Four-Oh-Eight Parish Investing

"In the time he was leading Sequoia, Don rightly saw no need to wander beyond the parish since he was of the mind that, gold had been discovered twice in California – first in the foothills and later in Mountain View. The parish, in his view was, ‘the four-oh-eight area code’ and he would say that he liked to be able to cycle to companies where he was involved. This was partly because all our contacts were around Silicon Valley and partly because Don believed that, ‘when you go east past Denver you go into a technical oblivion.’ Travel, save for the odd trip to Southern California or Seattle or, on occasion, Colorado (which housed a cluster of storage companies and where we always lost money), was saved for vacations. Our international strategy consisted of the occasional drive across the Dumbarton Bridge to Alameda County."

"As investors, Don and Pierre reflected their circumstances. Don was drawn to companies addressing large markets and, though he admired idiosyncratic engineers, was not particularly interested in understanding the technical particulars. Pierre, on the other hand, liked deeply technical undertakings and was less comfortable investing where, at the outset, he did not detect a pronounced technology advantage. At one point, while we were trying to invest in biotech companies, both Don and Pierre attended weekly evening classes at Stanford. At the end of the class it was Pierre, not Don, who would linger behind to grill the professor about an obscure detail of the lecture."