Transcript
Introduction
Patrick
My guest today is Jess Lee. Jess is a partner at Sequoia Capital, as well as their Chief Product Officer. Before becoming an investor, Jess co-founded fashion app Polyvore, and was an early Product Manager for Google Maps. Most recently, she co-founded All Raise, a nonprofit that is changing the gender balance in tech. Our discussion ranges from Burning Man, to Marvel, to Sequoia's mobile app. And I hope that Jess's passion for delighting users rubs off on you. Please enjoy my conversation with Jess Lee.
Investing With a Product Mindset
Patrick
Jess, I was thinking about an interesting place to begin our discussion today and I tried to respect what's unique about you, which is this really interesting vent diagram of product building and product thinking and investing. And so I thought maybe we'd begin right there at the intersection of those two things, specifically around products that investing firms offer. So, if you ask most people, especially at early stage private markets where Sequoia focuses, primarily when it makes its first investments, they would say that the product is capital. You're giving money to companies, you get a great team or a board member or whatever in exchange, and it's a very simple product and that most investment firms work that way. Why do you think more investment firms, especially ones that make direct investing where capital is part of the product, don't have more of a product mindset like actual products like the ones that they're backing themselves when they're outlaying capital?