Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Don Valentine famously had the rule. They didn't invest in any company that you couldn't bicycle to from Sand Hill Road. It's crazy. Dave Marquardt, I think most weekends, is flying up to Seattle to hang out with Bill and Steve. It was a real sell. He says, I was young, I was single, I had nothing better to do, and it was really fun and intellectually interesting, so I did it. That resulted in, depending how long TVI held, one of, if not the best venture capital return in history. Hard to argue with that one. Okay, back to the story. There are a couple more really, really key things that happened in the PC era. Particularly now, once we're into the IBM PC era and the clones, the 16-bit era. Let's start with applications. Like we've been saying all along, the 8-bit era, applications, package software aren't really a thing. In 1979, at the tail end of the 8-bit era, two programs come out for the Apple II, VisiCalc and WordStar. VisiCalc is the first software spreadsheet application, and WordStar is a word processor. These applications by today's standards are super simple, stone age–type stuff, but they're the first of their kind, particularly VisiCalc and the spreadsheet. They established the potential for business applications on personal computers. There's a joke at one point in the industry that the Apple II was a "VisiCalc" accessory for small businesses. I think that is part of what IBM is seeing and why they're deciding to now get into the industry with the personal computer. Around this time, Microsoft starts the "Consumer Products Division" to compete and make application software themselves.…

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