Early in my career, I canceled an interview with @sequoia legend Mike Moritz. I'm probably one of the few people in this Hall of Shame. But in hindsight, that wasn't even my biggest mistake.
Sequoia was starting their growth fund in early 2008. Their playbook for Associates was inspired by my previous firm. In many ways, I was an ideal candidate. I did 2 interviews with partners and did quite well. I figured I was likely to get an offer. But I called it off, canceling my scheduled time with Sir Mike.
What was I thinking? I had a few reasons.
The first was that I'd just gotten an offer from another firm, Media Venture Partners (MVP), and I felt honor-bound not to string them along. I didn't want to f*ck with them.
The second had nothing to do with honor. I'd been living in Palo Alto, working all the time. I wanted to move to San Francisco and live a little. Sequoia's office was on Sandhill Road. I hated the idea of a long commute from SF. Most people probably wouldn't have let that be a deciding factor. I wasn’t most people.
In hindsight, I think MVP would have given me more time to make my decision. They wanted me. But I didn't think that was the right thing to do.
Counterfactuals are pretty hard. If I had gone to Sequoia and succeeded, the expected value of my bank account would probably be higher. But there’s no guarantee that it would have worked out.
But the (hypothetical) financial loss wasn't actually the biggest mistake. That was failing to appreciate the value of Sequoia's talent density. The caliber of the Sequoia team was (and is) remarkably high. Now, the people I worked for at MVP were good and talented people as well. But there was a difference.
My general advice to people thinking about career planning, and especially people interested in tech and startups, is to try to land in a cluster of amazing talent. That’s what drives the Power Law outcomes that dominate tech. You don't even have to work for them full-time. I never worked full time for Palantir, but being proximate to that cluster still mattered. If I'd been at Sequoia, I would have been embedded in another hyper-dense talent cluster.
At certain stages in our life, our priorities are just different. I have no regrets about any of my career decisions. But the value of talent density wasn’t so legible to me back in 2008. It is today.