Soooo here for the Sequoia slander (ignore my audio quality idk)

So last week I posted about VC horror stories that founders have been blasting all over X and this weekend we have a new addition with some serious Sequoia slander. This time from one of the co-founders of Merch, the AI hiring platform, which is now valued at 10 billion by the way, went on X and shared a little bit about what he's calling the Sequoia scam. He's claiming that in the last six months, he's seen Sequoia do this sneaky little thing at least six times where they invest into startups in two tranches. The first tranche being at a lower valuation and the second being at a dramatically higher price. And everyone else in the round just kind of pretends that Sequoia only did the higher one. Founders are then misrepresenting it to their employees and then shop it to angels too. Sequoia's blended price comes out to about 50% of the one that they're projecting to the market, which is blatantly deceptive. So Sequoia is essentially pumping up the valuation of the startups that they're investing in and then screwing over anybody who invested after them. And all of this checks out, TechCrunch already reported on this happening with the company called Servel that does AI automation. Back in December, Servel announced their $75 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation led by Sequoia. And magically, days before that announcement, they had been valued at $400 million in a deal that Sequoia also participated in. So less than half the headline number. And this is exactly what Brendan is describing. And when all of this started bubbling up on Twitter, Sequoia's Sean Maguire tried to push back and say that it only happened like five times in the past seven years. He tried to explain that other investors are just willing to pay more than Sequoia, which is bullshit. And the crux of the issue that I have with all of this is that this larger headline valuation is used to signal dominance on behalf of Sequoia and then recruit employees and new angel investors that may not be doing the same level of diligence that Sequoia can. And that's where it gets really messy. Because you're as big as Sequoia, the prices nearly always right. And you're focused on getting other investors to agree to a price that you already know is inflated.