Who you are defines how you build.

This is the entrepreneurial thought leader series.

Brought to you by Stanford E-Corner.

Welcome YouTube and Stanford communities to the Entrepreneural Thought Leader Seminar.

I am Ravi Balani, a lecturer in the management science and engineering department at Stanford and the director of Alchemist, an accelerator for enterprise startups. And I'd like to welcome you to this week's ETL, presented by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, which is the Entrepreneurship Center in the School of Engineering at Stanford and BASIS, the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students.

Today, we are honored to welcome Alfred Lynn to ETL.

Alfred is a partner at Sequoia Capital, where he focuses on consumer and enterprise investments and co-lead Sequoia's early stage investment business in the United States and Europe.

I'm going to give a somewhat long introduction to Alfred just because Alfred has done a lot.

It's not that Alfred is an old man, but he's definitely not a young man, and he's packed a lot

into his life to date. So Alfred is a Taiwanese American who came to the United States from Taiwan

at the age of six, and then he went to the famously difficult Stuyvesant High School in New York,

then went on to Harvard where he got a bachelor's degree in applied math.

At Harvard, Alfred met Tony Shea, the future CEO of Zappos,

and Alfred and Tony would famously team up on three highly successful ventures

in the future post-Harvard,

which we may talk about if we have time.

But at Harvard, they were both already showing signs of entrepreneurial tendencies.

Tony Shea had started a pizza business to make some money at Harvard, selling pizzas,

and in his autobiography delivering happiness, Tony recalls how Alfred would buy whole pizzas every night.

And Tony thought that Alfred seemed improbably skinny for being his best customer and having such a

voracious appetite, but he only later realized that Alfred was actually reselling the pizzas,

not eating them himself, and selling the slices at a premium markup to his fellow dormates.

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