Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I actually heard the story. It was the opposite. The other existing partners when he joined were like, you're the new guy. For your initiation ritual, you're coming from Facebook, you deal with the website. I actually don't know which direction it was. Anyway, I think he worked on it a little bit. He came up with some ideas. He needed to make it more Web 2.0, more interactive, and incorporate live things. Ultimately, one problem was it ended up putting Benchmark too far forward. It was almost taking credit for these entrepreneurs' success. That is antithetical to everything Benchmark stands for. They want to be in the background. They want to be entrepreneurial. They want to be that quiet confidant and partner. They think that the best founders will be attracted to the idea that they're not taking credit by featuring those companies on the website, which is an interesting rationale for it. I think what really happened, or at least what also happened, is Matt was showing it to the rest of the partnership in these early revisions and got a whole lot of feedback and a whole lot of opinions, and it ultimately ended in just saying, hey, actually, I think we shouldn't have a website at all because I don't want to deal with this. Which also added up really because it totally added to the mystique, especially in that Fab Four era. It's so great. All right, let's land this plane.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.