David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…They held an open table for a long time while it was still public. I think this is something that puts a fine point on the analytical side of Benchmark and particularly, Bill Gurley's analytical side. I also came in thinking they know when to sell. They always sell going into the IPO or they sell a lot because they know that they are private investors and the goal is to get into the companies that are going IPO for the most and then exit near IPO. But actually, I think what they are is in some ways value investors. They're good at understanding the intrinsic value of something, which I think is why we saw them dump WeWork and why they were holding open table while still public in the terrible whatever that was, 2008, 2009, or 2010, that era where it was just massively undervalued because lots of public companies were massively undervalued. I think that illustrates for me that sure, there are lots of "rules for how Benchmark works", but the main thing that they're good at is breaking them when it makes sense to break them. I think we could go on on some more playbooks here. I've got plenty. One I want to highlight quickly is just the all-star team aspect of Benchmark. We've beat that horse plenty through this episode, but if Sequoia is the Yankees, Benchmark is the All-Star team. Those are two very different conceptions. I think we might have an opportunity to do some more Benchmark playbook discussions. I think I know where you're going with this. Yes, I think we may too. One open question I have going forward—and I just want to leave listeners with this at the end of the playbook—is really around consumer investing in the future going forward because all of their biggest wins in the past have been consumer companies. Uber, Snap, eBay, Riot, Twitter—Discord is still privately held but will be a big win—were all very contrarian bets at first. We've talked about people who thought they were idiots for investing in eBay because big consumer investments seem really weird. As more and more prestige has accrued to the firm, will they try and keep that prestigious track record going, or will they do really weird consumer stuff? Are they going to do more of these near-risk-free early-stage enterprise investments? If you look at the partner team right now, they're set up really well to do that. In the current partnership, Sarah no doubt is a primarily consumer investor, but she seems like the only one that's really actually focused on it. The swim lanes are not as clear as they were in the Fab Four era. I think their next partner will be really telling on this, and it'll be interesting to see does Benchmark stay a great breakout consumer investing firm, or do they look a lot more like high-performing SaaS B2B enterprise investors?…

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