Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I believe he was working on part of the city search team and then they had a business called pronto.com. I'm not sure exactly what that was doing, but he had bounced around. I think a lot of people that I see go between a whole bunch of their properties. Yup, and I'm not sure if this was IAC or his next gig, but he ended up taking over the post-bubble Evite team that had shrunk from like hundreds and hundreds of people down to this very small group. I think he grew it from $1 million to $25 million in revenue or something. Still relatively small compared to the grander scale, but had sort of done this take a startup, rehab it, and build it bigger. He hadn't actually done a startup from scratch but had built something meaningful with a small team. Man, Evite, that's like the cockroach of the internet, in a good way. It just won't die. Amazing. You would think, gosh, we're telling this story now, in hindsight, it's 2020. Incredible vision, proven demand for this product. Yes, it's going to be hard to build a full-stack company around this, but financing hard stuff, that's what builds moats. This should be an easy fund to raise. Ben, as you referenced John's episode on How I Built This is great around all this so we won't rehash all of it. It was incredibly hard to get this funded. All the VCs passed again and again and again. He ends up raising $400,000 to start from friends and family at a $2 million post-money valuation. Oh my gosh. And of course, folks probably all know now, I think it's later in my notes maybe what the current market cap of Peloton is, but at its peak, it was a $45 billion public company.…

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