Bogomil Balkansky

Happenstance has been a theme in my life—that, and being open to opportunities. I found myself in the U.S. because I was lucky enough to come of age right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and got a scholarship that made it possible for me to leave communist Bulgaria. I started swimming with whales because a wildlife photographer I follow on Instagram put out an invitation for a trip. And I’m at Sequoia not because I planned to become a VC, but because fate connected me with the right people—namely Roelof, who I knew from Stanford GSB, and Carl, who I’d worked with closely for years at VMware.

Markets come and go, so we need to move in lockstep with their evolution. The logical domains for me are cloud infrastructure, developer tools, DevOps, open source, observability as well as SaaS apps for sales and marketing, because that’s where my background is. But I try to follow the advice several of my partners gave me when I first joined Sequoia—don’t specialize too narrowly, and get out of my comfort zone.

In terms of specific companies and entrepreneurs, I’m looking for the same things I did when I was running large teams and hiring people: iconoclastic thinking, the courage to break paradigms, defiance of common wisdom. Ideas that aren’t obvious and that challenge my own assumptions. I’m also looking for charisma, but that can manifest in different ways. Maybe you’re a great salesperson, but maybe you’re a deep thinker or an amazing technologist or an exceptional recruiter. It’s magnetism.

Get in touch with Bogomil