Crucible Moments

A podcast about the inflection points that shaped some of the most important companies of our time. Crucible moments are pivotal decisions that determine your trajectory. Hear from founders like Jack Dorsey of Block, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, and Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe about how they navigated the challenges and opportunities that defined their stories. Hosted by Roelof Botha, Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital, who has spent over 20 years building companies such as Youtube, Square, and Instagram.

The content of this podcast does not constitute investment advice, an offer to provide investment advisory services, or an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund.

DoorDash faced skeptics from the start. Grubhub, Delivery.com, and others were already addressing the restaurant delivery market when CEO Tony Xu and his co-founders started in 2013. But after talking to hundreds of local small businesses, they realized there was still an unmet need: None of the competitors solved the problem of delivery with an on-demand workforce, the way Uber had done with drivers. After struggling to raise initial funding, DoorDash found traction. But the next few years would prove tumultuous, with cash scarcity and investor skepticism putting the company perilously close to the brink. The founders’ contrarian decisions, clarity on their commitment to serve small local businesses, and ability to out-operate competitors has turned DoorDash into one the decade’s startup success stories. In this episode, Tony brings us inside their decision-making, and what DoorDash saw that others missed.

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

Featuring: Tony Xu, Keith Yandell, Miki Kuusi, Alfred Lin

In 2004, bankrupt after the company where he’d previously worked had imploded, Fred Luddy decided to start over as a first-time founder at age 50. His vision was to reinvent the nascent IT software field for the cloud era. What started as simple help desk replacement software would eventually become a ~$150B market cap company powering digital workflows across the enterprise—but success didn’t come easy. Initially bootstrapped and ultra-lean, the company’s infrastructure began buckling under its own success as customer demand spiked. When the legendary Frank Slootman joined as CEO to help scale the company, he describes being terrified to check his email every morning. Hear how Frank, Fred and the team stabilized the business, expanded their product offerings, and nearly made a $150B+ mistake by selling too early.

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

Featuring: Fred Luddy, Frank Slootman, Doug Leone, Pat Grady, Carl Eschenbach

Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/crucible-moments-servicenow/

00:00 - Cold open

00:22 - Introduction

02:09 - Fred Luddy’s journey to coding

03:33 - Founding ServiceNow after financial ruin

07:11 - Finding product-market fit

15:16 - Finding a new CEO in Frank Slootman

22:19 - Overcoming scaling challenges

29:54 - Contemplating an acquisition offer

32:07 - Blocking the sale

38:17 - Lessons learned

Reddit is one of the largest and most culturally influential sites on the internet—and its journey is one of the most unusual company stories in internet history. College roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian founded Reddit in 2005 and scaled it on a shoestring until Condé Nast acquired it the following year. Struggling for direction under its parent company, the founders left, and Condé Nast ultimately spun it out as an independent company once again. With Reddit buckling under user discontent in 2015, founder Steve Huffman returned as CEO to save the company and navigate the way forward. Over the following nine years, Reddit stabilized and the company’s revenue grew more than 50-fold to a successful IPO 19 years in the making.

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

Featuring: Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, Chris Slowe, Jen Wong, Alfred Lin

Founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah reveal how they took a blog started as a hobby and turned the ideas behind it into a $20+ billion success. In 2006, HubSpot upended traditional approaches to marketing by taking advantage of the the nascent internet in a new way: By capitalizing on seach engines and social media, they offered a way to pull customers in rather than pushing ads and mailers out. They coined the new category “inbound marketing.” They continued to defy conventional wisdom, deciding to serve small businesses over big enterprises, and taking on a Goliath in a new category. As the founders explain, zigging where others zag is the key to their success.

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

Featuring: Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah, Pat Grady, Dannie Herzberg

Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/crucible-moments-hubspot/