Steve Jobs originally didn't get funding because he was "unconventional"

Fortune

“Steve Jobs originally was not funded by other people because he wasn’t wearing shoes and was unconventional,”  Sequoia's Managing Partner Roelof Botha said at Brainstorm Tech.

Transcript

00:00I think the characteristics we look for in founders have been the same for 50 years consistently.

00:04And a lot of that is looking for the quality of the idea and the unique insight that the

00:09founder has.

00:10And the founders we back really come in a variety of shapes and sizes.

00:14Steve Jobs originally was not funded by other people on Sand Hill Road because he wasn't

00:17wearing shoes and was unconventional.

00:19And yet Don Valentine saw through that because he saw the quality of the idea.

00:24And I think to this day we invest in people who dropped out of high school and people

00:29who have PhDs.

00:30We have some of the companies we're backing in AI specifically are some of the world's

00:34leading researchers in a particular domain.

00:36You know, the Robotics Foundation company we invested in, two professors at Carnegie

00:40Mellon, truly world experts at what they do.

00:43Many research papers that they've published.

00:45But then we listen to a founder who has a bright idea for an application.

00:48They're fresh immigrants.

00:49They're a team of three.

00:50And they have no academic credentials that we can easily verify.

00:54But the idea is interesting and they have customers that can reference the quality of

00:57what they're producing.

00:58So our job is not to look at the surface level of what people have accomplished, but rather

01:02to look at the quality of their idea.

01:04And we often want to focus on the Eureka moment.

01:08When did you come up with this idea?

01:10How did you come up with this unique insight?

01:12Tells us a lot about the founder, why this idea has legs.

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