Excellence Has Friends: A Thanksgiving Tribute

At Sequoia's office, there's a wall of S-1 filings – the document companies submit to the SEC before going public. It's not just paper; it's a tapestry of interconnected success stories representing over $8 trillion in market value. But look closer, and you'll find something fascinating: a pattern of excellence breeding excellence.

Sequoia was an early investor in Atari - creator of the video game Pong - in the 70s. Three companies on our wall emerged from a single source. Before reading on, take a close look at the photo and try to guess the three. Post your guess in the comments.

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The three are Apple (~$3T Market Cap), Pizza Time Theater (better known as Chuck E. Cheese), and Electronic Arts (~$40B Market Cap). Sequoia founder Don Valentine invested in all three because of his initial Atari investment. 

First of all, it is hilarious that Apple and Chuck E. Cheese are corporate siblings. 

Second, what an eclectic group of amazing companies. Steve Jobs was an early employee at Atari. Chuck E. Cheese was founded by the Atari founder himself, Nolan Bushnell.  Electronic Arts was founded by a Director of Strategy and Marketing at Apple, Trip Hawkins, who was heavily influenced by Atari and researching if there was a big enough market to launch games on PCs rather than just the traditional Atari-style console.

This isn't coincidence. Excellence has friends.

There are so many examples in Silicon Valley history. Here are two popular ones.

Traitorous Eight: In 1957, a group of pioneering engineers known as the Traitorous Eight left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory due to conflicts with its founder. This group went on to establish Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, and Kleiner Perkins. Fairchild, though less known today, became a breeding ground for future leaders, including Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia.

The PayPal Mafia: The "PayPal Mafia" is a group of former PayPal employees who launched remarkable companies. Key figures include Elon Musk, co-founder of Tesla and SpaceX; Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir; Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn; and Roelof Botha, who invested in YouTube, Instagram, and MongoDB, and now leads Sequoia.

There are countless examples of these groups of excellence in Silicon Valley. Even now, we see emerging diasporas happening from companies including OpenAI, Palantir, Stripe, Uber, and others.

Excellence has friends. 

When I was younger, I fell into the trap of viewing others' success as my failure. It was a toxic mindset that I thankfully shed in my early twenties. Letting go of that perspective wasn't just healthy—it was liberating.

This lesson was reinforced during my college years at RelateIQ, where I worked on AI-powered CRM (what's old is new again). There, I had the privilege of meeting Bill Campbell, the "Trillion Dollar Coach" known for mentoring the founders of Apple and Google. One day, he visited our cramped basement office where I shared a desk with two other college engineers. He posed a question that would stick with me: "Do you know what Silicon Valley was built on?"

We sat in reverent silence as this legend continued, "This! Three guys sharing a desk. Then one goes off and does something amazing. And the other says, 'wait, I can do that too!'"

That moment crystallized something profound about success: it's contagious, not competitive. Those two desk-mates? One became the Best Man at my wedding. True success isn't about winning at others' expense—it's about inspiring each other to reach higher.

Excellence has friends—it's a truth written across Silicon Valley's history.

This Thanksgiving, celebrate your friends' victories as if they were your own, because in a way, they are. While any acquaintance can offer sympathy in hard times, it takes a true friend to genuinely rejoice in others' success.

Be that friend who celebrates unreservedly. Because excellence doesn't just have friends—it creates them.