Jess Lee - Designing Investment Products - [Invest Like the Best, EP.284]
What this covers
Jess Lee, partner and Chief Product Officer at Sequoia Capital, sits down with Patrick to explore how investment firms can rethink their offerings through design and customer obsession. Lee brings a distinctive background to the conversation: before becoming an investor, she co-founded the fashion app Polyvore, managed product at Google Maps, and founded All Raise, a nonprofit addressing gender imbalance in tech investing. The core argument centers on a disconnect in how capital is packaged and sold—most firms operate capital as a commodity exchange (equity plus a board seat) rather than as a designed product worthy of the product mindset they demand from their portfolio companies.
The conversation spans the mechanics of productizing capital and the unexpected terrain where investment and product design intersect. Lee discusses how Sequoia itself wins deals beyond its brand name, how her role as CPO has reshaped her approach to investing, and what community-building principles (drawn from examples like Comic-Con and Burning Man) reveal about designing experiences around scarcity and belonging. The episode also turns to systemic patterns in venture capital, including the persistent gap in funding reaching female founders, what drives that disparity, and the rates of change in capital allocation. Throughout, Lee connects abstract product philosophy to concrete investment practice, grounding the discussion in how firms can better serve founders by treating capital as something to be carefully designed rather than passively distributed.
Lee argues that investment firms should treat their capital and services as designed products with a customer-obsessed product mindset, rather than viewing capital as a simple commodity exchange.
- Most firms treat capital as a simple product when it could be productized with a product mindset
- Product thinking and investing intersect in the design of investment offerings
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Most investment firms, especially at the early stage of private markets, treat their product as simply capital exchanged for equity and a board seat, operating without the product mindset they expect from the companies they back.
“primarily when it makes its first investments, they would say that the product is capital. You're giving money to companies, you get a great team or a board member or whatever in exchange, and it's a very simple product and that most investment firms work that way”