Sequoia Capital posted a memo to X on Wednesday morning titled "The Sequoia of Tomorrow." The firm says it has raised roughly $10 billion in new funds.
The memo says Sequoia is closing its London office, shutting down its Arc accelerator and its Scouts program, merging its early-stage and growth teams into one, flattening its partnership, and ending the Monday partner meeting.
The firm describes coming out of a roughly 20-year expansion phase. It says an unintended side effect of that period was hierarchy. The memo's framing points back toward a smaller team focused more narrowly on Silicon Valley.
Scouts, launched around 2009, gave small checks to founders and operators to invest on the firm's behalf. TechCrunch reports that Jason Calacanis pointed Sequoia to Uber through the program, and that Sam Altman brought Stripe to Sequoia as a scout. Arc, launched in March 2022, was Sequoia's batch accelerator for pre-seed and seed founders.
Luciana Lixandru, hired from Accel in 2020 as Sequoia's first partner in Europe, says she was offered a move to San Francisco and declined. She wrote on X, "Europe is where my family is, and where I want to build." She says she remains a partner and will keep her board seats while investing personally in European founders.
The memo says Europe will keep producing "outlier founders" and that Sequoia can support them from the Bay Area. It says, "We simply don't see the need for a local presence."
The memo names seven general partners who primarily own and operate Sequoia: Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, who are co-stewards, along with Andrew Reed, Shaun Maguire, Konstantine Buhler, Sonya Huang, and David Cahn.
The memo acknowledges the changes carry some cost. It says, "It is scary to break something that's already working just fine."