A Story of Pitching Sequoia

I spent the first half of 2009 pitching VC firms around the country. I’ll tell more about that at a later point. Today, I’ll tell a short story about pitching Sequoia.

With surprising ease, we landed a face-to-face pitch with Bryan Schreier, a partner at Sequoia and lead investor in Dropbox and other awesome companies. We had received a warm introduction from our customers at Google, where we had recently delivered great results.

In advance, we arranged several other bay area investors, customers, and partners to meet with during the trip and filled up our schedule. My head of sales and I traveled together to do the pitch and met with Bryan in one of Sequoia’s conference rooms.

The meeting went like this:

Bryan talked about the introduction he had received from our Google customers, and we connected on the work we were doing there
Bryan mentioned he had spent just a few minutes on our website and did not have much knowledge of GPU computing
We started the presentation and somewhere in the first couple of slides it dawned on him that we were from Atlanta, not Silicon Valley
His jaw dropped and he said, “Sequoia has never done early stage investments in companies without a presence in the bay area.”
Took all the wind out of the sails
We wrapped up the pitch quickly (our pitch was only 15-min long because Q/A would typically take the bulk of our meeting time with investors)
We asked the point blank question, “So you are telling us that the Atlanta geography is immediately a deal braker.” He said, “Yes.”
We left; total time under 30 minutes

I’m not sure if his statement about “never” having early-stage invested outside of the bay area is true. But it was clear that the geographical bias killed the discussion before it even started.

It was a bummer to have wasted our time preparing for the Sequoia pitch. He had not done his homework. We had not explicitly mentioned Atlanta in advance of the meeting. The referral by our Google customers had also probably led to the confusion.

My memory was jogged about this incidence by David Cumming’s post from a few days ago. I think Sequoia has done some later stage deals in Atlanta before (here and here).

Take home message is to ensure that VCs outside of Atlanta know where you’re located! Don’t waste time on geographically-biased investors.

It turned out to be a great thing to have avoided the transformation into a VC-funded company. Rather, gutting it out lean in those early days means we are much better off today.

Have you experienced similar geographical bias while raising money from investors outside of Atlanta?

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