20VC: Sequoia's Ravi Gupta on His Lessons From The Hyper-Growth of Instacart, The Key Question To Ask When Building or Evaluating Teams & The Importance of Investing In and Detecting Slopes Rather Than Intercepts

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

The Twenty Minute VC

Finance, Venturecapital, Tech News, News, Siliconvalley, Technology, Investing, Startups, Business

4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 2020

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ravi Gupta is a Partner @ Sequoia Capital, one of the world's leading venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Airbnb, Instacart, Stripe, UiPath, Zoom, the list goes on. As for Ravi, prior to Sequoia, he spent 4 years as COO & CFO @ Instacart playing an integral role in their hyper-growth journey. Before that Ravi spent 10 years as a Director @ KKR.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Ravi made his way from KKR to being one of the key execs leading Instacart? How Instacart led to Ravi becoming a Partner @ Sequoia?

2.) When thinking about team, what does Ravi believe is the single most important question to ask? How does Ravi determine between good and great when assessing talent? What are the leading indicators? What have been Ravi's lessons on what it takes to acquire those great talents?

3.) How does Ravi think about and approach prioritisation today? How does Ravi analyse what to delegate vs what to control? Should you get good at your weaknesses and double down on strengths? How does Ravi think about vulnerability within leadership? How did he show that vulnerability as a leader at Instacart?

4.) In joining Sequoia, what has Ravi been most impressed with in regards to the team? What has he been most surprised by? Why is Ravi so bullish unanimous decision-making is right? How do founders determine which Sequoia Partner will be on their board?

5.) How does Ravi think about what it takes to be the very best board member? Who is the best board member Ravi has worked with? What made them so special? What advice does Ravi give to new board members adopting board seats for the first time?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:

Ravi’s Fave Book: Clay Christensen: How Will You Measure Your Life?

As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!

Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the 20 minute VC with me, Harry Stabbings, and today we have a very special one for me.
0:04.3	It really exemplifies why I love what I do so much with the show.
0:07.3	I met this guest maybe six months ago.
0:09.2	We spent a lot of time chatting and becoming friends, and really is such a joy to do this with him today,
0:14.1	someone I respect and admire as much as I do.
0:16.4	Therefore, without further ado and enough of the soppy stuff, I'm thrilled to welcome Ravi Gupta, partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the world's leading venture firms for the portfolio,
0:24.5	including the lights of Airbnb, Instacart, Stripe, UI Path, Zoom, the list really does go on.
0:30.7	As for Ravi, prior to Sequoia, he spent four years as C.O.O. and CFO at Instacart,
0:35.6	playing an integral role in their hypergrowth journey.
0:38.1	Before that, Ravi spent 10 years as a director at KKR, and I'd also want to say a huge thank you
0:42.7	to Pat Grady, Mike Maritz, Will Gaebrick, Matild Colin, and Sagar Sangvi.
0:47.4	Some amazing question suggestions today.
0:49.5	Real team effort here on the schedule.
0:51.3	But before we move into the show today, I want to take a moment to mention HelloSign, a great example of a company that found success in building a product
0:58.0	focused on user experience. HelloSign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to
1:03.5	securely send and requests legally valid digital signatures and agreements. They raised a total
1:08.2	of $16 million in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox
1:11.8	for an impressive $230 million. Check out HelloSign.com forward slash 20VC to join the thousands
1:18.3	of companies and founders who value fast, secure and simple e-signatures. And I do have to mention
1:24.1	another incredible product-centric business, Digis. Digits has spent the last two years building this incredibly powerful financial engine for businesses.
1:32.2	Now they're ready to show you what they can do with it.
1:34.4	Back in April, they announced a real-time dashboard to help you manage your company's expenses for free.
	...

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