some people may have noticed that only Elon Musk features on the frontpage for Paypal while Peter Thiel and Max Levchin are not.

Apparently there is a lot of politics behind this, with Thiel and Sequoia having been at odds over funding, the IPO and then selling to eBay.

Also, supposedly one of the big motivations for Thiel and Founders Fund was to compete and out-do Sequoia.

Sean Parker from Plaxo also isn't on the front page. Moritz had him locked out of his Plaxo office by changing the locks, and then fired him. Funnily enough Parker now works with Thiel at Founders Fund.

Funny what you can learn from that webpage.

There's no way to learn any of this from that page without external knowledge...

Strikes me as a visual way of saying "we've carved out these spots for YC startups in the future."

Clever.

Or it could be a reference to the 3 YC startups Sequoia has already funded.

With Y Combinator as their cornerstone.

it could be, though it seems like they'd want to make the startup names explicit.

The traffic that visits Sequoia's frontpage can benefit from YC if they are early stage entrepreneurs. So it makes sense.

Might be just noise but the alt texts for the 3 YC blank squares are: Mellanox, VanceInfo, Paypal. Paypal in there hints to me it's probably just noise...

This is more than 11%. It's the FIRST link

Ok, so a little more: 11.\={1}\%

Plaxo? Am I the only one who thinks that doesn't fit in with the rest of the companies in that grid?

well they had a good exit and a decent amount of usage.

and a much-criticized, fairly annoying "viral" growth strategy.

What criteria do you think that Sequoia uses for highlighting companies? (They've funded far more companies than the ones listed.)

Name recognition.

Congrats, they seem excited.

Makes YC look like a Sequoia portfolio company, which it isn't... Hmm.

Or is it?

Of course it is. Sequoia gave YC money in return for a part ownership of YC.

That's not true. The investors get a percentage of the returns from the startups funded with that money. When the money runs out, the deal ends.

This is how all funds work. A university that invests in a fund managed by VCs doesn't get part ownership of the VC firm. They get part of the returns from the startups funded with the specific pool of money they contributed to.

Sequoia is acting like an LP (usually universities, pension funds, high net worth individuals,etc.) in a typical venture fund is the way I'm looking at it.

I stand corrected

And Apple gets 8.3%

I'm a bit confused by it: Apple has 3 squares. Yes, Apple it's kinda cool, but why really? It doesn't make sense if you think about it.

Perhaps because investing in Apple early was amazingly lucrative?

I get the "Y" but the peach squares around it just seem like a waste of screen real estate.