David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's the thing that bill really brought from being an analyst and from writing regularly. We've referenced probably 10 times on the show, A Rake Too Far, Bill's post where he compares all the different take rates and what goes into a take rate. There's so much tying that into moats and pricing power. He just understands all this stuff at such a deep level. I think we shouldn't disparage the other founding partners. It just wasn't their skill set. It wasn't their strength. They didn't look at financial statements and develop emotions around what this business was good at, bad at, and what the future could look like. They sat in a room with entrepreneurs and thought, does this guy have it? I think it's a very different skill set. Very, very different skill set. To bring it back now to this moment in time when they're bringing Bill on and also facing all of these other decisions and opportunities, now that Benchmark is Benchmark, it's interesting that that decision, the bringing Bill on, the evolving the partnership, that was the right decision. All the rest of it was the wrong decision, so let's get into that. To dive in on your right decision, I just want to add a little more color. The series A was the place to run to for that period of time because of the mispricing you identified. If they had said, we want to stay a gut-based business and we want to stay out of the formation stage investing. The rise of seed firms, accelerators, and angel funds, meant that that got so competitive so fast that they probably would have needed to go multistage and raise huge funds in order to compete rather than being lost in the baselines and lowercase.…

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