When We First Met

Everyone loves a success story. We want to see founders persevere — and win. It’s easy, though, to forget that even the biggest winners started small. For each of our portfolio companies, we‘re sharing a snapshot of our initial meetings — a series we call “When We First Met” — to remind aspiring entrepreneurs, and ourselves, that every company changing the world today began as nothing more than an idea and a handshake.

Latest Stories:

• Tecton — We hopped on a call to deepen our understanding of the machine learning landscape. We didn’t know that Mike, Kevin and Jeremy were hatching a plan to start their own company in the space…read the rest of the story here
• Jumpstart — The first time we met Ben, we didn’t even talk about his company — we were too enthralled by his life story…read the rest of the story here
• Carbon — We had never witnessed anything like Carbon’s product demo. Within an hour, we…read the rest of the story here

Seed Stories:

• Airbnb — When we first met Brian, Joe and Nate in 2009, they had big dreams, working from their tiny office on Rausch Street in San Francisco and leveraging our guide to writing a business plan… read the rest of the story here
• Dropbox — An introduction from a friend of Doug Leone’s led to an early Saturday morning meeting with a sleepy Drew and Arash in a small apartment on San Francisco’s Russian Hill… read the rest of the story here
• Ethos — Peter and Lingke were working out of their apartment and hadn’t yet launched the product. They weren’t even fundraising, but…read the rest of the story here
• Nubank — The idea was only in its infancy, a credit card company in Brazil, but we were sure about David…read the rest of the story here
• ThousandEyes — We first met Mohit and Ricardo in 2011, at a coffee shop on Mission Street in San Francisco. They were a team of two, having recently… read the rest of the story here

Other Early Stories:

• Aurora — When we first heard about Aurora, we’d known Chris Urmson for a decade via relationships at Google and then from an enlightening presentation he’d given us on autonomous vehicles in 2016… read the rest of the story here
• Citizen — We first met Andrew when he pitched his last company, Ooma, over a decade ago… read the rest of the story here
• Front — When Mathilde came to Sequoia to pitch Front’s Series B, we saw a rare combination of warmth and hyperfocus, of humility and high performance — a combination we’d seen three years earlier when Front was raising its seed round… read the rest of the story here
• Ironclad — After connecting through a mutual friend, we met Jason for coffee. A former lawyer, Jason was leading with empathy and solving a need felt by all startup legal teams… read the rest of the story here
• NEXT Trucking — We first met Lidia in a coffee shop, where we sat side by side, huddled over her laptop… read the rest of the story here
• Square — We first met Jack in his apartment in San Francisco, when Square was just two founders and a couple of developers… read the rest of the story here
• Tessian — We first met Tim, Ed, and Tom in 2015 via CyLon, a London-based cybersecurity incubator. We were immediately impressed with… read the rest of the story here
• Threads — We first met the Threads team in their San Francisco live/work loft. In classic startup fashion… read the rest of the story here
• Wonolo — Their scrappy team of 22 was packed tightly into their San Francisco headquarters, an office featuring… read the rest of the story here
• Zūm — We first met Zūm, then called Liftee, in late 2015. A year later, we reconnected… read the rest of the story here