Sequoia Capital | Menlo Park, CA | Venture Capital - Data Science & Engineering | REMOTE during SiP, On-Site One Day A Week Afterwards | Full Time
We are a small group of senior technologists operating in Sequoia Capital. Our group’s mission is to use data and software to invest in the world’s most promising startups.
We seek senior software engineers. Most of our work is in the backend and centered on data infrastructure. However, we also have opportunities to work on consumer-grade frontend projects. Ideally, you will have 10+ years of industry experience and feel confident building large distributed systems.
We are a small team and hope to remain small for a long time to come. We operate on high degrees of trust and autonomy. This is a fantastic opportunity for engineers who want startup-like camaraderie while enjoying all the benefits of a large employer. Just like a startup, there is an opportunity to share in the financial upside.
Sequoia offers robust benefits, team volunteering opportunities, and invests in training and personal development for all team members. The work you do at Sequoia ultimately drives returns for our Limited Partners, many of which are nonprofits and schools like the Ford Foundation, Mayo Clinic and MIT.
tl;dr - A16Z is reclassifying themselves as an "investment advisor", which will allow them to make riskier bets (crypto, real estate, etc). They'll still invest in startups like any other VC firm.
I feel like there's some misunderstanding of what these terms are. All VCs are investment advisors (either Exempt Reporting Advisors or Registered Investment Advisor depending on assets under management and investment types).
The article is vague in what it actually means, but it sounds to me like A16Z is going through the process of giving up its VC exemption to the Investment Advisers Act and registering as a RIA. It could also mean they're registering as a broker-dealer and getting its relevant employees licensed as such (e.g. Series 65)
Yes, that's the interesting thing here, so we've put it in the title above. Hopefully that will nudge the discussion to be more specific and less lame.
Isn't VC the person with the money, so they are more in control.
While an "investment advisor" is just advising or suggesting where the money can be put for maximum returns like an investment advisor in banks? So, presumably less in control.
I don't understand why a title change was needed. Any technical or legal reasons?
From 30k ft--in the financial industry, the VC title afforded a carve out from SEC oversight if its business was focused around certain qualifications (e.g., invested primarily in new-early stage private companies).
This classification, in turn, also limits what an entity with a VC status can ultimately do and invest in.
In this case, a16z has ambitions that outstrip the limited definition of VC in the eyes of the SEC. Under their new classification, they still have the monies as an 'investment advisor' but aren't hamstrung on what they can invest in. It will, however, change the way they will be required to operate due to new regulations that come with the investment advisor classification.
Related, an article from the NVCA on the subject from December. [0]
wpennington answered the overall question better than I could, but one clarification on this:
> Isn't VC the person with the money, so they are more in control.
Most of the money VCs invest isn't their own. The money is allocated by "limited partners" (entities such as pension funds, endowment funds, sovereign wealth funds, rich individuals/families), and the VC firm uses their expertise and network to invest the money on the LPs' behalf, in exchange for a "management fee" and a cut of the returns.
The VC firm's partners do usually invest some of their own money (to have some "skin in the game"), but it's a token amount compared to the outside money they're investing.
Due to their role as custodians for huge amounts of other people's money (which, particularly in the case of pension funds, ultimately belongs to ordinary people), there are substantial regulatory controls and requirements.
Totally--and this is a really good point to clarify, especially if one would like to understand more broadly how VC works. I intentionally abstracted the "where does the money come from" in my original reply to focus on the classification itself, but that admittedly left the comment lacking this useful context. LP and venture dynamics are both interesting and important to understand the full picture.
> Most of the money VCs invest isn't their own.
To underscore tomhoward's point--VCs are largely (already) stewards of other people's money (their LPs). So while they are set up to be "the person with the money" from the market's perspective (e.g., if you are looking to get your company funded), they are acting as investment advisors (e.g., where and how to spend the fund's money--and by extension the LP's money--for a fee). Albeit with a specific legal exemption set forth in the Investment Advisers Act that governs certain activity depending on how they are registered* (this is what is changing for a16z). No matter how they are registered, they do have compliance requirements as custodians of other people's money.
*Under the Investment Advisory Act, they can be registered as:
(1) ERA - exempt reporting advisor (what we are referring here as a VC in the traditional sense), or
(2) RIA - registered investment advisor.
As it relates to a16z, they are giving up their IAA exemption as a fund (registering as an RIA vs ERA). No need to get into why that matters again (see other posts that have already addressed it well). The point being, VCs are already in many ways "investment advisors" as custodians of other people's capital (and sometimes their own) through their funds and they have compliance requirements, just different depending on how they are registered.
still surprised I haven't seen any revenue shares of those kind of businesses on the blockchain, ever since 2013's crypto-securities bonanza
either the revenues are that high such that nobody has a desire to sell some of the company, or there is a language barrier in the host jurisdictions where these can legally operate, or nobody has considered it as the incumbents are so comfortable with their licensing/turf that they don't need to change a thing
the technology is so much better now than 2013 and nobody calls them crypto-securities anymore, it is such an obvious use case for price discovery, liquidity, and acceleration of public policy
I think @rsweeney nailed it. Your product is one that _should_ sell itself.
You only needs a complicated sales cycle if you're selling deep infrastructure or where high degrees of trust are required. But in your case, users can look at your website and immediately determine if they need your product and how much they're willing to trust you.
Re: your product --- It looks super cool. It's not something I need at this point in my career, but maybe down the road. Good luck!
I was in your shoes ~15 years ago. My biggest fear was to become a corporate programmer for some bullshit company.
Here's what I did about it:
1. I asked the most attractive & wonderful girl out on a date. Mind you, I am a geeky programmer and nobody's going to mistake me for a sex icon anytime soon. Nevertheless, she was impressed by my boldness and said yes. Now we're married with three kids.
2. I started a company as CEO. It failed. But being CEO stretched me into a new role and I grew immensely.
3. I'm now working on a project that I think has a huge potential for positive impact on the world. I'm not motivated by money or glory this time around, but just want to see if I can grow and pull it off.
I guess to sum it up: know what you want out of life and then be bold and take risks.
> I'm now working on a project that I think has a huge potential for positive impact on the world. I'm not motivated by money or glory this time around, but just want to see if I can grow and pull it off.
As a new-grad, when I read this I cannot help but guess that you've somehow covered yourself for the future by saving for retirement. I can only envision myself not being at least partially motivated by "money or glory" until I can secure future financial stability.
Two decades ago, when I was learning to code, the career path for engineers was to eventually become a "software architect". The architect was to be the god among mortals who would "design" large systems and dictate how these things fit together.
Fast-forward a few years and it turned out the "architects" were the biggest waste of of time and money. The best system designs came from the low-level engineers who were actually building the individual components.
In my humble opinion, the best way to learn big system design is to just put in your 10,000 hours of coding. The principles necessary for multi-thread concurrency are not so different from multi-datacenter concurrency. I suspect there are 1,000s of subtle design patterns that one can perhaps never fully articulate.
I've felt your pain. So much so that I took 6 months off and put a lot of groundwork into starting a company that would solve this problem. But in the end, I decided to abandon it.
I realized that in order to be 10x better than the alternatives, I was going to need to solve some very tricky AI problems. For example, acurately deduplicating a customer record "John Doe" vs "Johnathon Doe" is not straightforward. Maybe it's two different people?. Maybe it's just a spelling mismatch? The system must have a great deal of context to accurately determine if the data is indeed duplicated. And even if it does, perhaps there's a perfectly good reason for the spelling mismatch. (e.g. perhaps one table is his preferred name, while the other is just referential, etc). In the end, deduplication often comes down to the requirements of the company and it's hard to generalize.
I think there's space in the market for this kind of business, but it'll be a slog. Unless you have a 10x solution (i.e. super AI), you'll be competing with the likes of Trifacta, etc. And it's hard to compete with that kind of sales force.
@jakequist I think trifacta and similar tools are aimed at "data analysis" more than operations.
I think the question is about line of business software and issues there are very different.
For instance there is a literature on record matching and good techniques exist, but without an exception handling workflow you don't have a way to deal with the unusual cases the code works up.
I would love to talk and share notes about what you did.
Paul, you are correct. It's more about preventing duplication in the software design rather than cleaning it up after the fact (which is an interesting problem, but a diff topic).
Think of it this way: one could build a detailed Entity Relationship diagram (or OOP equivalent) in a machine-readable format with all the relationship and column-size constraints defined. One could then push a button and have a machine generate a working version of the software. Those tools do exist. But they are usually missing useful details and result in UI's poorly tuned for how employees will likely be using the system.
Many of the tweaks to make it "practical" will be exceptions or local customizations to the original ER diagram data. Those customizations/deviations are the bottleneck such that in practice most stacks use duplication of info instead. See DRY ("Don't Repeat Yourself") in software engineering slang sites.
TreodeDB a bit like Spanner, in as much as both offer transactions across datacenters. The implementations are very different. The way Treode uses Lamport clocks lets you use a simple rule to determine if your local cache satisfies application invariants. I'm not sure if Spanner's use of atomic clocks gets you a similar capability.
We are a small group of senior technologists operating in Sequoia Capital. Our group’s mission is to use data and software to invest in the world’s most promising startups.
We seek senior software engineers. Most of our work is in the backend and centered on data infrastructure. However, we also have opportunities to work on consumer-grade frontend projects. Ideally, you will have 10+ years of industry experience and feel confident building large distributed systems.
We are a small team and hope to remain small for a long time to come. We operate on high degrees of trust and autonomy. This is a fantastic opportunity for engineers who want startup-like camaraderie while enjoying all the benefits of a large employer. Just like a startup, there is an opportunity to share in the financial upside.
Sequoia offers robust benefits, team volunteering opportunities, and invests in training and personal development for all team members. The work you do at Sequoia ultimately drives returns for our Limited Partners, many of which are nonprofits and schools like the Ford Foundation, Mayo Clinic and MIT.
Please send your resume (or LinkedIn Profile) to [email protected]