David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Right. That’s a great point. One other question before we move out of trends and themes is, as you’re looking at companies that are pitching Madrona for investment in recent history, what are things that you learned from Amazon being so successful that you sort of look for at other companies as a pattern matching based on Amazon? Well, you know, every company isn’t going to go public and every company isn’t in it probably for the long term. But I really do prefer founders who have a long-term vision and at least in the beginning say they’re going to stick with it. I think it’s almost genetic though and you don’t know it until it happens. There’s lots of reasons to sell your company and your market didn’t turn out quite what you thought but you’re going to get a good price But what I really hope is that a founder, if he’s riding the wave as you say or has other reasons doesn’t sell out when he could be in it for the long term. Again, it’s somewhat personality and I think I was very fortunate that Jeff was in this for the long-term and so, even at moments when he could have gone out and sold the company, he wasn’t interested. He wanted to build something for the long term. When you think about a lot of the great companies, they've had founders who really wanted to accomplish something kind of beyond making the profit. We’re going to change how people think about software. We’re going to change how people do search. So, I think that isn’t guaranteed a successful company but I’ve always liked that longer term – they’re thinking about it and hopefully going to seek it. Cool. Thanks.…

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