David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…There was value destruction, hundreds of millions of dollars of value destruction. My two partners, I came in and I said, I may be drinking my own bathwater. I don't know what to do here. I was really vulnerable. I said, if I've gone off the deep end, no part of that truth seeking exercise would allow me to spin position, blame, be a victim. I was being accountable. I said, what have I done? They said, not only do we believe in this company, can we put it in the new fund too? I thought, well, that's crazy, but you're right. If you believe, you have to have that founder level. I always joke, employees can quit, founders can unfound the company. I think we feel that way in our commitments. We can't un-commit that founder permanence. Oftentimes, it outlives every executive that gets recruited. Not every, but a hyper majority of executives. This case of flourishing, and then that was a case of trust, all these things that come to stress, the LPs agenda, the founders' agenda. It's not that hard. You just look up and say, what's the purpose of the company? Let's resolve around that, and that will sort the rest of this stuff out. It's the Bezos thing. The long term, there really is no conflict, but delighting in a [...], impressing the customer and creating shareholder value. Our customer is not the founder. We say it is, but it's really the purpose of the founder. It turns out that the purpose if that's the customer. One of us may be deviating from that, and we can keep each other accountable. That happens internally. Me and my partner said no. The purpose of Docker is just the beginning. My God, it's going to get developers to program the global computer. Okay, so then you could dust off $300 million of loss capital. I want to do a big topic we really wanted to cover with you guys in this session. Stay focused on the early stage, not having a growth fund, especially when your entire peer set has become lifecycle capital providers. I actually think this is a good entry into it. Peter, the story you just told of when things are not going right, the Benchmark approach, I'm actually really curious when things are going right. Your competitive set has said, when things are going right, we should go along. We are going to interpret that. I think in large part, it's a competitive response to you guys during the past fab four era. We are going to become lifecycle capital providers. We're going to put a ton of money round, after round, after round into our best winners. It wasn't in response to Benchmark. That was in response to there's a crap ton of fees to make on. Any founders will keep taking our money, and we have brand new LPs. Benchmark stayed so true to their thing.…

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