Alfred Lin and Pat Grady have run Sequoia Capital for less than a year. They have already raised more money than any leadership team in the firm’s 54-year history.
Sequoia said this month it had collected roughly $10 billion for its growth and expansion funds, one of the largest hauls since Don Valentine founded the firm in 1972. The announcement doubled as the debut of the pair who now lead it: Lin and Grady, both longtime partners, took over as co-stewards in November 2025, and the fundraise is the first major test of their leadership. In an interview with Bloomberg, their first joint appearance in the role, the two men spent less than half an hour explaining how they intend to run one of the most storied names in venture capital.
The conversation ranged from the firm’s partnership culture to the mechanics of faster decision-making, and it returned again and again to one theme: conviction over consensus. They invoked the firm’s early bet on SpaceX, whose founder pursued a vision most of the industry dismissed, as the template for how decisions should be made. The story doubles as a warning, and the two stewards acknowledged as much: the same conviction that produced SpaceX also produced the firm’s early misses in AI.
Both men were direct about those misses. They acknowledged that Sequoia passed on Anthropic for years as the AI lab grew into one of the most valuable private companies in the world, a mistake they said had reshaped how the firm thinks about the AI wave. They described how the firm later added a position, and how the episode now informs the way they weigh founders’ ambitions against the market’s skepticism.
The fundraise itself is a statement about the market they see. Growth-stage investing has been uneven since the rate hikes of 2022, with valuations swinging as capital moved in and out of technology, and many funds have been slow to deploy. A $10 billion raise suggests Sequoia expects the window for large deals to stay open, and it gives the firm the scale to lead rounds rather than follow them.
Lin and Grady offered their most distinctive judgment near the end of the interview. The current market, they argued, is not the black swan that investors have been bracing for — the rare, unforeseeable event that upends every plan. It is a white swan: a period in which unexpected opportunities keep appearing, and in which the firms that move on conviction will capture them. The metaphor, drawn from the language of risk and probability, was a deliberate counterpoint to the caution that has defined much of late-cycle investing.
The money is split between two strategies with different jobs. The growth fund backs companies that have already found product-market fit and need capital to scale, while the expansion fund targets later-stage deals, including the large private companies that now dominate the technology economy. Together they give Sequoia the ability to stay with winners from early rounds through the point at which they go public, a continuity that has become the firm’s signature. AI companies, which tend to burn capital for years before showing profits, are the clearest beneficiaries of that structure.
The stakes behind the fundraise are concrete. Sequoia’s growth funds finance the later-stage companies that have become the firm’s biggest winners, and the new capital gives Lin and Grady room to write the large checks that the AI market now demands. Founders raising at nine-figure valuations have been choosing firms partly on the depth of their war chests, and Sequoia’s haul puts it back among the largest pools in the industry.
The leadership transition itself has been careful. Lin, a former Zappos executive who joined Sequoia in 2010, and Grady, who has spent his career at the firm, were chosen from inside, and the co-steward structure was presented as a way to keep the partnership’s culture intact while making decisions faster. Partners describe the pair as complementary: Lin the operator, Grady the investor, both steeped in the firm’s habit of betting early on founders who think in decades.
The white-swan thesis will be tested in the portfolio. The $10 billion must be put to work in companies that can justify large valuations in an AI cycle that has already produced winners and losses. The firm’s own history argues for patience: Sequoia’s best-known outcomes — Apple, Google, Nvidia — were held through long stretches when the market doubted them, and the firm’s returns were built on holding winners rather than trading them.
For Lin and Grady, the interview was also an introduction to a broader audience: the limited partners who supplied the $10 billion, the founders who will judge them on speed and judgment, and an industry watching whether a changing of the guard at a 54-year-old firm changes the firm itself. They framed the answer as continuity with a faster clock. Whether the market agrees will show up in the next fund, and the one after that. For now, the two stewards have raised the money and chosen their metaphor. The white swan is their bet, and they have put $10 billion behind it.
