Ben Gilbert: observation

Transcript context

…Exactly. This is before ebikes and scooters of all various types had really become a thing. It's all going great off to the races. This was summer and into fall of 2014. By early 2015—we're now less than a year after the Series A—they are alive in eight markets. They raise a $40 million Series B—again, we're two years removed from paloaltodelivery.com launching—led by Kleiner Perkins at a $600 million valuation. John Doerr basically comes out of retirement, he's ready to move along—I think he's Chairman of the firm at this point—he joins the Board. If you've listened to the show for a long time, you know the name John Doerr. Google, Amazon, the point to drive home here is John is arguably the greatest venture capitalist of all time. He came in, personally did this deal. If you think about that, $40 million on $600 million, they sold 8% of the company, less than 10% of the company in that Series B and got John Doerr to do the deal. The way to read into this is the company is going gangbusters and has a lot of leverage at this point. Absolutely. Today, it's not uncommon to see Series Bs happening within two years of a company's life, raising this amount of money at that valuation with less than 10% dilution. This was not common back in those days. Yes, seed rounds were happening at expensive prices already but this hand trickled down, they're trickled up to the Series A and Series B part to the market yet. This was an eye-popping round that happened.…

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