Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. A long story. I think that raising that money at the time, I thought, man, maybe we don't need to do it. But also, I thought, it doesn't matter. What matters for Zoom is the great product and the customers. Whether you take some more money, you don't take some more money, it's all fine. It would all work out. As we were preparing for this interview, our first thought was, if we just had one of you up here and we were interviewing you about capital efficiency, it'd be easy to chalk it up to business model and cash flow cycle. Multimillion-dollar contracts upfront in the case of Veeva, or in Zoom, customers flocking with their credit cards for a self-serve experience. These are two completely different models. I think one of the things that it illustrated to David and I is capital efficiency is a mindset and culture thing more than a business model thing. I'm curious to hear both of your reactions to that, but also, what are the things that enabled you uniquely, more so than 99% of startups to be so capital efficient? I can take that one. I guess I've seen a little bit of Zoom and a little bit of Veeva. I would say, probably, it starts with a mindset. Just run a profitable lemonade stand. From my point of view, for me, there's safety in that. Cash generating business is always going to be valuable to somebody. At some point, a business that's not cash generating is going to be valuable to nobody. There's security in the long term. It starts with the mindset. I think Eric shared that. Then you have to have product excellence, too. That's something I think Eric and I share. We're both product people. I think also, we both worked really hard. We work really hard now, especially Eric. Probably in the first five years, I worked really hard. You didn't see me working really hard, but I saw you working really hard. We worked really hard, we worked really focused. Anything that wasn't related to the product or the customer was just BS, then just don't do it. The first five years, I was not at a conference like this, for example. I was just maniacally focused, and then the market really helps too. That's something you just have to get lucky on. It was the right timing for Veeva, it was the right timing for Zoom. Maybe if you started Zoom five years earlier or five years later, it would have been hard. Product excellence, real focus, mindset, and then you have to have some luck in your market. I'm sure there are some things that I could have tried to do or Eric could have tried to do. We might have picked a bad market and then it just wouldn't work. We're outliers and so is Eric. You have to pick something that most people think is going to fail to be an outlier. Otherwise, by definition, you're picking something that most people think is going to work. A lot of people are picking it, therefore, you're not an outlier. Just like Eric, all VCs have any kind of note except for Emergence turned us down. Ours was really simple. Vertical specific software, that's a small market and it doesn't work. That's what they would say. I was encouraged by that because I thought, well, it has an opportunity to be really good because it's something non-obvious.…

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