David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…It's super private. Yup. Even at their launch, they didn't let any press inside to see it because they were afraid of giving up trade secrets. He embeds with eBay. It was crazy to do this. At the beginning of eBoys, Randall writes in the introduction here, "There was no precedent within the venture business for providing an outsider such access. I suspect that the Benchmark partners thought that something ballsy like this, which was sure to make the greybeards of the guild squirm, must, ipso facto, be a good thing," which is funny. Of course, it's more complicated than that. I think it's emblematic that they got the swagger back. They're like, you know what, you got to play like there's nothing to lose here. That leads us to the big one, the one that actually changes everything certainly then and still right up among their best venture investments of all time. This one required all the pieces of the puzzle. It required the executive recruiter. It required the knowledge of the consumer, which at the time, consumer investing was not a thing that overlapped with technology. It was not a thing that if you were betting on technology companies, you're usually investing in semiconductors, you're investing in networking equipment, you're investing in enterprise software. You needed this marriage of, we need to find a killer executive for a consumer company that's building a consumer brand that has unbelievably disruptive, brand new cutting edge, always falling over technology.…

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