Alfred Lin

“The simple questions are you've heard before is why now? Many of these ideas have people have thought of in the past? It's not the first time that someone has decided that we should deliver food there. In 1999, there was a company called Cosmo that opened up in New York. So, that didn't work. Why is Instacart in a much...”

— From Special: Sequoia Capital's Investment Playbook (with Alfred Lin), Family Cartoon (January 01, 2021)

“The winners get a disproportionate amount of the market cap. And if that's true, then they also will, by just simple logic, investors then want to invest in the winners. And so the winners get more and more of the capital. And if there's more money in the system today, the winners will get more money. And that allows t...”

— From Special: Sequoia Capital's Investment Playbook (with Alfred Lin), Family Cartoon (January 01, 2021)

“The lack of money is actually one of the things that sort of made Zappos successful. It very early on it had to figure out how to acquire customers in a way that is unit positive on the first order.”

— From Season 2, Episode 1: Zappos (with Alfred Lin), Family Cartoon (December 20, 2017)

“Nothing destroys value faster than irrational competitors. And so if we had irrational competitors very very early on for a long sustained period of time, I'm not sure Zappos would have been around.”

— From Season 2, Episode 1: Zappos (with Alfred Lin), Family Cartoon (December 20, 2017)

“I don't really think about exits as an investor. I never really thought about exits when I was an employee of those companies that eventually exited. It is just the path.”

— From Is The World Really Built for Humans? Unlocking AI’s Potential with Alfred Lin, Cobot (April 07, 2026)

“Two centuries ago, probably 80% of us worked on a farm. A century ago, probably 40% of us worked on a farm. Today, 2% of Americans work on a farm. Did we become obsolete? No, we just found other things to do.”

— From Is The World Really Built for Humans? Unlocking AI’s Potential with Alfred Lin, Cobot (April 07, 2026)

“The thing that we measure is being a net liquidity provider to our LPs. We actually measure how much we've distributed versus what our AUM is — when you distribute, your AUM actually goes down, so we're giving money back to our limited partners, many of whom are universities and endowments.”

— From Sequoia's Alfred Lin: "Software Code Is No Longer a Moat" | 2026 Upfront Summit, Upfront Ventures (March 12, 2026)

“Every single line of code that's generated has a marginal cost of zero. So therefore software — the lines of code — is no longer a moat.”

— From Sequoia's Alfred Lin: "Software Code Is No Longer a Moat" | 2026 Upfront Summit, Upfront Ventures (March 12, 2026)

“AI impacts are real. They're going to allow us to do a lot more than we used to be able to do. I don't think we're gonna give our decisions willy nilly to an AI to make, on retirements and benefits and insurance.”

— From Sequoia’s Lin Is Optimistic About AI’s Impact, Bloomberg Technology (February 25, 2026)

“Let's not forget, AI is a lot of software. Snowflake has to make the transition from where it is today, which has lots of customers and lots of people using it to build more AI into their business. If they do, they will do extremely well.”

— From Sequoia’s Lin Is Optimistic About AI’s Impact, Bloomberg Technology (February 25, 2026)

“When I started my career in technology, lots of people focused on software because software is already really hard and hardware is even harder. AI systems are really powerful in the digital world and the unchallenged thing is the physical world — the best innovators and the most valuable companies today combine hardwar...”

— From Driving Innovation and Investment: The Collaborative Future of Robotics | Brad Porter and Alfred Lin, Cobot (November 19, 2025)

“The thesis around humanoids is that the world is designed for humans — but the world is not designed for humans. We need more imagination and more variety of form factors than just humanoids.”

— From Driving Innovation and Investment: The Collaborative Future of Robotics | Brad Porter and Alfred Lin, Cobot (November 19, 2025)

“Well, we'll invest in all sorts of robotics because robotics is the future.”

— From Driving Innovation and Investment: The Collaborative Future of Robotics | Brad Porter and Alfred Lin, Cobot (November 19, 2025)

“Every single mega trend in technology prompted concerns about job loss, and in fact many of them reduced costs and ended up creating more jobs and more opportunity. If we're freed up from doing mundane tasks by digital and physical machines, we get to focus on higher-value, more creative work.”

— From Driving Innovation and Investment: The Collaborative Future of Robotics | Brad Porter and Alfred Lin, Cobot (November 19, 2025)

“If we reshore manufacturing, which is an important trend, that reshoring is going to have to come with a substantial amount of automation — we don't currently have the labor force educated or interested in those types of jobs. A highly automated local manufacturing base will be an incredible asset for the country, but...”

— From Driving Innovation and Investment: The Collaborative Future of Robotics | Brad Porter and Alfred Lin, Cobot (November 19, 2025)