The Deal

In 2005, Roelof Botha from Sequoia wrote an investment memo proposing to the investment committee (IC) that they invest in the seed round of a video company. That company was YouTube. Here is the YouTube investment memo by Sequoia

The partners agreed to invest $1 million which was then followed by a $4 million Series A. Google’s acquired YouTube a year later for $1.65 billion, netting Sequoia $500m- 57x its total investment. Not bad.

It would be pretty interesting to read that memo, right?

Out it Comes

During a 2010 court case of Viacom vs. Youtube (Google) case, Roelof had to disclose his investment memorandum as part of his testimony. Yay!

Read More

There is a detailed write up about the memo here. I’m not going to do the work when someone smarter than me has already done it ;).

If you want to see the pitch deck and some further information, head over to this blog.

Read it below, you can also download it here.