Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah. Fairchild would lead to many things including, of course, Intel and we'll get into that a little bit later. I mentioned Arthur Rock. What was the financing environment for “startups” in California at this point in time... Knowing how markets work, I think we can assume that there wasn't much of it given the terms of that other investment that you’ve just mentioned. Indeed. As you might guess from how Fairchild was financed, the “venture capital industry” or the proto-venture capital industry that existed in California at this time was pretty much nothing like we know it today. For one, it was so small that the individuals who are doing it, all of them, in California, they would meet once a month at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco at a regular table and they would sit around and talk about the various companies that they were working on. That was it. That was the entire industry. For two, none of them actually came from technology, or a startup, or company background. Arthur Rock, who we mentioned, he was an investment banker and a few other folks that were instrumental at this point in time, Pitch Johnson and Bill Draper—the name Draper might ring a few bells for folks—they had worked in the steel industry, and had come out to California and started financing companies. There was another gentleman named Tommy Davis. He was a real estate developer who developed an interest in this sort of thing. That was really the state of things. As evidenced by Fairchild, here you have eight of the most talented scientists and engineers working in the highest growth industry in the world, and it’s literally impossible to finance them; they have to get essentially bought by the East Coast Company to even get their company.…

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