flâneur

Douglas Leone: Five Lessons On Starting a Business in Silicon Valley | Stanford Graduate School of Business

gsb.stanford.edu · 838 words · saved by 1 readers

What does it take to successfully pitch a business concept to Douglas Leone, a managing partner at Sequoia Capital open in new window ? If you want to walk away with seed money, start out by being on time, turn your mobile phone off (setting it to vibrate does not count), and don’t waste his time by displaying ignorance of your target market, he recently told open in new window a group of Stanford Graduate School of Business students. It won’t hurt to mention that you come from a humble background, because Leone does too. His working-class family emigrated from Italy when he was 11, and his first job involved cleaning toilets. Didn’t get into your school of choice? Neither did Leone. Stanford Graduate School of Business rejected him twice, and he likes to hire “people mostly from modest means, people that have not followed a preset set of tracks.” Sequoia Capital was an early backer of WhatsApp, investing about $68 million in a startup that eventually sold to Facebook for $16 billion.

What does it take to successfully pitch a business concept to Douglas Leone, a managing partner at Sequoia Capital? If you want to walk away with seed money, start out by being on time, turn your mobile phone off (setting it to vibrate does not count), and don’t waste his time by displaying ignorance of your target market, he recently told a group of Stanford Graduate School of Business students. It won’t hurt to mention that you come from a humble background, because Leone does too. His working-class family emigrated from Italy when he was 11, and his first job involved cleaning toilets.…

related reading