Sonya Huang

What I admire must in a founder is imagination. Technology is a great enabler, but it takes imagination to harness technology and create something useful and delightful. Take computer vision for example: the compute and algorithms get better each day, but we've only scratched the surface of possible applications. That's really exciting to me. Venture capital is personal for me. My dad started a company with VC funding when I was a kid. The doors it opens for people arent just financialthe real benefits come from the power of cold, hard experience. The rise of consumer choice is fundamentally changing how companies do business. Youre not just delivering a product or serviceyou need to make people happy. Consumers are in the driver's seat, and enterprises need to buckle up. The last five years helped train my eye for operating and financial KPIs. Evaluating companies in the context of M&A, IPOs and buyouts gave me pattern recognition that I think can be valuable, especially to new CEOs. It's difficult to disrupt an industry without understanding its incumbents. Working with the world's biggest financial institutions helped me learn the nuances of how they thinkand how startups can disrupt or partner with them. I'm probably the quintessential #millennial consumer! I use startup tech for everything, from planning my wedding to tracking my runs to brewing my tea. Nothing makes me happier than discovering a beautiful, well-designed product. I'm a design junkie at heart. I was born in Mountain View and wrote my first computer program in third grade. I wasnt a whiz kid; my first lines of code didnt do much. But I kept at it. There were pros and cons to growing up in Silicon Valley. But it was fascinating to be in this gravity well of innovation and to live through the highs and lows, from blockbuster IPOs to the dotcom bubble bursting. When I was younger, I wanted to be a concert violinist. I was obsessedI just loved playing. I practiced for hours every day. The only other time Ive felt that kind of drive was writing my senior thesis. When you feel that youre on the cusp of creating something great, it's like this switch flips inside you and youre brimming with adrenaline. There's nothing like it. I trained to be a game theorist in college. I just fell in love with it as a way to understand the world through mathematical first principles, and I think it's given me a fresh perspective on how competition and markets evolve. One of the core tenets of game theory is incentive compatibility. If you cant make the economic incentives work for all involved, even the most delightful product wont take off. The most compelling companies create wins for everyone involved. I also spent time in college applying machine learning and computer vision techniques to various fields. My favorite was neuroscience. I applied neural nets to human brain scansessentially using computer imagery to try to read minds. I was skeptical about joining Sequoia at first. I was about to start business school, and I didnt want to be knocked off my path. I couldnt turn down the chance to work with some of the most talented founders out there. We get to partner with true visionaries. It's exhilarating to be part of the ecosystem that helps fuel their success.