David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Notably, that sovereign wealth fund is the largest LP in SoftBank Vision Fund fund one. They’re doing big deals all around the world. At this time, many billions of dollars each. Saudi Arabia, under Crown Prince MBS, had made a big deal over the past few years. If they want to diversify their economy from oil, they’re getting into tech, there are LPs in lots of venture funds, not just the vision fund, lots of money in the public markets in tech. This all seems like a great path. The deals agreed to in 2017, but under regulatory review in the US and UK and takes a while to close. During that time in 2018, folks will remember the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, I believe was a Saudi and was living in the US, and was vehemently opposed to the Saudi government. He enters the Saudi consulate in Turkey and never comes out. It is assumed and very likely that he was murdered by the Saudi government inside the consulate, which, of course, (a) is just horribly, but also (b) for the tech industry, specifically causes all sorts of problems because there’s so much Saudi money all over the tech industry at this point, and this is a major international event. This is the start of the startups being very aggressive and asking venture firms before they invest, hey, tell me who your LPs are. This used to be faceless money to me. Now, I don’t want this particular money or money that seems like this type of money to be profiting from my startup or having control over my startup. So very much shook the entire venture landscape of what it means to take capital and how much you should care about who’s invested in your investors and who’s invested those investors, et cetera.…

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