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...
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
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52:55
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
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29:18
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
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52:39
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
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41:35
Reddit ft. Steve Huffman - The Making (and Remaking) of the Front Page of the Internet
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
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.
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