Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…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. That’s wild. It’s so interesting. Venture capital falls under the broad asset class today of alternative investments, which always seems a little funny given how much—especially today with all late-stage money coming into startups—how much money is invested there. It’s silly to call it alternative. Now, when you look at it these days, you had to be a very alternative counter-culture person, to believe that this was the best way to go and invest your money. It's right at this moment in time that a—quite a maverick as one might say—individual, comes on the scene and basically single-handedly, writes the playbook of what modern venture capital and alongside it, what a modern startup would look like and that man's name is Don Valentine. Don, of course, goes on and starts Sequoia Capital and we're going to tell the story here. I cannot recommend highly enough, anyone, certainly if you work or are interested in venture, but even if you're not, if you're just interested in technology and startups, go do two things: (1) watch the Youtube video of a talk that Don gave at the GSB at Stanford in 2010 and (2) read this wonderful oral history that Berkeley did as part of the history department there with Don. You will get a sense for what an amazing character this guy is. A lot of the history of this show is taken from those two documents.…

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