Brad Gerstner: preference

Transcript context

…The natural thing to decide after all this is that you're going to go be a public markets investor. It's a great story. Also, what Altimeter ultimately becomes in this, and you guys (I think) are maybe the peers play examples—certainly one of the first, if not, the first—lifecycle investor, it was just not at all obvious that you should go to join a hedge fund at this point. How did that happen? There's a little bit more in between. September 11th happens, which is a really catastrophic event, particularly for our company that was an online travel company. We negotiated the soft landing with IAC. I won't take you through all the trials and tribulations, but it was a good outcome for General Catalyst. I thought I was going to go back and join David and Joe. I knew they were two extraordinarily special human beings and they were going to build something really big, but I had kind of been bitten by the startup bug. A friend named Bejul Somaia, who now runs Lightspeed in India and Southeast Asia had an idea. Effectively, think of pre-Yelp. Bej and I started this business. We bootstrapped it, had a bunch of venture capital term sheets, for a variety of reasons didn't take them, and we sold that business a couple of years later to a public company in Seattle. Again, in the first transaction, I'd worked really hard at NLG. I think I walked away after being the CEO and helped me put the deal together with a million dollars, which, for a poor kid from Indiana was game changing, but by Silicon Valley standards today, people would be like, are you clueless? There was a lot of work that went into that. The second business where I started with Bej, I think I owned 40% of the business when we sold it, that was 4X–5X the outcome. Then when I thought about what I wanted to do, I had two competing ideas. One was another operating business. If you're an entrepreneur, you have these ideas, you have to get them out of your crawl. But what I really thought that I was better suited for was investing. A person who made this clear to me was Rich Barton. Rich one day sat me down and he said, I don't think you're a great entrepreneur. I said, Rich, that's so insulting, why? Especially from Rich, like, the [...] entrepreneur.…

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