Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital's homepage loads with the grace of a capsizing whaler dragging three harpoons and a dead sperm whale—their initial bundle clocks in at a bloated 847KB of JavaScript before you even see Don Valentine's ghost. Built on what appears to be a custom Next.js implementation (based on the `__NEXT_DATA__` script tags and React hydration patterns in the DOM), their site commits the cardinal sin of client-side rendering everything, including basic navigation that should've been server-rendered faster than Leland Stanford could lay track across the Sierra Nevada. The LCP hovers around 2.3 seconds on desktop, which would make any portfolio company CTO weep into their Series A term sheet.

Diving into their source reveals the technical equivalent of gilded age excess: 23 separate tracking scripts from Google Analytics to Segment to some mysterious `sq-beacon.js` that's probably logging every mouse movement for their "portfolio intelligence." The irony burns hotter than a locomotive's coal furnace—here's a firm that's backed privacy-focused startups while their own site drops more cookies than a Carnegie steel mill drops slag. Their CSP headers are non-existent, leaving them vulnerable to XSS attacks that would make their cybersecurity investments question everything. The `robots.txt` file is a mess of conflicting directives that suggests multiple agencies worked on this without talking to each other.

The design system reveals the chaos of unchecked capitalism: CSS variables are defined but ignored, with hardcoded `margin-top: 47px` scattered throughout like they're paying developers by the arbitrary pixel value. Their mobile experience breaks spectacularly on iOS Safari thanks to a hero section that tries to be too clever with viewport units, causing the entire fold to collapse like the 1869 credit crisis. Navigation elements lack proper ARIA labels, making this less accessible than a Robber Baron's private club, and their heading hierarchy jumps from H1 to H4 with the logical consistency of a gold rush prospector's investment strategy.

Most damning is their portfolio section, which loads company logos through a third-party CDN that returns 404s for roughly 15% of their investments—including some unicorns that probably generate more revenue per second than this website cost to build. The search functionality is powered by Algolia but configured so poorly that searching "AI" returns their 1970s semiconductor investments before showing modern machine learning companies. Their blog runs on a separate subdomain with completely different performance characteristics, suggesting they've got the technical cohesion of competing railroad companies using different track gauges.