Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. And to go recruit somebody whose job it is to recruit. You can say many, many things about Dave, but you could never say that he doesn't have swagger and that he's not a hustler. Kind of like Bob, Dave also grew up pretty hardscrabble. His family was also a General Motors family. He grows up pretty working class, I believe, in New York. He ends up getting into the recruiting business and essentially, by pure force of nature and force of will, just wills his way to the top. It's like a Jerry Maguire type of story. He ends up starting his recruiting firm Ramsay/Beirne. They're based in Westchester County, New York. They're not working in technology at the start. They start cold calling prospective clients in tech and in Silicon Valley from Westchester, New York. Dave starts cold calling them and saying, we're Ramsay/Beirne, the leading executive search firm in high technology. They haven't done a single retained executive search in high technology when he starts doing this. But they're not claiming anything literal or specific. Leading? Sure. It's like how the new iPhone has a 2X better camera, but they don't tell you any units or what vector that is better on. Yeah, 2X better than what? But they're leading. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when in the late '80s, early '90s, Dave gets his big break and he gets through to John Doerr. John makes him his preferred executive recruiter for CEO searches for his portfolio companies. Remember, back in those days, that's part of the standard VC playbook. You come in, you back the company, and you start a search for a professional CEO.…

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