Mark Stevens
Fundraiser, Venture Capitalist and Member of Many Boards
But the Three Musketeers are Job One

The most satisfying part of Mark Stevens’ astonishing success is not the stellar list of high-tech companies that he has guided through the past decade’s Silicon Valley economic tumult. It’s not all of boards upon which he sits, including the USC Board of Trustees and the Viterbi School of Engineering Board of Councilors. It is not a remarkable academic pedigree.
For Stevens, a general partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the nation’s most successful venture capital firms, success is the colorful clutter of plastic toys that his twin six-year-olds, Sean and Scott, and 21-month-old Samantha have strewn around the yard of the Stevens family home in Atherton.

“They’re the Three Musketeers. The kids are at that stage where life is a bowl full of cherries. We have a lot of fun together,” he laughs. “The boys are just starting to ski. We got them on some of the blue runs – that’s intermediate – when we went to Steamboat Springs last winter. “

At age 43, life has never stopped being a bowl full of cherries for Mark Stevens. He does not waste more than six or seven hours a night on sleep. While he says that 95 percent of his waking hours go to Sequoia and his family, that still leaves time for Oakland Raiders season tickets and keeping up with the Dodgers and the Lakers. “I watch too many games on television. I love college football and basketball,” he admits. “Much to my wife’s chagrin.” Then he runs to stay in good enough shape to compete credibly in occasional 10 K races and he hasn’t quite given up playing in a basketball league. Most important of all, there’s the small life and death matter of Trojan football. He rarely misses a game.

“Busy, busy, busy!” he says. “But I’ve always been well organized.”

That would seem an understatement. Stevens’ wife Mary says her husband makes a to-do list every day, prioritizes it and then lives by it. But his meticulous organization results in the Stevens family eating together four out of five nights a week, so she is a believer.
“He values his time more than anyone I have ever known,” she says. “He says, ‘you can’t buy time. You can manufacture things, but you can’t manufacture time.’”

There is still time for more. Stevens has just signed on to co-chair, with San Diego real estate entrepreneur Daniel Epstein, an ambitious seven-year fundraising initiative for the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

“When you really need to get a job done, it’s best to ask someone who is busy. I’ve asked two of the most able people that I know,” says Dean C. L. Max Nikias. “Mark is a very busy person. He’s busy getting things done. He also understands our school, its strengths and its needs, and he cares very much about its future. So does Dan Epstein.“
Epstein, like Stevens, is both a USC trustee and a member of the School’s Board of Councilors.

“Both Mark and Dan epitomize what it means to be a Trojan. They have both enjoyed remarkable career success, but they have still found the time and energy to dedicate to USC and especially to the School of Engineering,” said USC President Steven B. Sample.

Epstein says he found it impossible to say no to the dean, but he did have one request.
“Max’s enthusiasm is infectious,” he says. “But I told him that if I was going to get involved in this initiative, then Mark was going to have to be involved as well.”

The dean holds up a faded page from an old appointment book -- 4 p.m. Friday, May 31, 1995 – a crucial meeting for Nikias, and for the School of Engineering. At the time, Nikias was an associate dean leading the effort to win an Engineering Research Center in multimedia and Internet from the National Science Foundation. This was the day he learned that Mark Stevens was someone upon whom he could depend. Nikias had spent the entire week in the Silicon Valley visiting high-tech companies and looking for support for the School’s proposal.

“I was tired and almost canceled the meeting,” remembers Nikias. “Mark was 35 years old then and very relaxed, wearing athletic shoes. We went over a lot of companies and he opened doors for us. That was a key factor in our getting the Integrated Media Systems Center.”

The challenge now is to secure new resources for the USC Viterbi School of Engineering at a time when the nation’s and the state’s economy is less than robust.
“We are a very good school now, but we need new funding to take the next steps to bring the school to the top two, three or four schools,” says Epstein.

For Stevens, raising money for the Viterbi School of Engineering is remarkably similar to what Sequoia does.

“At Sequoia, we like to say that we finance the future,” he says. “We are very specialized money managers.”

Roughly every three years, Sequoia raises a new fund and is currently managing about $2 billion in several funds. A major portion of those who invest – they’re called limited partners -- are university endowment funds, including USC. While endowments put most of their money in stocks and bonds, these large funds allocate about five percent to the high-risk, high-return category of venture capital. Stevens, and Sequoia, invest these funds in start-up companies, most of which fail.

“Usually five or six out of ten investments fail. We get no money back, or maybe we get part of our money back,” he explains. But some companies go public, or are acquired, and they become fantastic success stories. Then, Sequoia makes five, 10 or 20 times its investment. “It’s like baseball. For every ten at bats, there are five strikeouts, two or three base hits or doubles, and one or two home runs. At Sequoia, we’ve been fortunate to have our share of home runs.”

Sequoia helped start Apple Computer, Cisco, Yahoo and Google, which is currently preparing to go public. Stevens has been involved with Nvidia, Pixelworks, MP3.com and many others. He is Sequoia’s semiconductor specialist. “I’m Mr. Chips at Sequoia.”
While Stevens and the other partners at Sequoia clearly have to spend considerable time and mental effort in identifying promising companies with clever ideas, the fundraising part of the work is perhaps more important. In addition to raising money from limited partners, they help their companies raise money from other investors. They also help their companies go public, which is fundraising on an even grander scale.

“I’m always fundraising and I like doing it,” says Stevens. “You need to be organized and at the same time creative.”

Looking out across his yard to a vegetable garden in big planter boxes where he and his children are growing corn, pumpkins, basil, tarragon, squashes, zucchini, bush beans and tomatoes, Stevens spots an apt comparison.

“Some crops mature very quickly, but with others it takes years to develop into a fruit producing tree. Fundraising is like that. It is a cultivation business.”
For alumni, he wants to appeal to the pride they have in their school and motivate them to give back. Presumably, they have gained knowledge and wisdom while at USC and used it to build a career.

For people in industry, having the School do research in areas that will benefit their companies long-term is the key. Companies depend on engineering schools for a steady stream of technically trained and creative employees and for technical innovations that lead directly to profitable products.

“We will always need engineers – to build and rebuild our infrastructure, to help us determine how to make things bigger and better, or quicker and smaller as the case may be,” says USC President Sample, who is also on the faculty of the Viterbi School of Engineering. “Engineering and the research it fosters helps make our daily lives better.”

To Stevens, the USC School of Engineering is the eighth ranked company in a field of approximately 300 engineering schools. It is a company that needs an influx of capital to move further up, and it has a strong potential to successfully make such a move. It is not a company that is trying to move from the middle of the group closer to the front. It is already quite near the front and sees a chance to break into the front pack.

“This is a situation where we are seeking to turn better into best, not average into better,” he says. “That’s our theme.”

When he travels around the Silicon Valley, Stevens’ favorite statistic is that undergraduate freshman SAT scores at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering are higher than at Berkeley or UCLA. That raises eyebrows, but it also gets to the core of the challenge. Most people don’t know that that the School is ranked as highly as it is, or that it has been a good school for a long time. Perceptions, however, are changing. Stevens has noticed that bright kids in the Silicon Valley are beginning to get interested in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. The idea that USC is a highly selective university like Stanford or Berkeley or Duke is taking hold. Stevens says that most California high-tech executives he meets seem to be aware that the USC Viterbi School of Engineering is very good.

Stevens also sees an engineering school positioned for success because it has momentum and a plan for the future that touches on key areas of innovation. He, and many others, believe that the world is on the cusp of three important technology opportunities. One is information technology, which is based on an electronics industry that is already quite mature, having been around for more than half a century. The next is biotechnology, which has emerged relatively recently. Finally, there is nanotechnology, which is just beginning to emerge and which is in some respects a combination of the first two. Since he became dean two years ago, Nikias has announced initiatives in all three of these areas and has been recruiting new faculty for them, 26 tenure track faculty in all.

“The nations that lead those industries are the nations that will dominate the 21st century,” says Stevens. “We have to build up the School of Engineering to be in a leadership position to develop students to address these three big industries. We have to go out and get top faculty. We have to attract the top undergraduate and graduate students. We have to identify niche research areas were we can be number one. All of these things take a lot of money.”
Mark Stevens grew up in Culver City during the 60s and 70s when the Southern California aerospace industry was building Cold War machinery. It was a time of space shots, astronauts and sending men to the moon. His father was an engineer at Hughes Aircraft for 38 years. Like most engineers, the young Stevens started with an affinity for math and science, but he has never stopped being an intellectual gourmet.

“I’ve always been interested in everything, every academic subject,” he says. “If you’re in Hollywood, you grow up around the entertainment business. If you’re in Texas, you grow up around the oil or the cattle business. I grew up around the aerospace business.”
He chose USC because he thought the engineering school was good and the smaller class sizes in the private university didn’t seem as crowded as those in the public schools. And there was football. During the five falls that Stevens attended USC, the Trojans won a national championship, went to three Rose Bowls and Marcus Allen and Charles White won Heisman trophies.

“Yes, those were the glory days,” says Stevens who believes strongly that excellence in academics and athletics is not only possible, but highly desirable. “It helps socialize the greater university and makes the students, faculty and everyone in the community feel better. It was true 20 years ago and it’s true today.”

Stevens was 17 when he began classes at the School of Engineering in the fall of 1977 and did not turn 18 until his second semester. He chose chemical engineering until a vision of working on an oil platform in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico or the Middle East popped into his head. He switched to electrical engineering at the end of his freshman year. In his junior year he decided he would also major in economics and get two bachelor degrees.
“Today we encourage kids to get second majors or minors, but back then it was pretty weird,” he says. Engineering students could easily spend the whole day in the quad area and never venture to other parts of the campus. Stevens enjoyed going over the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences for liberal arts classes, especially economics where found that his math background provided an edge. By his senior year, Stevens was a member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. He was an officer in the engineering honor societies Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Pi, and he was working half time for Hughes.

“I was a busy boy,” he says. He graduated with his two degrees in four and a half years and immediately began working fulltime at Hughes. Within six months, he decided he didn’t want to be an aerospace engineer for the rest of his life. So in July 1982, he went to work for Intel.

“I loved Intel. I was in field sales and that was right when the PC boom was happening,” he says. But determined to “round himself off,” Stevens left Intel in the fall of 1987 to seek an MBA from Harvard. He went to school fulltime, got his degree in June 1989 and immediately began working as an associate at Sequoia. Today, he is the only one in his Harvard class who still works for the same company as he did when he graduated.

About six months after he started at Sequoia, a senior partner asked Stevens to work with a company called QuickLogic. Specifically, he was asked to help the three founders find their first office space. Stevens called a Silicon Valley commercial real estate company to begin working on the problem. The real estate company had to deliver a package of information to Stevens’ office. Neither of the two real estate people in the office that day wanted to make the trip, so they played a round of Roshambo (rock, paper, scissors). The loser, Mary Mathews, was stuck with the drive across the Silicon Valley. But in the end there were no losers in this deal.

“We ended up doing a deal and the company got their office space. And tenants were treasured then because there was a glut of office space,” says Mary Mathews who became Mary Stevens in October 1992. QuickLogic not only got their first real estate but also became a successful investment for Sequoia. A year after his marriage, Mark Stevens became a general partner at Sequoia. Mary Stevens left a real estate career that she truly loved only to discover that she loved being a stay-at-home mom even more. Now there are remodeling projects, a yard full of toys, children’s pool parties, weekend jaunts with the Three Musketeers to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk or the beach house in Aptos.

“The boys are confused because all of their friends have Giants caps, but they know their dad’s a Dodgers fan. I give them a year or two before they’re Giants fans too,” says Mark Stevens.

And that’s just fine with him. But USC Trojan fandom? That just might be non-negotiable.