According to Business Insider, Sequoia Capital partners Alfred Lin and Pat Grady explained their firm’s decision-making process on the “Jack Altman” podcast. For over a decade, the firm has recorded every partner’s vote on potential investments on a scale of 1 to 10, where a 6+ is positive and a 4- is negative. Their internal data shows that consensus doesn’t correlate with success; instead, the “presence of conviction” is what matters. They argue that a deal with some “9” votes and some “1” votes is better than one where everyone votes a safe “6.” The storied VC firm, an investor in Apple, Nvidia, and SpaceX, actively trains its historically high-achieving junior investors to build a risk appetite and get comfortable with failure to spot these outlier opportunities.
The Power of Polarization
Here’s the thing: this is a brilliantly simple framework that cuts against the grain of most corporate decision-making. Most committees want everyone to get along and agree. Sequoia is basically saying, “No, we want a fight.” A room full of 6s is a death sentence for a startup pitch there. That’s fascinating. It institutionalizes the idea that truly transformative, “outlier” ideas are inherently controversial. If an idea doesn’t make someone’s hair catch fire with excitement and someone else’s blood boil with skepticism, is it even worth billions? Probably not.
Training A+ Students to Fail
But let’s talk about the other, maybe more difficult, part of their system: training junior investors. Grady’s point is sharp. They hire “A+” students—people who have optimized their entire lives for minimizing risk and maximizing approval. And then they have to teach them to do the exact opposite. That’s a huge cultural shift. Can you really train someone to have a gut feel for a crazy moonshot? Or are you just selecting for the juniors who are best at acting contrarian to please the partners? It’s a potential hidden flaw. The system relies on authentic conviction, but in a competitive partnership, how do you ensure the votes are real and not performative?
The Consensus Trap
So why does this matter for anyone outside of Sand Hill Road? Because it’s a lesson in how to evaluate big bets, anywhere. The middle ground is often where mediocre ideas live. Sequoia’s data suggests that strong, passionate disagreement is a feature, not a bug, in identifying something revolutionary. It also exposes a quiet truth about venture capital: it’s not a science. It’s a gut-driven, pattern-matching game dressed up in data. The voting system isn’t about finding the “right” answer mathematically; it’s about quantifying passion and spotting which partners are willing to stake their reputation. That’s the real signal.
Does This Scale?
My skepticism, though, comes from history and scale. This philosophy thrived when Sequoia was a tighter, smaller partnership making fewer, concentrated bets. But now? They’re a global behemoth with a massive fund size that has to deploy capital. Can you maintain a culture of passionate, principled disagreement when you’re writing hundreds of checks? Or does the machine inevitably start generating more consensus 6s just to keep the money moving? The proof, as always, will be in their returns for this next decade. The theory is sound, but the execution at scale is the real test.
