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...
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
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31:50
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
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47:57
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
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48:14
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
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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