Jeff Wang: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta|E1212

I do think there are more threats on Google's business than there have been ever in the company's history. I think NVIDIA's price is reasonable if you think it's gonna continue to keep going. For us, 70% of our research process is actually up front on the theme and only 30% on the actual company. You have to be a pirate interpreting a treasure map. We need to sail to the right island. Now, if we don't sail to the right island, it doesn't really matter which ship you picked. Those are just not good investments.

Ready to go? (instrumental music plays) Jeff, I am so excited for this, dude. Listen, I spoke to Mike, I spoke to Doug, I spoke to Pat, many of our mutual friends. So, thank you so much for joining me today.

Oh, thank you so much for having me on the pod. Uh, by the way, I did see your tweet the other day about your frustration with folks going on the podcast circuit. This is my first podcast ever and I don't expect to do them regularly, so I've been listening to your pod for a long time. Sequoia folks have had such good things to say about you, and so I'm super excited to be on.

I pay them a lot of money to say-

(laughs)

... certain nice things, and that's, that's a big spend. Uh, listen, I wanna start in the early days, which is, how did you come to join SCG? And just take me to that aha moment and the joining.

So, we started SCGE, or, or Sequoia Capital Global Equities, in 2009. Uh, and it was really hatched actually by Jim Goetz, originally, so he worked with Michael, Doug, and Roelof to really get it off the ground. And I joined a year later, in 2010, before we externally launched and, and raised money from LPs. And I think I joined for the same reason that most people join a startup. So, I believed in the mission, uh, and this was to build a world-class public equities business, partnered with Sequoia Capital, which, which I believed at the time and still consider to be the best venture capital firm in the world. And so I joined as an early employee. Uh, we had 50 million of internal capital. Uh, we now manage about 9 billion of mostly external LP capital, but that internal capital amount is also now about a billion. Uh, the portfolio is about two thirds public and then one third private, and that one third private is almost exclusively co-investments with Sequoia. And so, when the SCG opportunity came along, I was super intrigued because it was a chance to go build a public equities business that had true ecosystem advantages in technology, and I believe those advantages would translate into the public markets. And then, I was also encouraged by the support and backing that SCG had from Sequoia's most senior leaders, like Jim and Doug and Michael and Roelof. On the flip side, though, uh, I was taking a 70% pay cut, uh, and there was a real risk of failure, right? Most hedge fund launches don't survive. And so my career prospects, if it failed, wouldn't have looked very good. I took the plunge to try to build something special.