Category:Sequoia Capital people
Sequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded in 1972, before either "Silicon Valley" or "venture capital" was in common use. Unlike the operating-company categories on this wiki, which fill with engineers and departing executives, this roster is almost entirely a partnership succession: the founder, the partners who led the firm through its largest decades, and the stewards who followed them. It is short enough to read end to end, and the sequence is the information.
The succession
Don Valentine founded the firm in 1972 after a career selling for the semiconductor industry, and brought a market-first philosophy to it: he judged a startup on the size and direction of the market it addressed rather than on the founder's credentials. His blunt, Socratic questioning became part of the firm's culture, and the companies he backed include Apple, Atari, Cisco Systems, Oracle and Yahoo.
Michael Moritz read history at Christ Church, Oxford, worked as a journalist at Time, and joined the firm to back Google, Yahoo and PayPal at early stages. Doug Leone emigrated from Genoa as a child and served for decades as a senior leader, holding the role the partnership calls senior steward, across the years the firm turned from a Silicon Valley fund into a global platform. Jim Goetz came from engineering and entrepreneurship in networking and internet infrastructure, led the firm's early investment in WhatsApp, and stepped back from day-to-day leadership in January 2017.
Roelof Botha arrived from South Africa by way of Stanford and a period as chief financial officer of PayPal, and led the firm from 2022 to 2025. Alfred Lin joined in 2010 after serving as chief operating officer, chief financial officer and chairman of Zappos, and took over as co-steward with Pat Grady in November 2025.
The wider orbit
A second and much smaller group appears in this category because their entries reference the firm rather than because they worked inside it, among them Jerry Yang, who co-founded Yahoo, and Brian Halligan, who co-founded HubSpot. Membership here should be read as a connection to the firm, not as a claim of employment by it.
See also
Pages in category "Sequoia Capital people"
The following 8 pages are in this category, out of 8 total.