Alfred Lin

Emigrating from Taiwan at the age of six, my parents moved me and my brother every few years to better school districts. I was always fascinated by businesses, how they operated and how to invest in them. In junior high, I tried to scale my lawn-mowing service—It didn’t even last a whole summer. In college, I bought whole pizzas and sold them by the slice, but I swear, it wasn’t predatory.

Academically, I had honored my parents’ wishes to be a good student, especially in math and science. I even entered a Ph.D. program in statistics, but I found reading business cases more interesting. When Sequoia invested, I joined my college friend Tony Hsieh at his startup, LinkExchange. After we sold LinkExchange to Microsoft (and made Sequoia 17x in 17 months), we started Venture Frogs, which was both an incubator and a seed fund. Out of that came Tellme Networks, which I joined in 2001, and Zappos, which I joined in 2005.

Michael Moritz had been our Sequoia partner at LinkExchange and we chose to work with him again at Zappos. He was a mentor to me and the rest of the management team. He always showed up, having poured through the board materials and listening intensely to every word. He would focus our attention on the first order issues, sharpen our thinking and push us to be even more ambitious. I learned from him that a partner’s most important value-add comes when the chips are down.

All investors essentially look for the same things: (1) outlier founders, (2) a delightful product or service, (3) a path to a massive market, and (4) a disruptive business model. This leads to a large universe of investable opportunities, which is far greater than our capacity to serve on boards and really partner with founders. To have an edge, you have to play the game differently.

I am much more focused on the founders’ special characteristics, their novel and unique insights, the eureka moment of their founding story, and their lived experiences that creates empathy for the customer they will serve. Basically, I am on the lookout for founder-market fit.

After you strip through all that, there is only one criteria for me: would I love to work for the founders and help them reach their and their company’s full potential? It is our job as partners, not just investors—to work for the founders.