Sequoia Capital

Founding

Don Valentine, a founder of National Semiconductor and earlier a senior sales and marketing executive at Fairchild Semiconductor, founded Sequoia Capital in 1972. The Computer History Museum's biography of Valentine states that he helped finance Atari in 1974, contributed start-up financing to Apple Computer in 1977 and saw Electronic Arts start in Sequoia's office in 1982, and that Sequoia financed Cisco Systems in 1987, after which Valentine chaired Cisco until 1996 and then became vice chairman. He also organized the start-up financing of LSI Logic and chaired Microchip Technology.¹

PayPal

Michael Moritz, a Sequoia partner since 1986, joined the board of X.com, later PayPal, in August 1999. The prospectus for PayPal's 2002 offering describes his appointment as "a condition to the obligation of entities affiliated with Sequoia Capital to complete their investment in our Series A Preferred Stock." In August 1999 Sequoia IX funds bought 15,000,000 Series A preferred shares from Elon Musk for $5.0 million, and they later bought 6,000,000 Series B and 363,636 Series C shares. Entities affiliated with Sequoia owned 9.9 percent of PayPal before the offering. Moritz, a managing member of SC IX Management, LLC, sat on the audit committee with Musk and Shailesh Mehta and on the boards of Flextronics, Saba Software and Yahoo.² The prospectus lists among PayPal's officers Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, David Sacks, Reid Hoffman and the chief financial officer Roelof Botha, who joined Sequoia in January 2003.²³

Square and Khosla

Square's Form D of September 2011, for a $100,000,052 Series C sale, lists Botha with Jack Dorsey, Jim McKelvey, Vinod Khosla, Larry Summers and Mary Meeker as directors and Keith Rabois as an executive officer.⁴ Rabois resigned as Square's chief operating officer in January 2013 after an employee alleged sexual harassment, which he denied, and joined Khosla Ventures that year.⁵⁶ In Square's registration statement of November 2015, Sequoia's 2010 United States venture funds held 15,728,310 shares, 5.3 percent, under SC US (TTGP), Ltd., whose directors with voting and investment discretion were Botha, Jim Goetz, Michael Goguen, Doug Leone and Moritz. Botha sat on the compensation committee with Meeker of Kleiner Perkins.³

Rabois's spouse, Jacob Helberg, listed interests in Sequoia Capital U.S. Venture Fund, Sequoia Capital U.S. Venture Partners XIV and Sequoia Technology Partners XII in his 2025 nominee financial disclosure, and in his ethics agreement of May 5, 2025 committed that he and his spouse would divest them within 90 days of confirmation as Under Secretary of State.⁷

Structure

Sequoia's United States funds are Cayman Islands partnerships. A Schedule 13D filed on February 27, 2024 for Maplebear (Instacart) shows each fund under a management partnership whose general partner is SC US (TTGP), Ltd., and names Leone and Botha as the directors and stockholders of SC US (TTGP) "who exercise voting and investment discretion." The filing, signed by Botha as authorized signatory, records that Sequoia managing member Ravi Gupta had joined Maplebear's board in August 2023.⁸

Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission as an investment adviser (CRD 157373, file 801-122957), with Sequoia Capital Europe LLP as a relying adviser. Its Form ADV amendment of July 17, 2026 reports $82,165,771,068 in discretionary regulatory assets in 60 accounts and lists 61 private funds. Schedule A names as direct owners and executive officers Leone (managing member since January 2003), Goetz, Alfred Lin, Pat Grady, Andrew Reed, Shaun Maguire (managing member since March 2021), Stephanie Zhan, Bogomil Balkansky, Konstantine Buhler, Sonya Huang and David Cahn, the chief financial officer Marie Klemchuk, and the chief legal and compliance officer Jung Yeon Son, together with family trusts of Lin, Grady, Zhan, Balkansky and Maguire; the Shaun Maguire Living Trust is listed as a member holding between 5 and 10 percent from December 2025. Botha is not listed.⁹

The same filing describes Sequoia Capital Fund, L.P., a Cayman Islands partnership registered with the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, with a gross asset value of $27,164,822,736, about 355 beneficial owners, 12 percent owned by the adviser and its related persons and 23 percent by non-United States persons.⁹

Stewards

On January 31, 2017 Goetz wrote to Sequoia's investors that he would step aside from his leadership responsibilities, thanking "Doug and Sir Michael." News24 printed the letter and reported that Botha would become one of three stewards with Leone and Neil Shen, who ran the China business.¹⁰ Botha became senior steward in mid-2022. On November 4, 2025 Sequoia announced that Lin and Grady would succeed him as co-stewards.¹¹

In 2025 Maguire called the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani an "Islamist" who "comes from a culture that lies about everything"; the chief operating officer, Sumaiya Balbale, resigned in August over the firm's decision not to discipline him, and Botha said in October that "we need spiky people inside of Sequoia."¹¹ In January 2026 Julie Bort of TechCrunch reported that Maguire, still at the firm, had posted comments on the Minneapolis Border Patrol shooting aligned with those of Rabois, and that Lin and Grady had not commented.¹²

Political contributions of partners

Federal Election Commission records for Moritz with Sequoia Capital, Sequoia Heritage or HRTG Partners as employer total $19,020,800. They include $13,800,000 to AB PAC, the committee that filed as American Bridge 21st Century through the 2018 cycle, in nine gifts from February 20, 2020 to September 23, 2024, among them $4,800,000 on April 5, 2024; $2,100,000 to The Lincoln Project; $1,500,000 to PACRONYM; $450,000 to the Everytown Victory Fund; and, in 2026, $500,000 each to VoteVets and Government That Works PAC and $100,000 to Abundant Future.¹³

Records for Leone with Sequoia Capital as employer include $125,000 to Right to Rise USA in January 2015; $100,000 to the John Bolton Super PAC in June 2017; $50,000 each to America First Action and Trump Victory in 2019; $100,000 to Security is Strength PAC and $100,900 to the Senate Georgia Battleground Fund in 2020; $893,500 to the Senate Leadership Fund in three gifts from November 2020 to February 2022; about $501,000 to the Congressional Leadership Fund; $820,900 to the McCarthy Victory Fund, in part with the employer given as "venture capitalist"; $213,500 to the Republican National Committee in two gifts on December 7, 2021; $2,000,000 to Never Back Down Inc. on April 19, 2023; $1,000,000 to America PAC on June 14, 2024; and $250,000 to the Trump 47 Committee on October 30, 2024. A $2,000,000 gift to Right for America on June 4, 2024 appears under his name with the employer given as self-employed. Botha's two gifts, of $5,000 each, went to the National Venture Capital Association's VenturePAC.¹³

Twitter

On May 5, 2022 Musk filed an amendment to his Schedule 13D for Twitter listing co-investors who had signed equity commitment letters for his acquisition. Sequoia Capital Fund, L.P. committed $800,000,000. The other commitments on the list included the Lawrence J. Ellison Revocable Trust ($1,000,000,000), VyCapital ($700,000,000), Binance ($500,000,000), AH Capital Management, L.L.C. of Andreessen Horowitz ($400,000,000), Qatar Holding LLC ($375,000,000), Fidelity ($316,139,386), Brookfield ($250,000,000) and Witkoff Capital ($100,000,000).¹⁴

FTX

In a profile of Sam Bankman-Fried published on Sequoia's website on September 22, 2022, the writer Adam Fisher recounted that Lin and Michelle Bailhe had studied cryptocurrency exchanges during the pandemic and contacted Bankman-Fried during FTX's Series B round in the summer of 2021, and that after a video call in which he described a financial "super-app," partners typed "I LOVE THIS FOUNDER" and "I am a 10 out of 10" in the chat window. The profile quotes FTX's head of product, Ramnik Arora, saying Bankman-Fried had been "playing League of Legends through the entire meeting."¹⁵ On October 1, 2026 the profile's address redirected to Sequoia's FTX company page.¹⁵

Sequoia invested in FTX's Series B in July 2021, at an $18 billion valuation; the Series C of January 2022 valued FTX at $32 billion.¹⁶ On November 9, 2022 Sequoia told the limited partners of Global Growth Fund III, and posted the letter publicly, that "a liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX" and that it was marking the investment to zero. The letter gave a cost basis of $150 million in that fund, Sequoia Capital Global Growth Fund III, Endurance Partners, L.P., under 3 percent of its committed capital and offset by about $7.5 billion of gains in the fund, and $63.5 million invested by SCGE Fund, L.P. It stated that in 2021 FTX had generated about $1 billion of revenue and more than $250 million of operating income, "as was made public in August 2022," and that "We are in the business of taking risk."¹⁶¹⁷ SC GGF III, the same Endurance Partners fund, appears among the Maplebear reporting persons in 2024.⁸

Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC was named a defendant in O'Keefe v. Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC, filed in the Southern District of Florida on February 22, 2023 against investors, auditors, banks and the law firm Fenwick & West; the case was closed on June 21, 2023 on transfer into the multidistrict litigation In re FTX Cryptocurrency Exchange Collapse Litigation before Judge K. Michael Moore.¹⁸ In that litigation Sequoia appears among the "Domestic Investor Defendants" with Altimeter, Multicoin, Paradigm, Ribbit, SkyBridge Capital, Thoma Bravo and Tiger Global Management. These defendants responded to a notice of supplemental authority in May 2025 and to the plaintiffs' motion to lift the discovery stay in June 2025, and on June 5, 2026 filed a reservation of rights on the plaintiffs' motion for preliminary approval of a second tranche of settlements.¹⁹

Sequoia Capital China and HongShan

On June 6, 2023 Botha, Shen and Shailendra Singh announced that Sequoia would separate into Sequoia Capital in the United States and Europe, Peak XV Partners in India and Southeast Asia, and HongShan in China by March 2024, writing that "It has become increasingly complex to run a decentralized global investment business."²⁰ Peak XV's adviser registration lists it as formerly Sequoia Capital India Operations II LLC, based in Mauritius.²¹

On October 17, 2023 Mike Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi, chairman and ranking member of the House Select Committee on the CCP, wrote to Botha and to Don Vieira, partner and global chief policy officer. The committee stated its understanding, from source material on file, that each of Sequoia's five entities had its own investment committee but that roughly 20 percent of the carry from each deal flowed to the top of the Sequoia family, a central compliance office in Menlo Park reviewed every deal, Sequoia Capital's chief financial officer and legal counsel retained authority over the foreign entities, and 60 to 70 percent of Sequoia Capital China's limited partners had been American, later about half. It described a screening process adopted in the summer of 2022 that covered only Chinese quantum, semiconductor and aerospace investments, named investments in EverSec, 4Paradigm, DJI and DeepGlint, and observed that the planned Treasury outbound investment rules would not reach HongShan once it was independent.²²

The committee's report of February 8, 2024 states that Sequoia had partnered with local leaders in 2005 to form Sequoia Capital China; that Sequoia Capital and Sequoia Capital China had invested about $1.4 billion in ByteDance from March 2014, and Shen sat on its board; that Shen had been a "steward of Sequoia Capital" and a representative to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference; that Sequoia Capital China invested $36 million in DJI from August 2014 and exited in 2019 and 2021, and RMB 466 million ($76 million) plus about $5 million through a fund with American limited partners in 4Paradigm from March 2015; and that Sequoia Capital China invested about $32 million in BGI Tech, a subsidiary of BGI Group, from 2013, exiting in November 2020, after an internal memo of September 2012 touted BGI's acquisition of the American sequencing company Complete Genomics. The Department of Commerce added BGI Tech to the Entity List in March 2023. Sequoia told the committee that its entry into China "coincided with expressed government policies and public positions in the US that encouraged businesses to invest in the region" and that Sequoia Capital China's renminbi funds had no American limited partners.²³

Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom describes Vieira as a former chief of staff of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice and counselor to the assistant attorney general for national security (2009 to 2011), an espionage prosecutor, deputy chief counsel of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and staff director of its oversight subcommittee, and a Skadden national security partner from 2017 to 2019. At Sequoia he founded the Washington office and global policy function, was chief legal officer, and represented the firm on the board of the National Venture Capital Association; he also sat on the boards of Genuity Science and Hakluyt & Co. He returned to Skadden on September 9, 2025.²⁴

23andMe

When 23andMe became public through a merger in June 2021, Botha was a director and Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC held 17,818,438 of the 18,442,574 Class B shares attributed to him, 4.54 percent.²⁵ On September 17, 2024 Botha and the six other independent directors resigned together, writing to Anne Wojcicki that they had not received "a fully financed, fully diligenced, actionable proposal" and would leave "because of your concentrated voting power."²⁶

San Francisco

Moritz gave $300,000 in September 2020 to Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, the political action committee that later spent about $4 million on the recall of District Attorney Chesa Boudin; he told Mission Local the 2020 gift was for that year's supervisorial elections.²⁷ In 2024 he gave just under $1 million in January and $1.5 million in late August to the committee for Proposition D, the charter measure of TogetherSF, a group he chaired and funded; Mission Local described him as a major benefactor of TogetherSF and the San Francisco Standard and reported that he had given more than $300 million to causes in the city.²⁸ Proposition D, which would have capped city commissions at 65, expanded mayoral hiring and firing power and restricted police oversight, drew $9.5 million and was losing 45 to 55 percent in early returns on November 6, 2024; the mayoral candidate TogetherSF ranked first, Mark Farrell, drew $5.4 million and stood fourth.²⁹