Leadership at technology startups

Bogomil Balkansky, partner at Sequoia, joins Leaders and Legends to talk about leadership and the keys to building a successful technology startup. Balkansky joined Sequoia as a partner in 2020 and was previously vice president of Cloud Recruiting Solutions at Google and a senior vice president at VMware.

Balkansky describes his leadership style as “very approachable but fearless”. He believes that great leaders are “great listeners. They listen to their team members’ ideas, concerns, and feedback, and act on them.”

Finally Balkansky said “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.”