Invest Like The Best
Episode 284 Designing Investment Products
Invest Like The Best

Episode 284: Designing Investment Products

Invest Like The Best

Episode 284

Designing Investment Products

Jess Lee is a partner at Sequoia Capital. We cover Sequoia's approach to product design, what ComicCon and Burning Man can teach us about the importance of communities, and the recipe for building great teams and companies.

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[00:02:35] - [First question] - Why more investment firms don’t have a product mindset

[00:05:22] - How to approach building a productized version of capital 

[00:08:00] - Ways Ampersand measures success and judging their own performance 

[00:08:49] - Driving reasons that Sequoia wins deals beyond their brand name

[00:10:28] - How her work as CPO at Sequoia has changed her investing approach

[00:12:28] - Everything she’s learned about community and its relevance to business 

[00:17:48] - What the gold standards are for studying strongly built communities 

[00:19:42] - What it is about Comic-Con that works so well from a community standard  

[00:21:18] - The role that scarcity plays in communities writ large

[00:23:10] - Product mindset and customer obsession 

[00:24:33] - Knowing when it’s okay to begin expanding 

[00:25:14] - The formative experiences or lenses that inform her investing decisions

[00:28:12] - Rates of change in her investment progress and dollars going to female founders

[00:29:36] - Systemic bias and what’s driving a lack of funds towards female founders 

[00:32:26] - How she applies community building lessons to All Raise

[00:33:20] - The internal learning culture in Sequoia that others could adopt and benefit from

[00:37:01] - Which Marvel superheroes her Sequoia partners would be  

[00:39:05] - Seeds of motivation for Arc and what it is

[00:43:06] - When you should innovate and when you shouldn’t reinvent the wheel 

[00:44:31] - The best ways she’s seen companies manage and support human capital

[00:45:36] - Biggest mistakes made when managing human capital 

[00:46:42] - What working on Google Maps taught her about product development 

[00:48:42] - Someone she admires and has learned the most from in All Raise  

[00:50:02] - Measuring success at Sequoia over the next ten years  

[00:52:20] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for her

[00:53:42] - What it was that made the people who believed in her take a chance on her 

[00:55:03] - Things in pop culture today that most has her attention

Designing Investment Products

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?

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