David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…It’s like white label Facebook. Yeah. Once again, ahead of its time. Marc, I think, was not super thrilled with how that was going. He ended up stepping back full time, right after the Opsware acquisition, brought in Jason Rosenthal from Opsware who had been a Netscape guy before that to come in and run Ning. Marc stepped back to just being a chairman. Remember, now we’re in 2007. We're now in the heyday of web 2.0, which is so funny. At any other point in time, if we hadn't had the tech bubble, the crash, and everything everybody lived through here, the rest of the market would have been gaga over Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga, Shutterfly, Flickr, and everything that was going on. It was so exciting in the Valley. But because everybody still had the hangover from web 1.0, valuations were minuscule for these companies. Well, in 2000, 2001, 2002, even in 2003, venture firms weren't raising new funds. Everyone's preciously holding on to the last fund they raise, parceling out each dollar to their own portfolios, trying to make sure they're only investing if it's the very next Yahoo, and using their bullets very carefully. When Facebook came along in 2004, it's one of the only obvious ones that's growing like absolute crazy and kicks off that next generation of venture capitalists are going to be able to start raising big funds again and come out of the tech bubble screaming.…

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