Why Great Investors Don’t Flinch

You wrote some lessons from your first 10 years at the Sequoia and one of them was don't flinch. — I grew up around New York City and I graduated high school in 2008. When I was, you know, entering the adult world, like the financial crisis in New York City was the main event. Yeah. I remember I read the big short right when it came out and I had to go, how am I going to react to like a crisis in finance? I picture myself on Park Avenue, you know, like wheeling and dealing, going to a boardroom, making a deal happen when, you know, things were blowing up. That's how you envision in your head. And like I really wanted to be a great investor. I like imagined myself in the moment so many times. What it actually looked like was I just bought a house. They had a pool outside. There was no furniture in the house. We were locked down because of COVID. I had an eighth of my wardrobe there and I was doing circles around my pool. Talking to Vladen Beiju about his investment when you know the market was gapping down five points every single day. But Robin Hood was like, you know, this is back when you could double your money on Boeing in, you know, 16 minutes. We did a $200 million check right that first week of COVID. You know, the app was down for a whole day. It was chaos to me. Like when I say don't flinch, I felt so proud that you know just not being scared of that moment. And similarly like dealing with legal battles that you end up entrenched in and otherwise I think you just like can't let yourself down. I think all of us like to imagine how we'll react in these like really high stress high stakes moments. Yeah. Yeah, don't flinch to me just means like just do the thing you know you should