How Sequoia Capital’s leader plans for 10 years into the future

When Don Valentine launched the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital in 1972, he purposely refrained from naming it Valentine Ventures in an eponymous nod to himself. Instead, he named the company after the Sequoia, which can live for up to 3,000 years, because he wanted a partnership that would outlive him.

“That led to a whole series of seemingly small decisions that accumulated in a very important advantage for Sequoia to be able to manage generational transitions,” Roelof Botha , managing partner and senior steward at Sequoia Capital , says on Fortune’s most recent Leadership Next podcast.

It’s also helped formulate the firm’s values around hiring and leadership succession. Botha emphasizes that his title is steward, not CEO because he’s here to serve. “So whenever we recruit young people at Sequoia, we think about whether they have the potential in years to come to lead the partnership and that we each have a responsibility to leave Sequoia in a better position than we found it.”

The company is especially focused on cultural traits around individualism and teamwork and when to flex each muscle. Stewardship is different from leadership, Botha adds. The latter focuses on day-to-day management execution and steering around obstacles that are put forth. Stewardship, however, is slightly longer range, he says. “How do we put in place the right strategic decisions to help us become a much better business five, ten years down the road?”

Botha recounts an exercise in which he asked each member of the investing team to draft a pre-parade—imagining it’s five or 10 years in the future and they’ve hit all their accomplishments at the firm and detailing what that entails—and a pre-mortem—the very opposite and detailing what went wrong in that scenario. The team circulated its ideas and made critical decisions that it believed would set it up to be among the top firms in 2030, including doubling down on seed investments and creating the Sequoia Capital Fund as a vehicle to help retain capital advantage structure after a company goes public.

Leadership Tip of the Week ??

Business leaders who expand their performance measures beyond productivity to include human-centric metrics, such as trust in an organization and the ability to foster connectivity, are about 1.7 times more likely to get their desired business outcomes and positive human outcomes like employment longevity.?

Leadership Next

A lot of tough decisions come your way when you’re a CEO – particularly in today’s world where there are no shortage of challenges.?In Leadership Next's final episode of the season, hosts Alan Murray and Michal Lev-Ram look back at 2023, highlighting how some of their favorite guests from the year are navigating these challenges.

Hear from LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman on AI; Vicki Hollub of Oxy on climate; CVS Health 's Karen S. Lynch on women in leadership; and Kenneth C. Frazier of General Catalyst - plus former 默克 CEO - on how to lead with purpose in an increasingly divided world.

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-Ruth Umoh, Fortune’s Leadership Editor