Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s largest venture capital funds, has grown its capital 17 times, Partner Roelof Botha revealed in a podcast. Botha was referring to the recent round of capital raised and deployed by the VC.
In a podcast with entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, Botha said, “The two billion that we had deployed, we had generated 34 billion in value. And those are realized gains by the way, so this number excludes all the value of shares that we still hold in all the wonderful private companies that we still own.”
Despite the stellar performance, Botha added that the company is more focussed on what the next investment round holds.
“I'll say one thing, the motto we have is that we're only as good as our next investment. Well, we're proud of what we've done in the past, but we're obsessed at Sequoia with what's next,” he added.
Sequoia has been active in the VC space for nearly five decades now. The fund had operations across the globe but split from its India and China operations in June. The VC fund announced plans to break up into three entities citing “complications running a decentralized global investment business in the middle of geopolitical tensions.”
The Partner also added some context to the Sequoia split, highlighting that breaking away from Sequoia has helped the India and China funds in reducing their back-office overhead costs.
“In India and China, we built thriving businesses, and earlier this year the different business leaders got together and we just realized it would be better for each of us if we acted independently. You know, there is a certain amount of overhead associated with trying to be a single global firm with a single global name,” Botha explained.
Following the separation, the Chinese business, led by investor Neil Shen, has been renamed as HongShan ("sequoia" in Mandarin) and the Indian and Southeast Asia arm has been renamed Peak XV Partners. The US and Europe units have retained the Sequoia name.
Botha explained how the funds worked independently of each other and raised and deployed capital independently, even before the split.
“Each business is a leader in its own category and we just thought we would do better just truly ny embracing that independence. Because we were independently owned, each business unit made independent decisions, so we're largely disentangling sort of back-office operations, finance, administration, and things like that, even some of the technology pieces– so each business can thrive on its own.”