Name: How Elon Musk and a financial crisis led Roelof Botha on the path to managing partner of Sequoia Capital
Uploaded: 2024-02-07
Duration: 3 min 38 s
Description: Roelof Botha, Sequoia’s managing partner and steward, joined the firm in 2003 after leaving PayPal.

Roelof Botha, Sequoia’s managing partner and steward, joined the firm in 2003 after leaving PayPal.

How Elon Musk and a financial crisis led Roelof Botha on the path to managing partner of Sequoia Capital

Illustration by Fortune. Photograph provided by Sequoia Capital.

Leadership

How Elon Musk and a financial crisis led this VC on the path to managing partner of Sequoia Capital

I saw somewhere. Is this correct that, that like a quarter of the value of the NASDAQ comes from companies that you invested in at one point early in its approximately 27%. Yes. So, so you have a great track record, not just a quarter, a quarter to random. I'm sorry to sell you short. Welcome to leadership. Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Alan Murray and I'm mia machine learning and A I have been around for a long time. The thing that has captured everyone's imagination over the course of the last 14 months is, is generative A I how big is generative A I, how important are these new large language models that we're dealing with? I call them foundation models, not just language models because very quickly these are going to become multimodal models. By the way, we've seen applications now where in the healthcare space, for example, people are using the images of the scan that you got along with the uh medical health record that you have and all the notes associated to end up making clinical recommendations and decisions. So it's multimodal in that sense, it's not just language, it's not just images, it's really the combination of these things, but you've got to remember that these systems are prediction systems, the memory prediction systems that are modeled after the way that the Neocortex works in mammalian brains. And it leverages the accumulated memory, you have stored with an ability to make forecasts, but they're probabilistic in nature. And that's part of why you get this phenomenon of hallucinations because it's not certain because it's making predictions. And that's why I love the term augmented intelligence rather than artificial intelligence because I think these capabilities are going to push us forward rather than push us out. It's really gonna make humans radically more productive and lead to fabulous economic growth. Rolph, can you give us a little bit of your backstory? I think everybody, you know, you're running this uh hugely successful uh business. Uh Everybody would like to know Jeez, how do I get there? So I was fortunate enough to come to Stanford Business School in 1998 which is the first time I set foot in America, which is amazing. Um And promptly, there was an emerging markets, currency crisis and all the rand I saved to come to Stanford lost 40% of its value on the eve of my departure. So that was, it was a brutal uh wake up call. So I had to work in my second year at business school to make ends meet. And I've been introduced to Elon by a classmate of mine, a mutual friend. So I ended up joining paypal before graduation and then I became the CFO of the company. So I took the company public uh when I was 28 years old in 2002. And I think I was the youngest CFO in the NASDAQ. And after ebay acquired us, uh Sequoia was looking for somebody who uh majored in computer science, who worked in product management at an enterprise software company. And I was an actuary who was the CFO of a financial services company. But Mike Moritz was impressed and recommended that the rest of the partnership interview me. And so, despite my not meeting any of the specs, I, I ended up with the job II, I must confess that for the first year or two, I really wondered when they were going to realize what a mistake they made. And, uh, and that's how I ended up at Sequoia. I guess that means anybody can be a venture capitalist. You just, you just have had to take a company public as CFO at the age of 28. That's all. So, otherwise anyone