David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…What's happening is this happens in all markets. The venture market is maturing. I might argue the venture market has over-earned for many years. The market is going to become more efficient. There's going to be more competition. With more competition, that means founders are going to have better access to capital. They're going to have more efficient markets, so that means they're going to presumably get a better price, less dilution for the work that they do, which presumably is an incentive to invent more [...][1] that's going to make the world a better place. I'm down with being part of the competition that makes venture more efficient. Listen. I wasn't invited into the venture party. There was a club out here on Sand Hill Road, but this club respects meritocracy. We come out here, we work really hard, and we add value to the companies. And if you do that over a long period of time, then I think you're going to have a shot at being part of this ecosystem. We collaborate as much as we compete. When we compete, we're going to go at it. We're going to lay out why we think we're the best partner for the company, but we're also going to collaborate. I know that what we're collectively doing makes America the best place on the planet to start a company. Amazing for founders. We talked to a bunch of your founders in preparation and they were like, oh, it's wonderful, this is great, this is the best thing. Rewind to my dad's story. What if a venture capitalist had handed my dad $5 million? He wouldn't have lost the house. That's who we should encourage, the risk takers, the bold ones, the ones who get into the arena. I think it's an incredible honor to be able to do that, but at the same time, I don't think I'm entitled to be able to run the table on the crossover business model. Everybody is going to compete for these different rounds. My job, just like any other founder or entrepreneur's job, is to build the best product. What is it that we do different for entrepreneurs than these other partners might do? Or how do we fit into the system?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.