Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. There were deals to be done during '95 and '96 that would have put the firm on a very different trajectory during those early years. Those were the years when Amazon as we talked about got done. That was the time when Yahoo! got done. Would Benchmark have beaten John Doerr to do Amazon? Probably not, or maybe, but they weren't even really in the picture. Certainly for Yahoo!, Mike Moritz is great. He's wonderful, but a big part of what started to make Mike Moritz Mike Moritz was Yahoo!. He wasn't Mike Moritz before he did Yahoo! Benchmark wasn't in the picture then, so there were some notable missuses during those years. Then, Val came from this very different perspective. He was coming from the proto software buyout industry, and Benchmark was all about doing formation stage investments in technology and Internet companies. There just wasn't a fit in investment styles. I think that is probably the right thing to chalk it up to. David and I stumbled upon this and we were like, Val Vaden. How have we never heard this guy's name? I remember thinking, wait, there was a fifth founder of Benchmark? They had people coming from a venture capital background, they had someone coming from an operational background, and they would have someone who we haven't talked about yet coming from an executive recruiting background who would be a slam dunk fit, but this person coming from more of a buyout background turned out not to have the same fit with the rest of the firm. At the end of 1996, Val ends up leaving the firm, the equal partnership, which certainly was I'm sure not what any of them planned or were hoping for. They've invested about $16 million in companies by the end of '96 which is a fine deployment but maybe a little slow. They're having a partnership transition. The firm is not winning. I'm sure it must not have felt great. I've been there. I've had friends who've been there. It can get depressing. If you're a new firm and you don't come out the gate strong, you end up fading away a lot of folks.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.