Crucible Moments

Sequoia Capital
  • 4.5 (2)
  • ENTREPRENEURSHIP
  • EVERY TWO WEEKS
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.

  1. Dropbox ft. Drew Houston - How the Cloud Pioneer Reinvented Itself

    6 DAYS AGO

    Dropbox ft. Drew Houston - How the Cloud Pioneer Reinvented Itself

    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 to crush them, Dropbox embarked on a set of strategic acquisitions to expand its product line—but failed to find product-market fit with the new offerings. What do you do when your idea for your second act doesn’t work like you hoped? Drew describes the insights that led them to strategically re-focus on work use cases for their core product, and the other moves that would re-ignite growth and turn the company profitable. In a counterintuitive bet, the cloud innovator would end up migrating off of cloud infrastructure to its own servers in order to be more cost-efficient. This engineering feat, called Magic Pocket, became the stuff of Silicon Valley engineering lore. Drew and engineering leaders Akhil Gupta and James Cowling recount the story of how they pulled it off. Host: Roelof Botha Featuring: Drew Houston, Arash Ferdowsi, Sujay Jaswa, Akhil Gupta, James Cowling, Bryan Schreier

    50 min
  2. LIVE: ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott on Unlocking Elite Level Execution

    2 JAN

    LIVE: ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott on Unlocking Elite Level Execution

    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 McDermott, who took the reins in 2019. This conversation was recorded in September, 2024 when ServiceNow’s market cap was $125B—today that number has grown to $225B. Their conversation sheds light on ServiceNow’s journey to becoming one of the world’s largest software companies, with over $10 billion dollars in annual revenue, and how Bill’s unrelenting focus on elite level execution is key to the company’s continued success. Featuring: Bill McDermott, ServiceNow; Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

    32 min
  3. Robinhood ft. Vlad Tenev - Reinventing Finance for a New Generation

    19/12/2024

    Robinhood ft. Vlad Tenev - Reinventing Finance for a New Generation

    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 it for a new generation, how it overcame immense challenges in that pursuit, and how it reinvented itself amid a market downturn with a holistic suite of customer offerings to mount an historic comeback.    Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Vlad Tenev, Micky Malka, Andrew Reed, Jason Warnick

    48 min

  4. 05/12/2024

    YouTube ft. Steve Chen - 18 Months That Changed the Internet

    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 confronting daunting technical and legal challenges—the early story of YouTube is an underdog tale of scrappy upstarts who ended up changing the world.  Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Steve Chen, Jawed Karim, Zahavah Levine, Colin Corbett, Yu Pan

    48 min

  5. 21/11/2024

    Natera ft. Matthew Rabinowitz - A Personal Mission That Led to a Biotech Revolution

    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 leverages molecular biology and novel bioinformatics technology to provide prenatal screening in nearly half of U.S. pregnancies, as well as transforming oncology and organ transplants. Hear about Matthew’s vision for the future of computational biology and its profound impact on human health. Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Matthew Rabinowitz, Jonathan Sheena, Steve Chapman, Chitra Kotwaliwale, Sarah Elliot

    53 min
  6. LIVE: DoorDash’s Tony Xu and Miki Kuusi Talk Scaling Operational Excellence

    14/11/2024

    LIVE: DoorDash’s Tony Xu and Miki Kuusi Talk Scaling Operational Excellence

    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. Host: Alfred Lin, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Tony Xu, Miki Kuusi

    29 min
  7. DoorDash ft. Tony Xu – The “Wrong” Moves That Built a Giant

    24/10/2024

    DoorDash ft. Tony Xu – The “Wrong” Moves That Built a Giant

    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

    53 min
  8. UiPath ft. Daniel Dines - From Bootstrapping in Bucharest to One of Software’s Biggest IPOs

    10/10/2024

    UiPath ft. Daniel Dines - From Bootstrapping in Bucharest to One of Software’s Biggest IPOs

    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 category of Robotic Process Automation, the company did a hard pivot, changed their name to UiPath, and rocketed from obscurity to the fastest-growing SaaS company ever at the time. After a successful IPO, today they are the global category leader in RPA. The unlikely rise of UiPath is an inspiration and a reminder that you can build something great from anywhere.  Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Daniel Dines, Andra Ciorici-Chelmus, Brandon Deer, Luciana Lixandru

    42 min
See All (22)

Trailer

Ratings & Reviews

4.5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

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.

Information

  • Channel
    Sequoia Capital
  • Creator
    Sequoia Capital
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2025
  • Episodes
    22
  • Rating
    Clean

More From Sequoia Capital

You Might Also Like

To listen to explicit episodes, sign in.

Stay up to date with this show

Sign in or sign up to follow shows, save episodes and get the latest updates.
Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada