Mike Vernal

I never aspired to do venture. I like building things! I was a PM and engineer at Microsoft and then spent eight years at Facebook leading engineering, product and design teams. But a close friend and college roommate—Matt MacInnis—founded a Sequoia-backed company called Inkling. He introduced me to Bryan and I slowly got to know the team at Sequoia. The most fun I had in my career were the early years at Facebook where everything was crazy and frenetic. It was just a bunch of kids running around, sleeping on sofas and trying to keep up with the insane growth while also building new products—it was incredibly fun. If you experience that once in your career, you are incredibly lucky. Sequoia offered the opportunity to help founders and teams going through similar journeys. I’ve seen hypergrowth a few more times now and it’s always exhausting but exhilarating. That’s probably what’s most exciting to me.

I like folks that are super sharp and clear thinkers—people who tend to be simplifiers (vs. complexifiers). I also look for impatience—speed is one of a startup’s most important assets. I tend to not over-index on sector—great founders have a way of making any industry interesting and compelling. I’m on the board of Whisper.ai—a hearing aid company—not because I have any expertise in hearing aids, but because the founders saw an opportunity to make life meaningfully better for tens of millions of people around the world (while also building a great business). And the technology is really cool.

The two things I know best are consumer products and developer products. I spent about half my career doing each. I spent a lot of my career designing APIs, developer tools and documentation. Nowadays, I gravitate most to products whose fundamental goal is to connect people.

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