# Alfred Lin

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How to Win by Being Right and Contrarian: Lessons from Zappos to DoorDash

Alfred Lin shares strategies for navigating startup challenges, building resilient teams, and creating long-lasting value. Lin explores lessons from companies like Zappos, Airbnb, DoorDash, and Amazon, offering actionable insights on topics like hiring for potential, managing crises, and fostering …

Alphabet's Bond Sale Signals AI Confidence

Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow breaks down Alphabet's latest jumbo bond sale, receiving about $115 billion of orders after looking to raise $25 billion, signaling renewed investor appetite for debt tied to the AI boom after a recent selloff. Plus, a rough day for Western Digital (WD) after the storage giant…

Airtable's Acquisition Tells Us One Lesson

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Airtable sold to Bending Spoons for $1.25B in cash, and the internet im…

Rich Sutton and Khurram Javed: Why AI Models Stop Learning, and How to Start It Again

Rich Sutton, who helped pioneer reinforcement learning and wrote the seminal AI essay The Bitter Lesson, has now cofounded Oak Lab with his former student Khurram Javed. Their goal: to build agents that continuously learn from their own experience rather than from us. Rich doesn't think he holds a …

20VC: Inside Sequoia's Investment Committee: Lessons from Don Valentine, Doug Leone and Alfred Lin | How the SpaceX and Citadel Deals Went Down | What Sequoia Specifically Looks for in Founders with Julien Bek

Julien Bek is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the most renowned venture firms in the world. At Sequoia, he has partnered with companies including Rillet, Tacto, and Auctor. Before joining Sequoia, Julien spent five years at Accel, where he worked with companies including Miro, Melio, and BeRea…

The First Investor Behind $60B Cursor & $22B Kalshi

Today I walk with Ali Partovi, founder and CEO of Neo and host of a new podcast Confession. Ali co-founded LinkExchange, which Microsoft bought for $265M, co-founded Code.org with his twin brother Hadi, and wrote the first check into Cursor, and now he runs Neo, the firm that backed Kalshi when eve…

Sequoia Capital Partner Alfred Lin on Being Misunderstood and Lessons from FTX and Uber

Ali speaks with longtime friend Alfred Lin, general partner at Sequoia Capital. Alfred shares early memories of moving from Taiwan to New York at age six, frequent childhood trouble, and pivotal teachers who taught him the importance of leadership. He also talks about tension with his parents over …

Product Journeys: Zappos

Zappos was founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn who launched the company with Tony Hsieh and Alfred Lin who invested $2 million through their investment firm Venture Frogs. The company was officially launched online in 1999 as "ShoeSite.com." In July 1999, the company's name was changed from ShoeSite t…

$3B Founder Who Left Anduril For Harvard On Purpose

Today I walk with Cameron McCord, co-founder and CEO of Nominal, the hardware testing platform valued at $3B. Cameron is a former Navy submarine officer who spent 484 days underwater, worked at Anduril, Saildrone, Applied Intuition and Lux, and left Anduril for Harvard Business School on purpose, a…