Sequoia Capital posted a memo to X on Wednesday morning titled “The Sequoia of Tomorrow” that’s full of surprises. The firm has raised roughly $10 billion in new funds, it says. It is also closing its London office, shutting down its Arc accelerator and its Scouts program, merging its early-stage and growth teams into one, flattening its partnership, and killing the Monday partner meeting.
The framing is forward-looking, but the messaging is very much about rewinding to an earlier time when the team was smaller and focused more narrowly on Silicon Valley. Sequoia says as much itself. The firm describes coming out of a roughly 20-year expansionary phase during which it built multiple businesses in multiple geographies and says an unintended side effect was hierarchy.
Nearly everything being undone here was built during that stretch, under a succession of stewards running from Doug Leone through Jim Goetz to Roelof Botha. One of the most surprising developments here is that the firm is killing two programs that put Sequoia closest to young founders. Scouts, which Sequoia launched around 2009 and, anecdotally, half the industry has since copied in some form, gave small checks to founders and operators to invest on the firm’s behalf; it was a way to see deals through people closer to interesting new founders than any partner could be.
Jason Calacanis famously pointed Sequoia to Uber through the program. Sam Altman brought Stripe to Sequoia as a scout, too. Other early scouts included Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and Dropbox founders Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston.
Arc, launched in March 2022, was Sequoia’s answer to Y Combinator: a batch accelerator for pre-seed and seed founders, running several cohorts a year for seven weeks, with admitted companies getting $500,000 to $1 million up front. Both were bets on being early and being everywhere. Now Sequoia says it wants to put more energy behind fewer people and things.
Also gone is the firm’s London office, which Sequoia opened in 2020 Several people will leave the firm as result. For European entrepreneurs, the message is going to be particularly difficult to digest, especially as it follows Andreessen Horowitz shuttering its London office last year and Coatue closing its own in 2024. Sequoia didn’t say it won’t fund Europeans, but it’s definitely reinforcing here that the center of gravity is once again in the Bay Area.
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