Sequoia rewinds 20 years, kills Arc, Scouts and its London office

Sequoia Capital is hitting rewind. In a memo posted to X on Wednesday titled “The Sequoia of Tomorrow,” the firm said it has raised roughly $10 billion in new funds — and is simultaneously closing its London office, shutting down its Arc accelerator and its long-running Scouts program, folding its early-stage and growth teams into one, flattening the partnership, and ending the Monday partner meeting.

The two cuts sting the most for young founders. Scouts, launched around 2009, handed small checks to founders and operators who invested on Sequoia's behalf; Jason Calacanis famously routed Uber to the firm through it, Sam Altman brought Stripe, and early scouts included Airbnb's Brian Chesky plus Dropbox founders Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston. Arc arrived in March 2022 as Sequoia's answer to Y Combinator, running seven-week batches for pre-seed and seed founders with $500,000 to $1 million up front.

London goes too, six years after Sequoia opened it in 2020. “We simply don't see the need for a local presence,” the memo says, insisting Europe will keep minting outlier founders that Sequoia can back from the Bay Area. Luciana Lixandru, hired from Accel in 2020 as the firm's first European partner, says she was offered a move to San Francisco and turned it down — “Europe is where my family is, and where I want to build,” she wrote on X — and will stay a partner, keep her board seats and invest personally in European founders.

Sequoia isn't pretending this is a normal Tuesday. The firm describes emerging from a roughly 20-year expansionary phase in which it built multiple businesses across multiple geographies, and admits an unintended side effect was hierarchy that crept from the operating side into investing. “It is scary to break something that's already working just fine,” the memo reads. It also isn't the first retreat: in 2023, Sequoia spun off its China and India/Southeast Asia arms into HongShan and Peak XV, ending a two-decade run as one global franchise under a single name.

The people chart got a shake-up as well. Carl Eschenbach, the former Workday chief, is back full-time as a partner after returning in March, and the memo says the team has “reinvigorated the GOAT,” Doug Leone. Sequoia now has seven general partners who primarily own and operate the firm: co-stewards Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, 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 oversaw Arc, has moved off the investor page and is now chief product officer. Stephanie Zahn, an investor since 2015, has left to launch her own firm. Roelof Botha, voted out as senior steward last fall and framed then as a handoff to Lin and Grady, cut his remaining ties this summer around the time he joined SpaceX's board. Sequoia rarely cuts people off completely — Don Valentine kept showing up at partner meetings for about a decade after handing over the firm, and Jim Goetz is still on the site — but Europe's founders, watching Andreessen Horowitz close its London office last year and Coatue pull back in 2024, are getting a blunter message: the center of gravity is back in the Bay Area.