Crucible Moments

Sequoia Capital
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Crucible Moments

A podcast about the inflection points that shaped some of the most significant companies of our time. Crucible moments are pivotal decisions that determine your trajectory. In Season 2, hear from founders and leaders like Steve Chen of YouTube, Drew Houston of Dropbox, Frank Slootman of ServiceNow and Tony Xu of DoorDash, Steve Huffman of Reddit and more about how they navigated the challenges and opportunities that defined their stories. Hosted by Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital. The content of this podcast does not constitute investment advice, an offer to provide investment advisory services or an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund.

  1. Robinhood ft. Vlad Tenev - Reinventing Finance for a New Generation

    19 DEC

    Robinhood ft. Vlad Tenev - Reinventing Finance for a New Generation

    Millions of Americans use their smartphones to invest and manage their finances every day—but before Robinhood started in 2013, finance looked very different. Investing was something for the wealthy, with steep fees charged on every trade, and was done exclusively on computers with arcane trading software. In this episode, co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev explains why Robinhood set out to democratize access to investing and reinvent it for a new generation, how it overcame immense challenges in that pursuit, and how it reinvented itself amid a market downturn with a holistic suite of customer offerings to mount an historic comeback.    Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Vlad Tenev, Micky Malka, Andrew Reed, Jason Warnick

    48 min

  2. 5 DEC

    YouTube ft. Steve Chen - 18 Months That Changed the Internet

    This episode takes us back to the earliest days of YouTube, as the founders explain why it was a longshot that succeeded against all odds. When cofounders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim left PayPal to start YouTube, it wasn’t even clear that the nascent broadband infrastructure could support playing video in a browser. In a brief period until its acquisition by Google—from its first incarnation as a video dating site to confronting daunting technical and legal challenges—the early story of YouTube is an underdog tale of scrappy upstarts who ended up changing the world.  Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Steve Chen, Jawed Karim, Zahavah Levine, Colin Corbett, Yu Pan

    48 min

  3. 21 NOV

    Natera ft. Matthew Rabinowitz - A Personal Mission That Led to a Biotech Revolution

    Founder Matthew Rabinowitz opens up about the intensely personal journey that set him on a course to revolutionizing healthcare. A PhD in electrical engineering, he had no background in genetics or biology, but after his sister had a baby with Down syndrome that hadn’t been detected and tragically died after 6 days, Matthew dedicated himself to solving this problem. After overcoming seemingly impossible obstacles, today Natera leverages molecular biology and novel bioinformatics technology to provide prenatal screening in nearly half of U.S. pregnancies, as well as transforming oncology and organ transplants. Hear about Matthew’s vision for the future of computational biology and its profound impact on human health. Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Matthew Rabinowitz, Jonathan Sheena, Steve Chapman, Chitra Kotwaliwale, Sarah Elliot

    53 min
  4. LIVE: DoorDash’s Tony Xu and Miki Kuusi Talk Scaling Operational Excellence

    14 NOV

    LIVE: DoorDash’s Tony Xu and Miki Kuusi Talk Scaling Operational Excellence

    Tony Xu and Miki Kuusi share insights from building two of the world's most successful delivery platforms—DoorDash and Wolt—which merged in 2022 to create an $80B GOV business operating in 32 countries. In this candid conversation with Sequoia's Alfred Lin live at a Sequoia event in Europe, they discuss the challenges of scaling operational excellence, maintaining culture through hypergrowth and the future of commerce in cities. Host: Alfred Lin, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Tony Xu, Miki Kuusi

    29 min
  5. DoorDash ft. Tony Xu – The “Wrong” Moves That Built a Giant

    24 OCT

    DoorDash ft. Tony Xu – The “Wrong” Moves That Built a Giant

    DoorDash faced skeptics from the start. Grubhub, Delivery.com, and others were already addressing the restaurant delivery market when CEO Tony Xu and his co-founders started in 2013. But after talking to hundreds of local small businesses, they realized there was still an unmet need: None of the competitors solved the problem of delivery with an on-demand workforce, the way Uber had done with drivers. After struggling to raise initial funding, DoorDash found traction. But the next few years would prove tumultuous, with cash scarcity and investor skepticism putting the company perilously close to the brink. The founders’ contrarian decisions, clarity on their commitment to serve small local businesses, and ability to out-operate competitors has turned DoorDash into one the decade’s startup success stories. In this episode, Tony brings us inside their decision-making, and what DoorDash saw that others missed. Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Tony Xu, Keith Yandell, Miki Kuusi, Alfred Lin

    53 min
  6. UiPath ft. Daniel Dines - From Bootstrapping in Bucharest to One of Software’s Biggest IPOs

    10 OCT

    UiPath ft. Daniel Dines - From Bootstrapping in Bucharest to One of Software’s Biggest IPOs

    The biggest enterprise software company to come out of Europe in the last decade didn’t come from London, Paris, Berlin or Stockholm—but Bucharest, Romania.  UiPath, founded in 2005 and originally called DeskOver, was a scrappy handful of engineers bootstrapping out of an apartment in Bucharest for about a decade, seeking in vain for product-market fit. When they stumbled upon an opportunity in the nascent enterprise software category of Robotic Process Automation, the company did a hard pivot, changed their name to UiPath, and rocketed from obscurity to the fastest-growing SaaS company ever at the time. After a successful IPO, today they are the global category leader in RPA. The unlikely rise of UiPath is an inspiration and a reminder that you can build something great from anywhere.  Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Daniel Dines, Andra Ciorici-Chelmus, Brandon Deer, Luciana Lixandru

    42 min
  7. Reddit ft. Steve Huffman - The Making (and Remaking) of the Front Page of the Internet

    26 SEPT

    Reddit ft. Steve Huffman - The Making (and Remaking) of the Front Page of the Internet

    Reddit is one of the largest and most culturally influential sites on the internet—and its journey is one of the most unusual company stories in internet history. College roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian founded Reddit in 2005 and scaled it on a shoestring until Condé Nast acquired it the following year. Struggling for direction under its parent company, the founders left, and Condé Nast ultimately spun it out as an independent company once again. With Reddit buckling under user discontent in 2015, founder Steve Huffman returned as CEO to save the company and navigate the way forward. Over the following nine years, Reddit stabilized and the company’s revenue grew more than 50-fold to a successful IPO 19 years in the making. Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, Chris Slowe, Jen Wong, Alfred Lin

    43 min
  8. MongoDB ft Dev Ittycheria - How an Early Pivot Catalyzed an Open Source Movement

    12 SEPT

    MongoDB ft Dev Ittycheria - How an Early Pivot Catalyzed an Open Source Movement

    MongoDB, founded in 2007, originally aimed to create a platform-as-a-service system with a new database layer. Facing competition from Google, the founders pivoted to focus solely on their database product, MongoDB—a new kind of database built for the scale of the internet era. Founder Dwight Merriman built a product that developers loved, but scaling the company proved challenging until Dev Ittycheria took the reins as CEO in 2014. As cloud computing grew, MongoDB transitioned from on-premise software to Atlas, a fully-managed cloud service. Despite initial skepticism, Atlas now represents 70% of MongoDB's revenue. As Atlas scaled, MongoDB faced another controversial decision: whether to change its open source license model to maintain its commercial moat. These pivotal decisions transformed MongoDB from a niche database to nearly $2 billion in annual revenue. Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Dwight Merriman, Dev Ittycheria and Tom Killalea Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/crucible-moments-mongodb/ 00:00 - Cold Open 00:19 - Introduction 05:30 - The NoSQL movement 09:52 - Scrapping the platform for the database 14:57 - Launching as MongoDB 19:52 - Moving to the cloud with Atlas 24:52 - Assigning a directly responsible individual 30:15 - How Atlas changed MongoDB 35:03 - Updating the licensing model to avoid “strip mining” 39:50 - Evolving back into a platform 41:26 - Executing on points of leverage

    44 min
See All (20)

Trailer

About

A podcast about the inflection points that shaped some of the most significant companies of our time. Crucible moments are pivotal decisions that determine your trajectory. In Season 2, hear from founders and leaders like Steve Chen of YouTube, Drew Houston of Dropbox, Frank Slootman of ServiceNow and Tony Xu of DoorDash, Steve Huffman of Reddit and more about how they navigated the challenges and opportunities that defined their stories. Hosted by Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital. The content of this podcast does not constitute investment advice, an offer to provide investment advisory services or an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund.

Information

  • Channel
    Sequoia Capital
  • Creator
    Sequoia Capital
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2024
  • Episodes
    20
  • Rating
    Clean

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