Crucible Moments

DoorDash faced skeptics from the start. Grubhub, Delivery.com, and others were already addressing the restaurant delivery market when CEO Tony Xu and his co-founders started in 2013. But after talking to hundreds of local small businesses, they realized there was still an unmet need: None of the competitors solved the problem of delivery with an on-demand workforce, the way Uber had done with drivers. After struggling to raise initial funding, DoorDash found traction. But the next few years would prove tumultuous, with cash scarcity and investor skepticism putting the company perilously close to the brink. The founders’ contrarian decisions, clarity on their commitment to serve small local businesses, and ability to out-operate competitors has turned DoorDash into one the decade’s startup success stories. In this episode, Tony brings us inside their decision-making, and what DoorDash saw that others missed.

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

Featuring: Tony Xu, Keith Yandell, Miki Kuusi, Alfred Lin

The biggest enterprise software company to come out of Europe in the last decade didn’t come from London, Paris, Berlin or Stockholm—but Bucharest, Romania. 

UiPath, founded in 2005 and originally called DeskOver, was a scrappy handful of engineers bootstrapping out of an apartment in Bucharest for about a decade, seeking in vain for product-market fit. When they stumbled upon an opportunity in the nascent enterprise software category of Robotic Process Automation, the company did a hard pivot, changed their name to UiPath, and rocketed from obscurity to the fastest-growing SaaS company ever at the time. After a successful IPO, today they are the global category leader in RPA. The unlikely rise of UiPath is an inspiration and a reminder that you can build something great from anywhere. 

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

Featuring: Daniel Dines, Andra Ciorici-Chelmus, Brandon Deer, Luciana Lixandru 

Reddit is one of the largest and most culturally influential sites on the internet—and its journey is one of the most unusual company stories in internet history. College roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian founded Reddit in 2005 and scaled it on a shoestring until Condé Nast acquired it the following year. Struggling for direction under its parent company, the founders left, and Condé Nast ultimately spun it out as an independent company once again. With Reddit buckling under user discontent in 2015, founder Steve Huffman returned as CEO to save the company and navigate the way forward. Over the following nine years, Reddit stabilized and the company’s revenue grew more than 50-fold to a successful IPO 19 years in the making.

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

Featuring: Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, Chris Slowe, Jen Wong, Alfred Lin

MongoDB, founded in 2007, originally aimed to create a platform-as-a-service system with a new database layer. Facing competition from Google, the founders pivoted to focus solely on their database product, MongoDB—a new kind of database built for the scale of the internet era. Founder Dwight Merriman built a product that developers loved, but scaling the company proved challenging until Dev Ittycheria took the reins as CEO in 2014. As cloud computing grew, MongoDB transitioned from on-premise software to Atlas, a fully-managed cloud service. Despite initial skepticism, Atlas now represents 70% of MongoDB's revenue. As Atlas scaled, MongoDB faced another controversial decision: whether to change its open source license model to maintain its commercial moat. These pivotal decisions transformed MongoDB from a niche database to nearly $2 billion in annual revenue.

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

Featuring: Dwight Merriman, Dev Ittycheria and Tom Killalea

Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/crucible-moments-mongodb/

00:00 - Cold Open

00:19 - Introduction

05:30 - The NoSQL movement

09:52 - Scrapping the platform for the database

14:57 - Launching as MongoDB

19:52 - Moving to the cloud with Atlas

24:52 - Assigning a directly responsible individual

30:15 - How Atlas changed MongoDB

35:03 - Updating the licensing model to avoid “strip mining”

39:50 - Evolving back into a platform

41:26 - Executing on points of leverage

In 2004, bankrupt after the company where he’d previously worked had imploded, Fred Luddy decided to start over as a first-time founder at age 50. His vision was to reinvent the nascent IT software field for the cloud era. What started as simple help desk replacement software would eventually become a ~$150B market cap company powering digital workflows across the enterprise—but success didn’t come easy. Initially bootstrapped and ultra-lean, the company’s infrastructure began buckling under its own success as customer demand spiked. When the legendary Frank Slootman joined as CEO to help scale the company, he describes being terrified to check his email every morning. Hear how Frank, Fred and the team stabilized the business, expanded their product offerings, and nearly made a $150B+ mistake by selling too early.  

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

Featuring: Fred Luddy, Frank Slootman, Doug Leone, Pat Grady, Carl Eschenbach

Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/crucible-moments-servicenow/

00:00 - Cold open

00:22 - Introduction

02:09 - Fred Luddy’s journey to coding

03:33 - Founding ServiceNow after financial ruin

07:11 - Finding product-market fit

15:16 - Finding a new CEO in Frank Slootman 

22:19 - Overcoming scaling challenges 

29:54 - Contemplating an acquisition offer

32:07 - Blocking the sale

38:17 - Lessons learned

In Season 1 of Crucible Moments, we heard from founders like PayPal’s Max Levchin, Block’s Jack Dorsey, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and more about the turning points and key decisions that shaped their journeys. Now Crucible Moments is back for another exciting season. We’ll get the unvarnished history and inside story from Tony Xu of DoorDash, Drew Houston of Dropbox, Frank Slootman of ServiceNow, Vlad Tenev of Robinhood and more. Hosted by Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital.

Crucible Moments will be back shortly with season 2. You’ll hear from the founders of YouTube, DoorDash, Reddit, and more. In the meantime, we’d love to introduce you to a new original podcast, Training Data, where Sequoia partners learn from builders, researchers and founders who are defining the technology wave of the future: AI. The following conversation with Harrison Chase of LangChain is all about the future of AI agents—why they’re suddenly seeing a step change in performance, and why they’re key to the promise of AI. 

Follow Training Data wherever you listen to podcasts, and keep an eye out for Season 2 of Crucible Moments, coming soon.

LangChain’s Harrison Chase on Building the Orchestration Layer for AI Agents

Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

Mentioned: 

Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/training-data-harrison-chase/

CEO Jensen Huang tells the legendary story of Nvidia, from the company’s early days pioneering 3D graphics cards for a niche PC gaming market to powering the AI revolution as the sixth most valuable company in the world. Nvidia faced multiple near-death experiences along the way, and their so-called “diving catches,” as Jensen calls them, were some of the most dramatic business stories of the modern era.  

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital 

Featuring: Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, Andrew Ng, Mark A. Stevens, Alfred Lin, 

Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/crucible-moments-nvidia/

Millions of customers have explored their genome with 23andMe. But when the company started in 2006, the idea of consumer DNA testing was heresy to the medical establishment. The FDA once even ordered 23andMe to stop selling its health testing product. The company persevered to make allies out of adversaries, and became the only FDA-approved product on the market. Learn how 23andMe defined the DNA testing category, and used its success to enter the massive new field of drug discovery.   

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital 

Featuring: Anne Wojcicki, Richard Scheller 

Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/crucible-moments-23andMe/

Co-founders Hosain Rahman and Alex Asseily, and Chief Creative Officer Yves Behar, recount the meteoric rise and fall of Jawbone. One of the most innovative companies of the mid 2000s, Jawbone pioneered wearable technology with UP, the first wrist-worn fitness tracker, and revolutionized sound with Jambox, the first smart wireless speaker. In one of the most dramatic turns in Silicon Valley history, the company went from a nearly $4 billion valuation to liquidation. This cautionary tale provides valuable lessons that are more relevant now than ever.

Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital 

Featuring: Hosain Rahman, Alex Asseily, Yves Behar

Transcript: https://www.sequoiacap.com/podcast/crucible-moments-jawbone/