Crucible Moments
A podcast about the inflection points that shaped some of the most significant companies of our time. Crucible moments are pivotal decisions that determine your trajectory. In Season 2, hear from founders and leaders like Steve Chen of YouTube, Drew Houston of Dropbox, Frank Slootman of ServiceNow and Tony Xu of DoorDash, Steve Huffman of Reddit and more about how they navigated the challenges and opportunities that defined their stories. Hosted by Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital. 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.
Episodes
January 23, 2025 • 50 mins
When Nubank started 10 years ago, a few big banks in Brazil had a stranglehold on the largest economy in Latin America: they controlled nearly all the market share, and imposed some of the highest fees and worst banking terms in the world. David Vélez was an unlikely character to challenge the system: an outsider from Colombia and Costa Rica with a Stanford MBA, David was working at Sequoia with the goal of investing in Latin Ameri...
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January 9, 2025 • 50 mins
A scrappy upstart taking on hyperscalers in a category with lots of hand-wavers, Dropbox became the canonical example of Silicon Valley viral growth, adding 50 million users in the first years following their 2008 launch and quickly dominating their category. However, as CEO Drew Houston explains, their path from viral sensation to enduring business was filled with daunting obstacles. As giants released competing products and tried...
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January 2, 2025 • 32 mins
Earlier this season we heard the startup story of ServiceNow—from Fred Luddy setting out to reinvent IT workflows as a first-time founder, to Frank Slootman joining as CEO to scale the business to an IPO. Even more remarkable is that ServiceNow has only accelerated as a public company, growing over ten-fold in the last decade. At a recent closed event in Europe, Sequoia partner Pat Grady spoke with ServiceNow’s current CEO Bill McD...
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December 19, 2024 • 48 mins
Millions of Americans use their smartphones to invest and manage their finances every day—but before Robinhood started in 2013, finance looked very different. Investing was something for the wealthy, with steep fees charged on every trade, and was done exclusively on computers with arcane trading software. In this episode, co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev explains why Robinhood set out to democratize access to investing and reinvent i...
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December 5, 2024 • 48 mins
This episode takes us back to the earliest days of YouTube, as the founders explain why it was a longshot that succeeded against all odds. When cofounders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim left PayPal to start YouTube, it wasn’t even clear that the nascent broadband infrastructure could support playing video in a browser. In a brief period until its acquisition by Google—from its first incarnation as a video dating site to co...
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November 21, 2024 • 53 mins
Founder Matthew Rabinowitz opens up about the intensely personal journey that set him on a course to revolutionizing healthcare. A PhD in electrical engineering, he had no background in genetics or biology, but after his sister had a baby with Down syndrome that hadn’t been detected and tragically died after 6 days, Matthew dedicated himself to solving this problem. After overcoming seemingly impossible obstacles, today Natera leve...
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November 14, 2024 • 29 mins
Tony Xu and Miki Kuusi share insights from building two of the world's most successful delivery platforms—DoorDash and Wolt—which merged in 2022 to create an $80B GOV business operating in 32 countries. In this candid conversation with Sequoia's Alfred Lin live at a Sequoia event in Europe, they discuss the challenges of scaling operational excellence, maintaining culture through hypergrowth and the future of commerce in cities.
H...
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October 24, 2024 • 53 mins
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 init...
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October 10, 2024 • 42 mins
The biggest enterprise software company to come out of Europe in the last decade didn’t come from London, Paris, Berlin or Stockholm—but Bucharest, Romania.
UiPath, founded in 2005 and originally called DeskOver, was a scrappy handful of engineers bootstrapping out of an apartment in Bucharest for about a decade, seeking in vain for product-market fit. When they stumbled upon an opportunity in the nascent enterprise software cate...
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September 26, 2024 • 43 mins
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 indep...
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September 12, 2024 • 44 mins
MongoDB, founded in 2007, originally aimed to create a platform-as-a-service system with a new database layer. Facing competition from Google, the founders pivoted to focus solely on their database product, MongoDB—a new kind of database built for the scale of the internet era. Founder Dwight Merriman built a product that developers loved, but scaling the company proved challenging until Dev Ittycheria took the reins as CEO in 2014...
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August 29, 2024 • 42 mins
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 ...
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August 22, 2024 • 2 mins
In Season 1 of Crucible Moments, we heard from founders like PayPal’s Max Levchin, Block’s Jack Dorsey, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and more about the turning points and key decisions that shaped their journeys. Now Crucible Moments is back for another exciting season. We’ll get the unvarnished history and inside story from Tony Xu of DoorDash, Drew Houston of Dropbox, Frank Slootman of ServiceNow, Vlad Tenev of Robinhood and more. Hoste...
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July 11, 2024 • 51 mins
Crucible Moments will be back shortly with season 2. You’ll hear from the founders of YouTube, DoorDash, Reddit, and more. In the meantime, we’d love to introduce you to a new original podcast, Training Data, where Sequoia partners learn from builders, researchers and founders who are defining the technology wave of the future: AI. The following conversation with Harrison Chase of LangChain is all about the future of AI agents—why ...
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November 30, 2023 • 39 mins
CEO Jensen Huang tells the legendary story of Nvidia, from the company’s early days pioneering 3D graphics cards for a niche PC gaming market to powering the AI revolution as the sixth most valuable company in the world. Nvidia faced multiple near-death experiences along the way, and their so-called “diving catches,” as Jensen calls them, were some of the most dramatic business stories of the modern era.
Host: Roelof Botha, Sequ...
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November 16, 2023 • 38 mins
Millions of customers have explored their genome with 23andMe. But when the company started in 2006, the idea of consumer DNA testing was heresy to the medical establishment. The FDA once even ordered 23andMe to stop selling its health testing product. The company persevered to make allies out of adversaries, and became the only FDA-approved product on the market. Learn how 23andMe defined the DNA testing category, and used its suc...
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November 2, 2023 • 36 mins
Co-founders Hosain Rahman and Alex Asseily, and Chief Creative Officer Yves Behar, recount the meteoric rise and fall of Jawbone. One of the most innovative companies of the mid 2000s, Jawbone pioneered wearable technology with UP, the first wrist-worn fitness tracker, and revolutionized sound with Jambox, the first smart wireless speaker. In one of the most dramatic turns in Silicon Valley history, the company went from a nearly $...
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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 “i...
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What happens to an events company when every event is canceled? “Even if you have spent 14 years building something, it could truly be gone in 14 days.” After working tirelessly to revolutionize how live events are organized, this was the reality Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz faced in March of 2020 as pandemic lockdowns went into effect, extinguishing the lifeblood of her business. She brought the same strategic thinking and grit that...
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September 21, 2023 • 37 mins
CEO Jack Dorsey reflects on Block’s origins and defining moments with host Roelof Botha.
Dorsey founded Square in 2009 with a clear vision: economic empowerment for all. Their dongle that turns iPhones into credit card readers was just the start. With Square, small business owners were able to reach more customers and better manage their companies. But when Cash App, which emerged from an internal hackathon, started to gain tracti...
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