Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s most storied venture firms, is unwinding two decades of expansion in a sweeping overhaul that closes its London office and ends two of the programmes that put it closest to young founders.
The firm set out the changes on Wednesday in a memo titled “The Sequoia of Tomorrow”, posted to X and signed by its seven general partners. Alongside the cuts, Sequoia said it had raised roughly $10 billion in new funds.
The memo ends the firm’s Scouts programme and its Arc accelerator, merges its early-stage and growth teams into one, flattens its partnership and abolishes the Monday partner meeting — a ritual at Sequoia and at nearly every venture firm.
Scouts was the more surprising of the two closures. Launched around 2009, it gave founders and operators small cheques to invest on Sequoia’s behalf, putting the firm in touch with deals its partners might never have seen. Jason Calacanis pointed Sequoia to Uber through the programme, and Sam Altman brought it Stripe. Other early scouts included Airbnb chief executive Brian Chesky and Dropbox founders Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston. The model was copied across the industry, with roughly half of venture firms adopting some version of it.
Arc, launched in March 2022 as Sequoia’s answer to Y Combinator, ran seven-week batches for pre-seed and seed founders, with admitted companies receiving $500,000 to $1 million up front. Both programmes were bets on being early and being everywhere. Now Sequoia says it wants to put “more energy behind fewer people and things”.
The London office, opened in 2020, will also close, with several people leaving the firm. “We simply don’t see the need for a local presence,” the memo says, adding that Europe will keep producing “outlier founders” and that Sequoia can support them from its home base in the Bay Area. Luciana Lixandru, hired from Accel in 2020 as Sequoia’s first partner in Europe, said she was offered a move to San Francisco and declined; she remains a partner and will keep her board seats while investing personally in European founders. The move follows Andreessen Horowitz shuttering its London office last year and Coatue closing its own in 2024.
Sequoia frames the overhaul as a return to focus after a roughly 20-year expansionary phase in which it built multiple businesses in multiple geographies — an expansion it says brought hierarchy with it. Its “objective function is not scale, but quality”, the memo says. The firm is now owned and operated by seven general partners: Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, the firm’s co-stewards, along with Andrew Reed, Shaun Maguire, Konstantine Buhler, Sonya Huang and David Cahn.
Note on sourcing: the changes described here rest on Sequoia’s own memo, as reported by TechCrunch and DealRoom. The firm has published no performance data for the Scouts programme, and the memo offers no criticism of it, so any explanation of its motives beyond the stated push for focus is inference rather than fact.
Sources: TechCrunch — “Sequoia hits rewind, undoing 20 years of expansion” https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/04/sequoia-hits-rewind-undoing-20-years-of-expansion/ ; TechCrunch — “Sequoia shutting down its Scouts program marks the end of an era” https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/06/sequoia-shutting-down-its-scouts-program-marks-the-end-of-an-era/ ; DealRoom — “Why Sequoia ended Scouts, the 2009 programme that found Uber and Stripe” https://dealroom.co/news/170262-why-sequoia-ended-scouts-the-2009-programme-that-found-uber-and-stripe/
