Uncapped #36 | Pat Grady & Alfred Lin from Sequoia

**Pat Grady** (0:00)
We've been recording the number that everybody votes on every investment for more than a decade now. Our internal data shows that consensus versus non-consensus does not matter at all.

**Jack Altman** (0:12)
It's just not a factor.

**Pat Grady** (0:14)
Presence of conviction is what matters. And so if everybody is a six, we vote zero to 10, no five, so six and above is positive, four and below is negative. If everybody's a six, probably shouldn't make the investment. It's consensus, but nobody has conviction.

**Jack Altman** (0:29)
Strong yes, strong no is much better.

**Pat Grady** (0:31)
If three people are nines and three people are one, we should probably make the investment.

**Jack Altman** (0:38)
All right, guys, thank you very much for doing this. This is my first attempt at a three-person podcast.

**Pat Grady** (0:44)
This is our first showing together, so.

**Jack Altman** (0:48)
Yeah, so I apologize if this is a disaster.

**Alfred Lin** (0:50)
It's not gonna be a disaster. We're gonna ask you questions too.

**Jack Altman** (0:53)
That's what I want. And then we can edit everything out. This could be a five-minute pod with whatever's good.

**Pat Grady** (0:56)
Love it.

**Jack Altman** (0:57)
And that'll be fine.

**Pat Grady** (0:58)
Five minutes might be generous.

**Jack Altman** (0:59)
That's all right. We'll take what we can get. I guess to start, how are you feeling? And where's your mindset? Are you like, do you feel the way you expected to when you first knew this was happening? You're a couple weeks settled in. What's going on psychologically?

**Alfred Lin** (1:15)
I mean, we just came out of a meeting where we both said we're more excited than ever before. And so we're excited. And part of it is because we get to help co-lead Sequoia into the next generation with a great team. And the team that we have is probably one of the best that we've ever had in the history of Sequoia.

**Jack Altman** (1:37)
Does it feel like heavy or light? Like, does it feel more like you just got to pick up the most fun video game, or are you like, whoa, I have the weight of something very serious on my shoulders?

**Pat Grady** (1:46)
I think it's a little bit of both. You know, I think for both Alfred and I, the idea of being steward someday was sort of a dream, but not an objective. I mean, it wasn't something that we sought necessarily, but it's an honor to get to continue the legacy that Rulof and Doug and Jim and everybody else sort of started for us. So I think it's heavy in the sense that we feel a responsibility to make Sequoia great. I think it's also light in a sense that one of the kind of main things that we want to try to do for Sequoia is to kind of get it back to what it's been for most of our 53 year old history, where Alfred and I are doing minimal amounts of administrative work and mostly in the field making investments alongside a team of people like Andrew Reed and Luciana Alexandru and David Kahn and Constantine Bueller, who are amazing at what they do. And our job is really just to enable them as opposed to really manage people.

**Jack Altman** (2:45)
If you think about like, you know, aspirationally, like, how good could it get? Do you like have in your mind like things that have to be, like, could it get better than this? Could it get more dominant than it's been? Or is the goal just to like stay where you are?

**Pat Grady** (2:58)
So actually, I'm obviously biased, but I think that if you took you, I think if you took the partners at Sequoia and you stacked ranked them against all of the other partners in our business, I think that our 7th or 8th person is still in the top 10 Like, I think we truly have...

**Jack Altman** (3:16)
Dang.

**Pat Grady** (3:17)
I know that's a really obnoxious...

**Jack Altman** (3:18)
We'll probably have a highlight reel of all the other people. I'm just kidding.

**Pat Grady** (3:20)
But I think we truly have like an unbelievably talented set of partners.

**Jack Altman** (3:25)
You do.

**Pat Grady** (3:26)
And I think for that reason, like you could even take me and Alfred out of the picture, and I think Sequoia would be an amazing shape.

**Jack Altman** (3:32)
Well, it's an interesting thing because these are individuals who could be incredibly successful on their own, obviously, and then you put them on the Sequoia platform, they get all the advantages that you have on top of that.