Venture capital giant Sequoia Capital closes London offices
Venture Capital giant Sequoia Capital has announced that it will be closing its London offices and making several roles redundant.
Sequoia’s track record is one of the longest in Silicon Valley, going back to the 1970s. Its early wins include Atari, Apple, Oracle, Cisco and Electronic Arts, and it was one of the first investors in Nvidia.
Several of its best-known wins came through acquisitions including YouTube (sold to Google for $1.65 billion in 2006), Instagram (bought by Facebook for $1 billion in 2012), and WhatsApp (bought by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014).
“We are closing our London office, which means several people will be leaving Sequoia. This is not about the team – they are excellent,” the group said in a statement on Wednesday (4 November).
“We simply don’t see the need for a local presence. We believe that Europe will continue to produce outlier founders and companies, and that we can continue to provide world class support from our home base in the Bay Area.”
The group added that it is now coming out of a 20 year expansionary phase, during which we built multiple businesses in multiple geos.
“One unintended side effect was hierarchy; it required real management to run the operating side of our business, and this crept over into the investing team.
“We’ve made several internal changes that have the effect of flattening the partnership. This allows every partner to flourish, and every founder to receive the full benefit of Team Sequoia – regardless of who your lead partner happens to be,” it said.
The group added that it was still in a process of reinvention.
“Some of these changes were obvious. Others less so. Many were hard. It is scary to break something that’s already working just fine, and it is painful to say goodbye to great people. We ask founders to do the right thing even when it is hard, and we are committed to doing the same,” it said.
“Some things remain unchanged. Our mission is to help the daring build legendary companies, from idea to IPO and beyond. Our objective function is not scale, but quality: delivering the best possible returns to LPs, and being the best possible partner to founders.”
