Crucible Moments
A podcast about the inflection points that shaped some of the most significant companies of our time. Crucible moments are pivotal decisions that determine your trajectory. In Season 2, hear from founders and leaders like Steve Chen of YouTube, Drew Houston of Dropbox, Frank Slootman of ServiceNow and Tony Xu of DoorDash, Steve Huffman of Reddit and more about how they navigated the challenges and opportunities that defined their stories. Hosted by Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital.
Episodes
Palo Alto Networks ft Nir Zuk & Nikesh Arora - The Grudge That Transformed Cybersecurity
In the early 2000s, the cybersecurity industry was dominated by incumbents focused on high margins, not innovation. Nir Zuk tells the story of how, frustrated by this stagnant culture, he set out on his own with a radical idea: the Next-Generation Firewall. His vision was to unify dozens of security functions into a single, intelligent platform delivered via cloud—an approach everyone thought was
Bolt ft. Markus Villig - From Bootstrapping in Estonia to a Global Leader in Mobility
At 19, Markus Villig borrowed €5,000 from his parents to fix Estonia's broken taxi system. What happened next defied every conventional startup playbook.
Markus started by making fleet dispatch software for local taxi companies. But when it became clear they weren’t embracing the on-demand revolution, he pivoted the business to ride-hailing for drivers, competing directly against what had been h
Supercell ft Ilkka Paananen - How an Early Pivot Led to ‘Clash of Clans’ and ‘Brawl Stars’
Founder and CEO Ilkka Paananen set out to create a different kind of game company—one where the game development teams would have decision-making power, not upper management. Ilkka recalls the early decision to scrap their first game and the entire cross-platform strategy that had landed them a Series A financing in order to make a counterintuitive pivot and focus exclusively on mobile. The decisi
Zipline ft Keller Cliffton - Reinventing Delivery with Instant Drone Transport
In 2014, Keller Cliffton made an audacious pivot: shut down his robotic toy company and rebuild it as an autonomous drone delivery system for life-saving medical supplies. Investors were skeptical: The team knew nothing about drones, healthcare, or logistics. But they pushed forward anyway. This is the story of Zipline's journey from near-death to delivering blood to remote hospitals in Rwanda, ba
Crucible Moments Season 3: Coming October 23
Previously on Crucible Moments, we explored the inflection points that shaped some of the most significant names in technology. Now, we're returning for a brand new season. Join us as leaders from Stripe, Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna, Supercell and more share what it's actually like to navigate the make-or-break decisions, early stumbles and leaps that turn scrappy startups into market defi
Nubank ft. David Vélez - An Outsider Upends the Brazilian Banking System
When Nubank started 10 years ago, a few big banks in Brazil had a stranglehold on the largest economy in Latin America: they controlled nearly all the market share, and imposed some of the highest fees and worst banking terms in the world. David Vélez was an unlikely character to challenge the system: an outsider from Colombia and Costa Rica with a Stanford MBA, David was working at Sequoia with t
Dropbox ft. Drew Houston - How the Cloud Pioneer Reinvented Itself
A scrappy upstart taking on hyperscalers in a category with lots of hand-wavers, Dropbox became the canonical example of Silicon Valley viral growth, adding 50 million users in the first years following their 2008 launch and quickly dominating their category. However, as CEO Drew Houston explains, their path from viral sensation to enduring business was filled with daunting obstacles. As giants re
LIVE: ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott on Unlocking Elite Level Execution
Earlier this season we heard the startup story of ServiceNow—from Fred Luddy setting out to reinvent IT workflows as a first-time founder, to Frank Slootman joining as CEO to scale the business to an IPO. Even more remarkable is that ServiceNow has only accelerated as a public company, growing over ten-fold in the last decade. At a recent closed event in Europe, Sequoia partner Pat Grady spoke wit
Robinhood ft. Vlad Tenev - Reinventing Finance for a New Generation
Millions of Americans use their smartphones to invest and manage their finances every day—but before Robinhood started in 2013, finance looked very different. Investing was something for the wealthy, with steep fees charged on every trade, and was done exclusively on computers with arcane trading software. In this episode, co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev explains why Robinhood set out to democratize
YouTube ft. Steve Chen - 18 Months That Changed the Internet
This episode takes us back to the earliest days of YouTube, as the founders explain why it was a longshot that succeeded against all odds. When cofounders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim left PayPal to start YouTube, it wasn’t even clear that the nascent broadband infrastructure could support playing video in a browser. In a brief period until its acquisition by Google—from its first incar
Natera ft. Matthew Rabinowitz - A Personal Mission That Led to a Biotech Revolution
Founder Matthew Rabinowitz opens up about the intensely personal journey that set him on a course to revolutionizing healthcare. A PhD in electrical engineering, he had no background in genetics or biology, but after his sister had a baby with Down syndrome that hadn’t been detected and tragically died after 6 days, Matthew dedicated himself to solving this problem. After overcoming seemingly impo
LIVE: DoorDash’s Tony Xu and Miki Kuusi Talk Scaling Operational Excellence
Tony Xu and Miki Kuusi share insights from building two of the world's most successful delivery platforms—DoorDash and Wolt—which merged in 2022 to create an $80B GOV business operating in 32 countries. In this candid conversation with Sequoia's Alfred Lin live at a Sequoia event in Europe, they discuss the challenges of scaling operational excellence, maintaining culture through hypergrowth and t
DoorDash ft. Tony Xu - The “Wrong” Moves That Built a Giant
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 driv
UiPath ft. Daniel Dines - From Bootstrapping in Bucharest to One of Software’s Biggest IPOs
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 t
Reddit ft. Steve Huffman - The Making (and Remaking) of the Front Page of the Internet
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
MongoDB ft. Dev Ittycheria - How an Early Pivot Catalyzed an Open Source Movement
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 Ittyc
ServiceNow ft. Frank Slootman and Fred Luddy - From Starting Over at 50 to Dodging a $150B Mistake
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 com
Crucible Moments Season 2: Coming August 29
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
Introducing "Training Data," a new podcast from Sequoia about the future of A.I.
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
Nvidia ft. Jensen Huang - An overnight success story 30 years in the making
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 mode
23andMe ft. Anne Wojcicki - How a DNA startup took on the FDA and redefined health tech
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
Jawbone ft. Hosain Rahman - The rise and fall of the first wearable technology company
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 histor
HubSpot ft. Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah - How an underdog helped invent modern marketing, and then took on Goliath
Founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah reveal how they took a blog started as a hobby and turned the ideas behind it into a $20+ billion success. In 2006, HubSpot upended traditional approaches to marketing by taking advantage of the the nascent internet in a new way: By capitalizing on seach engines and social media, they offered a way to pull customers in rather than pushing ads and mailers o
Eventbrite ft. Julia Hartz - A thriving events company took 14 years to build and nearly disappeared in 14 days
What happens to an events company when every event is canceled? “Even if you have spent 14 years building something, it could truly be gone in 14 days.” After working tirelessly to revolutionize how live events are organized, this was the reality Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz faced in March of 2020 as pandemic lockdowns went into effect, extinguishing the lifeblood of her business. She brought the sa
Block ft. Jack Dorsey - A controversial hack week project becomes the #1 financial services app
CEO Jack Dorsey reflects on Block’s origins and defining moments with host Roelof Botha.
Dorsey founded Square in 2009 with a clear vision: economic empowerment for all. Their dongle that turns iPhones into credit card readers was just the start. With Square, small business owners were able to reach more customers and better manage their companies. But when Cash App, which emerged from an interna
Airbnb ft. Brian Chesky - Battling a copycat clone and rebuilding user trust to revolutionize travel
As Airbnb took off in the early 2010s, Brian Chesky remembers worrying, “this is just one accident away from being a dead idea.” That accident finally came in 2011 when a host’s apartment was ransacked. It set off a period of soul searching that became a turning point—the company’s efforts to rebuild trust led it to becoming the global behemoth it is today. In this episode, Brian reveals how this
PayPal ft. Max Levchin - A merger of enemies that reshaped Silicon Valley
PayPal was the defining tech company of its generation, with alumni going on to start YouTube, Tesla, Yelp, LinkedIn, among many others. But the company nearly didn’t make it. The PayPal of today only exists because of how its team navigated early, unprecedented inflection points. Find out why Max Levchin now says he does “not recommend” a merger of equals to anyone, how the team pioneered CAPTCHA
Introducing "Crucible Moments"
A podcast about the inflection points that shaped some of the most important companies of our time. Crucible moments are pivotal decisions that determine your trajectory. Hear from founders like Jack Dorsey of Block, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, and Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe about how they navigated the challenges and opportunities that defined their stories. Hosted by Roelof Botha, Managing Partner of
