The Sequoia story started 1972, but the true history of the firm precedes the official launch date.
Prior to starting Sequoia, Don Valentine had spent fifteen years inside Fairchild Semiconductor and National Semi. He had worked alongside the traitorous eight at Fairchild. He had been part of the founding sales team at National.
By his own account, these experiences allowed him to see the future before it happened. It also gave him a front row seat to inter-firm dynamics, succession planning, and some of the struggles that eventually emerge with dictator-style partnerships that hold key-man risk. When he set out to start his own firm, all of the experiences played an influence.
Don deliberately did not name the firm after himself. He chose Sequoia.
He said the redwoods grow fast, grow big, and live thousands of years. He said he wanted the firm to take on those traits. What he didn't say - what Mike Moritz would say for him forty-seven years later in the firm's obituary for him - was the unstated implication: he was building something that would outlast him, which meant it couldn't carry his name.
The naming decision was the founding architectural move. Every succession Sequoia has executed since - five over fifty-three years, more than any peer firm in the history of venture capital - was downstream of that one choice.
The fifth handoff
In November 2025, Sequoia Capital handed itself off again.
Roelof Botha - three years into his role as sole Senior Steward - stepped aside. Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, who had spent fifteen and eighteen years respectively inside the partnership, became co-stewards. Doug Leone, who had run the firm before Botha, returned as Chairman with an active investing role. Botha kept his board seats and his office. The transition was orderly. No lawsuit. No leaked memo. No founder paydown. No sale of equity to an outside firm. No reshuffling of LPs. The partnership announced it on a Tuesday, and on Wednesday the firm operated as before.
This is unusual because of how few venture capital firms have been able to execute a clean leadership transition even once.
Kleiner Perkins - once Sequoia's exact peer - has notoriously struggled to move past John Doerr. Founders Fund still operates almost entirely around Peter Thiel's personal brand. Andreessen Horowitz remains in its first generation sixteen years in. Most of the eponymous firms of the 1970s and 1980s either folded, sold themselves to a parent, or quietly faded as their founders aged out. The firms that have tried to outlive their founders mostly haven't.
Sequoia just did it for the fifth time.
What this series is
As I said in the Outlaw manifesto, the firm sits on the shoulders of giants. As a student of history, I am trying to build the firm after some of the most notable firms and investors that have come before me.
Sequoia is near the top of that list.
I have spent the past ~12 months studying Sequoia's architecture in granular detail - every fund, every senior partner, every essay and interview, every succession event, the Moritz internal memoir on Valentine that every new Sequoia hire reads on day one. I have read or listened to every long-form interview Doug Leone, Roelof Botha, Pat Grady, Alfred Lin, and Andrew Reed have given in the past decade. I built a 21-entry archive of the firm's canonical writings. I tracked the genealogy of every senior partner and the structural mechanics of every fund cycle from 1974 to 2025.
I believe every firm is a living organism. The Sequoia of today is different than the Sequoia of 1972, and I think it is worth studying the decisions that have allowed the firm to become what it is in 2026. The best way I have found to do that is to break down the firm into different fund cycles and study the people who were driving the decisions across those different fund cycles.
Screenshot from my Notion where I have organized takeaways from different partners and fund cycles
The synthesis from my research is this: Sequoia is not a venture firm. It is a multi-generational franchise that happens to be currently expressed as a venture firm.
That distinction is the source of every architectural decision the firm has ever made. The naming choice. The refusal to sell stakes. The voluntary equalization of carry across generations. The 2021 evergreen restructure. The 2023 geographic split. The five successions. They all flow from one structural commitment that Don Valentine made in 1972: the firm is held in trust, not owned. Each generation inherits without paying. Each generation hands off without charging. The economics are a fiduciary arrangement, not an extraction vehicle.
Most VC firms cannot make this trade because they're designed the opposite way - to maximize the founder's personal economic outcome over a single career arc. Sequoia's compounding curve is the proof case that the other trade is possible.
This is the first of four pieces. Over the course of the series I'll work through the founding architecture (this piece), the apprentice era of Moritz and Leone (Part II), the actual operating system of the partnership (Part III), and the modern pivot - Capital Fund restructure, geographic split, the Botha removal, and what comes next (Part IV).
The goal is not a history lesson. There are already two of those - Sebastian Mallaby's The Power Law and the Acquired Sequoia episodes.
The goal is to extract the architectural blueprint. What did Valentine actually build, mechanism by mechanism? Which of those mechanisms are portable to the next generation of firm builders? Which are specific to Sequoia and cannot be copied? And how does a new firm inherit the most important parts of the Sequoia operating system without trying to replicate the entire firm?
That's what we're going to figure out, and we’ll start with the original architect: Don Valentine.
The rest of this piece is for paid subscribers.
Below the paywall: who Don Valentine actually was, how he raised the first $5M, the Atari and Apple deals, the foundational mistake that restructured the LP base for fifty years, the Valentine operating philosophy in his own words, the four-corner partnership template that every senior hire since has fit into, and the 1996 succession that established the stewardship economics every subsequent transition has run on.
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