[MUSIC]
Hello everybody, thank you all for
coming to the third Sequoia Labs event this evening.
Sequoia Labs was created as a way to be able to give you industry perspectives.
That basically give you a chance to think about ways that you can enhance your work
once you leave Stanford, the kinds of things you do here.
And potentially think about starting the companies of tomorrow.
And to be honest, it's a pretty unique opportunity, actually, to have Sequoia
joining us tonight to talk with you all about some lessons in leadership.
I don't know if you went to the first two events or not.
But one of the things, I went to both of them, and one of the things I really
appreciate actually about these evenings is they're candid discussions.
That really provides some actionable information that's useful to you.
Rather than just kind of giving you platitudes.
And that way, you get to learn from people's hard-fought and
won experience in the field to sort of think about your future.
So with that said, tonight's topic is on leadership.
And the idea behind that is to get lessons from four leaders in the field with some
real actionable information.
That will help you not only here but certainly in your life beyond Stanford.
And I'd like to welcome up Stephanie Zahn who has more information to share with
you. >> [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you Mehran.
Hi everyone, thank you for coming out to our third and
final capstone Sequoia Labs event.
We really appreciate you coming out, especially in the middle of midterms week.
My name is Stephanie, and I work as an investor at Sequoia.
I was in your shoes just three years ago studying CS and
now I get to see it from the other side.
Our mission at Sequoia is to partner with daring,
thoughtful founders who want to build legendary companies of tomorrow.
We want to be your first partner from idea to IPO and beyond.
And given Stanford's entrepreneurial spirit, we can't wait to
partner with many of you as you go on to start your own companies down the road.
Tonight's an especially exciting event for
us because we get to show you a glimpse of what it's like inside of Sequoia.
And what it's like to work with Sequoia as one of our portfolio companies.
All through what I think is one of our most special traits, leadership.
Effective leadership inspires your team and your customers and
it drives performance and the longevity of your business.
And the beauty of it is that effective leadership can come in all forms.
So tonight, we're here to share three different perspectives,
Tony from DoorDash, Julia from Eventbrite, and Doug, my partner at Sequoia.
Through these stories, we hope to inspire you to find and
explore your own strengths in leadership.
So without further ado, please join me in welcoming our first speaker Tony from
DoorDash. >> [APPLAUSE]
>> I still remember when I was a freshman
and DoorDash was still a class project.
Running pizza party contests, all the way through.
Otero never won any of them, but
it's been incredible to see DoorDash grow into an incredible business.
And transforming the way all of us eat today.
>> I think we're mic-ed, but
redundancy is a good thing. >> [LAUGH]
>> It's great to be back on campus.
Actually, tomorrow I'll be back again celebrating my five year reunion at
the business school.
And so it's super great to be back.
It's always amazing just walking in, the energy.
Even though I can see that some of you have your textbooks and your laptops here.
It's always been high and after speaking with the professors here,
it seems like the intensity in CS has never been higher.
So, for me, I like to start by sharing a story about toner.
When I was on campus, and the day after graduation, it was a Sunday.
I spent Sunday morning delivering hummus from my 2001 Honda.
Schlepping it around all over my car seats, the trunk, and
everywhere trying to bring it to the awesome citizens of Palo Alto.
But in the evening, I would raid toner on this campus.
One of the first things that we try to figure out at DoorDash was how do we get
the word out?
How do we get the word out when we have $18,000 in the bank.
When none of us has ever done anything related to marketing or
any of this growth hacking stuff?
And one of the first things that we did was we raided every single
colored printer on campus because our IDs still worked.
Actually they worked throughout that entire first summer that we launched,
summer of 2013.
And we printed out over 110,000 copies of, it's a lot,
of half-page fliers that would say, this restaurant now delivers.
Or, for example, Oren's Hummus now delivers, or, Ike's now delivers.
And when looked at the rates, in terms of what that would've cost to print out
at Kinko's, that would've been $33,000.
We had $18,000 in the bank, so that math didn't really work out.
And so, every night from 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM you would find
me in one of the awesome rooms here with printers basically crushing the toner.
And the next morning you'd find the librarians asking,
what the heck is going on?
Like schools out, everyone is suppose to be at the beach, or
having fun with their friends.
Yet all the printers are raided and are out of toner.
But that summer I can definitely tell you I recouped a good part of my
Stanford tuition. >> [LAUGH]
>> And it was the best uses of time and
investment to get the company off the ground.
For me, the lesson for both that story
as well as frankly many others over the summer.
Was the idea of resourceful, and being a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all.
My cofounders and I, this is our first company.
We don't know anything about anything.
Whether it was learning how to be a good delivery driver, we call them dashers.
Whether it was figuring out what are all the things you have to get right
in understanding, how the food needs to get to the store?
What systems we must speak with?
How do we fix something when things go wrong?
Or, how do we even get the word out?
All of these things were fun things that we had to learn step by step by step.
And that story of breaking all of the Stanford printers is just one of the most
important things I would say that has been a hallmark of the DoorDash culture.
Which is really to be resourceful and being a learn-it-all.
When I think about the journey since that summer, DoorDash has grown very quickly.
In four and a half years we grew from my apartment off campus and
the three, four of us.
To now 600 people spread across 800 cities across the US and Canada.
And I would say that every six months, every three months maybe.
This idea of being resourceful and learning it all,
happens pretty much front and center.
Every single day,
I pretty much walk in the door as the dumbest person in the room.
And I'm just trying to learn from every single interaction.
Whether it's with our office manager, whether it's with the CEO of Chipotle.
Whether it's with you all tonight.
Every interaction is an opportunity to learn something.
And I think that,
especially as when I think about when I was sitting in your shoes.
You think about all the things that have probably gotten you here.
You're incredibly bright, incredibly Hard working,
you have all of the access and privilege that you may or may not yet understand.
But one of the things I promise you that will hit you in the face especially
as you graduate, is that the world's not gonna care about that.
The world, especially if you can't bring them food on time when you said you would,
certainly will get hangry at you regardless of your CS degree or
your fancy machine learning model that was supposed to have fixed that.
>> [LAUGH]
>> So whether it's the most basics of just
learning how to deliver food, or whether it's figuring out
how to build a very sophisticated learning algorithm, every step
is really about having first and foremost the humility to start as a beginner.
In fact First Principle is one of the core values of the company, and
in every team at Door Dash today,
the best leaders always, we say, lead from the front.
That means they're the first to do something.
Maybe they're not always doing it later on in the course of
their positions on the team, but that's what they're doing.
They're the ones on the front lines taking customer service calls.
They're the ones getting thrown out of restaurants as we try to understand
how to best understand the decision makers within a restaurant.
They're the ones testing learning models, and when they break
actually fixing them at 3AM, in the evening after refunding customers and
doing deliveries to appease the customers.
These traits of fostering a humble culture, but
everything is about studying the problem
from a beginner's mindset from understanding every single detail
is really what has in my opinion led us to where we are today.
And especially as you build your organizations,
whether it's just the two of you right now inside your dorm room, whether it's
now spread across maybe an office with a ten of you.
Or maybe for some you in the near future, growing very very quickly,
you're gonna have to learn to fire yourself every six months.
Firing yourself from whatever it is that you're doing and
you're gonna have to teach that confidence to the people that you give that job to.
And the easiest way to inspire confidence and give people the ability to bet on
themselves is to show them that you can do it, and if you can show them that you can
do it, and if you can show them that you can do it in areas where you have no
experience or understanding, I promise you that very good things will happen.
Things that will very much surprise you.
I can tell you about one of our team members who started actually as a lawyer.
This is his only trained profession for 15 years.
This is the one thing that he thought he was planet Earth's expert in,
a particular type of law.
After solving some of our legal issues at Door Dash for the first six months,
the next assignment that I actually gave him was customer service which
is a very difficult problem since we have to solve real time tickets from customers,
merchants, and drivers at increasing scale.
And guess what?
You don't have 24 hours to solve someone's hunger problem, you have maybe 24 seconds.
After solving that, Keith decided to take on our people challenges and
actually lead HR, a profession, again, to which he has no experience.
After doing that, he decided to take on business development and
help us understand how can we partner with more and
more companies as we build a platform for last mile delivery.
He was able to do all of this because he had a beginner's eye.
And he was able to do all of this because first and
foremost, he understood that if we study from first principles,
that if we learn from every interaction that we carry, if we
are able to constantly be willing to be wrong in front of all of our teammates and
friends, that great things can happen.
And actually, frankly, that's actually how you solve problems.
And so your ability to be an expert learner,
your ability to then scale that across your team as well as with your
co-founders is in my opinion one of the biggest indicators of your future success.
And so I know that it's mid-term week,
I know that everyone is probably working really hard.
Thank you for coming.
That as much knowledge as you possess and will graduate this university from,
I wish you first and foremost the humility to keep learning and
to take every interaction that you have, and
let that really be the hallmark of what you lead your company with.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you Tony.
Our next speaker is Julia from Eventbrite.
She is an inspirational leader, and I've gotten to witness her leadership
first hand through board meetings and through meetings with her team.
She has completely transformed the way we all experience live events today.
So I can't wait for you to hear her story.
Please join me in welcoming Julia. >> [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you so much for having me.
When I think about what we've built at Eventbrite with almost a thousand
employees now worldwide, I always come back to our culture and how we work.
We're often recognized for the type of team we are,
the way we show up for our customers and authentically who we are as people.
And that always comes back to core values.
A little known fact about Eventbrite is that we actually don't
have core values written down anywhere.
They're not on the wall.
They're not codified in a statement.
And that has been intentional, I felt that core values
are at their very best when they're simply lived and walked and
breathe and then when they're a part of how you operate.
Not some manual that you get on day one and
have to try to emulate to the best of your ability.
However, I've been swayed a bit.
As we continue to expand rapidly all over the world,
it's become clear to me that we do need to write down some of the historical context
that 's gone into who we are as people at Eventbrite.
We call ourselves bright links, so we have been drafting values.
And it's been quite the experience.
We have these really fun pithy statements like let them in, and go all in,
and choose brilliance, and be a creator, and I'm happy that I can remember them,
but they don't really resonate with me as words on a page.
Because you walk into any great company and they do have values.
There's teamwork and dedication and perseverance, confidence.
What do those actually mean?
How do you actually define values?
It's 2008, we're cramming ourselves into Kevin's Mini Cooper.
Kevin is my co-founder, our former CEO and my husband.
Bad choice in cars, and we get into this Mini Cooper,
there's five of us, we're driving the 35 miles down the Sand Hill road.
We've decided, That our little idea that is now turned
into a company is ready to take on outside financing.
We've bootstrapped the company for almost three years and
we think that late 2008 is a great time to go out and
raise our first outside round of funding.
Every day we get in that car and we drive down to
Sand Hill Road, 27 firms, 27 noes.
Every time we hear an objection, whether it be our business model,
traction, the obvious macroeconomic environment that's happening behind us,
something strange happens.
We don't get down, we get more convicted.
We start to build this almost super power sense of conviction that we're on
the right track, that despite rejection, after rejection after rejection.
We actually have something, there's a there there, and
we believe in what we're doing.
And I can tell you that's not because we were a bunch of rebels who
sort of loved not listening to people, we are listening.
But every time we described our business,
we became more convinced that there was real value there.
So it was Kevin's idea to leave
our 2009 business plan with every firm that we met with.
And that was seen as somewhat of a risky idea because nobody knew what was going
to happen in 2009.
Companies were struggling to keep the lights on.
Many companies were shutting down around us.
For Eventbrite, 2009 was the year where we not only survived but we thrived.
We had to really get down to the brass tax of what mattered.
We didn't have much money left, probably close to what you had when you were
stealing toner. >> [LAUGH]
>> So, we focused and
we focused on the event creator and we focused on how our business enablement
platform could make them more successful, especially since times were tough.
We started to see something really interesting happening with our
event creators.
An entrepreneurial spirit came alive and
we started to understand that we weren't just democratizing ticketing,
we were enabling entrepreneurs and enabling business owners.
And so towards the end of 2009, we went back to a few select VC firms.
Obviously things had thought a bit.
But we also had beat our plan.
And when we met with those VC firms, that was a novel idea.
[LAUGH] That we had actually left our plan and did what we said we were going to do.
And on top of that,
we had this added conviction that had been born in that moment of rejection but
had grown over time through that year of operating the business.
The story has a very happy ending, we got three term sheets.
So we had a choice and we chose our first choice of partner,
and it just so happens that with Sequoia, I was not paid to say this.
>> [LAUGH]
>> They had the worst terms out of all
three and the best team.
And we chose the people, and I it'll be another day that
I can stand up here and tell you what that's meant to us for the last decade.
But I'm definitely a believer that choosing the right people and
the right partners can mean all the difference in the world.
It's 2010.
Fully capitalized.
We're feeling great.
We're sitting at brunch in Austin, Texas during South by Southwest.
It's the first year that Eventbrite has arrived at this music conference.
We had broken through to the music category and
we are having breakfast with some of our top customers and top prospects.
Music festival organizers, venue owners.
We just sat down to this delicious brunch in a beautiful restaurant
when I noticed that many of my teammate's
phones were starting to buzz on the table all at the same time.
It was like a symphony but
a dreadful one because that typically meant that something was wrong.
I looked across the table at Kevin and his face had gone white.
And he looked up and said the site's down.
We're sitting amongst 30 of the industry's finest,
and we have to act like nothing's wrong.
That wasn't a choice.
We couldn't just stay.
So a subset of us got together, scurried across the street to the W Hotel.
Found a random corner where we could all plug in.
And we started to get to work.
What happened was,
one of the premier music festivals called The Great Googa Mooga,
hosted by Superfly which is also the promoter who puts on Outside Lands,
had taken a risk by using Eventbrite for the first time.
And the on sale had crashed our site.
This was an epic failure.
We didn't have any time to really take stock of what had happened or
what that was going to mean.
We had to get to work.
Everybody jumped in.
We had a portion of people working on customer support.
We got the Great Googa Mooga organizers on the phone.
They were not very happy, and we stayed on the phone with them and our Ops team for
about six hours, until we had finally managed to get the site back up,
get the tickets back on sale, and sell out the event.
This wasn't a happy day, and
certainly many changes had to be made to our back and infrastructure after that.
But it made us stronger as a team.
Going all in meant that everyone forgot whatever task was at hand.
Having a fancy brunch with prospect customers or even their function.
We had our head of engineering entering customers podium house because remember
the entire site was down, it wasn't just one customer that was in a large.
And so what I learned that day was great teams and
great leadership come out when the going gets tough, and
there's always a magical moment where your team shows up.
And does the right thing, and
that's something you could be proud of even in the face of failure.
It's 2011, we've recovered from the Great Googa Mooga disaster.
It's summer in New York, it's about 90 degrees outside, humidity of,
I don't know, 107%, is that possible? >> [INAUDIBLE]
>> We're moving slowly through
the humidity in Central Park where we have bit off a bit more that we could chew.
We're not only ticketing the largest free concert that's ever happened
in Central Park.
We're managing the access control for a 60,000 person event in Central Park.
I'm not sure how many of you have done this, but it's a really complicated task.
Multiple gates, lots of people lined up for hours and hours and hours.
A multi million dollar stage, Black Eyed Peas, about to go on
to play one of their last shows together, and you've got about two dozen people in
bright orange Eventbrite t-shirts trying to act like they know what they're doing.
About halfway through the day we start seeing
some alarming weather forecasts appear on our radar.
One of our engineers, Bob Vansant, is also a pilot.
So he has this Doppler system on his computer and
he's starting to look a little worried.
Out of nowhere from our little trailer on Central Park West,
we start to see this cloud come down.
You can see it all the way down Central Park West.
It's starting to come near us, and it looks like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
From anybody, yeah, Ghostbusters.
Okay, or the remake.
And all of a sudden it occurs to us that if there's a freak lightning and
thunderstorm, what happens to an event in Central Park?
And we start researching.
The first thing that one of our teammates comes up with is a free
concert in the park where Diana Ross was to perform.
And it got rained out, and there was a riot.
And now there's a Diana Ross playground at Central Park because
the riot destroyed that whole part of the park.
It's not a good sign.
So we start worrying and we're like okay, what's the contingency plan here?
Well, there was no contingency planned, we just had to get to work.
So as it starts sprinkling, they open the gates.
And we start scanning people in, we built the system.
Again, no business scanning in 60,000 people for a Black-eyed Peas concert.
About 4,000 people in, NYPD, who has the authority to do this, calls the concert.
They say, not gonna go forward, too dangerous.
We have to then turn 4,000 people around and send them back out to
the 56,000 other people who are standing on Central, on all around the park.
And explain to them that they're not gonna be able to see this historic event.
And we're wearing Eventbrite T-shirts, remember.
So that was not a happy moment.
As we're all sort of trying to shepherd people out to the park and
feeling really downtrodden in ourselves.
We get together and we're trying to ascertain what just happened and
how this is going to go forward.
What's going to happen to this concert?
And Kevin comes in out of nowhere dripping from, it's now pouring and
there's thunder, lightning, and it's a violent situation.
He comes in with a huge smile on his face.
And I turn to him and I go, what are you so giddy about?
He's like we scanned 4,000 people in 15 minutes, we can to this.
Sure enough six months later we were given the chance to do it again and
we pulled it off without a hitch.
Now that type of optimism, and the amount of perseverance, and
the conviction that we've had.
Are all values that we've lived because they've come out of real experiences.
So the lesson that I wanna leave you today with is whether you're setting up your
own company or you're joining another company that you haven't started,
values do actually matter.
They matter in how you live and how you show up.
And if you're joined in a company that already has values, ask for
real-life examples.
Don't just take fancy worded statements as something you
should really trust and try to emulate.
Find out what these values actually mean from how they've been lived.
And the experiences that have really driven to those values.
And if you're an entrepreneur who's creating a company for
the first time, consider it a once in a lifetime experience.
And be very careful about how you state your values.
Maybe you live them first before you write them down.
Thank you. >> [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you Julia.
Our third and final speaker is Doug Leone, global managing partner at Sequoia.
And also someone who has become like a father figure to me.
He's an inspirational leader.
Not just for our investing team at Sequoia in the US.
But also as a leader throughout our other geographies.
Our teams in China, and our teams in India,
and our teams in the US, driving us all forward as one Sequoia.
Please join me in welcoming Doug Leone. >> [APPLAUSE]
>> Boy, it's really thrilling to be called
a father figure.
Can't wait until you get to be called a father figure.
So I'm gonna take a different approach.
I'm going to share with you what I think leadership is, and
then I'll give you an example afterwards.
And as everything in life, things can be boiled down to very
simple two or three items or entities.
So to me, leadership is three things.
It's vision, it's execution, and it's culture.
You only have vision, and you get called a visionary.
That's the one that you have, you can't execute.
You only execute, you're called the manager,
if you're lucky you're called an executive.
And if you set up a lousy culture, then you're called an asshole.
>> [LAUGH]
>> I'm serious, and so
let me drill down on that.
Vision comes from clarity of thought, and courage, and
conviction, cuz things are not quite linear.
And clarity of thought means clarity of speech.
So your team knows which way they are going.
It also requires courage as I said.
But if you get it right, then it changes into inspiration.
So your team is inspired to go do something, that's what vision is.
Then you got execution.
Through my experience execution, because I don't think I'm very special.
Is looking in a mirror first and figuring out what you're good at,
and what you're not good at.
And be really truthful, bluntly and coldly truth about that.
And then to hire a wonderful team around you that not only complements you,
but to which you are willing to listen.
Because get a team you think you are the smartest person in the room you'll never
get anywhere because team always win.
So hiring a wonderful team, listening well.
And then execution means one more thing.
Singularity of purpose, and notice the words that I've used.
Singularity, meaning we're gonna do not those four things, but
the really tough things for an executive is to do that one thing.
Because if you get that right, it's a tip of the arrow of the whole company.
If you get that wrong, you're going the wrong way, so that's two.
Culture, culture is the fabric.
I remember being your age and when a CO talked about culture,
I used to think, man, this guy is a [SOUND], [SOUND] culture.
And it turns out that to me, culture is the most important thing.
Culture is that fabric that holds you together.
And culture not only has to be written down.
The first thing I did, I actually wrote the tenets,
a play on words, tenets of Sequoia Capital, ten of of them.
Everybody says tenants.
I'm so tired of people hearing tenants.
It's the freaking tenets of Sequoia Capital.
But then writing them down is not good enough.
You've gotta live them every single day.
And as a leader, if you veer one micro inch
on the negative side, it gets completely amplified in your organization.
So you have to lead by example, and you have to make sure that
you really embed this culture in the actions of all your employees.
Which really means at the end of the day they're going to do what you want them to
do, what you expect them to do.
And if you're lucky,
even more that what you expect them to do because they have completely bought in.
And if you do all those things, I think you're called a leader.
Maybe even a wonderful leader.
So let me give you an example from Sequoia Capital.
Back when I joined Sequoia Capital 140 years ago.
>> [LAUGH]
>> There used to be a saying at Sequoia
Capital that if you can't ride a bicycle to it, we probably wouldn't invest.
Think about that.
And we started to notice that we were getting Indian founders,
Chinese founders, Italian founders.
And boy, that was pretty intriguing.
And, boy, Don Valentine, our leader still said, bicycle only.
But he was phasing out and
two of us were given Sequoia Capital for $0, tells you something about our culture.
And we decided that we needed to be global.
We decided that by 20, 20, we had an off cycle, 20,
20 its a play and words right, 20, 20.
That the world was gonna be globalized, and that if wanted to win,
we needed to have operations in India and China.
Vision, courage, conviction,
the conviction came that there were millions naysayers.
Why we're wasting our time?
Why do we have to deal with all this crap?
Why don't we just focus on Silicon Valley, like Benchmark does?
>> [LAUGH]
>> No, no, that's what they do.
And by the way, that's a great strategy.
You either wanna be a chip company, you wanna control the IP, or
you wanna control the distribution.
You don't wanna be in the middle.
Benchmark is here, we are global, those are the only two rational places to be.
Any place in the middle, or you're dead.
So two of us stuck our neck out.
It was a one page operating plan, and
we implemented a decentralized kind of strategy.
Let me tell you what that meant.
We found teams, and we said we have a deal for you.
Would you like to be Sequoia Capital China?
And we insist on one thing, you make the decisions.
Whoa, what do you mean we make decisions?
No, no, you have to make decisions.
Because Mike Wertz and I knew one thing.
They may not get it right, but we knew for sure in China we wouldn't get it right.
Like many things in business, if you think things through, the riskiest thing,
if you really think things through, turn out to be the least risky thing.
And so we implemented a decentralized structure, on the attack side
of the house, an important side the house, on the investment side of the house.
And we centralized the least important thing, the defensive side,
compliance, financial control, I think of it as a stay out of jail side.
And so we had vision, we executed by finding the team.
And then we established a culture of performance first,
teamwork second, do the right thing is part of the culture.
Founders come first because without them, there's nothing.
Our clients are endowments and foundations, non-profits come second.
And we know we come third.
You know why we come third?
Because if we do right by the first two, then we do right by ourselves.
And so what the result of all that is, we now preside over,
we are lucky to have been investors in over 1,000 companies,
300 IPOs, 75 IPOs in China, we're in India.
And if you think of 2030, 2040, 2050,
the three largest economies are gonna be China, India in that order, US.
And there's no firm, there's no partnership that are in those three geos.
And why people haven't left us, I don't know if you know the name Neil Shen,
number one on the Midas list is still with us.
Because we don't have our hands in his pocket.
It's part of a global platform.
One culture, and an information system from heaven.
So that we know everything that's going around the globe.
And so that's our example of leadership.
It took vision to do this.
It took guts.
It took conviction.
We executed.
Things didn't always work.
We had to take some people out.
We had to replace people.
And culture, decentralized trust.
And the global culture, that we all bought into.
So if you do those things, if you think about those things, especially if you're
as young executives, you've got to be very focused and as to where you're going.
And I'll say one more thing, write your business plans in pencil.
Write your vision in pencil because that could change.
But do not write your principles in pencil, those you gotta write in pen and
you better write those in indelible ink, those never change.
And culture's more on that side.
Thank you very much. >> [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you Doug.
>> We're now going to move into
open Q and A.
So Tony, Julia, and Doug, please join us on stage.
And if you guys have any questions, just raise your hands.
I'll help you repeat the question and we'll direct it
at whoever you want it to be asked to. >> Same order so
we don't confuse them. >> All right,
all right. >> In case they
think I'm you
>> [LAUGH] >> Don't you want one?
>> No, I'm okay
>> [INAUDIBLE] All the time
>> Yes.
>> Yes.
>> So, you guys have all talked
a little bit about called as leadership.
You taught it in your individual [INAUDIBLE],
how do you distinguish between leadership and management, and what that was like for
you? >> Something
curious happened at Eventbrite about three years ago.
Three or four years ago, I lose, [LAUGH] track of time.
It was like somebody opened up a pop-up book.
And we were largely a flat organization, not very hierarchical.
And it was almost as if we had hit some magical number.
Where all the humans at Eventbrite decided we needed to be structured, and
it was as if you just completely to that like opening a book overnight.
I couldn't believe how quickly it happened and and
I looked at the number of managers we had in the organization and it blew my mind.
It was something like 20%,
I mean there was just like this crazy distribution of managers.
And I got very curious about that because
just naturally there were people who weren't ready.
There were a collection of those managers who were leaders, and
then there were a collection of people who maybe were never going to be leaders, but
were in a management capacity.
And so in that moment,
we started to distinguish what that means to be a leader versus a manager.
And I'd love to get Doug's take on this but I tend to think that
leaders are a bigger portion of people than managers.
And that you can have great individual contributors who are leaders who can
have vision, execute.
They care about culture.
They influence others.
They care about that.
And then you can have managers who are really great at the day-to-day coaching.
And so what we try to do at Eventbrite right now is realize from that moment
where we strangely became a pyramid.
And everything that's happened from then, how we cultivate leadership in
everyone and how we train managers to be great managers.
And so, I hope that makes sense that it's more of a,
at least at Avemp right, it's more of a technical term.
Manager, but leader is something that we want to inspire everyone to be,
no matter whether or not they have someone directly reporting to them.
>> Yes.
How do you assess that in the founders or
the founding teams on that initiative? >> Well
what the founders, so what the question was.
I'm seeing I'm being signaled, I'm being coached by our if I remember.
It's to repeat the question.
See we do things in real time here.
I'm learning, still.
What the question was,
is how do we, the deal assess founders when they come to Sequoia.
Founders always have a lot of vision, sometimes too much vision.
And they want to do five things and they're a little scattered.
We hear a lot of pitches at 15 minutes into the presentation,
I truly have no clue what business they're in.
So, one of the things we look for.
No, look, that's the way it is.
It's very tough.
What founders do is black magic.
We have the greatest amount of respect.
We can do all the other junk.
We can help you do all the mere mortal stuff, hire people,
the great engineers, blah blah.
What you guys do, we cannot do.
In fact, when we lose the founders, we are screwed, okay?
Cuz there's no way to replace a founder.
But first of all, we look for founders that do have clarity and
not that are scattered all over the place.
And then, look, founders lack a little bit in execution,
right, because they tend to be a little inexperienced.
And then we look for the adjectives that people throw at founders as
negatives that we think is a positive.
He or she, they don't listen.
They're insufferable.
Those are terrific adjectives.
Who the heck wants a founder that every time they meet with someone,
they change their minds, so we look for these traits.
But we want you up to, almost like a great athlete.
We want you in the 98%, not in the 103%, because then, you can build around you.
We can coach you a little bit, we have seen this movie, now 1,000 times.
And so what we look for is the clarity, singularity, and
then, could you build around these founders?
We have been in business with founders where they can never recruit a VP or
they always loss VP.
They can execute,
they can look in the mirror, they don't know what they don't know.
And in our world it's okay to know and it's okay to know what you don't know.
It's not okay, the other thing is not good.
And so that's what we look for.
Highly perfect founders with great visions
are our cup of tea. >> And
the striped blue. >> All three of you spoke a lot
about vision and
drive and wanting to do something both in your company and just in general.
I'd be interest to know what came first for you.
Was it a vision linked to your company, so a vision for Doordash?
A vision for Eventbrite, or was it a vision for yourself,
on wanting to build something great, on wanting to build a great company.
And then the vision for
that specific company came into existing. >> So the question is what comes first?
Vision for the company or vision for
yourself? >> Actually it was the vision for
the customers.
It started actually not with an idea about delivery.
It started with an idea to help local businesses.
And whether they're a small business, a middle size business, or big business on
the street, it was to make sure that they would survive the next decade.
And that was because each member of the founding team had a personal connection
to local businesses.
For me, I grew up working for one.
I worked for my mom.
Inside of a restaurant, washing dishes and busing tables, all my childhood.
And so it wasn't a vision to build last mile delivery.
It wasn't like we dreamt of that, being hungry and wanting to order food.
That was never part of it.
It was a very organic discovery,
centered on a Passion for the customer, in our case, the merchant.
I would say that the second comment around a belief or
a bet on yourself, I mean that's something that we continuously learn.
And I think that's one of the best things that you can do as a leader,
is to give people confidence.
The confidence that they can achieve way more than they probably ever imagined.
And I think you can certainly demonstrate that, especially if you start by being
a very good learner. >> I'll take it one step further,
if it's about you, we run the other way.
It's about your dreams.
It's about wanting to change your world.
It's about broader things than just you.
>> At the very
back
>> [INAUDIBLE]
[INAUDIBLE]
>> So the question is,
what characteristics do you look for
when hiring people? >> So, we tend to look at how people
approach problems and what their mentality is when the going gets tough.
Because like that story I shared, all of them I guess.
They were people in those stories that are still at Eventbrite and
have been wildly successful.
Not because they had seen that movie before but
because they showed up and they really gave it their all.
And they were problem solvers and
solution seekers and collaborative in their approach.
And focused on what's most important, which for us is our event creator.
And so, I tend to think that the experience
aspect of hiring is almost a trap.
Because if you filter on that alone,
you likely are going to limit your access to great talent.
Because everybody is doing something for the first time.
That's a very personal statement in my regard.
So I think it's about how you could get hiring for
how people approach difficult situations.
And how their mind works and how you can capitalize on that frankly.
Anybody want to share examples. >> Look if you hire from experience it's
the kiss of death.
We are in a rapidly changing world.
And that model, what you knew yesterday, is borderline irrelevant for
what you do tomorrow.
What you want to, I think the words, first principles, you were the ones.
You wanted, look,
if you can find someone that has some experience and can break a problem down.
And doesn't have the answer before they understand the problem.
That's a person you wanna hire.
And I would take someone with no experience and a brain, over somebody
that's hardwired with lots of experience. >> Final question?
In the grey. >> I want to hear a little more about
how your leader instills minor change over time?
And specifically maybe working with Sequoia and maybe dealt with
the father figure till you're both gone. >> [LAUGH]
>> Grand grandfather.
>> Exactly.
>> That's the meme of the evening,
that's it. >> I'm curious to hear a little bit
more about what the interaction has been like where this is going?
How that might have helped you change your leadership style over time?
>> [SOUND] As a CEO.
>> I have a unique story because I was not
the the founding C.E.O of my company.
And I after a decade of co-opening company with my
co-founders i took my husbands job.
So it's such a very unique situation where in any case
Sequoia, I believe had a choice.
Well, they're on the board.
So they definitely had a vote.
But definitely a choice as to how to approach that, and it was a risk.
And the way they decided to approach it was to throw their weight behind me.
As a first time CEO, and really support me in ways that matter.
Which is ways like recruiting, I mean that is incredible.
And also to challenge me to think very long-term about the business.
And we have had some, like any other business, moments where it got bumpy.
And I'll never forget willful walking out of one of our one on ones saying,
something about like,
don't give up, don't sell the company, because this is too much fun.
Just keep doing this and it was just that little
minor statement that kind of gave me that extra fortitude to say you're right.
This is fun.
Let's keep building this.
And I think when you imagine yourself,
as a leader or a CEO, you can easily get in your own head.
And that's just a losing game.
So you shouldn't spend zero time thinking about it.
And really, just putting one foot in front of the other.
And so, for me, it has helped me as CEO to think longer-term than
I normally would and take a very frankly a bullish approach to what we can achieve.
And I've seen that really permeate the company, and
I think that's one of the strongest lessons that I've learned in the last
two years. >> The true north of the company,
there's only one question.
What is in the long term interest of the business?
When in doubt, ask that question. >> I think especially for
a first time founder CEO, one of the things that Sequoia certainly helped us
with was really always shine a mirror in the face.
And I think that that is very important.
In all businesses, and this is not whether the business is easy to measure,
difficult to measure, very early, or maybe a little bit later in it's growth.
It's very easy I think especially as the visionary to be very passionate.
Sometimes blindly passionate to the things that you wanna do and accomplish.
And I think that it's very helpful to have an accountability partner.
I think that in our case, we partner with Alpharin from Sequoia capital.
Who is a numbers freak?
[LAUGH] >> [LAUGH]
>> That's kinda
how he communicate sometimes. >> [LAUGH].
>> And it's great because our business
is so operationally involved.
As a result for very, very early days.
We were able to instrument, I think, a lot of things that made sure that if
we did more of that, that it was going to be a good thing.
Or that if it was a bad thing, we would not do more of that.
And I think that, you know, having an accountability partner, that is,
in some ways, not always working with you day in and day out is very important.
>> All right, thank you so much for
joining us for our third and final Sequoia Lab session.
Please join me in giving a warm thank you to Tony, Julia, and Doug.
[APPLAUSE] [APPLAUSE]
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