Don Valentine, Founder of Sequoia Capital at the GSB

Valentine’s talk is excellent and frank—his humor is old-fashioned. There’s a hubris to the way that he speaks about our companies—but there’s refreshment in the way that he pieces together the puzzle of systematic thinking about markets as driving the Sequoia investment thesis and that driving their choice of entrepreneurs to support. The excessive lionization of entrepreneurs by many new investors is pleasant, but often feels like a lot of smoke up your ass. In the end, we’d all be better off with a more tacit agreement with our backers and their real purpose—to win and to win big. Valentine’s candid acknowledgment of this—and the way he speaks of creating supportive management teams for founders with little experience is excellent. Remember, this is the same man that pushed out the Cisco founders—and probably for the best. Cisco would not be the company it is today without that push. If you have to choose investors, you want to work with people that have shown they know how to win through superior pattern recognition, connections, and resources.

In terms of storytelling, I want to extend the notion beyond marketing, sales, and fundraising to product design and user experience. I’ve been meaning to write something more substantive about Marc Hedlund’s excellent post-mortem, Why Wesabe Lost to Mint. I think the issue comes down to storytelling to your users. Mint succeeded at onboarding users and quickly giving them an experience that was congruent with the story they bought into by signing up for an account—ultimately that experience ended up being quite shallow (in terms of what you could do with your data) which is why Hedlund is quite correct that’s there’s still a huge opportunity there. But you can’t get to that opportunity unless you can tell the right story first.