Pitching the legendary Don Valentine
I write this a day after the passing of Don Valentine, the pioneering venture capital investor who founded Sequoia Capital. I share this anecdote in remembrance of Don, someone I greatly respected, a figure who played an enormous role in building the Silicon Valley ecosystem that now drives our economy.
I had only one meeting with Don, and it was very memorable. It was actually my very first time in a VC pitch meeting.
It was late in 1998, an epic year in the valley, one of the most inflationary years of a period that we would only later come to know in hindsight as the “Dot Com Bubble”. Just days before, I had signed on as the third person and head of marketing for what appeared at the time to be a very promising new startup. And now I learned that tomorrow our founder/CEO and I were going in for a second meeting with Sequoia Capital, the top-tier venture capital firm that had planted its flag in the white-hot Internet market by being first money in for Yahoo, a deal led by Michael Moritz.
Our CEO’s first meeting with Michael, prior to my joining, had apparently gone great, and tomorrow’s meeting with founding partner, Don Valentine, represented the chance to seal the deal for a million-dollar-plus initial round of funding. We just needed to convince Don, and we were golden*.
