Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…$100-ish billion, I think. $100-ish billion. The cool thing about what you're doing is you can hold for a long time, including when these things become public companies. I'll just say it so it’s coming from me. I think Snowflake is still over half, or as at the end of last quarter, was still over half of Altimeter's public position. It is unbelievable, both from a returns perspective but from a conviction perspective to stick with founders with that sort of founder mentality and this longevity this long. I think that's the unique thing about this kind of capital platform. I'll say a couple of things. One is, it was an extraordinary investment, but it's also just an extraordinary partnership. As founding CEOs—Mike Spicer, Bob Muglia, Frank Slootman, Mike Scarpelli—these are deep relationships that become really important friends. You work really hard through a lot of tough issues. When it's all said and done, the incremental dollar isn't going to change the answer. But working side by side and building something that you're extraordinarily proud of, it's what motivates me. What I would say about that investment is for our venture investors, I don't know what it was at the peak, but I talked about two different pools of capital. On the venture side, those are 10-year funds. Last year, we distributed extraordinary returns and a game-changing return for a lot of our partners. But at the same time, on the public side, and personally we think this is going to be a multi-year compounder. I think this company can be worth over $500 billion over the course of the next 5–7 years. I think it will be extraordinary. We have one of the best management teams in the business going against one of the biggest TAMs in the business and delivering a really beloved service. It's kind of a tragedy if you can't continue to participate in that, but you have to match. That's not the bet that the folks who invested in my venture capital firm made, that I'm going to hold this forever. You want to make sure that you match and you align the interest of the LPs in the product that they're buying with the duration and the nature of the investment that you're making. Sequoia has innovated in a really interesting way around this permanent fund in this regard. We have a structure that allows us to continue to partner, compound, and continue. I think you'll see more and more of this. Rewind the clock, I started investing in Priceline when it was less than a billion dollar enterprise value. Today, it's upwards of $130 billion. They went public or you could buy them in the public markets for less than a billion.…

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