Sequoia's Roelof Botha: Why Venture Capital is Broken & How Great Companies Are Built

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Sequoia is the most sought after name in the venture capital business.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
The firm has made over a thousand investments, now worth in the trillions in public market value.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:11)
There's a list of five VCs who I think can really transform a company, and you're one of those five.

**Roelof Botha** (0:17)
When I joined Sequoia, it was clear that if I wanted to make it as a partner, you needed to produce meaningful gains.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:23)
YouTube, Instagram, Square, this is a list of amazing, amazing start-ups.

**Roelof Botha** (0:28)
Our ambition is to build a partnership that endures, and that means we need to leave it in a better place than we found it.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:35)
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sequoia Capital's Roelof Botha. Good to see you, bro.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:45)
Good to see you.

**David Sacks** (0:48)
Good to see you.

**Eric Friedberg** (0:49)
Welcome.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:51)
Roelof, there's a question. What's that?

**Roelof Botha** (0:54)
Where did Sacks go?

**David Sacks** (0:56)
He had to peepee.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:57)
He had to make a wee-wee.

**Eric Friedberg** (0:59)
Come on. Yeah, exactly. You guys did work together.

**Roelof Botha** (1:03)
For 25 years ago. And he just abandons us right now.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:06)
He's had enough of you. Everybody wants to know, who's your favorite Sequoia Scout of all time? Let's go through it. Jason Calacanis, it is hilarious when you think about it. You came to me, gosh, 15 years ago, and you said, I have an idea for a program. It's called Sequoia Scouts. We'd like to have you go around and invest in some companies.

**Roelof Botha** (1:35)
And no good deed shall go unpunished.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:38)
Absolutely. It created a monster. But that program...

**David Sacks** (1:42)
Sorry, before you ask your question, how far are you going to insert your head up Roelof's ass?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:47)
Poof. We sat him that far away for a reason.

**David Sacks** (1:50)
I mean, sorry, bro. Jesus Christ. Go on with your question. Let me land the question. What's your question, Jason?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:59)
That program had some, that first cohort of individuals wound up being a pretty interesting group of folks. Maybe you can tell everybody just a little bit about that program you conceived of, and then who were some of the first folks in it and the first investments.

**Roelof Botha** (2:19)
We conceived of this program, as you mentioned, in 2010 when we launched it. And the idea was that there were a bunch of contemporary founders who had very interesting access to up-and-coming founders who were turning to them for advice. But these founders didn't yet have money. At the point that you became a scout, you didn't have the net worth you have now where you could write a check on your own. And so we thought it would be a great program for us to provide the capital for founders like yourself to be able to invest in those companies and hopefully we would get an introduction to those companies for us to be able to make an investment too. So you were in that program, you helped us with the investment in Uber, Sam Altman was in that group as well, he helped with an investment in a little company called Stripe.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:58)
They did okay.

**Roelof Botha** (2:59)
So at this point that fund is a 26x fund at this point.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:03)
Wow, that's up there in the...

**Roelof Botha** (3:04)
It's pretty good.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:05)
What's the best fund in the history of Sequoia, was it the Google Fund, the WhatsApp Fund, which one has the highest multiple in history?

**Roelof Botha** (3:12)
The highest multiple in history is I think Venture 12, which has Airbnb, Dropbox, Natera, AdMob, and a couple of other companies. And then Venture 13, which is the fund right after that, has Stripe and Square, Now Called Block, MongoDB, and a bunch of other companies. So those were both north of 20x funds.

**David Sacks** (3:39)
Tell us about the venture industry, actually. So we're at a point in the cycle where there's been a lot of specialization, both maybe at the stage level, at the sector level. There's been all kinds of experimentation and approaches and strategy. Can you just level set on what you've learned and what the industry has learned and where we are?

**Roelof Botha** (3:58)
I'm glad you called it an industry, not an asset class. I listened to one of the shows you guys had recently, and I think there's a huge problem with the venture industry that there's too much money. You guys have talked about this before. Venture industry as a whole invests right now between 150 to 200 billion dollars a year, was the last number I saw. If you think about reasonable assumptions for returns, let's just say 12% per annum net, which isn't great. You might as well invest in an index fund. The math basically implies that you need 3.5 to 4X funds to make that math work over a reasonable time frame. If you're investing, let's just say, 200 billion dollars a year, the industry needs to give back 700, 800 billion a year. VCs don't own 100% of the company. Last time I checked. That means that the aggregate exit value is north of a trillion a year.