Since founding Sequoia Capital in 1972, Don Valentine has financed many of the companies (Apple, Oracle, Electronic Arts, NVIDIA, Cisco, Google, YouTube, etc.) that have been Silicon Valley's biggest technology and business success stories. In this View From The Top talk given at Stanford Graduate School of Business, he describes some of the insights that allowed him to lead Sequoia through almost four decades of disruptive changes, creating several new industries along the way. Don mentions that all along the lifespan of Sequoia, their main Strategy has been to focus on the size of the market and magnitude of the problem that the entrepreneur is trying to solve. They look at the system view of the market, targeting multiple companies in the space that make up the ecosystem. The video is worth watching, as Don walks through the examples of Apple, Cisco, Sony, Xerox and Zappos giving great insights on starting new ventures. Notable Quotes / Advice:

Most important thing to learn is: how to ask a question. Constantly work on perfecting the questioning skills.

Learn the art of story telling. Can you write your business plan on the back of your business card?

As to failures, he admits that their failures have been more related to the failure of recognizing the market, and not the failure of technology that was at the core of the startup. As a VC, they do have lot of failures which they follow up with extensive  postmortems studying what questions they failed to ask in the deliberation phase, and what answers they failed to understand. via YouTube - Don Valentine, Sequoia Capital: "Target Big Markets", via GigaOm.