Key Takeaways
- Sequoia splits its investment process between asynchronous written memos for slow thinking and live debates for fast thinking.
- A single deal sponsor can override negative room votes if conviction is absolute, exactly what happened when Shaun Maguire backed SpaceX despite a partner voting a 1.
- Universal agreement at a 7 or 8 score is treated as a red flag; Sequoia assigns a partner to write a premortem arguing why the company will fail.
- Outlier returns come from high-conviction individuals rather than committee consensus, because skilled founders easily tailor pitches to win over lukewarm rooms.
Slow Thinking on Paper, Fast Thinking in the Room
Most venture firms run sequential Monday pitch meetings where partners react in real time. Sequoia splits the process into two distinct modes of thought: asynchronous written memos before the meeting, followed by synchronous debate.
Julien Bek explains the logic simply: “The reason for that is an IC is a great format for fast thinking. Speaking asynchronously is great for slow thinking. And so if you can get the benefit of both, you're hopefully going to make better decisions.”
Writing forces clarity. When a partner writes a memo, they cannot hide behind charismatic presentation skills or hand-wavy market sizing. Other partners read and annotate the memo privately, without social pressure to agree with senior leadership. By the time the partnership gathers in the room, the basic facts are settled, leaving the meeting entirely for pressure-testing assumptions.
The SpaceX Bet and the Power of the Sponsor
Sequoia partners score deals on a 1-to-10 scale. In a typical committee, a low score kills the deal. At Sequoia, the sponsor's conviction outweighs the average score of the room.
Bek recalls Shaun Maguire bringing the SpaceX investment to the table: “Credits to Sean when he brought in the SpaceX investment. We vote on companies. I think someone voted a one. I've seen fours, of course. I've seen threes. Never seen a two. I didn't even know we could do one.”
Maguire did the deal anyway. The structure protects partners who see an outlier trait that the rest of the room misses. “The best investments in all the funds are always the companies where the sponsor had the highest conviction,” Bek notes. “That's just the one thing that's been so that happened time and time again across funds.”
If you require full partnership buy-in, you filter for safe, agreeable companies that offend nobody. Outlier companies look strange, polarize smart people, and often draw extreme pushback.
The 7-out-of-10 Trap and the Forced Premortem
The most dangerous outcome in an investment meeting is not a fight. It is lukewarm agreement where everyone scores a deal a 7 or an 8.
Bek points out why this happens: “First, if everyone's a seven or eight, it's quite dangerous because look, founders know what we want to hear. The best founders are able to retrofit the narrative that they think is going to land with investors and that can be dangerous.”
When a pitch glides through with polite approval, Sequoia steps in to break the spell. The partnership designates a specific partner to play devil's advocate and write a formal premortem. That partner must outline the exact scenario where the business goes to zero, forcing the team to confront hidden failure modes before wiring capital.
What to Do With This
Run an anonymous 1-to-10 vote on your next major hiring decision or product roadmap debate. If your team returns a cluster of 7s and 8s, stop the process and appoint one person to write a one-page premortem explaining why the decision will fail within six months. If one person rates it a 10 and another rates it a 2, let the high-conviction sponsor run the experiment.