Practically 50 years in the past, Sequoia Capital was one of many earliest buyers to take a swing on the personal-computer startup Apple, Inc. Now, the enterprise capital agency’s managing accomplice has revealed how Sequoia goes about searching for the following Steve Jobs.
Talking on the Fortune Brainstorm Tech convention in Park Metropolis, Roelof Botha advised Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell that Sequoia is continually seeking to consider the standard of an concept, quite than the credentials of the one that’s pitching it.
“Steve Jobs originally was not funded by other people because he wasn’t wearing shoes and was unconventional,” @sequoia Managing Accomplice @roelofbotha says at #BrainstormTech.
“Yet, Don Valentine saw through that because he saw the quality of the idea.” https://t.co/vc0m8sRbaa pic.twitter.com/YIfdr6B58B
— FORTUNE (@FortuneMagazine) July 17, 2024
“Steve Jobs originally was not funded by the people on Sandhill Road because he wasn’t wearing shoes and was unconventional,” mentioned Botha, who was a high government at PayPal earlier than becoming a member of Sequoia. “Yet Don Valentine saw through that because he saw the quality of the idea.”
Jobs’ profession trajectory is famend for his unlikely rise from faculty dropout to co-founder of a revolutionary tech firm. When Sequoia founder Don Valentine met him, he was working as a technician at Atari. However he pitched Valentine on an concept for a private pc that the enterprise capitalist noticed potential in.
“I went to Steve’s house and we talked, and I was convinced it was a big market just embryonically beginning,” Valentine recalled in 2011 documentary One thing Ventured.
The remaining is historical past. Sequoia would find yourself investing $150,000 in Jobs’ startup, and in 1980, Apple, Inc. went public.
That very same perspective, Botha mentioned, is now being utilized to founders within the burgeoning synthetic intelligence market.
“Some of the companies we’re backing in AI specifically are some of the world’s leading researchers in a particular domain,” Botha mentioned. “But then we listened to a founder who had a brighter idea for an application—they’re fresh immigrants, they’re a team of three, and they have no academic credentials that we can easily verify. But the idea is interesting and they have customers that can reference the quality of what they’re producing.”
David Kang, a professor of worldwide relations and enterprise on the College of Southern California, advised Fortune in 2023 that when he first started monitoring the alma maters of Fortune 500 high executives in 1999, seven or eight CEOs had by no means even accomplished an undergraduate diploma.
“The results were stunning,” Kang mentioned. “Like everyone else, I thought Ivy Leagues would dominate. But the largest place they had gone to was no college at all.”
Of the 2023 Fortune 100 CEOs, solely 11.8% attended Ivy League faculties as undergrads, and fewer than one-in-ten obtained an Ivy League MBA. The vast majority of the highest 20 CEOs went to public universities, and 5 didn’t have any sort of graduate diploma in any respect.
“Our job is to not to look at the surface level of what people can accomplish,” Botha mentioned at Wednesday’s convention. “But rather to look at the quality of their idea.”
