Inside Sequoia’s Strategy: Alfred Lin on Company Building & Partnering Long-term

Sequoia Partner Alfred Lin https://x.com/Alfred_Lin joins Sourcery to share how one of the world’s most iconic venture funds, which has distributed over $43B to investors since 2020, continues to back outlier founders at the earliest stages. Sequoia just launched its latest early stage funds: Seed Fund VI: $200M and Venture Fund XIX: $750M, to continue partnering with the next generation of outlier founders at the start of their journey. Sitting at Number 1 on the Midas list two years in a row, Alfred goes deep to share Sequoia’s company-building philosophy with stories from OpenAI, DoorDash, Kalshi, Commure, Zipline, and more. Alfred explains how Sequoia thinks about partnering with founders four standard deviations above the mean, why efficiency matters more than capital, the role of pivots in scaling, and how to distinguish quality revenue from experimental revenue in today’s AI-driven market. Topics include: Sequoia’s founder-first investing philosophyHow Alfred helped Kalshi navigate regulatory battlesDoorDash’s efficiency playbook vs. Uber EatsZipline’s “Big P” pivot to medical drone deliveryRevenue quality, AI hype cycles, and Sequoia’s outlook Alfred Lin: https://x.com/Alfred_Lin Molly O’Shea: ⁠https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠ Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryvc 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery • Carta https://carta.com/sourcery—Carta connects founders, investors, and limited partners through software purpose-built for private capital. Trusted by 65,000+ companies in 160+ countries, Carta’s platform of software & services lays the groundwork so you can build, invest, and scale with confidence. https://carta.com/sourcery • Kalshi https://kalshi.com/sourcery—The largest prediction market and the only legal platform in the US where people can trade directly on the outcomes of future events: https://kalshi.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ (00:00) Alfred Lin, Sequoia (02:37) What makes an “outlier founder” (04:15) Bespoke founder support: lessons from Airbnb & DoorDash (07:10) Stories from Kalshi: regulation, elections & more markets (14:00) Little “p” pivots vs. Big “P” pivots (14:17) Zipline’s dramatic pivot to medical drones (18:00) DoorDash vs. Uber: efficiency as a weapon (19:49) When to pour capital into growth (20:07) Growth vs. true product-market fit (22:19) The race to $100M revenue – healthy or not? (25:55) Pilot/experimental revenue vs. real ARR (27:26) Breaking down revenue quality: SaaS vs. hardware vs. services (29:00) AI cycle, hype, and founder pressure (31:36) Why Sequoia expects more from this generation of founders (34:21) Closing thoughts: measuring company velocity, not just revenue

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  When the company is down, there is no point to beat someone when they're down. The best thing you can do is roll up your sleeves, pick up the pieces and help the company get through that hardship. And that's what we do at Sequoia.

• 0:10Molly O'Shea?

  Both Tanay and Tarek said throughout the time, you've been very supportive. But now it seems the relationship is much more focused and a little bit more intense.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  This is a very Sequoia characteristic of board members. We partner with the founders and we know to be shock observers during bad times and to be sparring partners during good times.

• 0:30Molly O'Shea?

  You back a wide range of companies, but what is that through line for you?

• 0:35Speaker 00

  At Sequoia, we're focused on outlier founders. And that's pretty consistent to how many companies and how many founders we have to see before we make one investment. Those two companies, Othelis, Camira, and then Kalshi, their stories are very, very different, even though it took a long time. The sort of natural tendency that every founder or investor thinks is like, oh, all these successes are overnight successes. It's just not true. Every founder has their journey and it's taken longer than they want. Even if when things go fast, it takes longer than they want. This idea that we have, we can just get to a hundred million dollars in revenue, that's the goal. I think quality of the revenue matters. It's why one-time revenue is not seen as good as subscription revenue. In technology, we live in a world of accelerating change.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  Things are moving faster today than 10 years ago. 10 years ago, things were moving faster than 10 years before that. And part of that means that founders today have a harder job than founders a decade ago.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  All right.

• 1:41Molly O'Shea?

  Wow. Alfred Lin, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Well, thank you for having me on the show. This is so fun.

• 1:48Molly O'Shea?

  It feels like a long time coming.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Well, I've been listening to what you've been producing in the last few months and the shows have been great.

• 1:56Molly O'Shea?

  Well, I have had a highlight reel of Alfred Lin's portfolio.

• 2:02Molly O'Shea?

  I'm gonna get more on too. So I've gotten to know Kalshi really well.

• 2:08Molly O'Shea?

  I've gone to know Nominal really well, helped break their funding announcement. I recently, just yesterday, was at Camer's office, was meeting with Tanay. I got a nice tour of physical intelligence with Brian. And they all have the same through line, and it's Alfred Lin. I'm curious, you back a wide range of companies. And this also includes Citadel Securities, and I want to go deep into this later because I find it fascinating. But what is that through line for you?

• 2:37Speaker 00

  I don't really think about the through line per se, but maybe there's a through line of my tastes in founders. We always start with the founders. And I think the companies that you named and many more at Sequoia were focused on outlier founders. And you can ask the question, what makes someone an outlier? And you can express it in, maybe in statistical terms. One standard deviation above the mean is good. Two is great. Three is exceptional. And four, standard deviations above the mean would be an outlier. And that's pretty consistent to how many companies and how many founders we have to see before we make one investment.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  Typically, we see about a thousand companies before we make one investment. And on top of that, being an outlier, I love founders that have a unique and novel insight into the world. And they mostly see a problem in the world that the world is solved incorrectly, in their view. And they want to change it. And they have the daringness and the purpose and the desire to go change the world. And that's what makes this job so fun.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  You can think of this as buying low, selling high, being an investor. But I really just think about it as partnering with these great founders who want to go change the world.

• 4:05Molly O'Shea?

  One of the notes that I learned from multiple founders about you, it comes from your operator builder DNA. How do you help these companies build?

• 4:19Speaker 00

  I think it's very bespoke for each and every one of these founders. And in in certain cases, like Brian Chesky doesn't need to be told how to tell a story. He's such a great storyteller. But, you know, international expansion, sort of setting up operations, he may need more help on recruiting, what to look for, et cetera, in the early days. With Tony Hsu, he's so good at looking at things from the highest level of detail all the way to the lowest level of detail. And I'll teach him that, but, you know, maybe certain things around how to think about breaking down the problem into smaller and smaller problems and and tell the story behind the data.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Every single founder comes at this problem of company building in a slightly different way because they have a certain set of skills. And I I hopefully help them think about all the other skills that they want to learn and will improve themselves as a founder by evening out all of the things that they want to learn along the way. With Kalshi, I don't have to teach him anything about regulatory. They're just experts at that. But, you know, sort of product and then they're great engineers, but building the product, making the the UI come to life, that took a bit of time because that wasn't something that they were used to. So for every founder, it's a little different. And that's what makes this job so much fun.

• 5:43Molly O'Shea?

  Have you been to Kalshi's new headquarters?

• 5:46Speaker 00

  I have not been to their new office. I was at their old office where they had this big celebratory thing during elections of last year, and it was just so fun to for them to call the elections last year. I was that was definitely exciting in their office. They called it before all of the other national media outlets. So that was that was a ton of fun.

• 6:10Molly O'Shea?

  They keep on doing that over and over and over again.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that was the start.

• 6:14Molly O'Shea?

  That was the start.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  We you always remember the start of things, you know, the success, the second or the third or the fourth is. Fun, but not as interesting as the first.

• 6:25Molly O'Shea?

  So between Kalshi and Khmer, I want to talk about both of those ones because they took a while to bake. But recently, they both hit inflection points. And for you as an investor and an operator, I'm curious how you helped navigate those really, really long periods of time. Like when I had Tarek on the podcast, he said it was brutal. Like it, he wouldn't wish it upon his worst enemy. Like it was just a excruciating, brutal process, but you were always supportive and pushing them along. So what, what was it like to get them to this point? And how do you support them now? How is it different?

• 7:05Speaker 00

  So I think the sort of natural tendency that every founder or investor thinks is like, oh, all these successes are overnight successes. It's just not true. Every founder has their journey and it's taken longer than they want. Even if, when the things go fast, it takes longer than they want. For those, those two companies, Othelis, Khmer, and then Kalshi, they're, the stories are very, very different, even though it took a long time. On Kalshi, the, the thing that they wanted to do was to be the first regulated

• 7:43Speaker 00

  events marketplace for, and, and exchange. And that took a long time just to get the regulatory side, to get work with the CFTC to get regulated. And once they did that, we invested in, I think, December of 2020, when that happened. But even then, it took a bunch of time working with the CFTC to launch these events, to sort of figure out how to sort of systematize it and so that they can launch. More and more events over and over again in a more repeatable way. And so when they first started, it probably took eighteen months to launch their first event. And now it takes a matter of hours. That work is something that just takes effort.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you have to take this big problem and break it down and figure out how to make it repeatable. It's it's the first one is do things that don't scale. But over time, you have to figure out how to scale the process. And that's what we we did there. And then we did it from and then we did small little P pivots along the way. So we started with current events, then with economic indicators. And then the election, which we had to sort of work very, very hard to get, including deciding whether we would sue the regulator. Our regulators generally not a great idea to sue your regulator unless you have a really strong case.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  And there was a lot of thinking and back and forth about exactly what the calculus was on how we would win. And we thought we had a really strong case and Tarek and Luana were fearless. And that's why they were able to propose that we sue our regulator of errors and to open up elections and we won. And then we pivoted small little P pivot to elections, which was a big deal. Then politics, other events along the way. And now there's a there's a small little P pivot to to sports. And along the way, we are going to go event by event. And the word Kashi means everything.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  So eventually they want to offer all sorts of event contracts where you can, if you have an insight, you can trade up.

• 10:02Molly O'Shea?

  I hope I don't get in trouble by saying this. Both Tane and Tarek said throughout the time you've been very supportive. But now it seems like you understand, okay, we caught something and we have to go hard on it. And so. The relationship is much more focused and a little bit more intense. How do you think about that?

• 10:23Speaker 00

  I think I've been pretty intense with them the whole time. They just don't realize it. I think this is a very Sequoia characteristic of board members. We partner with the founders and we know to be shock observers during bad times and to be sparring partners during good times. And so there's no point when the company is down. If something goes wrong, there is no point to beat someone when they're down. You actually, the best thing you can do is roll up your sleeves, pick up the pieces and help the company get through that hardship. And that's what we do at Sequoia. And then when things are going well, you want to be a sparring partner. You want to, you want to take things to the next level. You want to take, you have something that's working.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Well, it can work even better. And one of the things I, I always reflect on is companies, when things are going well, they, they get a little arrogant. And the first sign of why companies fail is the hubris of much success. Jim Collins wrote a book, it was a small book about why the mighty fall. And the first sign is the hubris of much success. And the second is the undisciplined pursuit of more. Those things, when I see that, I try to nip it in the book.

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• 12:41Molly O'Shea?

  What are the key characteristics you look for in founders?

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Well, we talked a little bit about being an outlier and having a spike. And for me, that's like number one. You just, we want people who are just off the charts, really good at something. And they have this like dream of building something that they have never, that the world has never seen before. One of the things I really love doing is riffing with founders. And so I love to hear the unique and novel insights. I love to hear how deeply they've studied the market or the industry, even though they're an outsider. And I think there are founders, they fall into three different buckets. There's the person who's a dreamer.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  They just can paint this beautiful vision of the future and you just get enticed by that. And there are people who solve their own, they have a, they see a problem and they want to solve that problem. And I love riffing with them on that, on that particular problem. And then there are founders who are very technical and they can describe the technology, but they're less good with explaining what the business is. And I try to help each of those three in different ways.

• 13:59Molly O'Shea?

  You had mentioned lowercase p pivots. Is that what you call it? Lowercase p pivots? But in my notes and research, you also have capital P pivots. And for one of those, it was with ZipLine. So what happened with ZipLine?

• 14:17Speaker 00

  And so this concept of little P pivots and capital P pivots is like, you know, when Amazon went from books to music, that's like, that's category expansion. You can kind of imagine that that would be all of e-commerce. Big P is like, you're completely going out of e-commerce. And so ZipLine, they started out with this idea of building a mobile platform for robotics, where the iPhone was going to be the brains. And what they ended up with was what Keller would say was kind of like a toy. And people would play with it. They had fun with it. And then after a few days or a few weeks, they would put it back on the shelf. And it wasn't a very sticky product.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  And Keller went back to the drawing board and came back and said, you know what? I think we want to build drones. And I'm like, what? You were building this mobile platform for robotics. Now you want to build drones. You don't know anything about drones. You don't have any on the team that knows anything about how to make a drone. How are we going to do that? Oh, and by the way, we don't have any ability to fly drones beyond visual line of sight in the United States. What are we going to do? It's like, oh, well, I guess we need to fly outside the United States. Like, what? Okay. And by the way, like, why would anybody pay you? The system is going to be expensive to sort of get started.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  So why would anybody pay you to deliver anything? It's like, yeah, I think medical deliveries are really valuable. So we're going to start there. But we're going to start in Africa. We're going to start in Rwanda because the infrastructure there is pretty poor. The road infrastructure is just bad. But we're going to be able to take blood from the central of Rwanda and fly it out to all these sort of remote places to save lives. I'm like, hmm, that's very interesting. That's a very big pivot from where you were before.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  But we talked through it and we tried to sort of reason through from first principles why this would work. But the whole idea was we're going to go out to Rwanda. We're going to prove out that we can do this and then we can bring back all of the safety records to to the US and eventually be allowed to fly in the US, which is what has happened now. And we're going to do a lot of deliveries in the US now.

• 16:48Molly O'Shea?

  Did they relocate the business when they did that, like the headquarters and everything?

• 16:52Speaker 00

  They didn't relocate the business, but Keller, I think, spent a lot of time in Rwanda, setting things up. I think he lived there for like three to six months, just for the first three to six months.

• 17:03Molly O'Shea?

  Seems necessary.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  It seems, it definitely was necessary. There are a lot of parallel landings, too. There, it wasn't perfect on day one.

• 17:12Molly O'Shea?

  Did you go? Did you visit?

• 17:14Speaker 00

  I have not visited Rwanda yet.

• 17:17Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so we need to get you to Kalshi's headquarters and also to Rwanda.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Kalshi's headquarters, I'm going to see, fly in New York this week, so I'll see them. We're leading a bunch of students from Harvard and MIT to their offices this week. So I'll see their offices soon.

• 17:36Molly O'Shea?

  Some quants?

• 17:38Speaker 00

  I don't know if you can count them as quants quite yet. They haven't graduated.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  It's a little sort of college recruiting for both Kalshi and Clay.

• 17:48Molly O'Shea?

  Good. They've got a big, they've got a big office they should fill up. So one of your earlier investments is DoorDash. There is something that you mentioned about DoorDash, and this has to do with capital. It's not a strategic weapon, but efficiency is the weapon. So how do you think about? When businesses are growing, what levers to pull?

• 18:15Speaker 00

  One of the things that we had to deal with at DoorDash was capital was plentiful and a lot of a lot of companies were funded during that time and a lot of competitors in the food delivery space was was funded. And you can either take this view that capital is a strategic weapon, which some people have said, or you can take the view that your your business model is your strategic weapon, your product is your strategic weapon, your efficiency or unit economics, your strategic weapon. And I've always taken that view, which is why I've always told them, hey, you know, we're not going

• 18:55Speaker 00

  to be able to raise as much money as Uber, but we're still going to win because we're going to be twice as efficient and for every hundred dollars that we spend acquiring customers, we're going to get twice as many customers. If we can do that, then you should you should really pour the capital in to the engine and let it fire. One of the things I've always sort of thought through, thought about was that capital and marketing dollars are really fuel. But do you have a fire burning? And if you have a fire burning really, really hot, you want to pour fuel on it. If you don't have a fire burning, pouring fuel on the ground, it's not going to burn.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  So I always tell founders, let's get the fire going first. Let's get your flywheel going first, then pour fuel onto the fire, fuel into your jet engine.

• 19:49Molly O'Shea?

  How do you know when it's the right time? I feel like they're from from some of the conversations I've had on this podcast. Marketing and marketing success can often mask actual product market fit. So how do you think about that when applying capital towards?

• 20:07Speaker 00

  The saying goes, growth covers all sins. But the problem is, as soon as you stop growing or you stop pouring money or marketing into the engine, you see all the things that are wrong with the company. And at some level, you have to be intellectually honest about what's going on. Do you actually have product market fit to your question? Or are you just throwing money to? To get users. And to me, you need to prime the pump. Let's get real. Like, sometimes you just need to get some users and test it. And so then you learn how to get better and better at building the product. And that feeds back into product market fit.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  But when you don't have product market fit and you're hiding that fact with capital, that's kind of a defeatist way of building a company. You need to sort of be intellectually honest with yourself. Often, the data is very simple. You just have to look at the engagement of your product. And we often think about things of the sort of output metrics. And Amazon taught us to think about the input metrics. The input metric is engagement, then retention, then monetization. And DoorDash did an extremely good job of being focused on how many orders does the user actually order? How did they retain over time? And then we can figure out how much we want to monetize.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  And if we monetize them more, we can spend more, more capital to acquire them. There were a number of metrics that DoorDash tracked that were all about retention. They were very, very focused on making the retention curves, the cohort curves, smile. And I think that was the reason for much of their success. One of the things that

• 21:57Speaker 00

  I think we forget is that startups are great at figuring out how to deliver value. And then after you deliver value, then you want to capture the value. And so the same is true with revenue. Let's figure out whether we deliver value first before we monetize it.

• 22:19Molly O'Shea?

  We should talk about revenue. Revenue is a hot topic right now. The race to a hundred million dollars in revenue has become somewhat of a standard metric. It's now the benchmark and whoever can get there the fastest apparently gets a gold star. So I'm curious, from your standpoint, how do you think about this overall concept of getting to a hundred million dollars in revenue? And I guess the through line or Underneath that, there are categorically companies that are pushing that. So maybe we can break that down a bit, too. But how do you think about race to revenue and getting these benchmarks for early-stage companies?

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• 23:34Speaker 00

  It is a very important topic because, again, I think financial metrics, revenue is a financial metric, is an output metric. And the health of the business is not just the output metric, but it's a bunch of input metrics. And I, you know, as a board member,

• 23:55Speaker 00

  a way to summarize how well the company is doing is just to show you the financials and not show you any of the input metrics. And I think they go hand in hand. And if you think about, there's inputs, there's the company, and then there's output. And how efficiently you're taking the inputs to produce outputs, that's the throughput of the company. And that's what the founders make sure that there's high throughput, the management team, the employees make sure there's high throughput. I think you need to measure all three of those. This idea that we have, we can just get to $100 million in revenue allows the fact that, you know, that's the goal.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  And yet, I think quality of the revenue matters. That's why. You know, one-time revenue is not seen as good as subscription revenue. And that's why SaaS companies trade differently than software companies because software companies one-time license and yet they're not valued as well as a subscription company like a SaaS company. And so the quality of revenue really, really matters. And so I prefer to have slower growth, quality revenue than fast growth, non-quality revenue. And today, I think there are a lot of, a lot of revenue that is experimental revenue. People are willing to experiment because they don't want to be left behind in AI. And that's good and bad. It's great for founders.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  They get to finance some of the, their R and D with revenue. It's bad because it's pilot revenue and may go away. It, you know, so you need to figure out with that revenue, are you going to retain that customer? Retention is so important. And so you can get to a hundred million and then if you churn all of it, you're going to go back to zero pretty quickly.

• 25:47Molly O'Shea?

  Can you explain experimental revenue a little bit more? Like, are teams aware it's experimental or is it just, we're going to try out different business lines?

• 25:55Speaker 00

  I think the teams are aware, they hide the fact that it's experimental. Pilot revenue is experimental, right? So would you like to sign up for this pilot? If the pilot goes well, we'll sign a larger contract. That's very standard thing that has happened in enterprise sales. You go in, it's like, this is a new product. You've never used this before. Why don't you try it? And, uh, and if we can hit a bunch of ROI metrics, then the customer is like, okay, well, you hit a bunch of ROI metrics, I'm going to extend.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  And so the, counting pilot revenue and counting it as ARR and annualizing it is kind of a joke, which I think a lot of founders know it's a joke, but they don't have any problems. Just taking whatever month's revenue is, that's all pilot revenue and multiplying by 12.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  But you're laughing. You know, it's a good joke, but they do it anyway and they call it ARR, like as if it was recurring.

• 26:58Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. What are the other types of revenue that people claim to be revenue? I think it's, it would be good. It would be clarifying to just list out all the different ways in which people claim they have revenue. I'm not saying this is like a getcha for anybody, but like, I think it would be helpful for founders and even some maybe younger investors to understand the difference between like actual revenue versus these different kinds of pilot revenue, et cetera, that people are calling.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. So there's pilot revenue. There is, and so that isn't really long-term revenue. You've got, you've got to be honest with yourself. There's revenue where you get a revenue share and you tell people your gross revenue, not your net revenue. And, you know, in the marketplace business, the quote GMV versus your take. Your take is like five to 10% and you're, you're, you're talking about GMV. That was done a lot in the marketplace as companies. You're, you know, the, there, there are plenty of examples where

• 28:02Speaker 00

  customers, you, you have a high churn rate. So 30% of your customers churn and you want to just count this month as ARR when you know that 30% of them are going to churn. So the quality of the revenue is not very good. There's professional services revenue. You are getting paid to do professional services, but it's not product revenue. It's one time and it is revenue. You get paid, but it will disappear. There's the subscription and hardware revenue. People, if you buy Peloton, there's the Peloton machine and then there's the subscription revenue. We value the subscription revenue way more than the hardware revenue because the hardware revenue is one time and it's low gross margin, whereas the subscription revenue of Peloton is higher gross margin.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  So there are all these little things and little tricks and I think it's not trying to. Be devious or anything, but we don't sort of break out all these different revenue into

• 29:03Speaker 00

  into these different parts. And if you want to be intellectually honest, you would want to break out all these different parts to be intellectually honest about the health of your business. And my partner, Pat, always talks about what the, what are the numbers behind the numbers? And the better the founder is, the better the management team on understanding the numbers behind the numbers, the more levers they're going to have, the more understanding they're going to have in the business.

• 29:30Molly O'Shea?

  One of the undercurrents for all of this is the increased competition within startups with AI, this hype cycle, if you want to call it that.

• 29:40Molly O'Shea?

  Things are moving so much faster than anyone could have ever expected. And there is pressure to perform and to, to keep up with everyone else.

• 29:51Molly O'Shea?

  More recently, I don't know if you saw this, but there was, and this was really interesting because there was a lot of backlash on it, but

• 29:59Molly O'Shea?

  Hamon was on 20 VC and they were talking about the standard triple, triple, double, double. And Hamon was saying like, no, it's, we actually expect more than that now because of what they're seeing at General Catalyst. And on Twitter, founders didn't like to hear that. Other people didn't like to hear that. I would assume you don't like to hear that based on what you mentioned earlier. You'd rather have sustainable quality growth than something really, really fast. But what do you think that means for the overall context of where we are right now in the technology cycle of companies feeling the pressure to grow as fast as possible? And then also these really, really large VCs now expecting that?

• 30:44Speaker 00

  So let me separate two parts of your question because I think it's a very, very important question.

• 30:50Speaker 03

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• 31:36Speaker 00

  In technology, we live in a world of accelerating change. Things are moving faster today than 10 years ago. 10 years ago, things were moving faster than 10 years before that. And part of that means that founders today have a harder job than founders a decade ago. That's just the price of progress. And so there is an element of truth that we expect more of this generation. And by the way, why? Well, 10 years ago, we didn't have all of these customers on mobile, on every single device, connected to broadband everywhere around the world.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Your ability to reach customers today is just a lot easier than 10 years ago or 10 years before that. When I started, I was still building PCs and computers in junior high school and high school because cloned IBM PCs were expensive. So people wanted to buy cloned PCs and you put them together. You don't need to do that today. You buy like full service. Oh, no, you don't, you don't need to put servers into a rack. You just go on AWS or GCP or Azure and you just provision a server. And so, and you don't have to set it up anymore with foundation models. They're bundled it.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  And so things are just a lot easier today in some respects, which means it's a lot harder in other respects. And it's a lot harder to, to get. Above the fray because once you launch and you have any success, fifteen competitors show up. And that was true fifteen years ago, but it's way worse now. When DoorDash launched, there was a lot of competitors. But today, you know, if you launch an AI company and it has some semblance of success, there's going to be a lot of competitors. At the same time, I think revenue as the metric is is a lazy way of looking at the problem. You have to look at the underlying metrics.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  And don't forget, some of the best companies in the world, over time, have taken time to build before they reach revenue. Part of it is to become feature parity. Figma just went public recently. It took a long time for them to be on the same feature parity with Photoshop. But it was collaborative, is obviously going to be the next generation on how you sort of collaborate with designers. You can do it on the web instead of like walking over to a designer's desktop and seeing what they design. But at the same time, it took time to build the product in the product surface area.

• 34:21Speaker 00

  And so the measurements should be about the velocity of the company, not just revenue growth.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.