????問：紅杉是最有耐力的風(fēng)投公司之一，而且已經(jīng)成功地進(jìn)行了多次轉(zhuǎn)型，而大多數(shù)公司連一次成功轉(zhuǎn)型都做不到，你能談?wù)勂渲械脑騿幔?/strong>

????Q: Can you put your finger on why Sequoia has been one of the most durable venture firms that also has had more than one transitional change successfully while most firms have zero successful transitional changes?

????Well, we've always been worried about surviving, and we've also always tried very hard to work as a team where no one or two individuals are indispensable. And I think that's the way that we've approached the business, and we've also always tried to stay fresh and vital and have new ideas and young blood as part of the team. It's working on a team that I think has held us in good stead or stood us in good stead. And not wanting to let down the team.

????Q: What's your opinion of the reputation of Sequoia as being very direct with entrepreneurs. When there's bad news to be delivered, Sequoia doesn't flinch from delivering it as opposed to other firms who may say "well, we're the friends of the entrepreneurs. We're in it with you." Are those fair descriptions of Sequoia's attitude?

????They're caricatures in large part devised, as we've learned, by competitors who needed to differentiate themselves and realized that they couldn't say, oh, it was tough to compete against our strengths and therefore they had to carve out a fictional market position for themselves that they could try to delude people into thinking it wasn't Sequoia's. But if you look at our more successful investments, those are ones where the founders started the company, the founders built the company, and the founders are at the helm of the company.

????The people who know us well really like being in business with us. We've been in business multiple times with the same people and we always invite founders who've heard, perhaps, of some of these things, just to talk to all the people we've been in business with and make up their own minds. And to the best of my knowledge in the last 15 or so years we've never had people do checks on us who have then elected not to do business with us.

????Q: And when you refer to the companies where the founders stuck around a long time, Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), LinkedIn (LNKD), YouTube, and PayPal (EBAY) would be some good examples?

????Yeah, for sure. Or, today, Green Dot or ServiceNow or Palo Alto Networks or Nimble Storage. A raft of private companies. These are decade-long relationships.

????Q: A few quick personal things. I know some of the coverage around your knighthood has focused on some of the philanthropy you're doing, including with Oxford University. Talk to me a little bit about that.

????My wife and I gave a gift to Oxford last year, a sizeable gift, designed specifically to help talented students from low-income families who would be priced out of Oxford by the tuitions now being levied at British universities to afford them the opportunity to have an Oxford education. The first of those students entered Oxford last fall. We hope this will help establish a pattern of giving in Britain for these sorts of scholarships because it's just not as widely accepted as it is in the United States because there's been far greater government involvement in funding university education throughout the U.K. And at the private schools, there aren't really counterparts to the big private U.S. schools like Stanford and others.