Ben Gilbert: recommendation

Transcript context

…You said our process is as long as it is for us to get conviction, but actually I think it's really important that it's a process of getting conviction on each other. That should be part of it. One of the things that makes me sad about some of the conversations in the industry is just the idea that a board member is just somebody who shows up. It feels like that's what everybody's been reduced to. We hold a higher bar for ourselves. We try to have that level of commitment that ends up manifesting in all different ways for the company, whether it's helping close an IC engineer or whatever, having those late night conversations or whatever it is. That is in the best form can be a really meaningful relationship for the founder and from the company from the very beginning. A founder should realize that, of course, you get into the anxiety and the stress of, am I going to get funded? What are the terms going to be? All those things, I want to get back to building my business, all that. But at the end of the day, it is this relationship that you're beginning. It's really important for the founder to recognize also that they're getting conviction through the process on what it's going to be like to partner with that person. It's this trope in the industry, which is you want to be the founder's first call. I've never really liked it so far because it's very reactionary. It's like, oh, they'll call me, I'll pick up the phone and respond. It's a low bar. I think it's a low bar. I think, hopefully, founders would say of us, we are their best caller. They've been proactive, had the space, thoughtfulness, contacts, and trust to be able to do that. I remember when Peter and I worked on Airtable. Pretty close to the initial investment right after it happened, Peter, you could imagine it was a decently high price in some ways, like a high multiple. Okay, let's press sales, whatever. Peter came in and was proactively sort of shattering the frame and saying, let's give away more for free. Why constrain this and squeeze juice from what we have? Let's unfill this even further. It's a database at the end of the day. Why would you constrain people putting stuff in a database? There's so much that happens on top of that. As you're evaluating mutual fit on an investment between the entrepreneur and Benchmark, in eBoys, there's some famous line about venture capital is more a ball's business than a brain's business. Let's stop using that phrase immediately. But it's so eBoys. It's the most eBoys thing ever.…

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