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PODCAST

Crucible Moments

Sequoia Capital

A podcast about the inflection points that shaped some of the most significant companies of our time. Crucible moments are pivotal decisions that determine your trajectory. In Season 2, hear from founders and leaders like Steve Chen of YouTube, Drew Houston of Dropbox, Frank Slootman of ServiceNow and Tony Xu of DoorDash, Steve Huffman of Reddit and more about how they navigated the challenges and opportunities that defined their stories. Hosted by Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital. The content of

business entrepreneurship

All Episodes

47:03

Palo Alto Networks ft Nir Zuk & Nikesh Arora - The...

Crucible Moments ·

2025/12/04

In the early 2000s, the cybersecurity industry was dominated by incumbents focused on high margins, not innovation. Nir Zuk tells the story of how, frustrated by this stagnant culture, he set out on his own with a radical idea: the Next-Generation Firewall. His vision was to unify dozens of security functions into a single, intelligent platform delivered via cloud—an approach everyone thought was crazy.Palo Alto Networks started as a disruptive startup with Nir sporting a "Check Point Killer"

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42:40

Bolt ft. Markus Villig - From Bootstrapping in...

Crucible Moments ·

2025/11/20

At 19, Markus Villig borrowed €5,000 from his parents to fix Estonia's broken taxi system. What happened next defied every conventional startup playbook. Markus started by making fleet dispatch software for local taxi companies. But when it became clear they weren’t embracing the on-demand revolution, he pivoted the business to ride-hailing for drivers, competing directly against what had been his core customer. The product took off in Estonia. But when Bolt's first expansion into Western Europe

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43:02

Supercell ft Ilkka Paananen - How an Early Pivot Led...

Crucible Moments ·

2025/11/06

Founder and CEO Ilkka Paananen set out to create a different kind of game company—one where the game development teams would have decision-making power, not upper management. Ilkka recalls the early decision to scrap their first game and the entire cross-platform strategy that had landed them a Series A financing in order to make a counterintuitive pivot and focus exclusively on mobile. The decision launched one of gaming's most remarkable success stories: By obsessing over quality and treating

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45:55

Zipline ft Keller Cliffton - Reinventing Delivery...

Crucible Moments ·

2025/10/23

In 2014, Keller Cliffton made an audacious pivot: shut down his robotic toy company and rebuild it as an autonomous drone delivery system for life-saving medical supplies. Investors were skeptical: The team knew nothing about drones, healthcare, or logistics. But they pushed forward anyway. This is the story of Zipline's journey from near-death to delivering blood to remote hospitals in Rwanda, battling volatile weather and regulatory hurdles, and eventually becoming a global leader in autonomous

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2:55

Crucible Moments Season 3: Coming October 23

Crucible Moments ·

2025/10/16

Previously on Crucible Moments, we explored the inflection points that shaped some of the most significant names in technology. Now, we're returning for a brand new season. Join us as leaders from Stripe, Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna, Supercell and more share what it's actually like to navigate the make-or-break decisions, early stumbles and leaps that turn scrappy startups into market defining forces.Hosted by: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital

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50:04

Nubank ft. David Vélez - An Outsider Upends the...

Crucible Moments ·

2025/01/23

When Nubank started 10 years ago, a few big banks in Brazil had a stranglehold on the largest economy in Latin America: they controlled nearly all the market share, and imposed some of the highest fees and worst banking terms in the world. David Vélez was an unlikely character to challenge the system: an outsider from Colombia and Costa Rica with a Stanford MBA, David was working at Sequoia with the goal of investing in Latin American companies. When the realization struck that they couldn’t find

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50:14

Dropbox ft. Drew Houston - How the Cloud Pioneer...

Crucible Moments ·

2025/01/09

A scrappy upstart taking on hyperscalers in a category with lots of hand-wavers, Dropbox became the canonical example of Silicon Valley viral growth, adding 50 million users in the first years following their 2008 launch and quickly dominating their category. However, as CEO Drew Houston explains, their path from viral sensation to enduring business was filled with daunting obstacles. As giants released competing products and tried to crush them, Dropbox embarked on a set of strategic acquisitions

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31:50

LIVE: ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott on Unlocking...

Crucible Moments ·

2025/01/02

Earlier this season we heard the startup story of ServiceNow—from Fred Luddy setting out to reinvent IT workflows as a first-time founder, to Frank Slootman joining as CEO to scale the business to an IPO. Even more remarkable is that ServiceNow has only accelerated as a public company, growing over ten-fold in the last decade. At a recent closed event in Europe, Sequoia partner Pat Grady spoke with ServiceNow’s current CEO Bill McDermott, who took the reins in 2019. This conversation was recorded in

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47:57

Robinhood ft. Vlad Tenev - Reinventing Finance for a...

Crucible Moments ·

2024/12/19

Millions of Americans use their smartphones to invest and manage their finances every day—but before Robinhood started in 2013, finance looked very different. Investing was something for the wealthy, with steep fees charged on every trade, and was done exclusively on computers with arcane trading software. In this episode, co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev explains why Robinhood set out to democratize access to investing and reinvent it for a new generation, how it overcame immense challenges in that

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48:14

YouTube ft. Steve Chen - 18 Months That Changed the...

Crucible Moments ·

2024/12/05

This episode takes us back to the earliest days of YouTube, as the founders explain why it was a longshot that succeeded against all odds. When cofounders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim left PayPal to start YouTube, it wasn’t even clear that the nascent broadband infrastructure could support playing video in a browser. In a brief period until its acquisition by Google—from its first incarnation as a video dating site to confronting daunting technical and legal challenges—the early story of

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52:55

Natera ft. Matthew Rabinowitz - A Personal Mission...

Crucible Moments ·

2024/11/21

Founder Matthew Rabinowitz opens up about the intensely personal journey that set him on a course to revolutionizing healthcare. A PhD in electrical engineering, he had no background in genetics or biology, but after his sister had a baby with Down syndrome that hadn’t been detected and tragically died after 6 days, Matthew dedicated himself to solving this problem. After overcoming seemingly impossible obstacles, today Natera leverages molecular biology and novel bioinformatics technology to

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29:18

LIVE: DoorDash’s Tony Xu and Miki Kuusi Talk Scaling...

Crucible Moments ·

2024/11/14

Tony Xu and Miki Kuusi share insights from building two of the world's most successful delivery platforms—DoorDash and Wolt—which merged in 2022 to create an $80B GOV business operating in 32 countries. In this candid conversation with Sequoia's Alfred Lin live at a Sequoia event in Europe, they discuss the challenges of scaling operational excellence, maintaining culture through hypergrowth and the future of commerce in cities.Host: Alfred Lin, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Tony Xu, Miki Kuusi

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52:39

DoorDash ft. Tony Xu - The “Wrong” Moves That Built a...

Crucible Moments ·

2024/10/24

DoorDash faced skeptics from the start. Grubhub, Delivery.com, and others were already addressing the restaurant delivery market when CEO Tony Xu and his co-founders started in 2013. But after talking to hundreds of local small businesses, they realized there was still an unmet need: None of the competitors solved the problem of delivery with an on-demand workforce, the way Uber had done with drivers. After struggling to raise initial funding, DoorDash found traction. But the next few years would

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41:35

UiPath ft. Daniel Dines - From Bootstrapping in...

Crucible Moments ·

2024/10/10

The biggest enterprise software company to come out of Europe in the last decade didn’t come from London, Paris, Berlin or Stockholm—but Bucharest, Romania. UiPath, founded in 2005 and originally called DeskOver, was a scrappy handful of engineers bootstrapping out of an apartment in Bucharest for about a decade, seeking in vain for product-market fit. When they stumbled upon an opportunity in the nascent enterprise software category of Robotic Process Automation, the company did a hard pivot,

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42:54

Reddit ft. Steve Huffman - The Making (and Remaking)...

Crucible Moments ·

2024/09/26

Reddit is one of the largest and most culturally influential sites on the internet—and its journey is one of the most unusual company stories in internet history. College roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian founded Reddit in 2005 and scaled it on a shoestring until Condé Nast acquired it the following year. Struggling for direction under its parent company, the founders left, and Condé Nast ultimately spun it out as an independent company once again. With Reddit buckling under user discontent

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43:54

MongoDB ft. Dev Ittycheria - How an Early Pivot...

Crucible Moments ·

2024/09/12

MongoDB, founded in 2007, originally aimed to create a platform-as-a-service system with a new database layer. Facing competition from Google, the founders pivoted to focus solely on their database product, MongoDB—a new kind of database built for the scale of the internet era. Founder Dwight Merriman built a product that developers loved, but scaling the company proved challenging until Dev Ittycheria took the reins as CEO in 2014. As cloud computing grew, MongoDB transitioned from on-premise

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42:12

ServiceNow ft. Frank Slootman and Fred Luddy - From...

Crucible Moments ·

2024/08/29

In 2004, bankrupt after the company where he’d previously worked had imploded, Fred Luddy decided to start over as a first-time founder at age 50. His vision was to reinvent the nascent IT software field for the cloud era. What started as simple help desk replacement software would eventually become a ~$150B market cap company powering digital workflows across the enterprise—but success didn’t come easy. Initially bootstrapped and ultra-lean, the company’s infrastructure began buckling under its own

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2:00

Crucible Moments Season 2: Coming August 29

Crucible Moments ·

2024/08/22

In Season 1 of Crucible Moments, we heard from founders like PayPal’s Max Levchin, Block’s Jack Dorsey, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and more about the turning points and key decisions that shaped their journeys. Now Crucible Moments is back for another exciting season. We’ll get the unvarnished history and inside story from Tony Xu of DoorDash, Drew Houston of Dropbox, Frank Slootman of ServiceNow, Vlad Tenev of Robinhood and more. Hosted by Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital.

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50:49

Introducing "Training Data," a new podcast from...

Crucible Moments ·

2024/07/11

Crucible Moments will be back shortly with season 2. You’ll hear from the founders of YouTube, DoorDash, Reddit, and more. In the meantime, we’d love to introduce you to a new original podcast, Training Data, where Sequoia partners learn from builders, researchers and founders who are defining the technology wave of the future: AI. The following conversation with Harrison Chase of LangChain is all about the future of AI agents—why they’re suddenly seeing a step change in performance, and why they’re

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38:53

Nvidia ft. Jensen Huang - An overnight success story...

Crucible Moments ·

2023/11/30

CEO Jensen Huang tells the legendary story of Nvidia, from the company’s early days pioneering 3D graphics cards for a niche PC gaming market to powering the AI revolution as the sixth most valuable company in the world. Nvidia faced multiple near-death experiences along the way, and their so-called “diving catches,” as Jensen calls them, were some of the most dramatic business stories of the modern era.Host: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital Featuring: Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, Andrew Ng,

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28 results

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