Alfred Lin on customer engagement
From Lecture 10 Culture Brian Chesky, Alfred Lin · · HIEP Tran Hoang
“It's better to have 100 people that love you, than to have a million people that just kind of sort of like you. It's literally better to have 100 people that love you. And the reason why is if you have a million customers or million users, and they just kind of don't care about you, but they kind of use your app, and you're okay. To get them to care is a really, really hard thing.”
On , Alfred Lin, Partner at Sequoia at Sequoia Capital, spoke about customer engagement during Lecture 10 Culture Brian Chesky, Alfred Lin on HIEP Tran Hoang.
About Alfred Lin
Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia Capital, appeared on the podcast "Deployed" in April 2026, where he discussed the evolution of robotics and AI. He argued that fears of human obsolescence due to automation are historically unfounded, noting that while the percentage of Americans working on farms dropped from 80% to 2% over two centuries, people found other roles. Lin described autonomous cars as a "ChatGPT moment for robotics," stating they can navigate flexible environments, and suggested that large language models and agentic abilities allow robots to learn in new environments rather than relying on hand-coded instructions. At the 2026 Upfront Summit in March, Lin stated that "software code is no longer a moat" because the marginal cost of generating code is zero. He said Sequoia measures success by being a "net liquidity provider" to its limited partners, focusing on distributions rather than assets under management. Lin advised that companies most vulnerable to failure are those that do not embrace change or recognize a paradigm shift, and he encouraged founders to identify and magnify their unique "spike" while ensuring weaknesses do not become liabilities.