David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…I had no idea. They meet with Masa. This is great. Bill Campbell, the legendary coach, is by this point in time on the board of Loudcloud. Masa backchannels Bill and says, this is in The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Ben is like, Bill, how did it go with Masa? Bill's like, honestly, he thought you were smoking crack. You know it's bad even when he's like, this is crazy. Eventually, they do raise a Series C of $120 million at a 700 post, but it's by the skin of their teeth. This is in the mid-2000. They still burn through all that quickly and are once again on the brink by the beginning of 2001. The only crazy last-ditch potential financing option available to them is to try and go public because weirdly, there were still some believers in the public markets, even though all the VCs and private investors at this point were like, oh boy, we don't be funding any of these money burning companies. In March of 2001, they actually went public at $6 a share and the Wall Street Journal ran a piece leading up to the IPO. It’s called the IPO From Hell. I think it might have been either referenced in the piece or the title of the piece, everybody's calling this the IPO From Hell. They have a quote from Dick Kramlich at NEA saying, "This is what we call a Hail Mary deal. You throw it up in the air, and you hope for the best." Oh my God.…

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