Alfred Lin Biography
Alfred Lin is an American-Taiwan venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital. Lin was the COO, CFO, and Chairman of Zappos.com until 2010. He was born and raised in Taiwan before migrating to the USA. Lin also attended the Stuyvesant High School in New York City. He then proceeded to Harvard where he earned a B.A. in Applied Mathematics and also an M.S. in Statistics from Stanford. Lin met Tony Hsieh who was by then the future CEO of Zappos.
The two met and opened a pizza parlor at Harvard. Lin’s best customer used to buy the pizza, cut them into slices and sold them at a profit. In 1996, Lin decided to drop out of the Ph.D. program at Stanford to join Hsieh at Link Exchange as CFO. 18 months later Link EXchange sold Microsoft for $265 million. However, before joining Zappos, he was also the VP of Finance and Business Development of Tellme Networks (MSFT).
Age
Lin has managed to keep his personal details all to himself. He has not revealed any details about his date of birth nor current age. He has also not revealed any details about his family background. It will be updated soon.
Alfred Lin Wife
This information is currently under review it will be updated soon. However, Lin has been spotted posting pics of a woman named Rebecca. It is still, not clear if she is his wife or not. For further clarification, you can visit Lin’s social media platforms.
Sequoia Capital Alfred Lin Photo
Alfred Sequoia Capital & Investments
TechCrunch has stated that Alfred has the “Midas touch”, since “every company he’s worked for has been acquired, and the smallest deal was $265 million.” Lin’s $265 million deal happened at LinkExchange, which was sold to Microsoft for $265M when he was VP of Finance and Administration.
Lin later helped Tellme Networks which was sold to Microsoft for $800 million. After that, Lin helped form Zappos to later be acquired by Amazon for $1.2 billion. Lin has invested in Airbnb, Achievers, Stella & Dot, Houzz, Humble Bundle, Kiwi, Romotive, Moovit, Styleseat, Uber, and Cardpool and MMTG Labs and SalesCrunch.He specializes in consumer internet, enterprise, and mobile companies.
Alfred Lin Zappos
Alfred Lin Net Worth
Lin’s estimated net worth is $248 million. His worth increased after Amazon actually approached him with a deal to buy the company under an account Hsieh wrote for inc. Magazine. After the deal was finalized, Lin joined the firm as a partner in 2010.
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Alfred Lin Instagram
See Instagram photos and videos from Alfred Lin (@alfred_lin)
Alfred Lin News
Sequoia Capital’s Alfred Lin On Why Uber’s Valuation Is Twice That Of Airbnb’s
Today, at the Post-Seed conference in San Francisco, Alfred Lin, the former COO and CFO of Zappos and now a Sequoia Capital partner, was asked a variety of on-stage questions about the current market.
Among them was whether Lin thinks it’s a good time to start a fund. “Probably not,” he said. “Valuations are high. But it doesn’t matter if you’re [thinking] long term,” he said. “If you’re building something enduring, you’re going to face lots of ups and downs anyway and you might as well start today.” As he noted, “It only gets more competitive in this world” of investing.
Lin was also asked about the changing landscape and talked about the slowdown he expects next year, prompted by rate changes that the Federal Reserve is expected to enact shortly. “With interest rates close to zero, you can’t make money in the bond market,” he said. “So the bond people now invest in stocks, and people who invest in stocks invest in private growth rounds . . . and VCs invest in seed deals.” That’ll all change when the Fed starts raising rates, which Lin anticipates it may do “maybe even once a quarter.” Once that happens, he said, “There will be less money chasing companies all the way down the spectrum.”
Sequoia’s most impactful decisions
Lin was also asked to take a look back and address some of Sequoia’s most impactful decisions in recent years. He was asked, for example, why Sequoia invested in the accommodations marketplace Airbnb but passed on the ride-sharing company Uber.
Lin – who invested personally in Uber, having written the company an early, $30,000 check — was candid, calling Sequoia’s decision not to fund Uber a “big failure on our part. Sometimes, we’re too smart for our own good.” Though the team “looked at the service and loved it . . . [and] looked at [CEO Travis Kalanick, who is] obviously a relentless, original thinker . . . we got stuck on the market. We thought it would be a black car service. We didn’t dream with him about what it could be, that it could transform transportation.”
As for what prompted Sequoia in 2009 to lead a $600,000 seed round in Airbnb — another company that plenty of VCs now kicks themselves for passing on — Lin said he thinks the partnership “came with a more prepared mind. It’d been looking at the vacation rental market much longer.”
Airbnb
Lin also noted that Airbnb is “a very rare, global network effects company, and that’s something we got our minds around as a proprietary defensible advantage.”
Lin, who joined the board of Airbnb back in 2013, said it was simply harder for Airbnb to buy inventory. At the end of the day, fewer people can be convinced to rent out a room in their home than persuaded to drive for Uber, he said. As a result, Airbnb is “growing more slowly.”
Indeed, Airbnb generated $340 million of revenue in the third quarter on bookings of $2.2 billion, according to a report last month from the WSJ. Meanwhile, according to a leaked investor document published in August by Reuters, Uber’s ride-share bookings were on track to grow to $10.84 billion this year and $26.12 billion next.
It’s seemingly a sensitive issue, the differences in the growth of the two Internet high-fliers. Last month, at a marketing conference in Orlando, Fla., Airbnb CMO Jonathan Mildenhall was asked what his company has learned from watching Uber expand around the world, and he seemed to disparage its tactics.
His answer: “They have their own way of seeking growth . . .I think for us, our community, and the humanity of our community actually drives a lot of the things that we do. So we approach any kind of awkward situation or any challenge with a lot of empathy and a lot of open collaboration. And so, we don’t want to kind of bulldoze our way into success. We actually want to partner our way into success.”
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