A scrappy upstart taking on hyperscalers in a category with lots of hand-wavers, Dropbox became the canonical example of Silicon Valley viral growth, adding 50 million users in the first years following their 2008 launch and quickly dominating their category. However, as CEO Drew Houston explains, their path from viral sensation to enduring business was filled with daunting obstacles. As giants released competing products and tried to crush them, Dropbox embarked on a set of strategic acquisitio...
Jan 09, 2025•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Earlier this season we heard the startup story of ServiceNowfrom Fred Luddy setting out to reinvent IT workflows as a first-time founder, to Frank Slootman joining as CEO to scale the business to an IPO. Even more remarkable is that ServiceNow has only accelerated as a public company, growing over ten-fold in the last decade. At a recent closed event in Europe, Sequoia partner Pat Grady spoke with ServiceNows current CEO Bill McDermott, who took the reins in 2019. This conversation was recorded ...
Jan 02, 2025•32 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast Millions of Americans use their smartphones to invest and manage their finances every daybut before Robinhood started in 2013, finance looked very different. Investing was something for the wealthy, with steep fees charged on every trade, and was done exclusively on computers with arcane trading software. In this episode, co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev explains why Robinhood set out to democratize access to investing and reinvent it for a new generation, how it overcame immense challenges in that...
Dec 19, 2024•48 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast This episode takes us back to the earliest days of YouTube, as the founders explain why it was a longshot that succeeded against all odds. When cofounders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim left PayPal to start YouTube, it wasnt even clear that the nascent broadband infrastructure could support playing video in a browser. In a brief period until its acquisition by Googlefrom its first incarnation as a video dating site to confronting daunting technical and legal challengesthe early story of...
Dec 05, 2024•48 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Founder Matthew Rabinowitz opens up about the intensely personal journey that set him on a course to revolutionizing healthcare. A PhD in electrical engineering, he had no background in genetics or biology, but after his sister had a baby with Down syndrome that hadnt been detected and tragically died after 6 days, Matthew dedicated himself to solving this problem. After overcoming seemingly impossible obstacles, today Natera leverages molecular biology and novel bioinformatics technology to pro...
Nov 21, 2024•53 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast Tony Xu and Miki Kuusi share insights from building two of the world's most successful delivery platformsDoorDash and Woltwhich merged in 2022 to create an $80B GOV business operating in 32 countries. In this candid conversation with Sequoia's Alfred Lin live at a Sequoia event in Europe, they discuss the challenges of scaling operational excellence, maintaining culture through hypergrowth and the future of commerce in cities. Host: Alfred Lin, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Tony Xu, Miki Kuusi
Nov 14, 2024•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast DoorDash faced skeptics from the start. Grubhub, Delivery.com, and others were already addressing the restaurant delivery market when CEO Tony Xu and his co-founders started in 2013. But after talking to hundreds of local small businesses, they realized there was still an unmet need: None of the competitors solved the problem of delivery with an on-demand workforce, the way Uber had done with drivers. After struggling to raise initial funding, DoorDash found traction. But the next few years woul...
Oct 24, 2024•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast The biggest enterprise software company to come out of Europe in the last decade didnt come from London, Paris, Berlin or Stockholmbut Bucharest, Romania. UiPath, founded in 2005 and originally called DeskOver, was a scrappy handful of engineers bootstrapping out of an apartment in Bucharest for about a decade, seeking in vain for product-market fit. When they stumbled upon an opportunity in the nascent enterprise software category of Robotic Process Automation, the company did a hard pivot, cha...
Oct 10, 2024•42 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast Reddit is one of the largest and most culturally influential sites on the internetand its journey is one of the most unusual company stories in internet history. College roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian founded Reddit in 2005 and scaled it on a shoestring until Cond Nast acquired it the following year. Struggling for direction under its parent company, the founders left, and Cond Nast ultimately spun it out as an independent company once again. With Reddit buckling under user disconten...
Sep 26, 2024•43 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast MongoDB, founded in 2007, originally aimed to create a platform-as-a-service system with a new database layer. Facing competition from Google, the founders pivoted to focus solely on their database product, MongoDBa new kind of database built for the scale of the internet era. Founder Dwight Merriman built a product that developers loved, but scaling the company proved challenging until Dev Ittycheria took the reins as CEO in 2014. As cloud computing grew, MongoDB transitioned from on-premise so...
Sep 12, 2024•44 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast In 2004, bankrupt after the company where hed previously worked had imploded, Fred Luddy decided to start over as a first-time founder at age 50. His vision was to reinvent the nascent IT software field for the cloud era. What started as simple help desk replacement software would eventually become a ~$150B market cap company powering digital workflows across the enterprisebut success didnt come easy. Initially bootstrapped and ultra-lean, the companys infrastructure began buckling under its own...
Aug 29, 2024•42 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast In Season 1 of Crucible Moments, we heard from founders like PayPals Max Levchin, Blocks Jack Dorsey, Nvidias Jensen Huang and more about the turning points and key decisions that shaped their journeys. Now Crucible Moments is back for another exciting season. Well get the unvarnished history and inside story from Tony Xu of DoorDash, Drew Houston of Dropbox, Frank Slootman of ServiceNow, Vlad Tenev of Robinhood and more. Hosted by Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital.
Aug 22, 2024•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Crucible Moments will be back shortly with season 2. Youll hear from the founders of YouTube, DoorDash, Reddit, and more. In the meantime, wed love to introduce you to a new original podcast, Training Data, where Sequoia partners learn from builders, researchers and founders who are defining the technology wave of the future: AI. The following conversation with Harrison Chase of LangChain is all about the future of AI agentswhy theyre suddenly seeing a step change in performance, and why theyre ...
Jul 11, 2024•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast CEO Jensen Huang tells the legendary story of Nvidia, from the companys early days pioneering 3D graphics cards for a niche PC gaming market to powering the AI revolution as the sixth most valuable company in the world. Nvidia faced multiple near-death experiences along the way, and their so-called diving catches, as Jensen calls them, were some of the most dramatic business stories of the modern era. Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, Andrew Ng, Mark...
Nov 30, 2023•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Millions of customers have explored their genome with 23andMe. But when the company started in 2006, the idea of consumer DNA testing was heresy to the medical establishment. The FDA once even ordered 23andMe to stop selling its health testing product. The company persevered to make allies out of adversaries, and became the only FDA-approved product on the market. Learn how 23andMe defined the DNA testing category, and used its success to enter the massive new field of drug discovery. Host: Roel...
Nov 16, 2023•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Co-founders Hosain Rahman and Alex Asseily, and Chief Creative Officer Yves Behar, recount the meteoric rise and fall of Jawbone. One of the most innovative companies of the mid 2000s, Jawbone pioneered wearable technology with UP, the first wrist-worn fitness tracker, and revolutionized sound with Jambox, the first smart wireless speaker. In one of the most dramatic turns in Silicon Valley history, the company went from a nearly $4 billion valuation to liquidation. This cautionary tale provides...
Nov 02, 2023•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah reveal how they took a blog started as a hobby and turned the ideas behind it into a $20+ billion success. In 2006, HubSpot upended traditional approaches to marketing by taking advantage of the the nascent internet in a new way: By capitalizing on seach engines and social media, they offered a way to pull customers in rather than pushing ads and mailers out. They coined the new category inbound marketing. They continued to defy conventional wisdom, deci...
Oct 19, 2023•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast What happens to an events company when every event is canceled? Even if you have spent 14 years building something, it could truly be gone in 14 days. After working tirelessly to revolutionize how live events are organized, this was the reality Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz faced in March of 2020 as pandemic lockdowns went into effect, extinguishing the lifeblood of her business. She brought the same strategic thinking and grit that had led the company through its previous inflection points to rall...
Oct 05, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast CEO Jack Dorsey reflects on Blocks origins and defining moments with host Roelof Botha. Dorsey founded Square in 2009 with a clear vision: economic empowerment for all. Their dongle that turns iPhones into credit card readers was just the start. With Square, small business owners were able to reach more customers and better manage their companies. But when Cash App, which emerged from an internal hackathon, started to gain traction, Square had a decision to make: stick to their core focus, or ri...
Sep 21, 2023•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast As Airbnb took off in the early 2010s, Brian Chesky remembers worrying, this is just one accident away from being a dead idea. That accident finally came in 2011 when a hosts apartment was ransacked. It set off a period of soul searching that became a turning pointthe companys efforts to rebuild trust led it to becoming the global behemoth it is today. In this episode, Brian reveals how this crisis shaped his thinking, and how the lessons would apply to the companys next defining moments, includ...
Sep 07, 2023•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast PayPal was the defining tech company of its generation, with alumni going on to start YouTube, Tesla, Yelp, LinkedIn, among many others. But the company nearly didnt make it. The PayPal of today only exists because of how its team navigated early, unprecedented inflection points. Find out why Max Levchin now says he does not recommend a merger of equals to anyone, how the team pioneered CAPTCHA to fight $10M in monthly fraud that nearly sank the fledgling business, and how they maneuvered throug...
Sep 07, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast A podcast about the inflection points that shaped some of the most important companies of our time. Crucible moments are pivotal decisions that determine your trajectory. Hear from founders like Jack Dorsey of Block, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, and Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe about how they navigated the challenges and opportunities that defined their stories. Hosted by Roelof Botha, Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital, who has spent over 20 years building companies such as Youtube, Square, and Instagr...
Aug 30, 2023•4 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
