Bogomil Balkansky

A while back, I was deep in research on the next generation of security infrastructure, talking to CISOs and security engineers at some of the most technically sophisticated companies in Silicon Valley. I asked them all the same question I'd asked a decade earlier when I worked in enterprise software: What's your biggest headache? The consistency of their answers surprised me.

The first sentence of my Sequoia profile reads: "Happenstance has been a theme in my life-that, and being open to opportunities." Partnering with Sandstone is Exhibit A. I was introduced to CEO Nick Fleisher by Genevieve Forslund from our talent team. She had flagged Nick as an up-and-comer-someone we should consider either for Sequoia itself or for one of our portfolio companies. She also introduced him to the CEO of a cybersecurity company we'd partnered with.

We've been looking for a company like Traversal for years. For more than a decade, we at Sequoia have been obsessed with "the rise of the developer," guiding our partnerships with companies that cater to engineers like GitHub, MongoDB and Stripe.