Sequoia Capital closes London office and cuts early-stage programs

TechCrunch reported Wednesday that Sequoia Capital detailed a broad restructuring in a memo to X, including roughly $10 billion in new funds and the closure of its London office. The firm said it will shut down its Arc accelerator and Scouts program, combine its early-stage and growth teams, flatten its partnership and end the Monday partner meeting cycle, according to the memo.

Sequoia framed the changes as a retreat from a roughly 20-year expansionary phase and a return to a smaller team focused on Silicon Valley. The memo says: "We are coming out of a ~20 year expansionary phase, during which we built multiple businesses in multiple geos." It adds that an unintended side effect was hierarchy, and that flattening the partnership lets every partner flourish.

The Scouts program, launched around 2009, gave small checks to founders and operators who invested on the firm's behalf, TechCrunch wrote. It surfaced early bets including Uber through Jason Calacanis and Stripe through Sam Altman, and early scouts included Brian Chesky, Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston. Arc began in March 2022 as Sequoia's accelerator program for pre-seed and seed-stage founders; it ran cohorts lasting seven weeks multiple times a year, and startups accepted into the program got $500,000 to $1 million upfront.

Sequoia opened its London office in 2020 and said several people will leave because of the closure. The memo states: "We simply don't see the need for a local presence." Sequoia adds that Europe will keep producing "outlier founders" and that the firm can support them from its Bay Area home base. Luciana Lixandru, who joined Sequoia from Accel in 2020 as the firm's first partner in Europe, said the firm proposed relocating her to San Francisco but she turned it down; on X she wrote "Europe is where my family is, and where I want to build." She said she is still a partner, will hold onto her board positions, and will invest personally in European founders. TechCrunch noted that Andreessen Horowitz shut its London office last year and Coatue closed its own in 2024.

The memo also says Carl Eschenbach, the former Workday CEO, is back as a full-time partner from March, and that the team has "reinvigorated the GOAT," Doug Leone. Seven general partners now have primary ownership and operation of the firm, according to the memo: Alfred Lin and Pat Grady as joint leaders, plus Andrew Reed, Shaun Maguire, Konstantine Buhler, Sonya Huang and David Cahn, who joined in 2023. Jess Lee, Sequoia's first female partner and the early-stage investor who ran Arc, is no longer on the firm's investor page; she is listed as an operator in the role of chief product officer. Stephanie Zhan, who had been with Sequoia since 2015, has departed to launch her own firm, according to TechCrunch.

The memo says Sequoia is doing away with the "Early & Growth" structure and will operate as one team. The Monday partner meeting cycle is gone, with the firm saying founders operate 24/7 and Sequoia will aim to do the same. The firm acknowledged the moves come at a cost: "It is scary to break something that's already working just fine."

TechCrunch reported that the changes unwind much of what Sequoia built under Doug Leone, Jim Goetz and Roelof Botha. Botha was removed by a vote as senior steward last fall in an unexpected leadership change that the firm characterized as a transition to Lin and Grady; he severed all connections with Sequoia this summer, around when he took a seat on SpaceX's board. In 2023, Sequoia split off its China and India/Southeast Asia operations, which became HongShan and Peak XV.