Building for the Long Term with Sequoia's Doug Leone

Doug, welcome to Startup Grind. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. I have been looking forward to this for a long time and really grateful that you'd spend the time to come. I know it's been a busy couple of weeks. What percentage of your day would you say that you spend actually talking to entrepreneurs? As much as possible.

Unfortunately, I have a role worrying about the global platform, which means I wake up to WeChat and I go to bed on email. But I usually meet with, I would say, three founders a day, maybe 15 founders a week—of new founders. And it's a privilege because the older I get, the more I realize what a great position we're in here. As we were saying in the back, we live in a moment in time, in the history of the globe, where there's this thing called technology that allows young people to create new things. And the older I get, the more I realize what a great job I have anyway, to get to meet you guys and gals. And it's a bit of a trade: I steal some of your energy and I give you some of my experience.

And I just think it's a great profession.

One thing I read about pitching Sequoia is that the partners understand that this is, for these people sitting across the table, this is like this sort of moment for them. It may be a day they have looked forward to or tried to prepare for. And I just wonder, as you're seeing that, as you're seeing these founders pitch, sometimes pitching their brains or their hearts out to you, what—how do you react, even if it's not something you're going to invest in? What is your go-to motion of reaction to it?

I think one of the important traits I have in my role is empathy, point one. Point two, while our competitors will tell you, 'Let us invest first and go to Sequoia a bit later,' that is crap. Come and see us as quickly as you want, as quickly as you can. And we understand—thank you—and we understand that when you come to Sequoia, it means a little something to you. And by the way, it means a lot to us. And so what we try to do first is we do everything we can, even in our office, our furniture, everything we can to make you more comfortable. There's no sitting in an empty office for the big investor to show up. We try to eliminate all that stuff. So you come in, and what we wanna do is engage you in a conversation so we can understand, first and foremost, where did you get the insight?

That is always the first question: 'How did you get the insight for this business?' And then we'd like you to describe the product and the business. We look for clarity of thought, clarity of vision, understanding of the problem—first-order understanding of the problem—and we can help you through all the rest. If we see first-hand understanding of the problem and just a modicum of vision of why you wanna go that way, knowing you're gonna zig and zag... And one of the things we look for, little secret, is what we call a spiky founder. What does spiky mean? It means you have something in your background, whether it's intellect, whether it's personal need to win, whether it's whatever, that makes you two standard deviations away from the

normal type of person, we will help you to build a business. So we understand it's your big day. Believe it or not, it is our big day because you could be the next Google, the next Facebook, the next WhatsApp. And we take the meeting quite seriously. We pay attention. We don't have any iPhones on, none of that. We don't have assistants coming in and pulling us out. Hearing, 'You have an important meeting,' meaning that the founder is less important than the meeting that's calling you out—we have none of that. We're all in, we give you honest feedback, we'll probably ask some tough questions because we're interested, we're paying attention. And if you can handle that—and it's not a test, it's because we wanna engage you in a conversation—we're probably gonna continue talking and it could lead to an investment and hopefully a very, very long run.

And as somebody that's been in a pitch where a VC started looking at their phone and being on their phone, that was one of the most disappointing things I have seen. Almost worse than getting a no. It's rude. Totally disinterested.

It's completely rude.

You care less about what you're doing to the point that they're checking email rather than hearing about what you're building. Last week, Sequoia announced that Roelof, one of your partners, will step into the role of senior steward of Sequoia Capital in July and that you will be stepping aside and becoming, maintaining as a general partner, but going to invest in companies versus running the fund. Sequoia is one of the few firms that that has successfully passed the leadership baton. I think this is now maybe the fourth time. What enables you to do this where others have not been able to?

The one word is culture, but that doesn't say it all. It's the understanding that you're privileged to be there. It's the understanding that you should be there until you either run out of gas, fail to perform, and so on. It's getting the compensation right. It's making sure that the people that work every day have 100% of the compensation. There's not some senior set of people that get 80% or 70% or 30%. Sequoia, it was handed to us by Don Valentine for $0. Imagine when someone does that for you, what your responsibility is. It's to execute, leave it in a better type of situation. And I created—it was two of us, Mike Moritz and I—we created a constitution, internal, it's an internal document we have, about 40, 50 pages.

We run Sequoia like a business, not like a happening, not like La Cosa Nostra—means the mafia—it's a business. And part of that was you had to get out of the way at the age of 65. And we were thrilled, and we planned for that for three or four years. We got everything in place. And we announced it last week that our limited partners, our investors, are meeting there. And our investors, about 70% of which are nonprofits. They're endowments, foundations, hospital groups, and you know all the names: Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Notre Dame, Ford Foundation, Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic. It's the places that make the world a better place for everybody.

I think most everyone would agree that being a founder, it may be the hardest job. It's not the hardest job there is. There's much harder jobs, but it's much harder than usually than being an investor. One of the things that I'm struck, having seen your partners and the culture you have created, is the partners at Sequoia work harder than, at least from what I've seen, much harder than anyone I've seen in the venture community. And I wonder if you could just talk about what is that? Why is that? And what sort of guides that ethos?

So I think it starts with the people that we hire. We hire people that had a shock in their system when they were growing up. Maybe they were shunned. Maybe they were too smart for their own good. Maybe they were left by a parent. Maybe they were in a vicious competition with a twin brother. We have all those. In my case, I came from Europe. I got abused in high school. I was pissed off. So we find these folks are a little edgy. And for the rest of their lives, they have something to prove. In some ways, not very different than founders. We put those people in an environment of trust. We teach them because those people, and starting with myself, we were not pros at using the "we" pronoun. Those people tend to be "I" people because they were set aside.

And we put them in a circle of trust and we teach them that "we" is better than "I". We get compensation right. We don't have a situation that Johnny makes 10% more than Susie. It's pretty flat, which means we share things among us. And so we have this need, this incessant need to do something to win that never goes away. And so when you say we work hard, it's all we've ever known. And the last thing I'd say, we're in a privileged spot. On one side, we have the non-profits I mentioned. On the other side, we have the founders who can see the future that are exciting as heck to be around. And we have little Sequoia in the middle. And think about how great that is. As we make the world a better place, as we help you create fabulous companies, as we help take care of our families and our careers, we create a win-win-win situation.

Why wouldn't you want to work? What else would you rather do in life? What are the options? I've always thought, wouldn't it be great to have, you know—I'm a bald guy now—long blonde hair, you know, a guitar sitting up front. I used to think that might be the greatest job. Not even close. This is the greatest job. And that's why Sequoia partners, Sequoia investors, and the whole operating team around us—we have many more people that operate, that help us execute, than we do investors—we don't seem to get tired because, quite frankly, it's a blast.

How do you test for that kind of hunger, that grit that you talked about? Is there a scale of that where it's like, "Hey, they weren't picked on enough to work here"?

He's too well-balanced, I reckon. Look, we interview people, and you know the laws of interviewing. There's a lot of places you can't go right now, but we try to fish around the edges. We look for the why. Why do you do what you do? Why do you get up early in the morning? Why do you code until 2 o'clock in the morning? I'm very interested in the why. Not that you actually code. What I search for is, why are you so driven? And the other thing we look for underneath that whole set of imperfections, because these people are highly imperfect. I'm super imperfect. There has to be a good human being on the inside. When you peel a couple layers of the onion, you have to be a good human being kind of on the inside.

And so we look for the reason for the drive, and we look for—clearly, I don't think we want you four or five standard deviations away. You might be a little too edgy for us. But we do look for the edge that will keep you going forever, that will help you want to help that founder forever, knowing that you're mission-driven and you're doing it for a reason far greater than yourself.

Spiky founders, but not necessarily spiky investors.

Spiky, but not crazy, crazy spiky.

Yeah, exactly. The other thing is you maintain such a high-performance culture for so long. And, you know, you see this a lot with people that have some level of success and then they're kind of like, "Hey, I'm good. Like, I did it. I did what I was supposed to do and, you know, I take care of my family and that's enough." And that—but it's interesting because, in having watched you and listened to you, some of the things you've said over the decades and years is like—it's almost like, listening to you, it's almost like, "We, we still have so much to prove or to show. We have so much to earn," and yet you've already done it. So how do you get people that have already done it and been so successful to continue to push and push and push?

So I explained the type of people, but here's how I think about the whole world. One, we live in a world of accelerating change. That starts to inform all of us, the kind of culture you want. Accelerating change means you want to take shots, you want to take risks. If it worked yesterday, it doesn't matter because it won't work by tomorrow. If you're in a bricklaying business, you don't want change. In our business, you want change. So already you want a culture of allowing for errors and so on. Second, you know there's a paradox. A living thing needs to grow in order to survive. On the other hand, you grow too big and you can't get out of your own way. Think of the U.S. government or any government.

And so you've got to deal with that paradox. And lastly, the knowledge that 99% of living things are gone. If you look at, or companies, if you look at the Dow Jones 30, in 1960, there might be one company left. So accelerating change, the fact that most living things die, and all the things I just went over. So you have that puzzle. So the only way to survive is to try new things, to iterate very rapidly, to empower people, to be decentralized and yet communicate. And it's a heck of a challenge. If people understand the challenge in front of them, it's very inspiring. Add to that the fact it's mission-driven. And everybody is terrified to become a second-tier firm, a second-tier partnership.

And so we have this group of people that understand it's a difficult challenge to stay alive. It's a difficult challenge to iterate. It's a difficult challenge not to die. And in a world of accelerating change, people are fully empowered. Everybody's decentralized. The people in the U.S. make decisions in the U.S., the people in China in China, Europe in Europe, India in India, hedge fund in a hedge fund. Family office—why do we have a family office? Because when founders do well, they tend to forget about you. So we thought if we're gonna be from seed to IPO and beyond, we'd like to wrap you in when you made some money so you're still part of the group. And so we put all these pieces in place including, as you probably know, we restructured a U.S. fund so we can look at a founder and say we can be with you,

from day one until year 30. And that's our real goal, our best partnership. And notice I don't call them investments. Notice I don't call them deals. Our best partnership with companies, we were the first seed investors. We invested in Series A, B, C, the growth round, the pre-IPO round, public, and so on, and maybe even the family office. And we have numerous examples of founders at Sequoia where we've had that relationship. It's just fabulous.

Over the last couple of days, as people have been coming from around the world to this event, and I've been able to spend time with people, it's clear, more real than even probably what I knew before, how hard it's been for the last few years for everyone. On top of that, you put the startup into play, and how hard that is in itself. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what you would tell a founder or someone in a startup that's been through a series of really difficult things, some in their control and others, to try to help them to sort of get their sort of mental state back to sort of ground zero, the confidence—you know, you lose those things. What do you advise people?

I think the given you stated, I'd like to argue with. It's been not so tough. It's been a 12-year, 13-year, 14-year bull market run. Regardless almost of what you did, there was always some investor that was willing to invest. In fact, there's investment firms that got into business saying, 'We will follow top-tier firm A, we'll make an investment, $50 million, no due diligence, price, it doesn't matter. Here, Mr. Founder, write your own price on a term sheet.' We've seen that. I want you to appreciate the bad habits that you build when you do that as a founder. Because you build—as you know in life, you learn your real lesson during the most difficult times. And here we are in the most difficult times.

Now it's game on. Okay, now last round's post may not matter. Now the true founders come out because these are pretty tough times. Now you've got to make a decision whether you just want money where you write your own price or you want someone that can help you really build a business. So let me be clear what we do and we don't do. Product-market fit is genius, that's you guys. We cannot help you in product-market fit. I've had board meetings where the company was struggling. I came up with some idea. It was a product. The founder goes, 'It's a great idea.' I go, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, stop. What do you mean it's a great idea? I'm not a founder. I don't know anything. I'm a little unnerved that you think my idea is a great idea.'

However, if you have a modicum of product-market fit, whether it's engineering management, product marketing, product management, product marketing, demand gen, revenue, culture. How fast do you run and why? The merchandising cycle. How do you get from product management to revenue, right? Because when that's broken, you know what it shows up as? As a bad sales rep. That's what it shows up as, but in most cases it's not. We can help you debug that, figure out your maximum optimal slope because maximum growth—I didn't say growth at all costs—maximum optimal growth is a strategic imperative. Unless you get it, somebody else will. We're the best in the world at helping you do that. No doubt, I'll say that immodestly.

We have, in each of those roles, we have the best operator working at Sequoia, whether it's product management, engineering management—Google, managed Google, the search team for seven years. Product marketing, we have it. Product management, we have it. Revenue, we have it. Carl Eschenbach, from 60 million to six billion, VMware. No one better. We have those in the building to help you execute and dominate. And making sure that when you do it, you own as much of your company as possible. Because the wisdom out there is, 'Raise as much money as possible.' No, don't raise as much money as possible. Raise as little money as possible to get you to the next milestone with a little bit of cushion so your price goes up.

So all this junk you read from these tourists that never made a dime, throw it out. Use your noodle. Hold on to your equity like crazy. Save it for your long-term partners. Doesn't have to be us. Your seed investors should get something. They'll be there for a year. They took a lot of risk. The firm, the partnership, the partners that are with you for the next 10, 12 years, they ought to get something. 12 years is a long time. But then save a whole chunk for great engineers, great sales rep, great marketing people. And that's how you roll out a great company.

Awesome. Better than the first clap we got. So we've seen a lot of companies—well, actually, maybe I could just ask you one thing on that, is that we see a lot of early-stage companies just giving away their company like it is nothing.

And on these SAFEs, I love the line, "I got a term sheet." It reminds me of, "I met my spouse in a bar when I walked in, the first 10 seconds." That's what I think about. Notice how well-trained I am. I said spouse. I didn't say girl. I said guy. I have been compliant to death as an old dude. No, but it's the same thing. "I got a term sheet." Who cares you got a term sheet? You're looking for a lifetime partner the next 10 years. Architect your cap table the same way you architect your product. Remember that.

Explain what that means.

It means, you know, when you architect your product, you put a lot of thought into what you're gonna do, you know, what kind of code, what kind of technology you're gonna use, versus, "I got a term sheet." What does that mean? Go find your partner. Slowly, carefully, do due diligence, not on the investments that worked. How about doing due diligence on investments that didn't work? That's when you find out how your partner behaves. Say, "Mr. or Ms. Venture Capitalist, I wanna know the last three crappy investments you did, and I wanna speak to those CEOs."

I wanna see how you behave when things got tough.

That's due diligence.

A lot of companies over-indexed in the last few years on the valuations, which you touched on. Just again, imagine you're sitting in front of the team that did this, and they're saying, "Now I've got this huge hole." What do you tell these people? How do they get out?

Meaning, "I've raised way more money than I should have. I've raised at a valuation that is going to be almost impossible to ever grow into." And, you know, my team's options are underwater. Like, what? I mean, that's just not private. That's public markets, too. I mean, stocks are down.

That's not the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world is when you do all that and you spent all the money. That's the real problem. But say you have some money left, a whole bunch of money left. Okay. First of all, continue to invest in product. Don't take your foot off the accelerator on product. That was the lesson we learned in 2008.

What did you learn in 2008?

In 2008, recession, bring everything back. If you're strong, attack. If you're weak, hold back. I would moderate now. If you're strong, attack. If you're weak, hold back. But keep on investing in product. Because product is the inner core of a company. Point one. Point two, do figure out if you are on attack or defense. And if you're on attack, attack, probably not as much as you might have gone before when you knew there was a next round. Don't let those unit economics go off the deep end and payback is four years. You may want to pull that back because your competitors won't be able to compete, so you have a little more leeway. Point two. Point three, fix your options. Get the lawyers involved, reissue options at a lower price, and do everything you do because you've got to have motivated employees.

And then it's math. It's got to add up to 100%. And try to be fair to everybody, because as the CEO, you represent everybody, including the board, the debt holders, the customers. And you have to feel good about everything. And some CEOs are me, me, me in the same way investors are me, me, me. If you get that dynamic in place, it's not good. And remember, as a CEO, you manage your board, not the other way around, okay? You're the leader of the band. You have to lead during these times. And you have to even force investors to do things they may not want to do, including throw investors off the board. You have to make, look, wartime leadership. I had a slide last week at an annual meeting, and war—look, we have a war in Ukraine, and war is serious.

People die and I don't take that lightly. But from a mindset right now going into this next couple of years, it is game on. It is wartime leadership. It is real serious. And you've got to be quite tough.

I mean, for someone that's never been on a board, who's never been in a boardroom, who's never had guidance on how to do it, I mean, this is a situation I was in as I started to raise funding for my company. Where would I turn? Where should I get these things you're talking about? You've been in boardrooms for 40 years. How do I learn what to do to protect myself and to protect the ship?

Well, look, in some cases, founders have largely made their beds by the partners they have. It's too late. It's not too late, though. And the reason it's not too late—you can find operating people that have experience. And at the end of the day, it's a connection you have with other people. And I would ask the board member to introduce you to CEOs, founders who are in similar shoes so you can compare notes, or CEOs and founders who've been through it. Because from an investment standpoint, they're on the cap table. It's going to be tough to say you're out and you're in. You just can't do that. But you can have individual operators or other groups of founders that you can get together with and talk about some of these problems and come up with the best solutions because each case requires a specialized type of solution.

And if you have product-market fit, everything can work. If you don't have product-market fit and you don't have money in the bank, you're in a bit of a problem.

Well, and I think that wherever you are in the stage of your company, and probably most people here are on the earlier stage, and maybe you're still trying to find product-market fit, do all the things you've said. Protect your equity like it's gold. It's your children. It's like the thing. Do that. Protect your board. Set it up in the right way. Invest in product, all these kinds of things, until you get that product-market fit.

Find even your first partners. Look, and we have a seed fund and we partner with seed funds. But you set the tone of your company the first time you hire your first employee. You set the tone of your company the first time you choose your first 50 or 100k investor. That's when the culture starts being set. So you want to think very carefully from that point on. And you've got to make the decision. Are you better off with someone that specializes in seed or are you better off with someone like us that does seed investments? And then when you're with us, people will say, 'Oh, the signaling risk, if Sequoia doesn't do the Series A, you're up Shit Creek.' The data says completely otherwise. You're way more likely to get a Series A done

by having us on your cap table, which doesn't mean you should choose us. This is not a sales pitch. There are custom solutions for each one. There are fabulous seed firms that you may want to partner with. And so there's no single-type solution; it's where you have the chemistry. If you have a company that's going to require a lot of cash, you may not want to have a seed firm. You may want to have a deep-pocketed firm day one. If you decide that you can get from here to there in 10 to 15 million, then you may have a little more flexibility. You may want to have a seed firm. So each company is semi-custom. There's no single solution. And as my partner, Shailendra, says, there are many roads to heaven.

Assuming things continue, what type of advice do you have in terms of how much money I should have in the bank right now or what I should be preparing for? We haven't seen a memo from Sequoia like we did in 2008. Is it that kind of moment?

I don't want to sound negative because then other firms will say, "Look, Sequoia is negative." It's such a vicious business out there. But let me just say there's a school of thought that we're going to be in for a few tough years. Simple logic says we're not going to have 14 years of good times followed by six months of bad times. That's just simple logic. You know, the good old "what goes up must come down." You know the inflation numbers that came out this morning. You know there's a war on. We know that people didn't work for a while. We had a nice job report. Thank God people are working again. But the savings rate is going down. There's a forecast that consumer-type demand is going to be strong for another two quarters.

It's going to come down. Consumer demand comes down. The B2B demand starts coming down. And so remember, raise as little money as you can early on to get you to the next milestone. When you're in the early days, if you got a business up and running and you have 100 million in the bank and someone wants to put another 20, at last round's post of six months ago, not the craziest thing to accept it. Not the craziest thing to accept it. In this, you've got to play a little defense from a financial market standpoint. Because there are more signs pointing down than pointing up over the balance of 2022. And going, thinking back, "Oh, things are going to get back to 2019 levels when things were trading 15 times revenue"—

Or worse. Or higher. Higher. I wouldn't necessarily put all my money on that. So I would play a little defense from a cap table standpoint and financing standpoint, which isn't to say that's a big company thing. If you're starting a company, I wouldn't go sell three quarters of my equity. I would still go, in the early days, the startups are immune to the public markets, that's later. The startups, you're still looking for a partner, you still want to raise, you still want to maintain equity. If you're going to raise for nine months, because you're going to have something in nine months, raise for 15 months, just a little cushion so that you get there. That doesn't change.

I'd like to talk to you about Silicon Valley, a place where you have lived since the late 1980s. And I've been here for 15 years. In my time, I've seen sort of three different phases. You've probably seen at least twice that many, maybe more. What is the future of Silicon Valley from your perspective? Is it still relevant? I mean, it is today, but is it going to continue to be relevant?

So first of all, through Netscape, the iPhone, we're all interconnected. And what only used to happen in Silicon Valley because of great universities and great weather—which is why people stayed here, right?—is now happening not only in other parts of America. It's happening in Texas. It's happening in New York. It's happening in L.A. It's happening in London, in Berlin, in Paris, in São Paulo, in Beijing, in Shanghai. It's happening all over the place. In Bangalore, in Singapore, in Jakarta. So Silicon Valley has competition for the first time. Second, unfortunately, you know the political decisions that have been made in California. And you see what's happening in San Francisco. And you see the debt, the homelessness.

And, you know, the young children wearing masks—I love it, the masks were taken off everybody until the preschoolers, I don't understand why they were the last ones. The fires, the broken infrastructure, the fires. California being the fifth largest economy in the world, and yet can't balance the budget. The rents. You can't build in San Francisco. Young people can't buy a home. I mean, just the whole thing is a bit of a mess. And people are going away. Companies are going away. You know, you all read that Elon has gone away. A lot of other companies have gone away. You know why I'm here? Because I have four children and seven grandchildren here. Otherwise, I'd be gone. And so, personally, I think Silicon Valley is not gonna be the Silicon Valley, it hurts me to say, of yesteryear.

We were talking backstage. The over-under of what percentage of startups are gonna come from Silicon Valley five years out, to me, 50%. In the world, it used to be 80%. Part due to competition, but part due because you have a 16% tax rate. There's many places in America you go where it's zero. And that's why. Humans are smart. Humans are mobile. Zoom exists. Now you can do whatever you have to do. In most cases, probably not a telesales force, you want a bit of a room to get the energy. But if you're an engineer, if you are a little bit introverted, if you are in a very important back end of the company, which is engineering, product management, you no longer have to be in the office five days a week.

And so my forecast for Silicon Valley is that it's gonna be less attractive than it was four or five years ago, unfortunately. It breaks my heart to say that.

As somebody that loves being here and loves what's been built, but at the same time, as someone that has lived, I lived eight of my years outside the US, it is incredibly exciting to see so much happening in other places, so many great companies from even Sequoia's portfolio, whether it's, you know, Qualtrics in Utah or Unity in Europe or Klarna or, you know, the, the, you know, Medallia founders or, you know, Nubank. I mean, there's so many great companies outside of that that were created outside of Silicon Valley that like that's—I mean, it's spreading it around. It's incredible.

Now, having said all that, I travel the world. America, with all its imperfections, is the greatest place in the world. And don't you forget that. Use some of the energy of the youth, the idealism. Undo some of the screw-ups that my generation has done. By the way, the generation before us is the one that polluted it. Clean it a little bit. May you clean it a little more. Improve it. But just realize that there is no place like the United States of America. And I'm an immigrant from Europe. And you talk to anybody that lives outside of America, they're dying to come to this country. I don't see a line of people in America trying to go to these other countries around the world. So enjoy it.

Don't screw it up. And please make it a better place than we're going to leave it for you because it's a hell of a country.

Well said. Thank you. OK, so I spoke with one of your partners about you preparing—I spoke with a number of people preparing for this interview. But I wondered if I could selfishly ask you for some advice. And that is that one of your partners shared with me that one of the things that most impressed them about you was the fact that you had raised, in the midst of a lot of success and a lot of things going on in your own life, that you had raised four really incredible children. I know you have, I believe, seven grandchildren as well. I have four children. So what advice would you have for me as somebody that's trying to raise, you know, kids who are good people and who don't hate me in 20 years for being a founder?

So none of us in this room can raise warriors. Because in order to raise warriors, you need desperation. I'm willing to bet all of us are going to go home. I'm going to have a warm meal, a nice meal. If you have children, they're going to live in an apartment or a house. So realize all our children are at a disadvantage. So what can you do? Well, first of all, you want to love them a ton. Because if you love them a ton and they feel the parental love, you're at least halfway, maybe more. And second, you want to make them earn everything they possibly have. So even though they're not warriors, you have a chance to have them have a drive, a drive to do something. And third, which is not about the kids, it's about, look, yes, I've made it and now I can say all these things.

But I talk a lot about the resume traits which we all are here to discuss and the eulogy traits that have been pointed out in a number of books. And as we drive to become someone and to make something of ourselves in a family, don't forget the eulogy traits. Because when you're dead, the fact that I'm a great investor, when I'm dead, the fact that I'm an investor will be the first five seconds. Everything else will be father, friend, and all the other things. And I'll end with this. I had a slide in this last pitch I gave at Sequoia this past week from Warren Buffett. It says, how many people would hide you? And I heard Warren talk about a woman from Auschwitz. She's still alive and she judges people by whether they would hide her or not.

And she makes the point: at the end of life, we all sleep in the same bed, more or less. Some fly private, some fly in plane, but it's somewhat the same. But at the end of the day, if you want to lead a rich life, it's the quality of the children and how many people would risk their life to hide you. If you do that, if you achieve some modicum of success—you don't have to be CEO, you just have to have done a little something, you've got the look in your eye—you're gonna lead a very happy life. And that's my parting advice.

Doug Leone, thank you so much for being here.