Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…And valuations were so low. It was crazy when John and Mike Moritz did Google at a $100 million valuation in the Series A. That was Earth-changing. To understand John, we've painted the picture of how dominant he and Kleiner were. There were two very specific aspects to his and Kleiner's style. One was he was unquestionably the guy is a good way to put it. He was the CEO of the firm. He was the leader. He was also the best player on the field. It's like he was Michael Jordan, Phil Jackson, and the front office. He did everything. That led to plenty of situations like we talked about on the amazon.com episode of he called Tom Alberg's wife, he aggressively came in to try to court and win the deal, and then he would try and pass off the board seat to a junior partner. Jeff, of course, didn't let that happen, but many entrepreneurs did. The other very particular aspect to the Kleiner Perkins model at this time was they had adopted this idea of a modern keiretsu within a venture capital firm. This is funny to think back on now, but it made sense at the time. You have to put yourself in the context of the 1990s, a proto-Internet ecosystem really. These were the AOL days leading into the Netscape days. Biz dev deals and distribution were a lot more important and different than it is now. It wasn't like you could just have an idea for a company, spin something up on AWS, put it on the Internet, and get distribution for free on social. It didn't work that way. You needed deals in place. Product-market fit was a lot less organic and quite frankly, a lot less real because you didn't get this immediate signal of users finding your product and paying for it in this high fidelity organic way. You had few products available to you and they were whatever products got done in these deals. True product-market fit ended up being an equal peer to your biz dev prowess, unlike today. A core part of this currency model at Kleiner is some would argue that they would do more than help facilitate. They would force these partnerships and biz dev relationships upon their portfolio companies. When your portfolio companies include Netscape, Amazon, and Excite, these would be quite valuable deals both for Excite and the young startups.…

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