timelets

Most people who succeed are not very objective or realistic about why. They think it's all their personal brilliance. And in significant part it is, but they forget the luck factor and the contribution of other people and timing and the economy and all the rest of it. People who fail often times are desperately in need of a success. They're smarter, they're more clever about how they do things, their sometimes tremendous egos are suspended in check.

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So we rarely will finance somebody at Sequoia who's had an outrageous success. My - my best example is my friend Steve Jobs. We financed Steve in 1977 at Apple. Steve was twenty, un-degreed, some people said unwashed, and he looked like Ho Chi Min. But he was a bright person then, and is a brighter man now. And here was a man that created Apple, and in the creation of Apple helped create the personal computer business. Phenomenal achievement done by somebody in his very early twenties. Outrageously success - successful, and after he - his stay at Apple he then evolved to an individual who was having lunch with the governor of California, then Jerry Brown, who had an apartment in New York City. When I met him he didn't know where New York City was.

https://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/transcripts/valentine.htm