My Sequoia Arc takeaways and why you should consider joining it

It was summer of 2022. Chkk had just raised a seed round from Sequoia Capital and I was pumped. I was ready to dive into deeper waters with our design partners, grow the team, talk to more customers, and start delivering for them. And then Bogomil Balkansky recommended that we consider joining this new Sequoia program for seed stage companies, called Arc. At first, I was like “this can’t be too bad. It’ll probably be like a one-day orientation/welcome-to-the-family type of thing”. Once I realized it was a multi-week -long commitment, the skeptical part of me wanted to press the eject button right away.

In my defense, I have serious battle scars from big tech leadership retreats, which are, without fail, a complete waste of time. I have two philosophical problems with these programs. First, they are run by people who have not built or operated anything of consequence.? Second, these programs are designed for the collective, when the things I need help with are unique to my story, my personality and where I am in my journey. Long story short, I begrudgingly agreed to join Arc with every intention of quitting on the first sign of it becoming yet-another-offsite/retreat.?

I now found myself on the terrace of the Sequoia’s offices in San Francisco, which are conveniently located right next door to Dandelion Chocolate. (If you don’t know what that is then you must be living under a rock and I can’t think of a better reason than dark chocolate to finally leave your rock.) That terrace was buzzing with the infectious energy of bright, young, and deeply insightful entrepreneurs. While me being one of the oldest people on that terrace didn’t fill me with warm fuzzies, I was beginning to think “this might actually be different”.

And it was. Sequoia Arc isn’t your run-of-the-mill “welcome to entrepreneurship… it’s gonna be awesome” training. It’s different because it’s run by operators, for operators. Each week is focused on a specific aspect of your business and each is filled with real-world success and failure stories–the latter being much more valuable for me, as success somehow suppresses the suck.

Arc is also a deeply personalized experience. The frameworks Arc speakers provided were meant to be guidelines, while each of us got to write our own story and draw our own conclusions. These stories were authentic and the conclusions, sometimes, terrifying–but that’s exactly what you need to hear at seed stage, and who better to hear it from than yourself.

Finally, Arc tangibly helped us in our early PMF journey. I was just looking at my weekly Arc reflections and thought I’ll share two quotes–one from the weeks focused on Product and Customers:

“I have realized that I am pushing too hard to sell, and should instead focus on curiosity and learning to get to PMF.? I also haven’t spent enough time as a product owner to write down the customer personas and then debating over the minutiae of these personas with the whole team–not just founders or senior engineers.”

“I realized that our vocabulary was confusing customers. We changed that to terms that DevOps engineers understand and updated the product’s navigation to match the new vocabulary. It had immediate resonance with DevOps engineers who now knew what to expect from each tab in the product. It was unbelievable for us as we had been trying to explain the same thing for a long time now.”

These insights directly affected how our entire team thought about customers and changed how we talked to our customers (through the product or over calls). Most importantly, these insights are mine… relevant to where we were in our PMF journey and who we are as a team.?

Arc is not a training. Arc is not a retreat. Arc is not an offsite. Arc is an experience, where inspiration will come from all directions: from the Arc organizers, from the guest speakers, from the network of operators that opens up for you, and, most importantly, from the other entrepreneurs that you are surrounded by. If you are considering signing up then brace yourself for an experience which will challenge you to define the scale of your ambition, will scrape away the varnish so you understand what real company building is and how hard it’s going to be, will inspire you build? mental models, frameworks and insights for different phases and dimensions of your journey, and will surround you with a network of people that are inspirational and helpful, not just during Arc but for the years to come afterwards.

And if that’s not enough to convince you then do it for the personalized tour of Disneyland, guided by Disney folks who designed those experiences ??

This blog won’t be complete without a sincere thanks to all the people from Team Sequoia who designed Arc and made it what it is. THANK YOU!?

And the amazing companies and founders that I have the privilege of calling friends now: Artemis , Arcwise , Breeze , Cybersyn , Flagship , Hallway , Roon , Safara , Summer Health , Zeet , Brie Wolfson , TK Kong , Young Kim , Kevin Chan . You guys are the best!