Doug Leone: “If you’re desperate, it’s a great asset” The Sequoia partner is asked what he looks for in entrepreneurs. He responds: “I think entrepreneurs—like investors—come in different flavors. And I will tell you, as I told my kids, that if you’re desperate, it’s a great asset. If you have too many choices in life, it clouds your thinking. When you have only one way to go and that’s forward, it’s very easy. You just go, go, go. Failure is truly not an option.” Doug and Sequoia look for people who’ve done quirky things and taken risks rather than “followed the same tracks” as everyone else. They also look for domain expertise and people who are solving their own problem. For example, when Jan Koum had a need for privacy and low cost messaging, he built WhatsApp. “Or something as simple as Zappos,” Doug continues. “The founders of Zappos couldn’t find a pair of shoes! We look for people who are trying to solve problems that they themselves have.” Video source: @StanfordGSB (2014)

Frank Slootman: “There’s lots of people in this world who are not really in the arena” Frank comments on why he opens his book with Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “The Man in the Arena” quote: “There’s lots of people in this world who are not really in the arena. They are either observers, consultants, agents, or VCs that provide capital. But there are some people who are in the arena, and they are very very special people.” Frank is frequently asked to speak at elite business schools, and when they invariably ask for his advice, he responds: “You all have elite educations… you’ll have many job offers paying you big bucks. Your parents and your siblings will be incredibly proud of you. But they’re all consulting jobs for Bain, McKinsey, and companies like that… You’re going to have an easy path to pretty quick earnings, but you’ll never know whether you have what it takes [to build something new].” In Roosevelt’s words, you’ll be “those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Full quote from Roosevelt’s speech: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Video source: @FoundationCap (2024)

Ben Horowitz: “Nobody was born a great manager. It’s a very unnatural job.” “Startups get really hard when the product gets into market… When you’re building the product, it’s all good. How’s your startup? It’s doing fantastic - we’re building a product, it’s going to be great, it’s so genius, everybody I tell about it kisses me on the lips and says it’s wonderful. But then you get in the market and nobody wants it. Then it gets real hard, real fast.” So the first job for any startup founder is build a great product. “If you can’t build a great product, it doesn’t matter if you can build a great company.” But once you’ve built a great product, your goal becomes building a great company. And to build a great company, you have to become a great manager, which Ben argues is a learned skill: “Nobody was born a great manager… It’s a very unnatural job… But as CEO, as a manager, that’s what you have to do - you have to evaluate people’s performance. You have to correct them. You have to make sure they’re on task. And those kinds of motions, you have to learn how to do them, and you have to learn how to do them in a way that everybody doesn’t hate you all the time.” Video source: @ECorner (2014)