Why a Sequoia Product Leader Doesn’t Hire “Generalists”

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Jess Lee’s interview and noted several insights. I previously wrote about how to evaluate founders, and I see this as a great complement to that.

When you build a company, you create a cult. People want to work not because of the salary, but because they share your dream and purpose with you.

A good founder is a storyteller who knows how to ignite people with an idea, even if it seems crazy.

The Google Maps Lesson: Think Impossibly Big

Jess Lee started her career at Google, working on Google Maps. The main lesson - ambition. Not making yet another map, but a map of the entire world with their own cars and cameras.

She joined Google’s Associate Product Manager program straight out of Stanford, led by Marissa Mayer. There, working on a small team of five engineers, she helped create “My Maps” - a feature that allowed users to create their own custom maps. But the real lesson wasn’t in the feature itself. It was in the audacity of Google’s vision.

While other mapping services were content with digital versions of existing maps, Google was physically driving cars with cameras around the world. They were building something that had never existed before. That scale of ambition - that willingness to pursue what seems impossible - became foundational to how Jess thinks about startups.

From User to CEO: The Polyvore Story

Polyvore was a startup from mid-2000s Silicon Valley. An online platform where users created collages from clothing, accessories, and interior items - essentially their own lookbooks and inspiration boards.

It was more than a tool. It was a community of over 20 million monthly users who were teaching each other about style, sharing trends before they hit fashion magazines, and building what Jess called “an army of Anna Wintours.”

The platform started as a solution to a personal problem: founder Pasha Sadri and his wife were redecorating their home and clipping images from magazines. He realized the same collage-building tool could work for fashion - and fashion would drive more repeat usage than home decor.

They grew in the early days by posting on other fashion forums. The community drove the growth. The economic model - affiliate links and native advertising - came later. By 2011, Polyvore was profitable and cash flow positive.

At Polyvore, Jess came as a user, wrote the founder a letter analyzing the product’s problems and proposing solutions.

The story is better than it makes it sound. In 2007, while working at Google, Jess became obsessed with Polyvore - a new fashion platform where users could create collages from clothing and accessories found across the web. But as a product manager, she couldn’t help noticing the friction. So she wrote an email to founder Pasha Sadri with a detailed list of complaints and suggestions. His response? “Why don’t you come here and fix this stuff yourself?”

She joined as employee #1 and the first product manager. She wore every hat imaginable - writing code, designing UX, building community, fundraising, selling ads. Most of these roles were completely new to her. But her love for the product and the community guided her through.

A few years later, she became CEO and eventually sold the company to Yahoo for $230 million. The story is about taking responsibility without a title and becoming a leader when the situation demands it.

But there’s a deeper lesson here: the three founders - Pasha Sadri, Jianing Hu, and Guangwei Yuan - retroactively made her a cofounder and even gifted her some of their own shares. They recognized that contribution matters more than timing. That generosity shaped how Jess thinks about equity, recognition, and building culture.

Jess Lee’s Core Principles

The principles are simple but powerful.

“As Mike Vernal likes to describe startups as like a turn-based game. You know, you play cards and you turn over a card. And it’s very hard to be more right about the next card or get, you know, figure out, like, make every decision correctly. Well, you can certainly make decisions faster and flip more cards. And just getting more turns and more add backs, you just find the answer. You get to the right place faster. And so that’s the one thing you control is you control velocity and how fast you ship.”

The winner isn’t the one who’s always right, but the one who discovers new moves faster. You need speed of learning, not perfection of execution.

When Jess moved from being a product manager focused purely on building features to being CEO responsible for the business, she faced a fundamental mental shift. At Google, she’d been trained to never think about money. As CEO, she had to understand that even a brilliant product is powerless if the economics don’t work.

Even brilliant products fail if the economics don’t work.

This is a lesson many founders learn the hard way. Unit economics that don’t work won’t magically fix themselves at scale. A broken business model stays broken.

Empathy without standards isn’t kindness. It’s cowardice.

This might be the most counterintuitive principle. Jess cares deeply about people - that’s clear from how she built Polyvore’s culture as “startup school,” transparently sharing company metrics and strategy with all employees, grooming them to potentially start their own companies one day.

But caring about people and holding them to high standards aren’t contradictory. They’re complementary.

The hardest management decision is letting go of people who aren’t working out. And you always know earlier than you act.

Waiting too long doesn’t help them or the company.

The Framework: EQ, IQ, PQ, JQ

At Sequoia, Jess evaluates people across four dimensions:

EQ - Emotional intelligence in one-on-one work. Can they read people? Do they build genuine relationships? Can they have difficult conversations? This is about human connection at the individual level.

IQ - Baseline level of intelligence. Can they handle complex problems? Do they learn quickly? Can they think through second and third-order effects?

PQ - Political intelligence, ability to navigate systems and processes.

“PQ is how good you are with sort of politics and the systems of people that govern things. It can be really good one-on-one and really bad at sort of figuring out how to work a system of people, like in an org, like getting promoted, all that stuff.”

This is the most underrated one, and the one that makes people uncomfortable. Political intelligence sounds... icky. Manipulative.

But that’s not what this means. It means understanding how organizations actually work, not how they’re supposed to work on paper.

Who actually has influence here? Who needs to be brought in early? What’s the right sequence for getting something done? How do you build coalitions without making enemies? How do you navigate competing priorities without pissing everyone off?

The people who dismiss this as “office politics” are usually the same people who can’t get anything meaningful done in large organizations.

JQ - Judgment quality and decision quality in critical situations.

“You could be super, super technically smart, but have bad judgment about business, like you’d be the smartest engineer and then join a series of very bad companies that don’t amount to anything.”

Why Not Generalists?

The conventional wisdom says to hire “well-rounded” people. Jess rejects this completely.

She believes in the power of peak values, not balance. She wants people who are exceptional - truly exceptional - at something. Then she assembles teams where those exceptional capabilities combine.

“I’m a big believer. Like nobody’s good at everything. And so you just really need to figure out what you’re really good at. And then you assemble teams that compliment you. And I look for very spiky people that compliment each other essentially.”

A team of people who are each 7/10 at everything will lose to a team where someone is 10/10 at strategy, someone else is 10/10 at execution, another is 10/10 at relationships, and another is 10/10 at navigating ambiguity.

The exceptional beats the balanced. Peak performance in complementary areas beats consistent adequacy across all areas.

“You think about product managers. Product managers are supposed to be organized and project managed. But if you’re working on creative, delightful products, sometimes you need to be really creative and out of the box. And sometimes creativity and organization do not exist in the same person that well. I found this guy who was extremely creative and very bright and very high standards, hopelessly disorganized. And usually a PM who cannot organize stuff is like dead in the water. But instead we hired him and paired him with a designer who was really, really, really organized and just managed the project.”

“Put together a pod of engineer, designer and PM where you just need all the bases covered, but they don’t have to be traditionally good at the same that they are supposed to be good at.”

This also means being honest about your own strengths and weaknesses. Know where you’re already a seven and double down there. Know where you’re a four and hire people who are ten.

The Leadership Formula

When Jess joined Sequoia without traditional investing experience, she discovered what truly mattered:

“What was interesting about Sequoia, and I think part of what differentiates the firm is the ethos was like, no, no, your job is not like a capital allocator who manages the portfolio. You’re not a financier. Your job is to be the consigliere to founders, to be the long-term company building partner, to really get to know the team and the people and like help, especially in the crucible moments, which is what we call those inflection points where you have to navigate big decisions.”

Great leaders can work with people who are nothing like them. They can navigate complex politics without becoming political. They can make good calls quickly when everything is uncertain and messy.

Everything else you can learn. These things? Much harder to develop if you don’t already have some foundation.

What This Actually Means If You’re Building Something

Stop hiring for well-roundedness. Look for people who are legitimately exceptional at one thing that matters for what you’re building. That beats “pretty good at everything” every time.

Be honest about fit, and be fast about it. If someone isn’t working out, deal with it now. It doesn’t get easier. It gets worse.

Think bigger than the competition. The best products don’t try to beat what exists. They create something new that makes the competition irrelevant.

Watch your economics like a hawk. Product-market fit without working unit economics is just a slower way to die.

Build something people believe in. If your team is just there for the paycheck, you’re competing with every other job. If they’re there because they believe in what you’re building, you’re competing with nobody.

The conventional wisdom says hire balanced, well-rounded people with no major weaknesses. Jess’s approach says the opposite: find peaks of excellence and build teams where those peaks matter.

In a world where everyone is optimizing for the same balanced profile, the companies that win will be the ones that understand the power of exceptional ability, even when it comes with tradeoffs.

That’s the difference between good companies and great ones. Not the absence of weakness. The presence of genuine excellence in the places that actually matter.