Doug Leone Quotes
18 quotes from Doug Leone — Former managing partner of Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most successful VC firms (Apple, Google, Airbnb, WhatsAp….
“Crystal-clear thinking is one of the things we look for – not a fancy slide pitch, but crystal-clear thinking.”
“In a downturn, aggressive PR and communications strategy is key.”
“Be incredibly, ruthlessly selfish with your equity.”
“Give me an entrepreneur with a lot of courage, gusto and who iterates rapidly, and I will back that person day in and day out.”
“Some of the greatest companies got created during times like this, whether it was Cisco, whether it was PayPal and Google, whether it was Stripe and Square.”
“Great companies often emerge in tough times, and easy money can be bad for founders.”
“What we have right now is a bit of a shitshow.”
“Guys like me on the investor side are a dime a dozen.”
“What we have right now is a bit of a shitshow. There's companies with $500 million in the bank, $1 billion in the bank, with maybe an $80 million run rate and no growth perspective.”
“AI is the next platform shift in the same way that mobile was.”
“You start a company because you see an opening, and you just can't fall asleep at night until you go after it.”
“What got me here? [Fear](/mental-models/fear), hunger and empathy. I came to America from Italy as an only child with my parents at age eleven. We settled in Mount Vernon, New York, which was a tough town. I couldn't throw or hit a baseball. I was an outsider trying to blend in.”
“You have to be willing to put yourself out of business by trying new things, before someone else does.”
“So, you take the sweetest of children and put him in an environment where he gets the shit beat out of him all the time, belittled at every level. The sweet little boy of ten became abused socially by fifteen. That created someone with an inner heart but a very sharp outer edge.”
“I'd rather have someone who gets A, F, F, A than someone that gets B+, B+, B+, B+. I prefer people who ask for forgiveness rather than for permission.”
“The trick is, a market has to be nonexistent when you start. If the market is large early on, you will have too many competitors. You have to make it large.”
“Doug — not fit to listen to founders. And in this new day and age, everybody wants weekly feedback. Let me tell you, you read that note from Don Valentine. That's all the feedback you need for the next twelve months.”
“Be incredibly, ruthlessly selfish with your equity. Guard those shares with your life, and you should architect your investors the same way you architect your product and your engineering team.”
