11 Accel FB & KPCB
There is a saying in our business, ‘If you are treated like an analyst, you are going to act like an analyst,’” Efrusy explained later. An analyst could point out the arguments on both sides of an issue, but that was different from taking a stand, and this difference defined the psychological gulf between being a venture capitalist and not being one. In the end, venture investing came down to that scary jump from messy information to a binary yes-or-no call. It came down to living with the reality that you would frequently be wrong. It was about showing up at the next partners’ meeting, rising above your wounded pride, and mustering the optimism to make fresh bets on a bewildering future.
分析师和投资人的区别，投资人是要分析完有结论的：YES or NO.
But the serious reason for the meeting was that Accel had closed only four deals so far that year, fewer than most of its rivals. A series of slides listed sixty-two software or internet investments done by other top firms; next to some there were notes saying, “Aware—lost?” or “Aware—didn’t evaluate,” signifying that Accel had failed to invest despite knowing of the opportunity. The slides also noted the particular promise of a new kind of online business. If Internet 1.0 had been about selling stuff (Amazon, eBay), Internet 2.0 was about using the web as a communications medium. “‘2.0’ frenzy around social networking; Accel may have missed the boat,” one slide read. Having recognized Internet 2.0 as a hot field, the partnership’s leaders encouraged Efrusy and other junior members of the team to go after it. The way Accel’s founders saw things, there was a link between deliberately choosing a promising investment space, thereby reducing risk, and empowering the novices, thereby embracing risk. “It is a lot easier to turn young investors loose if you know they are working fertile ground,” Jim Swartz said.
Accel的低潮期，2004年仅投了4个项目，错过了62个，一个个拎出来分析，发现web2.0的机会可能赶不上了，鼓励年轻人重点找里面的机会。基金的创始人们也能看到给年轻创始人赋能拥抱风险和选择一个有前景的领域逐步降低风险的连接，其实是一件事：选好方向、找到好的创始人赋能、拥抱但是持续降低风险。这个策略比较主流，也算是Hands off的风格了，但还是延续了prepared mind的行业思路。
As Skype’s value soared, the Accel partners recognized the magnitude of their error. In venture, backing a project that goes to zero costs you one times your money. Missing a project that returns 100x is massively more painful. “There were some colleagues who said we should have locked the Skype guys in a room and not let them out until they signed,” Golden remembered, perhaps with Efrusy in mind. “There was a lot of frustration within the partnership.”But the good news was that Accel’s distinctive culture gave it a way of processing its miss. It could build on the prepared-mind exercise begun in Sausalito.
In a world of power-law returns, the costs of missing out were higher by far than the risk of losing one times your money. As one of the keenest proponents of the Skype deal, Efrusy could see that the partnership’s mindset had evolved. Accel would not be weirded out by the next Skype-type opportunity. “When I first arrived at Accel, I thought prepared mind was bullshit,” Efrusy recalled later. “It isn’t.”
错过机会的成本是巨大的，也是极其痛苦的，这就是幂律定律。投错一个仅仅是亏了本金，但错过一个，至少是错过一支基金，还可能是错过人生的前景。这个观点让我开始反思过去的看法，这其实就是这个行业的游戏规则，一致保守，可能不会出局，不会有大输，但也一定不会有出路。
Efrusy pulled all the standard tricks to get around this obstacle. Through a friend who had interviewed for a job with Thefacebook, he got an appointment to talk by phone with Parker. Then Parker canceled on him. Next, Efrusy discovered that another friend, Matt Cohler, had recently begun working for Parker. He called and asked for a second introduction. Sorry, Cohler said. Parker wasn’t interested. In early 2005, Efrusy heard from a colleague that Thefacebook had begun talking to other investors. He took a deep breath and emailed his contacts again. When nobody answered, Efrusy resorted to that old technology: the phone. Parker refused to return his voice messages. Efrusy now opened up a third channel. He learned that Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, had invested in Thefacebook. An Accel partner named Peter Fenton was close to Hoffman. Efrusy asked Fenton to help him. Fenton called Hoffman and hit the same wall: Thefacebook wasn’t open to a meeting. This time, however, the rejection was paired with a reason. As Hoffman explained it, Parker and Zuckerberg believed that venture capitalists would never understand their firm. They would not pay fair value for it. Hoffman also mentioned that Thefacebook had an offer at a high valuation from a corporate investor. “You’re not going to pay as much. This isn’t worth your time,” he said, as though not meeting Thefacebook might be in Accel’s best interest. Fenton relayed the message to Efrusy. “It is worth my time!” Efrusy insisted. “I don’t value my time as much as you value yours.” Fenton called Hoffman again. “It’s worth our time,” he told him.Having given a reason for the rejection, Hoffman felt obliged to help when that reason was invalidated. If Accel promised to take Thefacebook seriously—if it promised not to make an insulting lowball offer—then Hoffman would arrange a meeting with Parker. Even after this, no meeting transpired. Hoffman did his best. But Parker was in hiding. On April Fools’ Day 2005, Efrusy grew tired of waiting. Emails had not worked. Telephoning had not worked. He had deployed three different intermediaries. There was one last maneuver he could try. He resolved to show up at Thefacebook in person, with or without an appointment.
It was a Friday afternoon, and Efrusy asked another thirtysomething colleague if he would accompany him. A visit from two Accel investors would make a stronger impression than a visit from one. And if Efrusy was going to sell the deal to his colleagues, he could always use an ally. Efrusy’s young colleague was busy. But, in a testament to Accel’s collaborative culture, Efrusy felt able to rope in the other investor who happened to be in the building: Arthur Patterson, the firm’s co-founder.
用遍了7种方式（面试的朋友、公司的朋友、邮件、电话、通过合伙人找Angel帮忙2次、直接陌生拜访还拉上了基金创始人）才见到了2005年Facebook的年轻CEO们，一家计划估值6000w估值融A轮的公司。这么做的前提首先是判断Facebook是一个历史性投资机会，加上这样真正不懈的努力，好运气是必然。
Knowing the founders’ impatience with questions from VCs, Efrusy avoided asking any. “I get how valuable this could be,” he assured Parker and Zuckerberg, preempting what he knew to be their doubt. “Come to our partnership meeting on Monday, and I promise I’ll either give you a term sheet by the end of the day Monday, or you’ll never hear from me again. Thefacebook confronted no trade-off between expanding user numbers and diminishing user engagement. When the meeting was done, Accel’s verdict was unanimous. Nobody minded about Zuckerberg’s mute style. Nobody brought up the alarming sexual imagery at the Facebook office. Nor did anybody worry about the fact that Sequoia’s leaders, Michael Moritz and Doug Leone, had warned Accel to be wary of Parker. The only thing that mattered was the exploding popularity of the product. The fact that Zuckerberg was too young to buy a beer merely added to his authenticity.
Accel看似再低三下四的追项目，甚至受到创始人的不友好对待，大家都清楚唯一重要的是产品的爆炸性增长，以及可能带来的巨额回报。
The question was how to get Thefacebook to accept Accel’s capital. The partnership knew it was up against a corporate investor, probably a big media firm, and Parker had revealed the terms that the rival was offering: a pre-money valuation—that is, the value without counting the new capital going in—of $60 million. After some deliberation, Accel sent Thefacebook a term sheet valuing it at the same $60 million price, but with an offer to inject more money than the other bidder. That night, Cohler sent an email back: thank you but no thank you. Evidently, the rival bid was real. By now, Accel’s well-connected managing partner, Jim Breyer, had figured out that it was almost certainly from the Washington Post Company. The next day the Accel team regrouped to consider how much to increase its offer. That afternoon, Efrusy and two colleagues marched down University Avenue, catching Thefacebook gang midway through a meeting. He slapped down a new offer. Accel was now valuing Thefacebook at fully $70 million before any new capital went in. It proposed to invest $10 million in the firm, taking the post-money valuation to $80 million.For once, Parker was impressed. “Okay, this is worth considering,” he conceded. Graham was not prepared to get into a bidding war. His friend and mentor Warren Buffett had schooled him in the discipline of value investing, and he regarded Silicon Valley’s power-law mentality with suspicion.
For the venture-capital industry, the Facebook deal showed how a traditional partnership could navigate the youth revolt. It could gather intelligence from a Stanford grad student. It could train and empower an investor in his early thirties. It could deploy the worldliness and connections of the forty-something managing partner. It could even draw on the investment judgment of its sixty-year-old founder. When Facebook went public in 2012, Accel reaped an astonishing profit of more than $12 billion. For shrugging off the slings and arrows of arrogant youth, the partnership had been amply rewarded.
即便和Parker接触上了，公司也达成一致，但如何投进去还是不容易的。特别是已经有了投资人的情况下，Accel先给了一样估值的offer，收到不够热情的回复后能看出来竞争对手，下班路上把人截住给了更高的offer，钱也更多，变得有吸引力了。对手没加价，Accel才顺利拿下。这其中作者总结的一个机构如何让20多岁的实习生帮忙搜集到信息、发现机会，让30左右的投资经理历练好，让40左右的合伙人用上全球的关系来帮忙，最后让60左右基金创始人形成投资判断，这是个非常好的配合，这样的机构也堪称通力协作的典范了，值得我们学习。
By around 2015, after a series of mediocre funds, Kleiner had disappeared from the top table.Kleiner’s descent was especially striking because of the path dependency in venture performance. VCs who back winning startups acquire a reputation for success, which in turn gives them the first shot at the next cohort of potential winners.
Kleiner’s fall from grace is commonly ascribed to a spectacularly bad investment call. Starting in 2004, the firm pursued so-called cleantech startups—bets on technologies that help fight climate change, from solar power to biofuels to electric vehicles. In 2008, Kleiner doubled down, devoting a new $1 billion growth fund exclusively to this sector. The commitment reflected a mixture of idealism and wishful thinking. John Doerr, Kleiner’s dominant partner, was unabashedly emotional in his public promises to help save the planet. He liked to quote Mary, his teenage daughter: “Dad, your generation created this problem; you’d better fix it.” At the same time, Doerr insisted on the financial case for going green, reminding audiences that energy was a $6 trillion business.“Well, I’ll tell you what. Green technologies—going green—is bigger than the Internet.
KPCB的衰落是其路径依赖的结果。2004年基金开始往清洁科技方向投资，2008年继续双倍下注。但这个领域的发展没那么快，导致了这一切。
For Kleiner’s limited partners, the upshot was painful. The first wave of green investments did particularly poorly, and the venture funds raised in 2004, 2006, and 2008 suffered accordingly. A dozen years after investing in the 2006 fund, one limited partner complained that he had lost almost half his capital. Kleiner’s second cleantech wave, starting with the green growth fund raised in 2008, did better. The partnership homed in on businesses that did have a moat, and produced a few dramatic hits: as of 2021, the plant-based meat company Beyond Meat had generated 107x, the battery maker QuantumScape had made 65x, and the “smart solar” company Enphase had produced 25x. This was enough to generate at least one venture fund that ranked in the industry’s top quartile. But Kleiner’s overall performance remained dull.
几期基金表现都不好，06年的基金亏了近半，08年的基金好很多，也投出了不少好项目，但整体一般。
As Accel’s Facebook deal suggested, and as many other case studies confirm, venture capital is a team sport: it often takes multiple partners to land a home-run deal, and the investors who lead the chase are not always the same as the stewards who guide the portfolio companies after the deals have been completed. For a venture team to work productively, the culture of the partnership has to be right.
This is what Kleiner Perkins mismanaged spectacularly. In the early years of KPCB, the partnership had appeared lopsided. Tom Perkins was the flamboyant and domineering rainmaker, and he overshadowed the other three named partners. But if you looked under the hood, the other partners did matter—not necessarily because of their investments, but because of their effect on Perkins. When the big man’s ideas were crazy, they talked him down. When his temper threatened to blow up a deal, they knew how to smooth things over. On one such occasion in 1983, Mitch Kapor showed up at the Kleiner office to pitch Lotus Development. For no evident reason, Perkins flew into a fury. “I don’t see why I should waste my time listening to some company that we are obviously not going to invest in,” he barked, storming off to his office. John Doerr, then three years into his career at Kleiner, looked like an inflatable balloon figure that had sprung a leak. He had worked hard with Kapor to prepare the pitch; now the pitch seemed dead before delivery. But at this point in the story, the value of teamwork came into play. Frank Caufield, one of the partnership’s unsung investors, assured Doerr that he would talk sense into Perkins; he knew how to make him laugh and bring him down from his high pedestal. With Doerr sufficiently reflated, the Lotus pitch went ahead, and everyone ignored the brooding figure of Perkins, visible through the glass wall of the conference room. Thanks to Caufield’s intervention, the tantrum did not matter and the deal was done. Perkins’s volatility, which could have cost the partnership millions, had been elegantly managed.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, Kleiner Perkins lost this equilibrium. Part of the problem was that the firm grew. Whereas traditional partnerships such as Benchmark still had only half a dozen general partners, Kleiner now had about ten—plus various senior advisers and junior investors. In 2004, Vinod Khosla tired of this unwieldy structure and quit to set up his own shop, leaving Doerr without an intellectual counterweight. That same year, Mackenzie and Compton followed, creating a firm called Radar Partners. Doerr replaced these seasoned colleagues with a string of famous names. In 2000 he had hired Ray Lane, who had driven the success of Oracle. In 2005 he followed up with Bill Joy, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, and the former secretary of state Colin Powell. In 2007, Doerr rounded out his team by adding the former vice president Al Gore as a sort of adjunct senior partner. The newcomers had no investment experience and were in their fifties or sixties. Kleiner had effectively embraced the opposite of the philosophy at Accel, which believed in recruiting hungry up-and-comers and training them. This change in Kleiner’s culture set the stage for the cleantech fiasco.
When Doerr decided to bet the franchise on a challenging sector, nobody was there to check him.“If it’s not 10x different, it’s not different,” went his mantra. If Kleiner had not suffered a brain drain, Compton and Mackenzie would have been on hand to make these arguments. But without the old gang at the table, “John became impossible to challenge,” an insider recalled, probably exaggerating only slightly. Tom Perkins’s firm went from being a white-hot-risk eliminator to a Hail Mary risk-taker.
VC投资需要团队配合，像体育活动一样。Accel建立了好的榜样，招募和训练那些有朝气、急迫感的年轻人，KPCB的问题主要是找了一堆50-60岁的知名人士加盟，名气很大，但不会提供不同意见。这就让本来合伙人共同参与决策的机制变成了Doerr一言堂，说什么是什么，失败就不远了。这也是对机构负责人而言巨大的教训，要打造一支能好好配合好的团队、能互相取长补短的团队。
12 Growth Equity Yuri & Tiger
Milner continued, Facebook lagged foreign social-media sites in converting users into revenues. By virtue of being in Silicon Valley, Zuckerberg had found it easy to raise money from investors, so he had faced limited pressure to squeeze money out of customers. In contrast, foreign social-media businesses had been forced to maximize revenue from the get-go. Again, the multi-country spreadsheet tabulated this phenomenon, allowing Milner to point out that Facebook was an outlier. In China, most social-media revenues came from selling virtual gifts, an option that Facebook had not even tried. In Russia, VKontakte’s revenues per user were fully five times Facebook’s. International experience demonstrated that Zuckerberg had enormous room to monetize mindshare. Thanks to his global perspective, the Russian who had never set foot in the Valley understood Facebook better than the Palo Alto mafia.
Andreessen knew otherwise. Milner was neither crazy nor dumb, nor was he even impetuous in the way that Masayoshi Son was. To the contrary, what distinguished Milner was his data-driven approach. He had meticulously compiled the key metrics on the world’s social-media firms, and his revenue projections told him that a $10 billion valuation was reasonable.
Yuri敢于2007年按100亿估值投资2亿美元到Facebook，不是莽撞，背后是缜密的分析。全球的社交网站的变现都不错，俄罗斯的公司变现能力是Facebook的5倍以上，FB没做收入是因为融资太容易了，就没有压力，但不是没有潜力，相反潜力巨大，也是巨大的机会。
Over the next weeks, Milner sweetened his bid with two innovations. He knew that Zuckerberg jealously protected his control over Facebook, recently spurning an advance from an investor who had demanded two board votes. So he declared he would not take a board seat—not even one—and Zuckerberg would get the right to vote Milner’s shares as he wanted. In one stroke, the entrepreneur’s chief qualm about raising money was erased. Rather than diluting the founder’s control over his company, a capital injection from Milner would concentrate it.
Milner promised to fix this problem. He would happily buy employee stock in addition to shares freshly issued by the company. What’s more, he proposed a clever twist: he would pay one price for the company-issued (or “primary”) stock and a different, lower price for the secondary stock sold by Facebook workers. Up to a point, it was obvious that the primary stock should be worth more: it was “preferred,” meaning that it came with some protections against losses. But Milner used the two-tier pricing to add a secret weapon to his negotiating arsenal. He could offer Zuckerberg a satisfying valuation for Facebook’s primary stock while holding down the cost of acquisition by lowballing his offer to employees.
Yuri在FB项目上给了Zuck两个无法拒绝的理由：不要董事会席位、投票权可以委托给CEO，这个几乎从来没有过。就连公司的期权压力他也帮忙解决，投资更多买进来，这不是麻烦，是好事。
Needless to say, Milner reaped a bonanza. Facebook’s audience and revenues exploded, just as he had predicted. Eighteen months later, in late 2010, the company was valued at $50 billion. DST was sitting on a profit of more than $1.5 billion, and Facebook continued to head skyward.
For Silicon Valley, it was a watershed. Thirteen years earlier, Masayoshi Son had shocked the traditional venture shops by foisting $100 million on Yahoo. In contrast, Milner had initially bought more than $300 million worth of Facebook. In the 1970s, hands-on venture investors had invented the idea of building governance around a startup founder. Now Milner was inverting the model. He was protecting founders from governance.
Yuri准确预测了FB的成长，18个月之后估值就翻了5倍到500亿美元了，浮盈15亿。这是硅谷生意的另一个分水岭。不同于70年代的VC发明的一些列管理创始人的方法，Yuri反过来帮创始人规避这些管治。
Shleifer homed in on the part of his friend’s spreadsheet listing the Chinese web portals that had gone public just before the bubble burst: Sina, Sohu, and NetEase. All three had taken off with the help of venture capitalists like Shirley Lin and Kathy Xu, who had bet on the character of the founders and the potential of their markets. But now Shleifer would apply a different kind of investment skill. The three portals had matured to the point where they had customers, revenues, and costs. An analyst with twelve hundred hours of training at Blackstone could model their fair value. Shleifer began by applying a technique that was standard at Blackstone but foreign to most Valley investors. Rather than looking at profit margins, he looked at incremental margins, meaning the share of revenue growth that falls to the bottom line as profits. Any amateur could see that the three Chinese portals all had negative margins; put simply, they were losing money. But a pro would know to focus on the incremental picture, and this looked spectacularly positive. As revenues grew, costs grew much less, so most of the additional income showed up as profits. It followed that growth would soon drive the three portals into the black. By thinking incrementally, Shleifer could see into the future.
Tiger的Growth Equity业务起点就是这样一个分析师的踏实工作，用对冲基金的分析方法看刚上市的中国互联网公司，不像业余投资人直接看到的亏损，而是专业地看到毛利逐渐好转的趋势，看到投资价值。
Feeling his excitement build, Shleifer took his notes from the phone calls and fed them into his earnings model. For now, of course, the portals were losing money. But because revenues were growing much faster than costs, profits in 2003 were set to surge: they would come in at around one-third of the companies’ market capitalization. In 2004, Shleifer calculated, the profits might equal two-thirds of market cap, and for 2005 he penciled in a one-for-one ratio. Said differently, an investor could buy these portals almost for free. If Tiger Global put in, say, $10 million, it would acquire a claim on $3.3 million of profits the first year and $6.7 million the second year, so it would have earned its cost of acquisition back. In the third year it would have a claim on another $10 million in earnings, with the out-years promising exponential bonanzas. After staying up all night, Shleifer walked into Coleman’s office. “Okay, Sina, Sohu, and NetEase,” he announced. “Let’s dance,” he added.
During September and October 2002, Tiger Global duly bought $20 million worth of Sina, Sohu, and NetEase, committing a bit under a tenth of the fund’s $250 million portfolio. A tiny team of New Yorkers became the largest public shareholder in China’s digital economy. By the summer of 2003, Tiger Global’s China positions were up between 5x and 10x.[20] In less than a year, a $250 million hedge fund had become a $350 million one. Coleman elevated Shleifer to partner and moved him from his cubicle into an office. Together, the two were advancing down the path that would lead to Yuri Milner.
财务分析的结果非常明显，估值相当于2003年3倍P/E，2005年1倍P/E，果断投入了2000w，一年后的2003年涨了5-10x，让基金回本了。分析师也立即成为合伙人。
The more he more he considered Shleifer’s proposed bets, the more Coleman wanted to do them. But he still had to manage the liquidity risk—the danger of holding unsellable positions using capital that could be withdrawn at short notice. In July 2003 he came up with a fix: he would set up a separate pool of capital to make private investments. The analytical techniques of hedge-fund investing would be married to the structure of a venture-style fund, with the limited partners locked in for long periods.
Coleman hoped to raise $75 million for Tiger’s new private fund, but he met with resistance. “Twentysomething white guys talking about the really interesting investments they had found in China . . . we sounded completely nuts,” Coleman said later. Everyone had war stories about Americans who went to China and got fleeced. Many were still scarred by the tech bust and leery of dot-com investing. But despite this skeptical reception, Coleman managed to raise $50 million. It was enough to close a few investments. It was not enough to close all five Chinese prospects, however. In a testament to the difference between venture thinking and the hedge-fund mindset, the one that Tiger chose to drop was Alibaba. Shleifer had negotiated a term sheet to buy 6.7 percent of the company for $20 million.
Tiger的老板Coleman也很厉害，看到机会的同时也关注到了流动性风险，对冲基金是可以随时赎回的。于是计划设立可以投私募股权的基金，计划募集7500w，实际只募集到了5000w，只够投5个。
Shleifer had discussed an investment with Neil Shen, the future Sequoia China boss who was then the finance chief at the online travel company Ctrip. The two had agreed on a valuation, and while Shen said later that the agreement was provisional, Shleifer had mentally banked it. A few weeks after he had left China, Shen called him in New York. SARS had ended, Ctrip’s revenues had jumped, and Shen was now demanding a 50 percent increase in Ctrip’s valuation.
当年老沈摆Tiger这道很有价值，一是携程多拿了不少钱，二是后来遇到王兴的坐地起价就心照不宣了。
But by moving sideways from hedge-fund stock picking into private technology bets, Tiger had created the template for Milner’s later Facebook investment. The Tiger tool kit featured the global tabulation of tech business segments, the modeling of earnings and fair value, and rapid intercontinental opportunism in response to a shock—in Tiger’s case, SARS; in Milner’s case, the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Yet in order for Milner to learn from Tiger’s template, he had to know of its existence.
Over the first half of 2004, Tiger duly invested in Mail, Rambler, and Yandex. The following year, even as Shleifer began chasing “the this of the that” in Latin America, the relationship with Milner deepened. Tiger became the first institutional backer of Milner’s investment vehicle, Digital Sky Technologies. Through Milner, Tiger gained exposure to other Russian internet stocks, including VKontakte, the clone of Facebook. Through Tiger, conversely, Milner’s eyes were opened to the possibility of investing globally. “All of a sudden this whole world opened to me,” Milner said later. “Tiger was an inspiration.
Tiger是Yuri的老师，也是DST的主要投资人，难得Yuri那么猛，还是要有高人。名师出高徒。
For his part, Paul Graham of Y Combinator preached that there was nothing much to learn. “Build something users love, and spend less than you make. How hard is that?” he demanded. But Horowitz was acknowledging that even talented founders would have to suffer through a grueling learning period. The title of his compelling memoir—The Hard Thing About Hard Things—captured the trauma of entrepreneurship. At the same time, Andreessen and Horowitz would supply technical founders with the sort of Rolodex that a seasoned CEO would have—connections to customers, suppliers, investors, and the media. Accel had differentiated itself by specializing in certain fields; Benchmark had pitched its “better architecture” of high fees and small funds; Founders Fund had pledged to back the most original and contrarian companies. For their part, Andreessen and Horowitz promised to smooth the learning curve for scientists who wanted to be chief executives.“Our claim to fame is ‘by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs,’” he declared confidently.
硅谷的各大派别各有不同，YC认为创业没什么好学的，可以集中培训；A16Z认为技术和科学家出身的创始人变成企业家有个比较艰难的学习曲线，于是提供各种支持，号称“以企业家支持企业家”；Accel还是专业基金，保持领域内的绝对专业度；Founders Fund要找最原创和特别的创始人，Bechmark保持小基金模式。
In June 2009, the month after Milner closed his Facebook deal, a16z announced it had raised $300 million from investors. To make good on the promise of coaching founders, the partnership promised to recruit a much larger head count than other VC outfits. In the past, other VCs had hired “operating partners” who focused on helping portfolio companies rather than making investments, but Andreessen Horowitz aimed to build an extensive consultancy under its roof. There would be a team to help startups find office space, another to advise on publicity, and yet others to source key recruits or provide introductions to potential customers. Up to a point, this promise of coaching corresponded to the reality. Often, the key interventions came not from the elaborately staffed consulting service but from Andreessen and Horowitz themselves. In the case of a next-generation networking startup called Nicira, for example, Horowitz saved the company from two extremely costly errors.
投后再多再深，最核心的投后还是来自基金创始人。
Too much of a tough attitude would cause further defections, Horowitz answered. The priority for now was to keep the engineers in place while Okta fixed its real problem: its sales strategy. The startup had been trying to sell its secure dashboard to small companies. But small companies generally don’t care about network security.
战略纠偏，不要把产品卖给不需要的客户。
Soon after it got going, in September 2009, Andreessen Horowitz plunked down $50 million for a stake in the breakout telephony company Skype, which by now was owned by eBay. The bet amounted to fully one-sixth of a16z’s first fund, yet it had little to do with its promise to coach green technical founders. After all, Skype was already six years old; it had no shortage of sophistication. Instead, the Skype deal had everything to do with Andreessen’s recent exposure to Milner and to his privileged position at the heart of the Valley network. Andreessen’s Skype coup was followed by other Milner-style growth deals. Using the capital in its first fund, a16z also invested alongside DST in the gaming company Zynga and staked $20 million on the mobile app Foursquare. Its second fund, a war chest of $650 million, made a pair of $80 million bets on Facebook and Twitter; a $40 million bet on Groupon; and a pair of $30 million bets on the picture-sharing app Pinterest and the real estate rental platform Airbnb.
VC还是要灵活，即便A16Z反复讲自己怎么帮助企业家，投后的意义，但最大的一笔钱还是直接投给了Skype，一家不需要什么投后的公司，去做了成长阶段的投资。并且在成长性投资的路上越走越远，没有停下来纠偏的意思，其实这就是最好的策略。早期和成长期要平衡好，核心还是抓住机会。
For a venture partnership that had advertised itself as an early-stage startup doctor, committing more than a third of a fund’s capital to growth deals was off brand. But this surprising pivot was a testimony to the influence of one man. “We made a bet that this expansion-stage opportunity had arisen,” Andreessen said later. “A lot of this had to do with Yuri Milner.”
As a16z hired additional investing partners, following its proud rule that all must have an entrepreneurial background, it found that some did not work out: being a founder is not the same as being able to pick which founders to invest in. In 2018, a16z elevated a non-entrepreneur to the rank of general partner for the first time. “It’s a kind of a big thing for especially me to eat crow on,” Horowitz admitted to Forbes. “It took probably longer than it should’ve to change it, but we changed it.
A16Z在成长性投资上越走越远，也越来越好了，增加了新合伙人，也不再要求必须企业家背景了。
The VC firms that launch with a splash tend to have two things in common. They have a story about their special approach, and they have recognizable partners with strong networks. In a few exceptional instances, the special approach is powerful enough to explain most of the success. Such was the case with Yuri Milner, who arrived in the Valley with no connections and vaulted straight to the top. Such was the case with Tiger Global, which improvised the hedge fund/venture hybrid model. And such was more or less the case with Y Combinator, whose batch-based seed investing was genuinely novel. But in the large majority of examples, new venture firms succeed because of the founders’ experience and status, not because of the claimed originality of their methods. Academic research confirms what is intuitively obvious: success in venture capital owes much to connections.“Silicon Valley is gripped by the cult of the individual, But those individuals represent the triumph of the network.
成功的VC机构有两个事比较共通，一个是讲自己特别的定位或方法论，另一个是靠合伙人能力和连接。Tiger、Yuri、YC可以讲定位和特别的方法论，但更多的是靠合伙人的连接能力。这就是VC的本质。
13 King Sequoia
Its ownership group featured Bob Kagle, the Benchmark partner who had invested in eBay, and Mark Stevens, a longtime stalwart at Sequoia. Its regular fans included Ben Horowitz and Ron Conway. And this fusing of sports and technology finance operated in two ways: the venture capitalists rooted for the Warriors, and the Warriors became venture capitalists. Kevin Durant, the team’s star forward, assembled a portfolio of some forty startups, ranging from LimeBike to Postmates. Andre Iguodala, the defensive specialist, built a similar empire, while a retired Warrior, David Lee, was recruited by a VC partnership.
企业家和VC投资人角色之间，往往是可以灵活转换的。
The venture partnership that best embodied this boom was Sequoia Capital. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Sequoia and Kleiner had been the top two Valley firms, and in some ways they were similar: partnerships with a focus on networking, software, and the internet, with turbo-power-law rainmakers. Early in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when John Doerr was at the peak of his celebrity and Sequoia was on the wrong side of the youth revolt, Kleiner appeared stronger. But around the middle of the decade, the tables turned, and Kleiner and Sequoia began to look like opposites. Where Kleiner charged into cleantech, Sequoia approached cautiously. Where Kleiner led on recruiting women, Sequoia followed woefully late but then implemented the shift less clumsily. Where Doerr parted with Vinod Khosla and other members of his team, Michael Moritz remained bonded to Doug Leone, who provided the engineering savvy and ability to read people that complemented Moritz’s grand strategy. And where Doerr hired established, fifty-something celebrities, Sequoia had no interest in recruiting comfortable executives who, as Moritz put it, “had been too successful, had lost some spring in their step, were not hungry enough, had too many outside commitments and, most of all, were not prepared to become rookies again.” The contrast in approach generated an astonishing contrast in performance. In 2021, when Kleiner partners had all but disappeared from the Forbes Midas list, Sequoia occupied the number one and number two slots, and three of the top ten, making it by far and away the top firm in the industry.
Sequoia和KPCB一度是硅谷的双子星，80/90年代的20年间持续关注在网络、软件和互联网上，投出了整个时代；但进入21世纪都遇到些问题，Sequoia被年轻的创始人刻意回避，KP到了顶点，看起来更强一些；十年之后就彻底反转了，KP全力投入到清洁技术，Sequoia跟了一阵开始转其他方向，收获了新的时代。用人上也皆然相反起来，Doerr和Khosla分手，Moritz和Leone持续搭档；KP不断招50岁左右的知名人士加盟，Moritz保持招年轻人，认为太成功的人缺乏饥饿感，最终今天来看，已经地位相当不同了。
Sequoia’s secret sauce began with the union between Moritz and Leone, the most successful buddy act in the history of venture capital. Moritz was strategic, and Leone was operational. Moritz enforced discipline, and Leone enjoyed conversations at the watercooler. Moritz had admired “the purposeful cadence of a relentless, disciplined march”—the stamina and willpower that patiently built success, one advance upon another.
Moritz和Leone的双子星组合，长期紧密配合、高度互补对于成功极为关键。Moritz善于战略性思考，执行纪律，崇尚目标明确、按纪律稳步前进，通过耐心和意志构架一个又一个的成功；Leone更加务实参与实际运营，能够通过沟通及时刹车，不允许员工不能全心投入。想超越平庸，首先要精神上先做到。
Stamina was just the start of the Sequoia formula. Moritz and Leone focused uncompromisingly on the culture of the firm: external investment hits would flow from an internal quest for excellence. Moritz once enumerated the challenges that this entailed: “recruitment, team building, setting of standards, questions of inspiration and motivation, avoiding complacency, the arrival of new competitors and the continual need to refresh ourselves and purge under-performers.” From this long list, team building and the development of young talent were particular priorities. Sequoia believed in “nurturing the unknown, the homegrown, and what becomes the next generation,” as Moritz put it. Of course, this was a fair description of what Accel had done by training Kevin Efrusy.
Sequoia的成功离不开Moritz对文化的打造，耐力第一，内部追求卓越来收获成功，通过招聘、团建、设定高标准、互相激励和带来灵感、避免自满情绪、不断更新自己的做法、及时清除绩效差的表现者。不断地培养下一代。
The story of Roelof Botha illustrated the Moritz-Leone approach to talent development. Sequoia hired Botha from his position as PayPal’s chief financial officer in 2003; it was a canny way of forging links with a go-getting cohort of PayPal alums, who were not otherwise well-disposed toward the partnership. Beyond his PayPal connections, the South African–born Botha was a natural Sequoia hire: he had been top of his class at Stanford Business School and had the drive of an immigrant. But he was not yet thirty and had no experience as an investor, so the firm’s senior partners made it their mission to develop him. Of course, if he foundered, they would push him out as clinically as they closed a weak startup, sending him on his way with an airtight nondisclosure agreement. But their vehement intention was to help him put points on the board: to make him a Sequoia warrior.
Unsuccessful startups generally fail faster than good ones succeed, so demoralizing losses materialize before the winners. The first time Botha had to report that one of his companies was a zero, he teared up at the partners’ meeting: normally, he was composed and certain of his judgment; failure was acutely painful. Then, three years into his tenure, Botha shifted from anguish to elation.
Roelof最近接了Leone退休的班，成为Sequoia继Von、Moritz&Leone之后的第三代接班人了。他的故事也非常具备代表性，2003年是Paypal的CFO，被招进来：斯坦福毕业、有初代移民的内驱力、不到三十岁、投资经验是白纸，对他重点培养，定期派它去关闭一间不成功的企业，路上让他签了保密协议，但是这一切都是为了让他早日成为公司的一线战士。烂企业总是死的更快，亏损先兑现，他的项目第一次亏成零让他感受到切实的痛苦，合伙人会议上大哭。三年就从这种痛苦走向一个个收获。
失败后的反思能到哭的程度，我还没有过，这真是非常人所能及啊。用情至深，对工作的认真至深。
Despite Sequoia’s cerebral and disciplined culture, the firm’s team-building efforts included a surprisingly soft side. Partnership off-sites began with something called “check-ins”: colleagues opened up to one another about marital tensions, insecurities at work, or a sickness in the family. “If you’re willing to expose yourself and nobody takes advantage of it, it creates a trusting atmosphere,” Doug Leone reflected. The off-sites also featured poker tournaments: Partners competed for the “Don Valentine tartan,” a monstrously garish red, yellow, and black jacket. At one retreat, during an intensely muddy game of flag football, Botha allowed his South African childhood to seize control of his instincts. He barreled toward a muscular opponent and felled him with a rugby-style tackle. “It was one of the moments that unlatched our friendship,” Botha remembered later. The team building extended to the way that Sequoia celebrated its successes. When a portfolio company achieved a profitable exit, the newspapers would profile the named partner on the board, as though venture were a lone-wolf business.
团建是文化的很重要组成部分，也是工作文化的补充。工作上要理智、纪律严明，团建要让团队感到团结和互信，比较温暖，分享个人和家庭的成长，扑克赛等，非常有用。团建的目的是建立信任。
Because of Sequoia’s status as the Valley’s leading venture firm, most startup founders were eager to pitch to it; by the partnership’s own reckoning, it was invited to consider around two-thirds of the deals that ended up getting funded by the top two dozen venture shops. But this privileged deal flow was both a blessing and a curse. The partners’ days were crammed with meetings organized at the visitors’ request. It was easy to become reactive.To manage this danger, Goetz brought Accel’s prepared-mind approach to Sequoia, leading the partners in mapping out tech trends and anticipating which sorts of startups would prosper from them. He was early to sketch out a detailed picture of the mobile internet landscape, laying out the base stations that phone carriers would have to build, the chips that would go into the handsets, and the software that would run on them. Another prepared-mind “landscape” showed the shift of data from customer devices to the cloud, anticipating the new hardware configurations, software business models, and security vulnerabilities that would flow from it. Yet a third landscape focused on the rise of the developer.
硅谷2/3的项目是被前20家机构在水下就拿下的，但这种独特的项目安排既有好处也有坏处。最大的坏处就是会慢慢变成反应性的，应对这些找上门的项目，缺乏主动性。Goetz借鉴了Accel的方法开始通过研究趋势构建“未来的投资地图”，找到机会点。
While Goetz led on the prepared mind, Botha pioneered the application of behavioral science to venture capital. This was a radical idea, and Botha’s colleagues came to regard it as transformative for Sequoia. At other venture partnerships, investors often boasted about relying on instinct. They claimed to have “pattern recognition,” an investment sixth sense; “I’ve had this my entire career, and I do not know why,” one successful VC said happily. He set out to apply the resulting insights to Sequoia’s Monday partners’ meetings. The goal, at a minimum, was to make the investment process consistent from one week to the next. “Sometimes we felt that if a particular company had been there the previous Monday, or the subsequent Monday, our decision would have been different,” Botha explained. “That didn’t feel like a recipe for sustainable success.
Botha’s focus on behavioral science grew partly out of the premature sale of YouTube. In accepting Google’s acquisition offer, the founders had behaved precisely as behavioral experiments predict: people are often willing to gamble in order to avoid a loss, but they are irrationally risk averse when it comes to reaching for the upside. Examining the pattern of Sequoia’s exits, Botha determined that premature profit-taking occurred repeatedly at the firm, despite Moritz’s earlier efforts to extend the partnership’s holding periods. The behavioral literature also drew attention to another tendency that Botha observed: VCs suffered from “confirmation bias,” the practice of filtering out information that challenges a position you have taken. At Sequoia, the partners sometimes missed attractive Series B deals because they wanted to make themselves feel good. They hated to admit they had been wrong in saying no to the same startup at the Series A stage.
Botha把行为心理学引入了投资决策过程中。很多机构的投资主要依赖直觉，形成模式识别等方法论。在Youtube等项目出售时会发现大家在面对亏损时应该风险规避却更愿意赌一把赢回来，但面对利润时却不理性地风险规避更愿意早日获利了结的心理偏差，虽然公司希望多持有一阵子，还是不断地卖早了，反复出现。确认偏差也经常出现，经常会错过很好的B轮投资机会，仅仅是不想承认A轮时自己看走眼了。这个还是满深刻的。
The first step toward overcoming cognitive bias is to recognize it. Botha arranged for outside psychologists to present to the partnership. He led his colleagues through painful postmortems of past decisions, homing in on times when they had weighed evidence irrationally. Previously, the partners had tried to extract lessons from portfolio companies that had failed. Now Botha was equally focused on the times when Sequoia had declined to invest in a startup that subsequently succeeded. To enable scientific postmortems, the partners kept a record of all votes at investment meetings. “It’s not about scapegoating,” Botha explained. “It’s just ‘What did we learn as a team?’ If we can get better at decisions, that is a source of advantage.”
引入心理学家，分析过往失败的教训，分析每次错过的原因，是一条痛苦但一定通向光明的路。
As well as running postmortems, Botha began to build new habits into real-time decision making. To overcome the risk-aversion identified by decision science, the partners included a “pre-parade” section in each investment memo—a description of how the company would turn out assuming everything went perfectly. By building this exercise into their process, the partners gave themselves permission to voice their excitement about a deal, and to do so with a fullness that would otherwise have been uncomfortable. “We all suffer from the desire not to be embarrassed,” Jim Goetz reflected. “But we’re in the business of being embarrassed, and we need to be comfortable enough to say out loud what might be possible.”
这个将克服决策时相求安稳、不理性的风险规避的习惯改起来挺难的，但可以尝试，在Memo加上如果一切顺利的话，这个公司能做成什么样。通常这种想象不被接受，容易被现实打脸，但其实VC这种常常被打脸的生意，反而更需要这样的想象，才能达到未来。
Sequoia also began to design around the problem of “anchoring”—that is, basing a judgment on other people’s views rather than wrestling with the evidence and taking an independent position.
Ahead of a decision, each of them would read the investment memo with an unpolluted mind; they should do their utmost to avoid groupthink. Then they would come to the Monday meeting prepared to take a stand. “We don’t want passive “do it if you want,’” Leone said. “The sponsor needs help. It’s a very lonely place to be the lead on an investment.”
避免锚定、避免互相在决策上的干扰。这些细节能做到位，难怪能保持高效的正确。
In 2010, acting on an idea from Moritz, Botha began to build Sequoia’s “scouts program,” an inspired variation on the idea of angel investing. The insight was that most angel investors were yesterday’s leaders. They had cashed out from their startups; they had money to play with; but their understanding of the business landscape was dated. Meanwhile, active entrepreneurs had their wealth tied up in their firms, so they lacked the ready cash to make angel investments. With the advent of growth investing, this was becoming more of a problem, because entrepreneurs were delaying the moment when they took their gains out of their companies. “You’re Drew Houston in 2012 and you’re worth $100 million but you can’t make rent, never mind have the luxury of investing in other companies,” Botha explained, using the example of one of Dropbox’s two founders. So Botha and his partners came up with a fix. “We give you $100,000 to invest. We take half of the gains, but you as the scout get to keep the rest.”Of course, the effect of this arrangement was to generate investment leads for Sequoia. Today’s top entrepreneurs were identifying the brightest stars in the next cohort.
这个新奇的计划还真是有趣，找年轻的创始人来做天使投资，以此发现好项目，真是绝了。
Sequoia’s tight team and loose experiments illuminated the enigmatic skill in venture capital. Taken individually, the story of every venture bet can seem to hinge on serendipity. Investor receives random referral. Investor meets inspired young misfit. Investor manages to connect with youth by means of an opaque alchemy. Explaining this bonding process, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang had remarked mysteriously that Michael Moritz “had soul,” But despite these trivializing explanations, Sequoia illustrates the method behind the seeming arbitrariness and chance. The best venture capitalists consciously create their luck. They work systematically to boost the odds that serendipity will strike repeatedly.
紧密的团队和看似松散的团建等实验相结合创造了持续的好运气；持续成功是有方法的，不靠运气。
As part of his focus on proactivity, Goetz had conceived a system he called “early bird”: seeing in the advent of the Apple App Store a trove of useful investment leads, Sequoia had written code that tracked downloads by consumers in sixty different countries.
早鸟，通过跟踪App Store的下载数据来发现新机会。
The same double story—serendipity on the surface, systematic effort deeper down—could be told of other Sequoia winners. In the spring of 2009, for example, a Sequoia partner named Greg McAdoo dropped by the Y Combinator building and struck up a conversation with Paul Graham. What type of startup might survive the post-financial-crisis slowdown? he wondered. Graham said something about startups with “intellectual toughness” and nodded toward a team of youths huddled over a laptop on one of YC’s long tables. McAdoo duly approached them and wowed them with his understanding of their business model, and the result was an investment in the real estate rental platform Airbnb, which ultimately generated a multibillion-dollar jackpot for Sequoia. Told like this, the Airbnb story makes the venture business sound absurdly casual, with the payoff wildly disproportionate to skill. But the deeper truth is that McAdoo’s visit to the YC building was not at all casual. He was there because Sequoia had deliberately made itself the incubator’s primary ally, investing in multiple YC graduates and providing capital for YC’s own seed fund.
不少成功项目的投资看似凑巧，但深入看其实是系统性的努力导致，不是偶然。Greg去YC请教什么样的公司能在金融危机后活下来，Paul解释了，还给了个单子，最终投了AirBnB，看似偶然。但实际是Greg非常认真地和每一家谈了之后才分析出来的结果，前提还是Sequoia已经投了不少YC的企业。
But by far the greatest triumph of the scouts program was Sequoia’s investment in the payments startup Stripe. Here was the ultimate example of Sequoia deliberately creating the circumstances in which fortune might strike. If “manufactured serendipity” could be said to exist, Sequoia was the master of it. Sequoia was the biggest player in Stripe’s seed round and provided nearly all the money in the Series A; alone among the investors, Moritz took a Stripe board seat. By 2021, Stripe was valued at $95 billion, and Sequoia’s stake was worth $15 billion and rising.
刻意创造巧合的大师。偶然巧合背后的必然，是需要付出巨大努力的。
Thanks to the Stripe bet and many others, Sequoia dominated the venture business even as the field became more crowded. Taking all its U.S. venture investments between 2000 and 2014, the partnership generated an extraordinary multiple of 11.5x “net”—that is, after subtracting management fees and its share of the investment profits. In contrast, the weighted average for venture funds in this period was less than 2x net. Nor was Sequoia’s achievement driven by a couple of outlandish flukes: if you took the top three performers out of the sample, Sequoia’s U.S. venture multiple still weighed in at a formidable 6.1x net. Deploying the capital it raised in 2003, 2007, and 2010, Sequoia placed a grand total of 155 U.S. venture bets. Of these, a remarkable 20 generated a net multiple of more than 10x and a profit of at least $100 million. The consistency across time, sectors, and investing partners was striking. “We’ve hired more than 200 outside money managers since I came here in 1989,” marveled the investment chief at a major university endowment. “Sequoia has been our number one performer by far.
Sequoia的表现太好了，155个项目出现20个10x以上回报。同业平均不到2.0x，他们能做到11.5x
Singh set out to rescue Sequoia’s experimental Asia bet with further sub-experiments. Acknowledging that there was little tradition of entrepreneurship in India, he recognized that startup founders needed extra help. Following the a16z model, he hired operational consultants to advise startups on sales, marketing, and recruitment, gradually building a team of more than thirty people; given that Sequoia Capital’s Sand Hill Road headquarters had an investment staff of around two dozen and a total head count of seventy-five, this was a sizable expansion.
印度的做法不同于美国，发现主要问题是缺乏有经验的企业家，于是开始按Hands on的方式i来做，成立30个人的大规模的投后团队，因地制宜。
At home in its traditional market, Sequoia experimented with new kinds of investments. Ever since the Yahoo experience with Masayoshi Son, Moritz and Leone had eyed the growth-equity business, determined to avoid being outmuscled by kingmakers with larger checkbooks. In 1999 they duly raised a war chest of $350 million and made a series of big bets on the internet darlings of the era. In 2000 the Nasdaq crashed and Sequoia’s fund was down $80 million that year and $65 million the next, at one point losing as much as two-thirds of its value.The disaster was compounded by Sequoia’s inexperience in evaluating growth deals. Incumbent venture partners managed the fund; there had been no thought of hiring a dedicated team of growth specialists.
成长性投资并不比早期投资更容易，二者也完全不一样。首期成长基金遇到泡沫破裂跌去了2/3。
They had been trained to invest in obscure companies that had never taken venture capital—that had “bootstrapped.” Most of these bootstrappers were located outside Silicon Valley, and some had no connection to technology; Summit stayed away from flashy deals, preferring unappreciated bargains. The way the Summit people sourced investments spoke volumes about their mechanical style. They sat in the office cold-calling companies that fitted their spec. Then they extrapolated revenues and costs to arrive at a forecast of earnings, finally applying a standard multiple to figure out the companies’ fair value. Before going ahead with an investment, the Summit people demanded a good price. Their return target for each position was 3x. Overpaying could turn a solid bet into a pointless one.
这段故事也很有意思，他们一度雇佣了Summit的团队专门挑那些没拿过VC钱的成熟的公司来投资，目标3倍回报，主要靠财务基础算P/E，项目来源可以cold call。稳扎稳打，也赚不了大钱。
ServiceNow delivered the first ever $1 billion gain on a Sequoia growth position.For the young Pat Grady, it was a vindication. In 2015 he would become co-lead of Sequoia’s growth business; in that familiar pattern, the unknown and homegrown had been promoted. For the rest of the ex-Summit crowd, it was the reverse. As Moritz had put it, one of the tasks of venture leaders is to purge underperformers: one by one, the other ex-Summiteers left the partnership. Meanwhile for Sequoia, the ServiceNow experience proved that it had finally succeeded in forging a distinctive growth style, fusing the quantitative methods of the Summit tradition with the risk appetite and activism that came naturally to venture capitalists. As of early 2021, Sequoia’s growth funds raised in 2009, 2011, and 2014 were showing returns of around 30 percent per year, ”
第一个成长期投资的10亿回报项目，Pat被提升为负责人，其他业绩不佳的人必须离开，Pat把Summit的量化分析方法和风险偏好相结合，成长性投资连续保持30%的收益。
In 2008, Sequoia performed a reverse-Tiger shift: having focused throughout its history on private investments, it advanced into the hedge-fund arena. The idea came from Jim Goetz, and the plan was to extend the firm’s bets on the best tech startups beyond their IPOs: Why let other investors capture the gains from the mature phase of these companies? After all, tech-focused hedge funds were increasingly sidling up to Sequoia for advice; evidently, Sequoia’s insights could be translated into public-market profits.Moreover, by setting up a hedge fund, Sequoia would acquire an additional tool. Rather than just backing the winners from digital disruption, it could profit by “shorting” the losers—that is, by betting on falls in their stock prices. For example, the advent of the iPhone spelled the eclipse of the predecessor device the BlackBerry. Sequoia would therefore short BlackBerry’s creator, Research in Motion, as well as being long the companies that stood to profit from the coming mobile internet.
和Tiger相反，从VC进入对冲基金领域！
Now Sequoia Capital Global Equities, as the hedge fund was called, experienced a 100 percent rejection rate from fifty external investors. On top of that, one of Sequoia’s hedge-fund hires quickly defected. Gritting their teeth, the partners launched the fund in 2009 with $50 million of their own personal savings, most of which came from Moritz and Leone.
首期对冲基金被50个外部投资人100%拒绝！M&L创始人自掏腰包成立第一期！
By the beginning of 2021, Sequoia Capital Global Equities had $10 billion under management. It was an extraordinary rise: in just over a decade, it had grown its assets two-hundred-fold. In the four years since the change of leadership, the fund’s returns had averaged 34.5 percent per year, double the performance of the S&P 500 and among the best in the hedge-fund industry.The experiment was so successful that Sequoia China launched its own hedge fund.
红杉中国居然也有二级业务了。
Henceforth, his team would simply look for great investments, and these could come from anywhere: the scope of the challenge was infinite. The Heritage fund would have to decide whether this was the time to buy Brazilian land, or Chinese tech, or stakes in hedge funds engaged in litigation in Argentina. Every potential investment would have to be evaluated relative to all others, so Johnson would have to recruit exceptionally versatile colleagues—“a team capable of comparing, in a very thoughtful and debate-oriented way, apples versus oranges.” Moritz and Leone pledged $150 million each to Johnson’s plan, and together they set out to raise more from outside investors. But, much as with the hedge fund, Sequoia suffered rejection. After visiting potential investors all over the world, the team returned home with far less than it had hoped: about $250 million of external capital.
遗产基金业务，从所有项目中比较选择最好的那个，再次被拒绝，还是募集了一些。开始都不容易。
In 2010, Heritage began to make investments. It chose areas as obvious as private equity and hedge funds, but also niches as esoteric as a direct stake in a chain of emergency veterinary clinics. Because it believed in actively choosing investments rather than spreading capital among silos, it made far more concentrated bets than other endowments, retaining only one-third as many outside managers. Likewise, because it had abolished silos, Heritage could move capital between strategies nimbly; there was no quota that had to be deployed in commodities or Asia or some other bucket. Between 2013 and 2015, much of the fund’s gains came from public markets and real estate. Then, for the next three years, the big contributors were energy and hedge funds. Next, from 2018, late-stage technology bets drove the performance. By 2020, Heritage’s assets under management had shot up to around $8 billion, and it boasted a better one-, three-, and five-year record than any U.S. endowment.
一如既往的优秀。
By 2020, Tiger Global was managing an astonishing $40 billion worth of assets, and Lone Pine and Coatue, two other offshoots of Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management, vied to compete with it.
Coatue 和Lone Pine居然是Tiger的学生。
14 Unicorns
Theranos was a vindication for VCs because almost none of the money that Holmes raised came from Sand Hill Road practitioners. She had pitched a venture partnership named MedVenture, which specialized in medical devices. The meeting had ended with Holmes leaving abruptly, unable to answer the investors’ questions. Holmes also approached Tim Draper, the venture capitalist who had tried and failed to get into Yahoo. Draper made an angel bet because of a family connection, but it was modest. Tiring of skeptical professionals, Holmes raised the vast bulk of the capital from billionaire Valley outsiders. The Walton family of Walmart fame invested $150 million. The media baron Rupert Murdoch invested $121 million. The DeVos family (retail) and the Cox family (media) ventured $100 million each. Mexico’s Carlos Slim, the Greek American heir Andreas Dracopoulos, and South Africa’s Oppenheimer family kicked in $85 million between them. The comforting lesson, from Sand Hill Road’s perspective, was that amateurs had failed. The pros had stayed out of it.
Theranos居然洗白了硅谷VC，集体没有参与，多么强的纪律性啊！反而是大家族们不镇定了。充分说明了VC还是个专业活，业余的光有钱不行。
Along the way, however, something fundamental had been changing. After Benchmark led WeWork’s Series A and a partnership called DAG Ventures led the Series B, the next three funding rounds brought in mutual-fund houses and investment banks. The bankers in particular were in tension with the VCs. Their goal was not just to make investments that increased in value but to establish lucrative relationships. The tension between the venture capitalists and the relationship bankers surfaced in October 2014, when WeWork raised one of its funding rounds. On the board call to approve the financing, WeWork’s existing investors were informed that as part of the deal Neumann’s shares in the company would acquire super-voting rights: each founder share would now confer the right to ten votes, giving Neumann the power to outmuscle the investors who were supposedly overseeing him. As a responsible venture capitalist, Bruce Dunlevie opposed this move: if the founder veered off track, Benchmark would need the votes to force a change—just as a16z had done with Zenefits. At the same time, however, Dunlevie didn’t want to block the financing: WeWork needed the capital. Balancing these considerations, Dunlevie registered his opposition politely, arguing that super-voting rights were a mistake not only for investors but for Neumann himself. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” he reminded his fellow board directors.
创始人和VC的关系紧张，超级投票权是原因之一，WeWork上Benchmark投了反对票，十分不易啊。国内近年把这件事当成顺理成章的事情，不应该啊。老师们都没有这么放浪形骸呢，所以最担心的就是学生照猫画虎，没学到精髓，把糟粕都用上了。
Gurley’s investment in Uber was the perfect model of an intelligent Series A bet. Before joining Benchmark, he had been struck by the writings of Brian Arthur, a Stanford professor who studied network businesses. Companies that enjoyed network effects inverted a basic microeconomic law: rather than facing diminishing marginal returns, they faced increasing ones. In most normal sectors, producers that supplied more of something would see prices fall: abundance meant cheapness. In network businesses, contrariwise, the consumer experience improved as the network expanded, so producers could charge extra for their products. Moreover, the improving consumer experience was matched by falling production costs because of the economies of scale in building a network. As Benchmark had discovered when it had backed eBay, the rewards could be enormous.
Bill发现了网络效应带来的价值递增、涨价潜力和递增的毛利，果断的投资到了Uber。
The next day Benchmark presented a term sheet to Kalanick, and after a bit of back-and-forth the partners led Uber’s Series A round, paying $12 million for one-fifth of the equity. Gurley had landed his OpenTable for black cars. His ambition for the startup was that it might match OpenTable in its results, going public in due course at a valuation of perhaps $2 billion. But soon Marc Andreessen signaled that a16z might be ready to value Uber at somewhere around $300 million. It was five times more than Benchmark had paid, less than a year earlier. Satisfied with a16z’s proposed valuation, Kalanick called Pishevar to say that he would not be taking Menlo’s money. But then history swerved in an unexpected direction. Andreessen backed off the $300 million valuation that Kalanick thought he had promised. Over dinner with Kalanick, the VC declared that Uber’s customer numbers and revenues made the valuation too rich. He cut his offer by a quarter. Kalanick tried to persuade Andreessen to meet him halfway. Andreessen wasn’t budging. A few days later, Kalanick accepted the reduced price and left for a tech conference in Ireland. The valuation still bothered him. He emailed Andreessen again, asking for a better deal, something between the original $300 million and the $220 million that a16z was now offering. But Andreessen refused to shift position. Kalanick fumed. Then he phoned Pishevar.When he got back to his hotel, Pishevar sent Kalanick a text, valuing Uber at $290 million. It was almost 30 percent more than a16z’s reduced offer. This time Kalanick got back to him immediately. The $290 million offer had been fine; he was happy to take it. “Done. Bring it in,” Kalanick instructed. Pishevar printed out a term sheet and took it to Kalanick’s hotel room, where the two men signed it. When the due diligence was done, Menlo Ventures duly invested $25 million at the $290 million valuation, taking 8 percent of the company. Bezos, Goldman, and a few other investors kicked in a further $12 million.
With the unfair benefit of hindsight, the Pishevar investment was a premonition of the troubles in Uber’s future. Kalanick had decided that money was power and that expert venture-capital guidance was dispensable. Fittingly, despite the substantial size of his investment, Pishevar became a nonvoting board observer rather than a full Uber director: he had not been chosen for his ability to provide oversight, so observer status seemed appropriate. Rather, Pishevar’s chief function at Uber would be to serve as cheerleader. He shaved the company logo into his hair. He arranged for the rapper Jay-Z to invest. He threw a party featuring a musician who became Kalanick’s girlfriend. Thanks to Google, Facebook and the youth revolt, a patina of founder-friendliness had become almost mandatory for VCs, but Pishevar pushed this fashion to the max, serving as buddy and valet. Once, when Kalanick flew into Los Angeles, Pishevar sent a car to meet him at the airport. In the back was a fresh suit for Kalanick to change into.
Benckmark的1200w投资之后，目标20亿的估值，有30x的空间。但一年不到，就翻了5倍，被A16Z计划按3亿投资。只是其最后临时砍价25%给了Menlo机会，Pishevar再次扮演了Accel当年在Facebook前的角色，果断补位，按照2.9亿拿下B轮领投，赚翻了。大机会面前绝对不能纠集价格，错过的成本太高了。
In the first half of 2013, Hailo raised a Series B of $31 million and prepared to launch in New York City.[50] For its part, Lyft raised a $15 million round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and then a $60 million round led by a16z, which by now regretted missing out on Uber. But the good news, from Benchmark’s perspective, was that Uber remained comfortably ahead; if this was a winner-takes-all competition, bring it on, because Uber was the likely winner. In August 2013, Kalanick trumpeted his dominance by raising a crushing $258 million Series C round, which was led by the prestigious venture arm of Google. As if to emphasize his front-runner status, Kalanick also arranged for the private-equity giant TPG to come in on the deal. A clause in the closing documents gave TPG an option to invest an additional $88 million at some point in the next six months. It was a warning to rivals: Uber could out-blitzscale anyone.
Yet even as its value boomed, Uber was charting its version of the worrying shift that occurred simultaneously at WeWork. Slowly and steadily, Kalanick was consolidating his power at the expense of his investors. In addition to denying Pishevar a voting directorship, he had used his Series B round to take board rights away from an angel backer who had crossed him. In the Series C round in 2013, Kalanick had followed up by arranging super-voting power for himself, his cofounders, and his early investors, with the result that the large amounts of capital provided by Series C and D backers did not translate into large leverage. As a matter of principle, Benchmark hadn’t liked this, just as it didn’t like WeWork’s embrace of super-voting rights a year later. But Benchmark itself got super-voting rights on its Series A shares, and with Uber poised to be the biggest win in the partnership’s history, Gurley was not going to rock the boat on behalf of the later investors.
Uber后面虽然顺利，但C轮要超级投票权还是遭遇Benchmark的否决，最后Benchmark也有超级投票权了。这看似简单过分的要求，实则最后由此挽救了Uber。所以还是要有纪律。
Gurley’s essay pointed out three problems. First, unicorns were overvalued, and unlike other Valley investors Gurley was prepared to say so. Late-stage tech investment rounds had become “the most competitive, the most crowded, and the frothiest,” he announced bluntly. The new money pressing into the Valley explained why this was so. The assorted tech novices—banks, mutual-fund houses, PE firms, and hedge funds—had little interest in allocating $10 million to a startup. Rather, they wanted to write $100 million checks that might move the needle on their multibillion-dollar portfolios. Inexperienced money therefore crowded into big-ticket late-stage rounds, driving valuations skyward.
When Kalanick refused to pay attention, Gurley accepted invitations to speak to MBA classes, using these occasions to generate debate on his predicament. If the bright-eyed business students found themselves on the board of a recalcitrant unicorn, what would they do? Gurley discovered that none of them could say. “The only answer we could think of was that the public markets would do a better job of holding companies accountable,” he lamented.”
The truth is that standard venture capitalists were not the main villains: not at WeWork, not at Uber, and not at overmighty unicorns more generally. Between 2014 and 2016, more than three-quarters of late-stage venture funding in the United States came from nontraditional investors such as mutual funds, hedge funds, and sovereign wealth funds.But that didn’t change the fact that the venture industry confronted a challenge: unicorn governance was broken. In his anguished essay of 2015, Gurley had pointed to the clearest fix: that unicorns should go public. A public listing would get rid of those distortive liquidation preferences that encouraged unicorn recklessness.
Bill很早发现了独角兽过高估值背后的问题，管治崩快，需要IPO上市成为公众公司来接受监管，几乎是唯一的出路了。可惜是美国，在国内，公众公司的治理问题也很多，更加任重道远。
The rush of IPOs was an encouraging sign, but it was marred by the emergence of a device called a SPAC—a form of public listing that sidestepped the scrutiny and disclosure involved in a traditional IPO process.
SPAC是帮助企业逃避监管的IPO。
15
To a surprising degree, Salganik concluded, blockbusters are random. For star venture capitalists, of course, this verdict encourages humility. Because of the feedback effects in a power-law business, some venture capitalists will dominate the sector, raising the lion’s share of the dollars, getting the best access to the hot deals, and generating the best performance. ”
In 2018, a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research tested this logic directly on the venture industry. Sure enough, the authors confirmed the existence of feedback effects. Early hits for venture firms boost the odds of later hits: each additional IPO among a VC firm’s first ten investments predicts a 1.6 percentage point higher IPO rate for subsequent investments. After testing various hypotheses, the authors conclude that success leads to success because of reputational effects. Thanks to one or two initial hits, a VC’s brand becomes strong enough to win access to attractive deals, particularly late-stage ones, where a startup is already doing well and the investment is less risky. Moreover, those one or two initial hits seem not to reflect skill. Rather, they result from “being in the right place at the right time”—in other words, from good fortune. ”
幂律定律的反馈效应让VC机构更加服从幂律分布，早期的成功带来声誉，声誉带来更多机会和更多的成功，这么看PR和业绩都非常有价值，但主要还是业绩说明问题了。
the existence of path dependency does not actually prove that skill is absent. Venture capitalists need skill to enter the game: path dependency can only influence which among the many skilled players gets to be the winner. The second reason to believe in skill lies in the origin story of some partnerships. Occasionally a newcomer breaks into the venture elite in such a way that skill obviously does matter.
技能和路径依赖都有作用。路径依赖帮助有技能的投资人更加成功。
Third, the idea that venture capitalists get into deals on the strength of their brands can be exaggerated. A deal seen by a partner at Sequoia will also be seen by rivals at other firms: in a fragmented cottage industry, there is no lack of competition. Often, winning the deal depends on skill as much as brand: it’s about understanding the business model well enough to impress the entrepreneur; it’s about judging what valuation might be reasonable. One careful tally concluded that new or emerging venture partnerships capture around half the gains in the top deals, and there are myriad examples of famous VCs having a chance to invest and then flubbing it.
机构品牌对于投进去好项目的帮助没那么大，更加核心的还是VC的技能，能否很好理解商业模式和给出合适的估值。数据显示新机构能抓住市场上一半左右的好项目，可以了，那就是老机构们看走眼的。
As the story of Sixto Rodriguez tells us, early luck and path dependency are at play in power-law businesses. Of course, venture capital is no exception, and sometimes it is better to be lucky than smart: think of Anthony Montagu, the toothbrush-wielding Briton who snagged a slice of Apple. But smartness is still a major driver of results, as are other qualities that VCs bring to the job: hustle, for getting to standoffish founders first; fortitude, for riding through the inevitable dark periods when your investment goes to zero; emotional intelligence, for encouraging and guiding talented but unruly founders. Great venture capitalists can turn themselves into instruments for modulating entrepreneurial mood swings. When things go well at a portfolio company, they ask the searching questions that keep complacency from setting in. When things go wrong, they rally the team and refresh its commitment to the mission.
早期的成功和路径依赖对收获幂律分布很有帮助，聪明也很重要，还有高效执行/着急、坚韧、情绪稳定都很重要。好的VC投资人能把自己变成熨平创始人情绪波动的工具，做好互补。
In the first decades of the industry, VCs financed capital-intensive projects by writing appropriate term sheets. For their patience and ample cash, they demanded a large share of portfolio companies. In the 1960s, Davis & Rock expected to own around 45 percent of any startup it backed. In the 1970s and 1980s, Series A investors typically expected around a third of the equity. Then, in the late 1990s, the share fell further: Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins pumped a large sum into Google but took only a quarter of the company between them. Finally, at the nadir, Accel got just an eighth of Facebook when it backed Zuckerberg in 2005, a share that Arthur Rock would have found derisory. This shift to ever smaller stakes followed from the assertiveness of young startup founders, as we have seen. But it also reflected the fact that software startups required limited capital and promised quick and astronomical rewards: no wonder venture capitalists were content to own a modest share of them.
VC发展的趋势之一就是早期VC的占股比例越来越低了，从控股到1/10以下。
In 2007 a partnership called Lux Capital raised its first fund with an explicit mandate to avoid the obvious stuff. “No internet, social media, mobile, video games—things that everybody will keep doing,” as its co-founder Josh Wolfe explained it. Instead, Lux invested in areas such as medical robotics, satellites, and nuclear-waste treatment, and the results serve to prove that these capital-intensive challenges are not beyond the reach of venture capital. As of 2020, Lux boasted strong returns and managed $2.5 billion of investments. In the first half of 2021, nine Lux portfolio companies staged successful exits, and the partnership raised an additional $1.5 billion.
LUX是个异类，不投互联网，专投硬科技。
For another illustration of how capital-intensive technologies can be venture-backable, consider Flagship Pioneering. A Boston-based venture operation focusing on ambitious medical breakthroughs, Flagship proved the point that high-risk, high-cost moon shots can pay off if the VC owns enough of the upside. Flagship incubated startups internally and eliminated the white-hot risks before seeking capital from other firms. As a result, Flagship usually retained around half of the equity when its successful projects went public, with the result that the firm’s limited partners reaped exceptional profits.One Flagship startup, the biotech company Moderna, invented a vaccine for COVID-19. There could scarcely be a stronger proof of venture capital’s utility.
Flagship基本是当年Hands-on派的手艺，收益相当可以。
One last point about blitzscaling is worth noting. The goal of the blitzscaler is to establish market power—something approaching monopoly. This can harm society in three ways: overmighty companies may underpay suppliers and workers, overcharge consumers, and stifle innovation. But the right answer to this problem is to regulate monopolies when they arise, not punish venture capital. After all, venture capital is all about disrupting entrenched corporate power: it is the enemy of monopoly.
VC是通过破坏性创新的支持来反垄断的，垄断需要被监管。
Underscoring venture capital’s advantage in financing the industries of tomorrow, venture hubs have grown outside the United States. Between 2009 and 2018, four of the top ten cities for VC investment were elsewhere: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and London.[42] Promising VC clusters have emerged in Israel, Southeast Asia, and India.
我辈有幸身在其中。
With the United States and China in a competitive mood, and with the technology gap narrowing, the old win-win assumptions demand reexamination. Because of its disproportionate contribution to economic growth and innovation, venture capital has become a pillar of national power; it cannot be left out of geopolitical calculations. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, U.S. venture capitalists’ role in building China’s technology sector benefited China more than the United States: the U.S. investors earned money, but China gained strategic industries. This China advantage is clearest where U.S. venture capital helped to develop Chinese technologies with military potential.
China is a military competitor bent on siphoning intellectual property out of other advanced economies. USA has no choice but to defend its commercial and strategic interests: restricting inbound Chinese VC and vigorously protecting U.S. intellectual property are legitimate ways to go about this.
中美的长期竞争也是VC的竞争，国内VC出海应该是没什么机会了。
Beyond facilitating a low cost of capital and stock options for employees, governments can encourage tech startups by priming the pump of invention. Hence the third policy lesson: governments must invest in science—both the training of young scientists and the fundamental research that is too far removed from commercialization to attract VC funding. Investments in university laboratories must be coupled with legal provisions that allow the resulting discoveries to be commercialized. In the United States, the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 allows universities to patent inventions made with the help of federal research grants and to license these patents to startups. As a result, many American universities have established sophisticated technology transfer offices that connect inventors to venture capitalists. Just as industrial clusters depend on rapid circulation of capital and people, so intellectual property must be freed to seek its most productive uses.
政策支持的重点应该培养科学家和基础研究。要允许科研的知识产权被商业化，这也是国内的巨大机遇，应该对其重点关注，从总找寻好的机会。可以讲，这个必然是国内硬科技大企业的源泉之一。
Spend time with venture investors in China, and you sense the pressure that they feel. Gone are the days when Shirley Lin could finance Alibaba without attracting political attention; now that digital technology is power, venture capitalists are expected to serve on government committees and invest with an awareness of government priorities. On a trip to China in 2019, I interviewed a Beijing-based VC who spoke politely of the government’s constructive leadership; then, when the interview was over and I switched my recorder off, the same VC denounced state interference bitterly. Although it is hard to be certain, the escalating clampdown since then seems likely to drive talent out of China. Meanwhile, half a century after Arthur Rock’s heyday, Silicon Valley’s freethinking and freewheeling entrepreneurial spirit remains staggering.
国内VC只能跟着政策走啊。硅谷的自由思考、自由放任的创始人精神在国内复制还任重道远。
In an age when artificial intelligence will overwhelm the war machines of yesteryear, Anduril’s aspiration is to combine the coding virtuosity of a Google with the national-security focus of a Lockheed Martin. For U.S. national security, Anduril could be transformative. But the company also stands as a reminder of something even more significant. It embodies the audacity of the Valley and the special way of coming at the world that animates venture capital. If others are daunted by a problem, go there. Try and fail, don’t fail to try.
Remember, above everything, the logic of the power law: the rewards for success will be massively greater than the costs of honorable setbacks. This invigorating set of axioms has turned America’s venture-capital machine into an enduring pillar of national power. Six decades after the formation of Davis & Rock, it remains unwise to bet against it.
AI和军用相结合是大势所趋。