED, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:34)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:36)
And we are your hosts. Today, we tell part two of the Sequoia Capital story. We are going to pick up where we left off in 1996, when Sequoia's legendary founder, Don Valentine, turned the firm over to Sir Michael Moritz and Doug Leone. In this modern era of Sequoia since 1996, Sequoia has been the investing partner behind an absurd number of the industry-defining companies of the last 25 years, including Yahoo, Google, PayPal, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, 23andMe, HubSpot, WhatsApp, Dropbox, Airbnb, Docker, Stripe, Instacart, UiPath, DoorDash, and Robinhood. No kidding. And while David and I spelunked into part one of Sequoia's history on our own, we have the very best person in the world with us today to help us do part two right, Doug Leone. Now David, who is Doug?

**David Rosenthal** (1:28)
Doug is the global managing partner of Sequoia Capital in charge of overseeing the firm's many diverse businesses, which we will get into, from seed to global growth investing across the US, India, and China. Doug first joined Sequoia in 1988 after famously cold calling Don Valentine, and was the champion of Sequoia's expansion from a single $150 million early stage fund to the multi-billion dollar global powerhouse it is today. Welcome, Doug, and thanks for joining us.

**Doug Leone** (1:56)
Thank you very much for having me. It's my honor to be here.

**David Rosenthal** (1:59)
It's great to have you.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:00)
This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:06)
So, crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners, and literally crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because crusoe's cloud is purpose-built for AI and run on wasted, stranded, or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:31)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:37)
The other element that makes crusoe special is the environmental angle. crusoe, of course, locates their data centers at stranded energy sites. So, think oil flares, wind farms that can't use all the energy they generate, etc. And uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:55)
Yeah. obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on costs since crusoe doesn't rely on the energy grid. Energy is the second largest cost of running AI after, of course, the price you pay NVIDIA for the chips. These lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (3:11)
It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote-unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers, such as AWS and Google and Azure, who need to build their data centers close to major traffic hubs where the internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:27)
Yep. If you, your company, or your portfolio companies would like to use the lower cost and more performant infrastructure for your AI workloads, go to crusoecloud.com/acquired, that's C-R-U-S-O-E cloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. And now, over to David to take us into Sequoia with Doug.

**David Rosenthal** (3:50)
We're going to talk a lot about Sequoia during your time and its evolution. But before we do, we want to ask you to tell your story a little bit. Your family immigrated from Italy to New York when you were 11 years old. What brought your family here?

**Doug Leone** (4:05)
So we had a bit of a World War II heritage, where my dad's sister got married to a lieutenant, ended up in America, had a child, call mom, and so now we had grandma for me and aunt in America. And we were the Italian family with the American Ben. My first name was Douglas, but in the church, you cannot be called Douglas for the simple reason that you need to have a name from one of the 365 saints. So in Italy, I was Mauro Douglas Leone, or Douglas, as my mom called me and my dad called me. And in school, I was Mauro. When I came here, I just flipped the two names. But a long story short, my dad saw an opportunity, maybe his career, it was not going so great in Italy, saw an opportunity to come to America. He came here. It took me about two years of my mom to come here. I went two years without seeing my dad. And then we finally came here in august 1st, 1968 Wow.