also, i wrote the “Fear is the Mind Killer of the Silicon Valley Entrepreneur” rebuttal before i joined Founders Fund.

If anything this shows herd mentality prevalent among investors.

It is not leadership to play chicken little and shout sky is falling. Nor is to harp on the latest buzzword real time web.

Tell us something that we don’t know.

Hardly.

The first half of 2009 was pretty rough for a lot of companies, and making some deep cuts initially was definitely the right call for many companies.

It is also pretty clear that Sequoia actually showed quite a bit of leadership here for Silicon Valley.

Far from damaging their brand, this did a lot to show who gets listened to in the Valley.

(And, it’s not the capex that they were telling people to cut, Dave, it was the opex. 30% off of opex is a pretty big deal.)

pure & simple: Sequoia overreacted, and damaged their own brand in the process.

Ron at least about-faced quickly, and actually even accelerated his pace of investment.

in the past year, smart investors & entrepreneurs pressed on the accelerator.

the companies that Sequoia got to downsize were largely not working, and cutting capex by 10-30% probably did little to stop the bleeding.

Sequoia got it wrong. or at least their public statements were wrong.

It makes sense that the implosion has been in finance and real estate, primarily, with collateral damage for the economy and tech.

Learn more here: http://www.fireeconomy.com/

I’m not spamming for the site — it’s just a very interesting perspective. One of the originators of the term predicted the 2008 crash in February 2008, in Harper’s magazine: http://www.harp...2008/02/0081908

It was both. The VCs way over-reacted. The Sequoia memo became VC mantra with 24 hours of posting on TechCrunch. They should have known better — as we had just had a tech recession 4-5 years before then between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, and huge profits were made by those who invested in the right companies during that transition.

The entrepeneurs in many cases did know what to do. Many had been there before, and with no portfolio to ‘manage’ and prune — just one company — they simply cut back and modulated, and focused on what mattered and stopped what didn’t. And came out better for it.

It is sad that we are going to blow hundreds of billions on govt spending with only a fraction of that to show in real value.

During the Spring-Summer 2009, we then saw most core revenue streams stabilize, but actually proactively walked away from some business lines. The recession had taught us to be more focused.

Now we’re seeing stability, and each month the numbers are starting to be a little easier to hit. My gut says growth is returning.

Knock on wood, but I for one am hopeful.