Stephanie ZhanSan Francisco, California, United States
Bio
I grew up in Hong Kong and Beijing, in the early days of the internet: Baidu, Weibo, Wechat, JD and Alibaba. Technology elevated the lives of a billion people through two decades of transformative socioeconomic change. That scale of ambition, energy, hard work, appetite for change—all of it has shaped me deeply. It’s made me believe that anything is possible. It’s made me a more flexible and creative thinker, and a forever optimist. I root for the daring to build the impossible, and we’ll work to make your wildest ambitions a reality together.
I worked at Nest in the early days before it’s acquisition by Google. I’ve also seen first hand through my husband who co-founded Ethos, in the Sequoia portfolio, what it’s like to build and scale a high growth startup. I have deep empathy for founders and the imperfect reality that defines the startup journey.
Experiencing the inside of the journey shapes how I partner with the founders I work with, as a partner from day one: helping you find product market fit, hire your first few team members, build a leadership team and scale an organization over time. My goal is to help founders avoid making mistakes others have learned the hard way, and to share the practical, operational advice to build a business that is meaningful and enduring over time.
Experience
Partner
Sequoia Capital
Jul 2015 - Current
General Partner at Sequoia. From your Seed to Series A & beyond. Your first & long term *partner*.
Would love to hear from you: szhan@sequoiacap.com
Board Director
Sunday
May 2020 - Current
Led Series B. Building a new outdoor home brand, starting with lawn care. It’s simple, easy to use, and personalized to your home. Come try it out at www.getSunday.com
Board Director
Linear
Jul 2019 - Current
Led Seed and Series A. An issues tracking tool you will enjoy using, born from our own frustrations building software at Airbnb, Coinbase and Uber. We wanted to create the tools that enable teams towards progress, built around speed, efficiency, and delight.
Board Director
Middesk
Mar 2019 - Current
Invested in Seed and led Series A. Middesk aims to redefine how businesses build trusted relationships, with complete and reliable data at scale and a suite of products including business verifications, legal and regulatory checks, and industry classification products for companies selling to businesses.
Investor
Graphcore
Nov 2017 - Current
Led the Series C. Graphcore has created a new processor, the Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU), specifically designed for artificial intelligence. The IPU’s unique architecture means developers can run current machine learning models orders of magnitude faster. More importantly, it lets AI researchers undertake entirely new types of work, not possible using current technologies, to drive the next great breakthroughs in general machine intelligence.
Investor
Ethos Life
Jun 2017 - Current
Led the Seed and Series A. Ethos provides modern, ethical life insurance to protect the life you're building and the people you love. Ethos is built for people who don't have time for fine print, extra doctors appointments or hidden fees. We transformed a 15-week process of paper applications and medical exams, into just the click of a button - by quantifying the user’s health risk using predictive models.
Board Director
Rec Room Inc.
Aug 2016 - Current
Led Seed, Series A, and Series D. The online universe where you play and create games with friends. Discover millions of player created worlds and games, play multiplayer games like Paintball, or just chill in the park. It's free and cross-platform (i.e., Oculus, PlayStation, Steam, & iOS), so come and join the fun!
Former Board Director (Now acquired by Dapper Labs)
Brud
Jun 2017 - Oct 2021
Maker of computer-generated internet celebrity @lilmiquela and the magical @brud universe. Now acquired by Dapper Labs, bringing crypto to the mainstream!
Product Manager
Nest
2014 - 2014
Associate Product Marketing Manager
Google
2013 - 2013
Google Maps
Education
Stanford University
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer ScienceInfoThis public profile is provided courtesy of Clay. All information found here is in the public domain.