Dan Boneh: Sequoia Capital was founded by Don Valentine in 1972 around the time of the birth of the term “Silicon Valley.” In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Bay Area saw rapid growth in computer and semiconductor related companies. Before then, orchards rather than technology companies dotted the landscape around us here at Stanford University. Sequoia Capital went on to invest and assist founders and management in the building of household names such as Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bob Swanson of Linear Technology, Sandy Lerner and Len Bozack of Cisco Systems, Dan Warmenhoven of NetApp, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo!, Jen-Hsun Huang of NVIDIA, Michael Marks of Flextronics, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube and Dominic Orr and Keerti Melkote of Aruba Wireless Networks. Roelof Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital focusing on services and software investments. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2003, Roelof served as the Chief Financial Officer of PayPal (EBAY). Earlier, he worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company. Roelof is a certified actuary (Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries), and has a BS in Actuarial Science, Economics, and Statistics from the University of Cape Town and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Roelof: Thank you Dan for the introduction. I’m flattered to have the opportunity to speak to you this afternoon. I’ll do my best to make it entertaining!
