Sequoia in Europe with Luciana Lixandru

Roxanne Varza (0:04)

You're listening to STATION F, the podcast. From the world's largest startup campus in Paris.

This is STATION F, the podcast, and I'm your host, Roxanne Varza. First and foremost, happy 2021, everyone. Wishing you all a great new year, and hoping for a little bit less Covid in the upcoming year. Now, I am absolutely thrilled for this first episode. We have the honor to speak with Sequoia Capital's first European partner, Luciana Lixandru. We're gonna talk about all types of things that they're doing in Europe from their investment strategy, why they're coming to Europe, what they're looking for next, how they're growing their team and more. And for this episode, we have Gwen Salley from my team, who is going to be moderating. Gwen is in charge of the investor community and more recently in charge of business development.

Gwen Salley (1:19)

Luciana, thank you so much for taking time once again, and I think I want to get started with something that is quite on the news this day, where everyone in the Valley seems to be moving to Miami, and you guys actually moved to Europe and set up shop in London. Can you tell us a little bit about that dynamic and why you decided to move to London?

Luciana Lixandru (1:39)

Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to have a chance to chat to you guys today.

I will say that this is actually only my second podcast ever. So please bear with me. We're definitely talking during a strange time. I just mentioned earlier, I'm looking outside my window in London and there is no one on the street. So yes, it's a strange time and we're all hoping that 2021 will be kinder to us. Sequoia has been thinking about Europe for quite some time, and Sequoia has been investing in Europe for quite some time. So we are investors in companies like Unity and UiPath and Klarna. And it was just a natural evolution for the firm. It was natural because we kept on seeing talent from the distance in Europe and we kept on seeing opportunity. We were making investments, but we were making these investments slightly later on. And it's a natural evolution to want to find these founders earlier and candidly to be able to help these founders on the ground. I think that makes a really big difference. So we were building our team out of London. I joke that we're the only people who are signing a 10-year office lease. Everyone is giving up their office space. We're very committed even from a real estate perspective. And yeah, that's why. Candidly, it's just a very natural evolution. There's just more opportunity in Europe than ever before.

Gwen Salley (3:13)

Okay. And is there a reason why you decided to make this move in 2020, Covid aside? Is there a dynamic that you identified in Europe where the team in the valley was like, okay, it makes sense to make that move right now?

Luciana Lixandru (3:28)

So Sequoia is very thoughtful about any move, and especially when it comes to entering a new geography. Of course, we've been active in China and in India for a long time, for over a decade, and for the past decade, we have not entered a new geography because we take these things so seriously. So there's just so much more opportunity in Europe than ever before. I would say the market really pulled us in other than us finding our way here. Really interesting talent comes out of anywhere, and we want to be as close to that talent as possible, and we want to be able to help on the ground.

The way we think about things is the following. We want to invest in global category leaders. When we invested in UiPath, we looked at the competition in robotic process automation in the US, we looked at the competition in Europe, and we decided UiPath would be the global category leader. This company started in Eastern Europe in Romania. It's an unusual location for a very successful technology company. But we want to have the opportunity to look across geographies and pick the company that we really want to put the entire weight of Sequoia behind.

Gwen Salley (4:44)

Definitely. And also, you mentioned a few deals that you've been making in Europe before having a presence on the ground, like Klarna, Graphcore, UiPath. What is going to fundamentally change with having a team being present physically on the ground in Europe?

Luciana Lixandru (5:00)

What will change is that we're hoping to find founders earlier.

We invested in some of these companies very early on, by the way. Unity was a Series A investment. And we invested, I believe, about 10 years ago. So in some of them, we did invest very early, and some a bit later, like in UiPath, for example. But we want to find more of these exceptional founders, and we want to find them earlier on. We want to intersect them already at the seed stage, at the Series A stage. And we really feel that the best way to do that is to be on the ground, and to develop our networks here on the ground. So that's the first reason. The second reason is, we want to be able to help on the ground. Sequoia is a very, we think of ourselves as company builders, not only investors. And a lot of the founders we work with will expand into the US, and that's a big part of why we think we can be very helpful. At the same time, of course, these companies will always have strong European roots. And being here on the ground, I think, makes a big difference in order to be able to help them at home in Europe and in the US as they decide to expand over there.