Pat Grady: Sequoia Partner on Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha and Alfred Lin | E1174

If you have Sequoia on your cap table, chances are your life just got a lot easier. There are kind of two things that I care most about when assessing founders. So one is founder market fit and two is the vector that describes them. The market determines how big a company can get. The founder determines how big the company will get. I'd say on sourcing, we are eight or nine out of 10. On picking, I think we're maybe a six out of 10. When a company is a wild success and you don't see us in the cap table, chances are at some point we screwed it up.

Ready to go? (instrumental music plays) Pat, I am so excited for this, my friend. I mean, we've known each other for like nine years and-

It's been a long time.

... we've never done this in person.

Been a long time. It's good to be here.

Thank you so much for coming. Now, I spoke to literally everyone on the team, I think, and I said to you before, everyone responded, which has never happened before, which is testament genuinely to you as a leader.

(laughs)

Really, it's amazing to see the culture that you've built.

We have a great team.

But I spoke to Sean McGuire and he said, "You got to just start with the upbringing." And Matt Miller said this too. He said like, you know, growing up in Wyoming, you know, doing roofs in the summer holidays?

(laughs)

Just talk to me about the childhood in terms of what do you think shaped you most? So you don't need to give a narrative on what-

Yeah, yeah.

But what shaped you most?

I think my one-liner would be happy but desperate. And the word desperate-

Sounds like my love life. (laughs)

(laughs) The word, the word desperate is probably a bit too dramatic in the context of the first word, because it was, it was very happy. My parents were wonderful people. I got a great, great brother. You know, it was a very loving family. There was no trauma. There was no suffering in my childhood. But the, um, uh, but the desperate piece, I think like a lot of people who grow up in small towns, you just have this desperate need to figure out what else is out there. And when you're in a small town, even if it's a very nice town, and, and we lived in Gillette, Wyoming, which is in the northeastern part of the state, and it's coal mining country, but it's a really, it's a really nice place to grow up. Even when you're in a nice place like that, you just feel like the world is small and feel like there must be more out there. And you kind of have this desperate need to go figure out what that is. And so when I was in high school, I think the, my greatest fear was boredom. And I think now, that kind of translates into my greatest fear, which is probably irrelevance, just kind of feeling like you are living a life that is worthwhile.