David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Importantly, now, Webvan did have this last mile component as the initial founding wedge. Whereas Amazon, they're like, yeah, we'll get to do it. It might take two weeks. Of course, then they get to Prime, they get to Prime now, now they're trying to do one-day Prime, and all sorts of things can happen the same day if you're spoiled like me and live in Seattle. Webvan had that from the start, and it was equally ambitious. Louis Borders did want to do food and everything. It was The Everything Store at the edge, close to your house whenever you wanted it. It was so ambitious that even the Benchmark partners, after they invested, kept trying to talk him into, could we just do food? Do we have to compete with everything Amazon is doing right away? The Benchmark partnership as a whole, but I think especially the original four Benchmark partners were the ones really pushing David to push Louis. Hey, can we just do food? Can we scale down? David totally falls in love with Louis. This is what he's there to do from his perspective. It didn't feel like this was the sell to Dave. Hey, leave your lucrative successful executive search firm, because if you come here, you can make big bets. I think that was the thing that was always on his mind. If there's a bet that everyone else at the firm is too scared to make, maybe I'll make it.…

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