Sequoia Capital

I recently participated in Sequoia Capital’s Crucible Moments podcast to discuss the pivotal moments during my tenure at #MongoDB that have not only shaped where the company is today but also who I am as a leader. If you’re not familiar, Sequoia Capital defines "crucible moments" as inflection points where a choice you make today has an outsized bearing on your trajectory for the years or even decades that follow. While it was not a term I was familiar with until Roelof Botha mentioned it many years ago, it is a philosophy I’ve believed in since the beginning of my time as CEO of MongoDB. I want to thank Roelof, Dwight Merriman, and Tom Killalea for helping to bring the MongoDB story to life in this episode. And, importantly, I want to thank the other founders, our other early investors, and the fabulous?MongoDB?team, including the current team and those who have since left, for helping bring the company to where it is today. I hope you enjoy it! https://lnkd.in/eMJM8Bj2

Hear the story of MongoDB on a new episode of Crucible Moments. YouTube: https://seq.vc/na6 Apple: https://seq.vc/yla Spotify: https://seq.vc/0n4

How do you scrap your business plan, the majority of your code, and pivot to a smaller scope after your product is already in the market? Dwight Merriman and the 10gen team did just that,?abruptly dropping their platform-as-a-service idea to focus on a database product, MongoDB. Hear the whole story on a new episode of Crucible Moments featuring Dwight, Dev Ittycheria, and Tom Killalea. ?? ?? https://seq.vc/0n4

On the latest episode of Training Data from Sequoia Capital, we're excited to feature Eric Steinberger of Magic. Eric is one of the great AI researchers of the current/next generation, from the epic story of how he became Noam Brown's collaborator as a high school student to advice for young researchers. In this episode, Eric shared his thoughts on how bridging together LLMs and reinforcement learning could provide both specialized and general problem-solving power, what it means to build AI that feels like a colleague, updated us where he’s at on his AGI to-do list, provided advice for young AI researchers, and more. Listen to the full episode here or wherever you listen to podcasts:? YouTube: https://seq.vc/3i3 Spotify: https://seq.vc/8i8

A year after founding MongoDB – then called 10gen – and opening in beta, Google App Engine released and steamrolled over the founders’ initial idea. They scrapped their business plan, most of their code, and pivoted to a smaller scope: a novel database they’d developed internally. Tomorrow on Crucible Moments, hear the surprising story of MongoDB and its journey to global scale.

LangChain Academy is live! Our first course — Introduction to LangGraph —?teaches you the in-and-outs of building a reliable AI agent. In this course, you’ll learn how to: ??? Build agents with LangGraph's graph-based workflows ?? Use memory + human-in-the-loop for smarter, self-corrective agents ?? Create your own AI assistant that can perform knowledge tasks Enroll now for free ?? academy.langchain.com Bring LangChain Academy to your company ???https://lnkd.in/gmUC6D2V?

Being a pioneer isn't easy. With leading global customers like UBS, Deutsche Bank, and General Electric, ServiceNow had to create a reliable cloud network at a time when cloud infrastructure didn't really exist. Figuring out how to do that was one of Fred Luddy and Frank Slootman's biggest challenges, and ultimately, biggest successes.

From a solo founder picking himself up after financial ruin to one of the biggest SaaS companies in the world, here are lessons from the epic story of ServiceNow: ? You don’t have to be first Fred Luddy didn’t invent the IT workflow software category when he started ServiceNow in 2004. But he knew it could be done differently. If you can solve the problem in a different and radically better way, you can win. ? Simplicity scales Fred’s stroke of genius was to create a product so simple and intuitive that it could easily be adapted for workflow uses beyond IT. When department heads came to IT managers with a request to provision software for new workflows, IT managers recommended ServiceNow—and it organically spread through the organization. IT managers became ServiceNow’s beachhead to evangelize the product for wider adoption in the enterprise. ? Explosive growth: be careful what you wish for Explosive growth without the infrastructure to support the product and the customer experience can cause your company to collapse. ServiceNow was being “buried under its own success” when Fred began the search for a new CEO who could scale the company to new levels. When CEO Frank Slootman joined, Douglas Leone says they were “90 days from going out of business.” Running lean is good, but running too lean is a dangerous liability. ? Know when to bring in outside leadership Fred Luddy made the difficult but necessary decision to step aside as CEO and bring in Frank Slootman to scale the company. Recognizing your own limitations as a founder and finding complementary leadership is crucial for growth. ? Scaling can mean ripping up the playbook and starting over Amid serious outages, Frank needed to overhaul ServiceNow’s cloud infrastructure to make the product reliable. As a cloud pioneer, there was no playbook to reference. Frank and his team started down the wrong road more than once, ripped up the playbook, replaced team members, and iterated until they got it right.? ? Keep growing the pie Frank took the extensibility inherent in Fred’s product design, and merchandised it into a wider and wider set of formal product offerings, expanding the company from a "help desk replacement tool" to the “ERP for IT,” selling licenses across the organization. Widening its remit allowed ServiceNow to grow into the behemoth it is today.? ? Expand the scale of your ambition, and don’t underestimate the long-term When VMware approached ServiceNow with an acquisition offer of $2.5B, Fred, Frank and the board were all ready to sell. But Doug Leone was convinced it was too early and that the company had far more potential. Fred recalls Doug’s pitch that if it remained independent, it could reach a valuation of $10B. “The only question that matters is, What can this company be five years from now, seven years from now, ten years from now?” says Doug. Doug convinced the company not to sell; 12 years later, it’s worth over $150B.

Few companies get to define a category and Cortex is one of them. IDP (Internal Developer Portal) has become an indispensable solution to increase developer productivity and to enable engineering leaders to manage execution. Ironically, the VP of Engineering is the last executive to get their "system of record." The VP of Sales has had their Salesforce for a long time; the CFO has their ERP, and the CIO has their ServiceNow. And now, finally, the VP of Engineering has their Cortex. We at Sequoia Capital embarked on this journey with Anish Dhar and Ganesh Datta more than four years ago when we led the seed, and we are proud to continue supporting them.

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