David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…This is how. This was how. I think before the IPO, but after eBay is clearly working and Meg Whitman is there, Benchmark had been doing for a while and would really embrace bringing in entrepreneurs and residents in doing the EIR strategy of company formation, bring somebody who wants to start a company in, house them at the firm, help them get started, bring the whole partnership together to help them, and incubate the company. They did this with an EIR named Danny Shader. Danny comes up with the idea for a company he calls accept.com. He notices eBay is becoming so big. It's now this viable platform on its own, but actually doing payments for auctions that are completed is pretty hard. He says, I think there's actually an opportunity to build a separate independent company to do payments on the Internet, and specifically to start with accepting payments for sellers on eBay. Benchmark partnership gets super excited about this. They bring in eBay, they bring in Meg. Meg is talking about like, we like this, we need this, maybe eBay will invest in the deal itself, too. They put the deal together. They fund the company Benchmark does. The IPO roadshow starts, Meg gets distracted, eBay ends up not investing. After the IPO is done, eBay gets cold feet. They don't do the deal. They're thinking about, oh, should we build this ourselves? Should we look at other acquiring companies? PayPal doesn't exist at this point. Right. Why are we partnering at all? Shouldn't we own just 100% of this thing if we're bringing all the customers to it?…

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