David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why are any of us going to work anymore at all, even if it's to invest our own capital? Even though I think they all do recommitment—eBoys talk about this a little bit—it's hard to know what the actual psychology was of any of the folks at the time. But as painted in eBoys and as born out in practice, they all do recommit. Nobody raises their hand and says, you know what, I can't go 100% anymore, I'm going to do other things. They do later, but they don't now. Even despite all that, the game just got way harder for them because they went from the people painting the targets on the back of John Doerr and other people to now, they're the ones with the targets on their backs. That's the lesser problem. The bigger problem is the target of people who want to work with them. They're now overwhelmed with opportunity. The easy opportunities are the deals, the investments, the entrepreneurs, the new companies. Even as the tech bubble starts to burst, Benchmark is now one of the top tier firms. They get all the calls. They get to see whatever they want to see, basically. There are a bunch of things we didn't even talk about, like all the Fortune 500s that are calling them to say, start a joint venture with me to create a dot-com. You don't even have to put any money in, but help me recruit the management team and understand how to do a startup.…

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