Sequoia Capital China: And I Choose to Start a New Table

@Jing Liu

A warm welcome to the first female interviewee at elsewhere: Gong Yuan.

In my mind, Gong Yuan has always been associated with fresh things. In 2018, when the VC industry was still drowning in the sharing-economy whirlpool, she was already embedded in the tech circle at China Growth Capital. After joining Sequoia Capital China, she went and built HongshanX — publishing papers here, incubating scientists there, making noise in ways that stood out.

In short, Gong Yuan isn't someone who clings to extension cords. She defines this behavioral logic as: "starting a new table."

This phrase is worth noting — it appeared 31 times in elsewhere's interview with her. It's also a crucial life creed for Gong Yuan.

On Chinese New Year's Eve 2024, Gong Yuan received a call from Neil Shen informing her that she had become a partner at Sequoia. That's a terrifyingly fast trajectory — just five years earlier, in 2019, she had joined as a VP.

Of course, titles don't tell the whole story. But Gong Yuan's story reveals, to some degree, what kind of organization and values Sequoia needs and celebrates.

So in this interview, beyond her personal growth — how she stumbled into VC by accident; how she moved from an early-stage fund to Sequoia; and her path to becoming a partner — we also spent considerable time discussing Sequoia itself: how their investment committee is structured; why Sequoia possesses an almost uniquely rare organizational form; and what the core of Sequoia's culture really is.

There's plenty of historical content about Sequoia, but these topics have rarely been revealed.

For the full interview, please listen to the audio version on the Xiaoyuzhou app, or the video version on Bilibili and other platforms. Below are ten excerpts we distilled from the conversation.

The First "New Table"

Gong Yuan entered the VC industry around 2016. As Huadong Wang of Matrix Partners later put it, if you were still insisting on investing in TMT from that year on, you were living through history's garbage time.

At the time, Gong Yuan was at China Growth Capital — a fund still in its entrepreneurial phase. They had experimented with venture lending for over a year but quickly realized it didn't work, so they pivoted to VC.

But looking around, the industry was already packed. "It was like walking into a room and finding the big shots' tables already full," Gong Yuan said. There was no seat for newcomers.

After repeated deliberation, they decided to enter through tech — though "tech investing" in that era bears no comparison to today. The peers Gong Yuan encountered were all fellow investors sitting on cold benches.

Gong Yuan always found a way. She quickly realized that many tech founders came from Tsinghua University and a handful of other key schools, so she deliberately mapped out and connected with them. At one point, she could recite from memory the lineages and personnel lists of these core departments.

It was during this period that China Growth Capital invested in companies like LandSpace, Deephi Tech, and WeRide. Of course, in retrospect there were regrets. In the same sectors, they made many "pick-one" choices, but tech isn't always winner-take-all — multi-line deployment might have been the better strategy.

Yet this experience shaped Gong Yuan's later scarcity. In 2019, when the VC industry began its great migration to B2B, she joined Sequoia Capital China.

Before Joining Sequoia, She Calculated She Lacked Wood

Here's a small interlude.

As her first job after returning to China, Gong Yuan naturally had deep feelings for China Growth Capital. When she proposed leaving, she and the partners there "cried together several times."

Later, Weiming Xiong, then a partner at China Growth Capital, secretly had someone read her fortune. He told her afterward that if the reading had shown she wouldn't do well at Sequoia, he would have fought harder to keep her. Fortunately, it came back auspicious.

Looking at the fortune Weiming brought back, Gong Yuan said she bawled in the office. But it was through this passive fortune-telling that she learned, for the first time, that she lacked the wood element in her five-element chart.

Lacked wood — then joined Sequoia.

Do You Love Investing, or Do You Love Money?

During the interview, Kui Zhou asked Gong Yuan a question: In VC, do you love investing or making money?

It's a good question, and it's good precisely because it contains a trap: many would unhesitatingly choose the former, because it appears more idealistic, while the latter is harder to admit.

Gong Yuan said she only found the question impressive at the time, and was momentarily stunned. But looking back years later, she understood more deeply that, more first-principles, the answer was probably the latter.

Nightmares on One Hand, Qingcheng Mountain on the Other

Right after joining Sequoia, there was a team-building trip to Qingcheng Mountain — in her hometown. Gong Yuan became the organizer.

Being a conscientious person, she scouted the location in advance and even climbed to the summit to get a feel for it. At the time she felt she had done her utmost, and it took her three hours.

But miraculously, when the entire Sequoia team came to climb, everyone reached the summit within two and a half hours. She was the last one.

At the time, tech investing in China was heating up. Gong Yuan, new to Sequoia, was under considerable pressure. She even had a nightmare — all the tech investors she knew had joined Sequoia.

A partner worried she was carrying too much psychological burden and asked her to share some thoughts during the trip. With pressure on one side and the miraculous climbing speed on the other, Gong Yuan said in her sharing: Sequoia is exactly this kind of place — it gives you nightmares on one hand, yet lets you reach the summit in two and a half hours on the other.

If the Company IPOs, Do You Really Want to Be Just One of Them?

Investing can be quite counterintuitive sometimes.

For instance, a company you once passed on is presented to you again — do you look at it, or pass again? Or a company you once invested in has seen its valuation rise tenfold — do you double down?

This is actually a common feature of Sequoia's most successful historical investments, such as ByteDance and PDD.

This was one of the first lessons Gong Yuan faced upon joining Sequoia.

There was a company she had previously invested in whose valuation had risen significantly in a short time. While she hesitated, a partner said to her: Think about it — when the company goes public someday and all the investors are posting on WeChat Moments, what will you post? If you're just one of them, it doesn't mean much.

So Gong Yuan brought the deal back and worked hard to evaluate and decide.

Gong Yuan said she quickly understood something important about investing: it's not enough to have invested in a deal. What matters more is how much conviction you have, and how much capital you're willing to bet — these are things that "require desperate thinking and fighting for."

Sequoia's IC: From 0 to 10

Many people are surely curious about how Sequoia's investment committee (IC) is structured, especially the legendary scoring system.

Gong Yuan explained it in detail in the video podcast —

Typically, 4 means don't invest; 6 means you agree others can invest but you don't want to; 7 means you want to invest; 8 means must invest; and 9 means "slamming the table — even if I have to leave today, this deal gets done."

Gong Yuan said if a company gets 7s from everyone, it's probably not going to be a good investment in hindsight (because it's too consensual). The deals that ultimately work out well are often ones where the deal team gave 8 or higher, while others gave 6 or lower.

The IC inevitably has moments of disagreement, even confrontation. As Shanshan Guo, investment partner at Sequoia, aptly put it: the essence of IC is not to argue and fight.

Gong Yuan offered a further explanation this time: IC is also not about convincing each other, nor about collective brainstorming. Rather, when everyone expresses their genuine opinion, it constitutes a microcosm of the entire market's view. That's what makes an effective IC.

So Sequoia is also one of the few ICs without a silver-bullet mechanism — to some extent, this addresses the IC's effectiveness.

A Uniquely Rare Organizational Form

Most funds have clear one-to-one or one-to-many mappings between partners and junior staff, but Sequoia may be the only place with a "many-to-many" relationship. That is, from investment manager to VP to MD to partner, anyone can form cross-cutting collaborative relationships.

This is an extremely distinctive feature of Sequoia's organizational form.

Gong Yuan believes this design gives junior colleagues enormous space — even without partner support, they can directly email the highest levels to express conviction, while also avoiding the blind spots in decision-making that come with factional culture.

As for some obvious speculations, Gong Yuan said if people over-interpersonalize this, they're complicating and even misreading the original intent of this mechanism.

What HongshanX Actually Does

2022 was a low period for Gong Yuan after joining Sequoia. The market was hot, valuations were soaring, and club deals were everywhere (somewhat similar to today, it seems).

Gong Yuan said she felt unprecedented exhaustion, so she decided to take time off and rethink: what else can investing be?

Building on her previous tech investing, she gradually realized that scientist-entrepreneurs would emerge in greater numbers — something like Ilya Sutskever at OpenAI. She gradually sketched out the prototype for HongshanX.

The name actually borrows from Google X, suggesting the exploration of innovative things within the Sequoia system. Beyond what people later saw with Xbench and other initiatives, the core板块 was incubating scientist-entrepreneurs — in simple terms, HongshanX systematically plays the role of Sam Altman.

There's already been much discussion and debate about "scientist-entrepreneurship," which we won't expand on here. Gong Yuan is also well aware of potential issues, so she said an important criterion is that the kind of general-like figure she seeks must be someone with enormous ambition themselves, not someone half-pushed into starting a company.

Under this logic, they invested in companies like Infinigence-AI and others.

Win & Conviction

On that day in 2024, Gong Yuan was wintering with her family in Sanya. Near the New Year's Eve dinner, she suddenly received a call from Neil Shen.

She assumed something urgent had come up, but it was to inform her: she was officially a partner at Sequoia Capital China.

With some qualification: Gong Yuan may be the only person in the past five years at Sequoia China to become a partner from the outside (the others were mostly internally cultivated).

Given that Gong Yuan has something of a more external perspective, we asked her to articulate what the core of so-called Sequoia culture is.

She believes it's two words: Win and Conviction. She even feels this represents the ultimate values of the investing industry. Because this is an industry that amplifies the individual, you need to love winning; but conviction is equally important, as it determines whether you care about every decision you make, because history will remember each one. These two points seem like two ends of a balance.

A Question from an Old Colleague

At the end of the interview, we relayed a question from a former China Growth Capital colleague: When she decided to go to Sequoia back then, had she reached the mountain she was trying to climb?

This question seemed to deeply move Gong Yuan. She paused for a long time before saying she believed she had: first, surviving at Sequoia; second, doing some different things.

The follow-up question: So what's Gong Yuan's next mountain?

At this point Gong Yuan returned to her rationality and progressivism: "I think it's myself."

Full Audio and Video

Cover image: On set