Pat Grady & Alfred Lin on the Tactics of Great Venture Investing | Ep. 36

We've been recording the number that everybody votes on every investment for more than a decade now. Um, our internal data shows that consensus versus non-consensus does not matter at all.

It's just not a factor.

Presence of conviction is what matters.

Huh.

And so if everybody is a six, we vote zero to 10, no fives, 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. If-

Strong yes, strong no is much better.

If three peoples are, are nines and three people are one, we should probably make the investment. [upbeat music]

All right, guys, thank you very much for doing this. This is my first attempt at a three-person podcast. So-

And this, this is our-

This is our first- [chuckles]

... showing together, so.

Yeah. So I apologize if this is a disaster. [chuckles] Um, so-

It's not gonna be a disaster. Um, we're gonna ask you questions, too. [chuckles]

That's what I want, and then we can edit everything out. This could be a five-minute pod with whatever's good. [chuckles]

Love it.

And that'll be fine. Um-

Five minutes might be generous.

No, that's all right. We'll take what we can get.

[chuckles]

I guess to start, like, how are you guys... How are you feeling, and, like, where's your mindset? Are you like- do you feel the way you expected to when you first knew this was happening? Like, you're a couple weeks settled in, like, what's, what's going on psychologically?

I mean, we just came out of a, a meeting where we both said we're more excited than ever before. Um, and so we're, we're excited. And, uh, it's- part of it is because we're- we get to help lead, co-lead S- 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.

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?"

I think it's a little bit of both. Y- 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-

[chuckles]

... sought necessarily, but it's, it's an honor to get to continue the-

Yeah, of course

... legacy that Roelof and Doug and Jim, and everybody else, sort of started for us. Um, 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 kinda main things that we wanna try to do for Sequoia is to kinda 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 Reid and Luciana Alexandru and, you know, David Khan and Constantin Buhler, who are amazing at what they do, and our job is really just to enable them, as opposed to, to really manage people.