David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…The thing that I really want to underscore here is for the asset class of actual venture capital, early-stage, high risk, high return stuff, you want to back someone who's got a missionary-focused dream like Louis Borders, who was ready for his next act and he wanted it to be really, really big. It was probably the right bet, maybe at the wrong time. It's probably a decade, maybe two decades early, but the vision was right. You're betting on someone that has to be bigger than their previous wins, so they have an incentive to make it really, really big. As a venture investor, you want to be buying all that risk. You don't really want to be making these risk-mitigated bets. No. That is why you have a portfolio of 30 companies. Go get all the risk you can. Especially for $3.5 million, that's less than 5% of the fund. For sure, of course. Do that all day long. That starts to bring some swagger back to Benchmark, and then you alluded to eBoys. It takes a couple of years for the eBoys to get written and come out, but what a ballsy move. These guys are like, yeah, let's bring in an established author. Randall Stross had written (at that point) Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing about NeXT. The tagline on the book, which I think was part of—the actual book ended up being different than I think what everybody thought—the first inside account of venture capitalists at work. The Benchmark guys, they got nothing to lose again at this point, so, why not? Let's be the first inside account of venture capitalists at work. Randall gets access to everything. He sits in partner meetings. He's the author in residence. He's there 2480 Sand Hill. He's in the portfolio companies. I think he even visited the Webvan facility.…

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