Bogomil Balkansky

VC Team at Sequoia Capital

Happenstance has been a theme in my life—that, and being open to opportunities.

About

Happenstance has been a theme in my life—that, and being open to opportunities. I found myself in the U.S. because I was lucky enough to come of age right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and got a scholarship that made it possible for me to leave communist Bulgaria. I started swimming with whales because a wildlife photographer I follow on Instagram put out an invitation for a trip. And I’m at Sequoia not because I planned to become a VC, but because fate connected me with the right people—namely Roelof, who I knew from Stanford GSB, and Carl, who I’d worked with closely for years at VMware.

“I’m a very intuitive person. If I try to be overly rational and put all the pros and cons in a spreadsheet, I get myself into trouble. But if I follow my gut, I rarely make mistakes.”

Markets come and goso we need to move in lockstep with their evolution. The logical domains for me are cloud infrastructuredeveloper toolsDevOpsopen sourceobservability as well as SaaS apps for sales and marketingbecause that’s where my background is. But I try to follow the advice several of my partners gave me when I first joined Sequoia—don’t specialize too narrowlyand get out of my comfort zone. In terms of specific companies and entrepreneursI’m looking for the same things I did when I was running large teams and hiring people: iconoclastic thinkingthe courage to break paradigmsdefiance of common wisdom. Ideas that aren’t obvious and that challenge my own assumptions. I’m also looking for charismabut that can manifest in different ways. Maybe you're a great salespersonbut maybe you're a deep thinker or an amazing technologist or an exceptional recruiter. It's magnetism.