He may have other opportunities to celebrate. Mr. Lin and Sequoia invested early in Airbnb; DoorDash, a food delivery start-up valued at $7.1 billion; and Houzz, a home design and remodeling start-up worth $4 billion.

Sequoia wrote Airbnb a $585,000 check in 2009 and invested in each of the company’s later funding rounds. Mr. Lin said he was impressed by how the Airbnb founders could “articulate a dream of the world that is very different from what exists today.”

Yet sometimes those lofty dreams clashed with reality. As Airbnb grew, Mr. Chesky said, he wanted to hire executives from Apple and Disney, companies he admired for their creativity, design and simple product lines.

Mr. Lin, a former executive at Amazon-owned Zappos, said he had gently suggested that Airbnb emulate businesses that looked more like itself: ones with complex operations in many different places and a wide array of inventory, like Airbnb’s millions of home listings.

To help make the point, Mr. Lin introduced Mr. Chesky to Jeff Wilke, the head of Amazon’s retail business, in 2012. That meeting persuaded Mr. Chesky to shift his focus. Airbnb ended up poaching top Amazon executives to become its chief financial officer and head of its homes business.

“Part of our job is to help with the sparring of ideas,” Mr. Lin said.

With the I.P.O. stampede now on, he said, he is cautioning companies not to rush to go public because their peers are doing so. “These things are milestones, to some degree, that you celebrate,” he said. “But soon after you go public, you have to go back to running your business.”