Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Or maybe. There was a flotation with an empire in there as we'll get into. There was. Benchmark famously believes that venture capital doesn't scale. They have zigged when others have zagged. They have not grown their fund size. They haven't tried junior partners. They don't have a platform team. They are not multistage. I've heard they don't even have a CRM, and yet they are the big early backer of so many of the world's most important companies. There were early ecommerce companies in the '90s like eBay, eShop, 1-800-Flowers, semiconductor and networking companies like Synopsys and Juniper Networks, and of course, in the next generation, OpenTable, Zillow, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, WeWork, Snap, Riot Games, Asana, Discord, New Relic, and our friends of the show at Modern Treasury. We are at the moment of the changing of the guard. Bill Gurley is not a general partner in the next Benchmark fund, and the majority of the current partners joined in the last five years. They clearly transition from the eBay generation to the Uber generation. The question is can they do it again? Will this third generation of Benchmark continue to set the benchmark for all-time greatest venture capital funds in history? I like what you did there. That was good. Ben teed this up before we started recording. He's like, I really like my intro on this one. If you don't like it, stop me. But I like that. That was good. Well done.…

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