Sequoia Capital Brand Guidelines: Don Valentine’s 1972 Tree, HongShan & Peak XV

Don Valentine’s Menlo Park firm, 1972.

Sequoia Capital was founded in 1972 in Menlo Park, California, by Don Valentine, according to Wikipedia and the firm’s own history page. The firm says that when Valentine started it, the term “Silicon Valley” was less than two years old, and that he came to venture capital as a veteran of the young semiconductor industry. Wikipedia dates the first Sequoia fund to 1974, an early investment in Atari to the following year and a stake in Apple to 1978; the firm’s own page says its first fund backed both companies.

The name is the founding brand decision. Sequoia’s history page says Valentine chose “Sequoia,” a tree that lives thousands of years, rather than naming the firm after himself, and presents that choice as a sign of the humility and long horizon it wants to be known for. Unlike Andreessen Horowitz, which carries the surnames of its two founders, Sequoia has a name that points to age, scale and patience rather than to a person.

Leadership passed between partners. Wikipedia says Doug Leone and Michael Moritz took over in 1996, and that Jim Goetz led the US business from 2012 to 2017 before Roelof Botha succeeded him; Business Insider reported in June 2023 that Botha had become the firm’s “senior steward” the previous summer. “Steward” is Sequoia’s own title for its top leaders, under a model Wikipedia traces back to Valentine. In November 2025 Alfred Lin and Pat Grady succeeded Botha as co-stewards, Wikipedia says, citing the Financial Times, and Silicon Republic named the pair as the firm’s leaders in November 2026.

One firm becomes three.

For decades Sequoia grew by planting regional branches. Wikipedia says it set up a dedicated fund for Israeli start-ups in 1999, established Sequoia Capital China in 2005 and later Sequoia Capital India, and that by 2019 it was the most active venture investor in India. The firm’s own history page names Cisco, Google, Airbnb and Stripe among the companies it has partnered with across the generations since its founding. Wikipedia says its limited partners have mainly been university endowments, charitable foundations and other large institutions, and that it invests at seed, early and growth stage in private technology companies.

That structure was taken apart in stages. On 6 June 2023, Business Insider reported, citing Forbes, that Sequoia would split into three entities: Sequoia Capital for the United States and Europe, HongShan in China and Peak XV Partners in India and Southeast Asia, so that each could invest on its own, including in competing start-ups. Wikipedia says Sequoia cited the complexity of running a decentralised global investment business, that the separation was due to be complete by March 2024, and that from 2024 the three would no longer share investors or profits. HongShan, Wikipedia notes, is the Mandarin word for sequoia, so the tree survived in translation; Peak XV took an entirely new name.

In October 2021, Wikipedia says, Sequoia announced the Sequoia Capital Fund, an open-ended structure for its US and European business that lets it stay involved with companies after they list, instead of the usual fixed fund cycle. The firm frames its role in similar long-term terms: its ethos page says it considers itself a partner for the long term rather than an investor, and that words such as “deal” and “exit” are forbidden inside the firm.

How venture firms present themselves.

Venture capital firms sell no products, so their identities rest on a name, a few lines of copy and the companies they back. Their websites can be strikingly spare. Sequoia Capital’s homepage opens on a single sentence, “We help the daring build legendary companies,” and Andreessen Horowitz uses its motto, “Software Is Eating the World,” as the tagline that runs across its site.

The founder is usually the hero. Sequoia describes the people it wants to back rather than the money it manages, and its ethos page lists “the creative spirits” and “the underdogs,” and both firms give over large parts of their sites to founder stories and to portfolio pages that gather the names and marks of the start-ups they have funded. Wikipedia noted in November 2025 that the a16z website listed more than a thousand portfolio companies.

Publishing has become part of the job. Andreessen Horowitz runs a podcast network of about a dozen shows, newsletters, a books list and a New Media team that, in its own words, offers “go-direct as a service” to founders; Tech Times wrote in June 2026 that its thesis urges founders to speak through their own channels. Sequoia’s site mixes partner essays and videos with its Training Data podcast. Essays matter too: Marc Andreessen’s 2011 piece “Why Software Is Eating the World” gave his firm a motto.

Place and name do the rest. Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where Andreessen Horowitz lists its headquarters office, has given its name to a book by one of the firm’s partners, Secrets of Sand Hill Road. Names are chosen with care: Sequoia says its founder picked a long-lived tree rather than his own name, while Andreessen Horowitz compressed two surnames into a16z, a short handle it now uses across its website address, podcasts and social accounts.

Back home in the Bay Area.

The latest change came in November 2026. Silicon Republic reported on 5 November that Sequoia had announced on X the day before that it was closing its London office, saying it did not need a local presence there and could support European founders “from our home base in the Bay Area.” The same report said the firm was flattening a hierarchy built up during what it called a “20-year expansionary phase,” winding down its Scouts programme and ending its Monday partner meeting cycle; the report’s headline added that the Arc programme was also being sunset. Wikipedia says the London office had opened in 2020 and served as the firm’s European base.

Sequoia’s public voice is spare. Its website opens on the line “We help the daring build legendary companies,” and its ethos page describes the founders it wants to back as “the creative spirits,” “the underdogs” and “the outsiders.” It says its team is small, values teamwork over showmanship and is “skittish about the first person singular.” Alongside portfolio news, the site carries essays, videos and podcasts such as Training Data, hosted by Pat Grady and Lauren Reeder. The firm says it invests mainly on behalf of nonprofits and schools, naming the Ford Foundation among its limited partners. The ethos page ends by repeating the homepage line and extending it: the firm helps the daring build legendary companies “from idea to IPO and beyond.”

For a design guide, Sequoia Capital shows how one carefully chosen name can carry a whole story of patience and longevity, and can even survive translation when the firm itself divides. Compare Andreessen Horowitz, a younger Menlo Park firm named after its founders, and Kleiner Perkins. For this guide we use a deep forest green, a redwood brown and warm ivory with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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