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Speaker unverified: belief

17 Oct 2022 Acquired Benchmark Part II: The Dinner

“There is one big trade-off with our model, though, that I think about all the time just because I'm a paranoid person, which is at the end of the day, our job starts.”

— Speaker unverified

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Speaker
Speaker unverified
Attribution
Not verified from this transcript
Claim type
belief
Recorded
17 Oct 2022
Publisher
Acquired

Transcript context

…Strategy is just all about making trade-offs and aligning all of your trade-offs, so that they're a force multiplier rather than in conflict with each other. If I had to sort of summarize why Benchmark works, it seems like all the trade-offs are actually just thought through very clearly and tried to align them all so they sort of amplify each other rather than conflicting with each other. There is one big trade-off with our model, though, that I think about all the time just because I'm a paranoid person, which is at the end of the day, our job starts. The thing that we have to be paranoid about every day is, how do we make sure we have that first meeting with the founder that's going to build that next iconic company? So much of what we do is about maximizing that probability that we do get to meet that founder and then end up partnering with them. A lot of firms, I mean, all the other firms outside of us have built machines around that. You have lesions of people at these firms. I grew up doing this. I was an analyst at Bessemer. Cold calling startups. Yeah. You have all these firms who have built these big teams to do that. They nurture relationships with seed funds, invest in the seed funds, relationships with angel investors, incubators. They have this machinery that's smart, because it's all about making sure that every deal, every round that happens, they're going to be in the mix. There are five of us. There's always the risk that one of those founders who kind of mistake basically our lack of outreach for a lack of interest when it's really just a constraint. We do everything we can. Of course, it's not like we're just resting on our laurels and waiting for calls. We're doing everything we can to make sure that we are in the mix. But at the same time, we are limited. Even if you work 24/7, you still have a lot less hours.…

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