About Sequoia

Independent advice. Executive perspective.

Sequoia Consulting is a board-level advisory firm focused on the relationship between organisational health, technology and business performance.

We work directly with executive leadership to provide an independent view of one of the most important — yet often least effectively challenged — areas of the modern organisation: how well it uses technology.

The challenge isn't that executives need to understand technology in greater technical detail. It's recognising that the same principles they already use to judge the rest of the business — ownership, accountability, incentives, capability, cost, performance and return — apply just as powerfully here.

We help leadership apply that perspective to uncover unnecessary cost and complexity, increase organisational capability, improve technology performance and understand why security problems continue to emerge.

We have no technology to sell and no predetermined solution to recommend. Our interest is in the outcome: helping organisations become healthier, more capable, more secure and more competitive.

Why Sequoia exists

Technology has become fundamental to almost every organisation, yet it remains one of the hardest areas for executive leadership to see, challenge and benchmark effectively.

That creates an unusual blind spot. Significant cost, complexity and poor performance can become normalised. Technology can appear to be working while delivering far less capability than it could. And recurring security problems can be treated as an inevitable fact of modern business rather than signals of deeper organisational and technology issues.

Sequoia exists to give leadership a different perspective.

We connect what happens in technology — including many of the security problems organisations struggle to manage — to the organisational conditions behind it: ownership, incentives, governance, structure, engineering practices and ways of working.

That allows leadership to move beyond managing symptoms and identify where changing the organisation itself can reduce cost and friction, increase capability, improve technology performance and prevent many security problems from being created in the first place.

Greg van der Gaast

Greg van der Gaast is the founder and Managing Director of Sequoia Consulting.

His career has spanned cybersecurity, technology transformation and organisational advisory, giving him an unusual perspective on why technology and security problems emerge — and why conventional approaches so often fail to address their underlying causes.

Today, his work focuses on helping executive teams understand the organisational conditions shaping technology performance, cost, capability and risk, and turning those insights into measurable business improvement.

Greg advises organisations and executive teams internationally and speaks regularly to boards, leadership teams and industry audiences on organisational health, technology and security.

He is the author of I Call Bullshit: Why Organisational Health Beats Cybersecurity. Every. Single. Time., which explores many of the ideas that underpin Sequoia's approach.

Sequoia Consulting and Advisory Ltd, Company Number 15406222, registered at 2nd floor, College House, 17 King Edwards Rd, Ruislip, London, UK, HA4 7AE, under the laws of England and Wales. Click here for our privacy policy.