Sutter Hill runs on an evergreen fund rather than the standard 10-year cycle, letting it back companies over a longer period, and it often incubates startups from the ground up—hosting them in its own offices, recruiting the first employees, and sometimes even acting as the interim CEO, as it did with Snowflake and Sigma Computing—while also concentrating heavily on very few companies at once, with partner Mike Speiser once spending 80% of his effort on a single project, an approach tied to the firm's history of taking an active, hands-on role in turning technology into full businesses rather than investing passively. This approach helped produce results like Snowflake, where Sutter Hill kept a 20.3% stake worth about $12.6 billion at IPO after investing under $200 million, all while staying highly selective about adding new partners throughout its history.