Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…But it sort of pervades a very passive view of almost like trying to superforecast a set of odds, and you did the diligence to superforecast those odds. We never talk in that way. When we think about partnering with a founder, it's not, oh, we want to make a good bet. It's like, we want to make a commitment. That commitment manifests as a group to be vulnerable, honest here, collectively get that feedback, and then with the founders to be on the field denting those odds. Each year, big years, and even a couple times every year, there are important moments where you can tell we can't transform necessarily when I say we got some silver bullet, but that commitment can really change the odds. Each of us make one or two of these commitments a year. There's a level of relationship that then happens with the founders because there's only one or two a year. What you end up feeling is that you really just care about every company that you work with and the founders, the teams, and everything. When these moments happen, it's not a transactional thing of one of a lot of companies with which you work. It's a founder that you really work closely with that you know so much about. That level of support doesn't feel unusual for us to do. It's something that we just expect of ourselves. And that's the relationship that we'll have with these teams. This may be drifting into an area that's harder to talk about. We can abstract it a little bit away. We talked about Uber on our episode, but I want to abstract it to how you think about this generally. The role of a general partner in a venture capital firm, traditionally, is that you have a fiduciary responsibility to your LPs to maximize their returns, and you have a second fiduciary responsibility when you join the board of a company to the company. It's hairy enough trying to balance the trade off, because sometimes those things are at odds. You're representing all shareholders on the company's side. With your LPs, you're representing their interests. You then introduce this third thing which is the thing you care the most about, which is support of the founder and empowering the founder. When do those things get hard? How do you balance those things? I assume most of the time, you're indexing strictly to we're partnering with this founder and we trust them, but when do you have to juggle those things? When people go to therapy often, they only talk about the shit that's going wrong. I think it's useful to think about what's going right. If there's not a DSM for flourishing, there's a DSM for dysfunctions. We could open that book up and we can have all sorts of flavors in a dysfunctional family. I think we could do that, and that would be illustrative and informative about how it can go wrong. I would flip it and say, when it works well, what are the preconditions of where you have alignment? And then you look at degradations from that. I think one of the words that's vital to any durable founder, Benchmark partner relationship is vulnerability. If there's ever caution or pause, if I can't share this information with my, then we've degraded the relationship, and we have to fix that. You fix trust. It's fixed intimately one on one. You have conversations that allow you to zoom up to say, okay, what's the collective purpose? I think that we could talk about Uber. I have every reason to believe Travis's purpose was the biggest, most extraordinary Uber imaginable. We had a collective gaze on that together. In many situations, this was one of them, pathologies creeped in. You learn this through a course or from experience, which is when you start to see that happening, you need to act immediately The minute we get othered, and it's not about us in this joint purpose, but it's you and me, it's my agenda, my LPs' agenda, and all that, I suddenly see that with a lot of the other firms in the industry, because it's not necessarily the partner in the room that's got the issue. It's their partners that have told them that they need to do this or they need to do that. I see it and I'm like, oh, man, I adore you, but your partners, I have different feelings about. You're here trying to rattle because they've said, why are we meeting our plan? The entrepreneur immediately vulnerability snaps like that, it closes, and then you have no trust. Now they come to us, typically, and they say, we got a problem with one of our directors. I'm like, okay, we'll up and off sidebar with them and say, what's going on here? How can I help you with your partners? As much as you look at situations where it falls apart, let me give you an inverse story, which is where it really only could have worked, I think, in this firm model. I was on the board of a company that wrecked somewhere between $200-$300 million of capital, and I'm pretty accountable. Now I should be fired if this job actually had standards, governance, and practices. And that company is called Docker. I was just in Miami yesterday at their all-hands meeting.…

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