Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…The other fun thing too is companies can almost choose how interesting they want it to be. I think the best example of the sponsored deep dive that I've done was, and this was early on but it was Ramp and they're double unicorn round when they raised at a $1.1 billion valuation and $1.6 billion dollar valuation in the same transaction. The reason that one worked so well was because Eric, the CEO there, was like, dude, completely open kimono, ask us anything. I will give you the timeline of how this round game came together. I will give you exactly how we think about cap table construction. You tell me what you need to make this the most interesting piece possible and I will give that to you. A lot of companies make the trade on the other side, which is also totally fair. They want to keep some information private that they think there's an advantage to keep in private. So that's the trade that I think you make there, but there's a reason people refer to that piece often when they're reaching out to me about sponsored posts. Then a lot of companies aren't willing to make that trade-off when I'm like, cool. The reason that one worked so well is because they told me everything. I'm like, cool, do that but maybe 90% of the information. Before we move on, I want to cover one final topic of journalistic integrity. Because David, I think your take may come across when we go back and listen to this as a little bit too—and this is when the downfall of democracy started. We can point to this moment where David Rosenthal said that journalistic integrity is not important. I don't mean it that way.…

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