David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. It’s so interesting. The timing plays so much of a role in the success of these companies. There was so much innovation here and all the different ways that we’ll get into payments, reviews, trust, and all that that it could have succeeded in any time. But boy, did they have the wind at their back from the secular trends going on to make it a no brainer for a lot of people and really accelerate their ability to find product-market fit. It was absolutely the right time. I think all these things are true, and CouchSurfing—as we talked about a little bit—definitely didn’t have the right model, definitely mess things up, but they also were launching and starting to build in the build-up to the financial crisis during the go-go years. Nobody was that interested in cheap travel. Despite getting a lot of push back from the rest of the Sequoia partnership, McAdoo does end up convincing Sequoia to invest. Rather than doing it as a Series A, they say, I’m not sure about a lot of money here. I’m not sure about this being a full traditional investment. We need to conserve our cash and triage our portfolio. Let’s do a small seed check. They say we’ll lead a seed round. Sequoia will invest just under $600,000 in this company, $585,000. We’ll bring in some other folks. Also, that’s nothing for Sequoia today. That’s still pretty much nothing for them at that time.…

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