Grove, an exclusive community for founders

We were asked by one of Silicon Valley’s most respected venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital, to create a community oriented site for portfolio companies. Sequoia Grove is the result of rapid iteration, gathering product feedback from a variety of different stakeholders including investment partners, technology team members and the marketing group.

Grove (Today, 'Commons') is an important differentiator in a competitive venture capital market where only value added firms get access to top tier companies. Grove allows founders to access tribal knowledge and search one another's networks. Sequoia wanted to develop a site that would be rapidly adopted by the portfolio community to flourish and blossom, like a grove.

The team spent time understanding multiple stakeholder needs by doing user research. Personas from partners, admins, LPs, and of course, Founders were all taken in consideration. We developed a stakeholder needs matrix and included both product and content needs for each group. In order to ensure that the platform would actually be adopted by users, we spent time envisioning potential barriers and enumerated ways in which we could eliminate them.

We assembled a product/adoption roadmap to get startup founders to use the community site, get them to engage with it, and amplify its utility over time.