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Sequoia Capital founder Don Valentine passed way at his home in Woodside, Ca., today at age 87 of natural causes.
Sequoia posted a tribute to Valentine shortly afterward, calling him &one of a generation of leaders who forged Silicon Valley.&
A native of New York, Valentine majored in chemistry at Fordham University before joining Raytheon in South California, then moving north to the Bay Area to work at Fairchild Semiconductor, where over the years, Valentine began investing his own small checks into technology companies that he was meeting. According to Sequoia Capital, he soon attracted the attention of an early mutual fund group, Capital Group, which staked Valentine, allowing him to form a $3 million venture fund in 1974. Among his first bets from that pool of capital: Atari and Apple. He later led the firm into numerous other high-flyers, including Cisco Systems.
Valentine continue to lead Sequoia until handing over the reins well before retirement age to Doug Leone and Michael Moritz, though he continued attending partner meetings for another 10 years. The partners have said they were happy for his continued advice and guidance — not that they always agreed with him.
In 2017, in keeping with the firmfocus on succession and ensuring smooth transitions, partner Roelof Botha was made U.S. head of the firm working under Leone, who oversees the firmglobal operations with Neil Shen, the founder and managing partner of Sequoia Capital China. (Moritz stepped away for health reasons in 2012, though he has continued to remain actively involved in the firm.)
Leone issued a statement this afternoon about Valentinepassing, writing: &We are deeply saddened to share that Don Valentine passed away on October 25, 2019. Donlife is woven into the fabric of Silicon Valley. He shaped Sequoia and left his imprint not just on those of us who had the privilege to work with him or the many philanthropic institutions that invested with Sequoia, but also on the founders and leaders of some of the most significant technology companies of the later part of the twentieth century. Our thoughts are with Donwife, Rachel, with his family, and with all those inspired by his pioneering vision and indelible impact.&
Valentine chose the name Sequoia because it &conveyed the longevity and strength of the tallest of redwoods,& according to the firmtribute today to Valentine. The partners note, too, the &humility of someone who refrained from putting his own name on our business.&
Valentine is survived by his wife; three children; and seven grandchildren, according to Sequoia.
Valentine joined TechCrunch at a Disrupt event back in 2013. He appeared along with another pioneer of the venture industry, Kleiner Perkins Caufield - Byers cofounder Tom Perkins . Perkins passed away in June 2016 at age 84.
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Read more: Don Valentine, who founded Sequoia Capital, has died at age 87
Write comment (91 Comments)Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, has a new book coming out this coming Monday titled &What You Do is Who You Are,& that takes a look at how to create &culture& at a company.
Ita word thatthrown around a lot but thatvery hard to grasp, let alone implement in a sustainable way. Horowitz learned firsthand as a CEO how elusive it can be when he took stock of his company, only to discover it was made up of &screamers who intimidated their people,& others who &neglected to give any feedback,& and at least one compulsive liar who excelled at sucking up to Horowitz and also making up stories from whole cloth.
Horowitz says creating culture was a missing part of his education, and in this new book — a follow-up to his best-selling &The Hard Thing About Hard Things& — he does his best to fill that gap for other CEOs, using his own experience, as well as lessons gleaned from historical figures Toussaint Louverture and Genghis Khan, along with Shaka Senghor, a contemporary who served time for murder and today is a criminal justice reform advocate.
Itan instructive and novel combination, and we suggest picking up the book, especially if you love history. In the meantime, we sat down recently with Horowitz to talk about its timing and whether some of the biggest cultural blow-ups in the startup industry — Uber and WeWork — could have been avoided. These excerpts have been edited for length and clarity. Note that we&ll have more of the conversation — including Horowitzthoughts about dual-class shares — for readers of Extra Crunch on Monday.
TC: You&ve just written a book about culture thatcoming out just as a lot of questions are being raised about culture because of WeWork. What happened there?
BH: [Cofounder Adam Neumann] had a certain kind of culture there. He had some holes — some great strengths and great holes. And sometimes that happens. When you&re really good at part of it, you can delude yourself into thinking that you&ve got everything you need when you have some massive incompleteness.
Adam is so amazing. Like, the way they got all the money and everything. And the vision was so spectacular. And everybody there believed it, and they recruited some phenomenal talent. But when you&re that optimistic, it does help to have something in the culture that says [allows] people to bring you the bad news, like, if the accounting is all over the place or what have you.
TC: As with UberTravis Kalanick, whose culture also came under fire, Neumann operated in very plain sight. He wasn&t hiding who he was or what he was spending.
BH: Right, everybody knew how Travis was running the company. Everyone in Silicon Valley knew, let alone everyone on the board. The culture was published. You can look up Ubervalues [from that period].
Travis designed, I think, a really compelling culture, and believed in it, and published it. And the consequences of what he was missing were also super well-known. Itonly when board members think people are coming after them that [they take an interest in these things].
TC: What are the biggest lessons in these two cases?
BH: I obviously know more about Uber [as a Lyft investor who follows the space]. In Ubercase, ita very subtle thing. Travis had a really good code. But he had a bug in it.
I think it was reported that, like, Travis encouraged bad behavior. I don&t think he did at all. I just think he didn&t make it clear that legal and ethical [considerations] were more important than competitiveness. As a result, when left to their own devices, in a distributed organization where there was a lot of distributed power, that combination had people doing things that were out of bounds.
And he was making everybody so much money. And the company was growing so fast that, for the board members, I suspect they were like, ‘As long as itmaking money, I&m not going to worry about what happens next.&
To me, the unfair part is, like, they shouldn&t get any credit at the end. Whatever you&re blaming Travis for [you should blame them, too] because they didn&t see it, either. I think thata charitable way of putting it.
The reason I wanted to go through [how to create business culture] in the book is so if you&re a new CEO, you can see, look, this thing looks like a small thing, but itgoing to become a big thing. Ethics are a bit like security issues. They&re not a problem at all until they&re a problem. Then they&re existential.
TC: Why was this issue on your mind?
BH: A few things. First, it was the thing that I had the most difficult time with as a CEO. People would say, ‘Ben, pay attention to culture, it really is the key.& But when you were like, ‘Okay, great, how do i do that?& it was like, ‘Um, maybe you should have a meeting about it.& Nobody could convey: what it was, how you dealt with it, how you designed it. So I felt like I was missing a piece of my own education.
Also, when I look at the work I do now, itthe most important thing. What I say to people at the firm is that nobody 10 or 20 or 30 years from now is going to remember what deals we&ve won or lost or what the returns were on this or that. You&re going to remember what it felt like to work here and to do business with us and what kind of imprint we put on the world. And thatour culture. Thatour behavior. We can&t have any drift from that. And I think thattrue for every company.
On top of that, the companies in Silicon Valley have grown so fast and become so powerful that they&re getting a lot of criticism about their culture now, which, some of it is fair enough. But the proposed solutions are wacky . . . so it kind of felt like somebody had to make a positive contribution and not just a critique about, like, okay, herewhat you ought to do.
TC: These fast-growing companies are also distributed, as you noted with Uber, but I don&t think you talk about remote workforces in this book. Do you have thoughts about establishing a culture where individuals are scattered here and there?
BH: I didn&t talk about remote workforces and that one is interesting because itevolving because the tool sets are changing. It used to be nearly impossible for an engineering organization to be distributed and to be effective, because the information flow wasn&t good enough and the build systems weren&t good enough. And so for years, Microsoft would only buy companies that they could move to Redmond.
Lately, due to things like Slack and Tandem, people are getting better results with it. And I think a lot of the cultural techniques intersect with the tools quite a bit. But then you have to set the culture through electronic media more than you would walking around, catching somebody doing thing in a meeting.
We just did a thing on email the other day. We have this cultural value, which is: we don&t like to criticize entrepreneurs. I don&t care if we think your idea is stupid or whatever. You&re trying to create something from nothing. You&re trying to chase your dream. We support that, period. So if you get on Twitter and do what Bill Gurley does and say, ‘That company is a stupid piece of shit. It&ll never made a $1 and blah blah blah,& like, you get fired for that. [Similarly] on our podcast, we have a news segment and I didn&t want us to do a story on ‘WeWork, the cautionary tale.& Thatnot us. And ita cultural statement. There are a million people who are going to write that story; we were like, let them write that story.
So you don&t have to be in person to set the tone, but you do have to be thoughtful about the way you do it, and who all hears it.
More on Monday . . .
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Read more: VC Ben Horowitz on WeWork, Uber, and one cultural value his employees can’t break
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The U.S. Department of Defense today announced that Microsoft has won its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract, worth up to $10 billion over a period of 10 years. With this, Microsoft will provide infrastructure and platform services for both the Pentagonbusiness and mission operations.
&The National Defense Strategy dictates that we must improve the speed and effectiveness with which we develop and deploy modernized technical capabilities to our women and men in uniform,& DOD Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy said in a related announcement. &The DOD Digital Modernization Strategy was created to support this imperative. This award is an important step in execution of the Digital Modernization Strategy.&
Microsoft beat out Amazon in the final round for this lucrative contract after the two cloud giants beat out other competitors like IBM and Oracle in an earlier round. Most pundits considered Amazon to be the frontrunner to win the deal.
&We&re surprised about this conclusion. AWS is the clear leader in cloud computing, and a detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings clearly lead to a different conclusion,& an Amazon spokesperson told us in an emailed comment. &We remain deeply committed to continuing to innovate for the new digital battlefield where security, efficiency, resiliency, and scalability of resources can be the difference between success and failure.&
The process to get to this point has been anything but uncomplicated, though, with various lawsuits, last-minute recusals and other controversies, with even the president getting involved at one point.
It&ll remain to be seen how Microsoftemployees will react to this news. Last year, a number of Microsoft employees posted an open letter asking the company not to bid for the contract. More recently, its employees also protested against GitHubrelatively small $200,000 contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Against this backdrop, chances are we&ll see similar protests now that the company has won this deal with the Pentagon.
Update: Amazon provided us with a comment. We&ve added it to the story above. We&ve also reached out to Microsoft for a comment and will add that once/if we receive it.
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Write comment (91 Comments)NASA is looking for liquid gold on the Moon — not oil, but plain-old water. If we&re going to have a permanent presence there, we&ll need it, so learning as much as we can about it is crucial. Thatwhy the agency is sending a rover called VIPER to the Moonsouth pole — its first long-term surface mission since 1972.
VIPER, or the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, will touch down in December 2022 if all goes according to plan. Its mission: directly observe and quantify the presence of water in the permanently shadowed polar regions.
These perennially dark areas of the Moon have been collecting water ice for millions of years, since thereno sunlight to melt or vaporize it. NASA already confirmed the presence of water ice by crashing a probe into the general area, but thata bit crude, isn&t it? Better to send a robot in to take some precise measurements.
VIPER will be about the size of a golf cart, and will be equipped with what amounts to prospecting gear. Its Neutron Spectrometer System (mentioned yesterday by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine ahead of this announcement) will let the rover detect water beneath the surface.
When itover a water deposit, VIPER will deploy… The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain, or TRIDENT. Definitely the best acronym I&ve encountered this week. TRIDENT is a meter-long drill that will bring up samples for analysis by the rovertwo other instruments, a pair of spectrometers that will evaluate the contents of the soil.
By doing this systematically over a large area, the team hopes to create a map of water deposits below the surface that can be analyzed for larger patterns — perhaps leading to a more systematic understanding of our favorite substancepresence on the Moon.
A visualization of Moon-based water ice under the surface being mapped by the VIPER rover
The rover is currently in development, as you can see from the pictures at the top — the right image is its &mobility testbed,& which as you might guess lets the team test out how it will get around.
VIPER is a limited-time mission; operating at the poles means thereno sunlight to harvest with solar panels, so the rover will carry all the power it needs to last about a hundred days there. Thatlonger than the U.S. has spent on the Moonsurface in a long time — although China has for the last few years been actively deploying rovers all over the place.
Interestingly, the rover is planned for deployment via a Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract, meaning one of these companies may be building the lander that takes it from orbit to the surface. Expect to hear more as we get closer to launch.
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Write comment (94 Comments)Tesla has launched the third iteration of its solar roof tile for residential home use, which it officially detailed in a blog post on Friday and in a call with media. Tesla CEO Elon Musk kicked off the call with some explanatory remarks on the V3 Solar Roof, and then took a number of questions. The company says it&ll begin installations in the coming weeks (Musk says some installations have already begun) and that it hopes to ramp production to as many as 1,000 new roofs per week.
Teslasolar roof tiles — which are designed to look just like normal roof tiles when installed on a house, while doubling as solar panels to generate power — are something of a work-in-progress. The company is still tinkering with the product three years after announcing the concept, having done trial installations with two different iterations so far. &Versions one and two we were still figuring things out,& said Elon Musk on an earnings call earlier this week, adding that he thinks &version three is finally ready for the big time.&
TeslaSolar Roof website now includes a pricing estimator, which lists $42,500 as the total price for the average 2,000 square-foot home, with 10kW solar panels. It also lists $33,950 as the price after an $8,550 federal tax incentive. You can also enter your address and get an updated estimate that takes into account local costs and incentives, and add on any Powerwalls (with three as the default for a 2,000 square-foot roof).
&The solarglass roof is not going to make financial sense for somebody who has a relatively new roof, because this is itself a roof, that has integrated solar power generation,& Musk explained. He went on to note that Tesla has managed with this version three product to achieve a price point that is &less than what the average roof costs, plus the solar panels& that you would add on top of said roof.
&Figuring out how to install it effectively is very non-trivial. And we&re actually going to have […] ‘installathons,& & Musk said, which will pit two teams against each other to see who can roof one of two similar-sized/designed roofs faster. Musk reiterated later that there&quite a bit of R-D just in the installation process itself.&
Musk also said that while ithiring and training specialized installers at first, the plan is to ultimately expand installations to any third-party contractors as well. On the call, he and the Tesla team discussed how they focused on getting the installation time down to where itfaster than installing traditional shingles, plus solar panels on top of that. Musk added that his ultimate goal is to install the solar glass tiles even faster than comparative shingles. This is a significant change from version two of the solar roof, Musk later said.
&We&re doing installations as fast as we possibly can, starting in the next few weeks,& Musk said about availability, adding that the goal is to &get to 1,000 roofs per week& sometime in &the next several months.&
A report from CNBC from September 2018 found that Tesla still hadn&t performed many actual installations of its solar roof tile, despite the two-year gap between announcement and the date of their investigation, and a January announcement about the initiation of solar roof tile production at TeslaBuffalo-based Gigafactory. During the companyannual general shareholder meeting in June, Musk said that the third iteration of the tile was being worked on, and while he didn&t detail the actual number of installations, he did say that they were in progress in eight different states across the U.S. at that point.
Musk addressed some of the production delays to date, addressing the installation complexity of previous generations, but also citing the Tesla Model 3 production ramp, which he said &really stripped resources from solar for a year or a year-and-a-half.& Now that Model 3 production is in a good place, Musk said that that has unblocked significantly some of the companyability to focus on this challenge.
The total addressable market that Musk sees for this product is somewhere on the order of 100 million houses worldwide, and Musk stressed that the company does indeed intend to make this available worldwide.
While at launch there will be only one available look for the Solar Roof, the Tesla CEO also said that the company will roll out additional variants as quickly as it can, including tiles that resemble clay and other alternatives.
The tiles and roof installation carry a warranty of 25 years, which includes their protective weatherization (including 130 MPH wind resistance) and their power generation capability. On balance, the Solar Roof provides more energy generation than a similarly sized roof retrofitted with traditional tiles, though individually, the tilepower-gathering cells themselves are less energy-efficient than a traditional solar cell. The Solar Roof is better performing, however, because it covers more surface area of a home.
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