Sequoia Capital Chief Product Officer & Partner Jess Lee shares the hard-won product and leadership lessons shaped across three chapters of her life: building early at Google, cold-emailing her way into Polyvore (eventually becoming CEO and selling to Yahoo), and now backing founders and scaling product at Sequoia.
What you’ll learn in this conversation:
- Why Jess only hires “spiky” people - and the 4Q framework (EQ / IQ / PQ / JQ) she uses to evaluate founders
- Velocity as the #1 signal of product-market fit - and how Sequoia measures it internally
- The biggest mistake she made as CEO: picking the wrong market and business model
- How empathy helped her lead - but also held her back when she avoided firing fast
- Why storytelling is now a critical founder superpower, not a soft skill
- How Polyvore built cult-level community loyalty with emotional product design
- The difference between horizontal vision and solving painful user problems
- Jess’s belief that AI will spark a new consumer wave
Whether you’re a founder, PM, designer, or investor, this episode offers a product-first lens into how Sequoia evaluates people, companies, and the future of consumer AI.
🔗 Want to go further? Talk to Jess on Delphi, where you can ask follow-up questions and explore her Digital Mind: https://www.delphi.ai/jesslee
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