Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
74 published records
01 / evaluation
“Product-market fit was a lot less organic and quite frankly, a lot less real because you didn't get this immediate signal of users finding your product and paying for it in this high fidelity organic way.”
02 / evaluation
“There was. Benchmark famously believes that venture capital doesn't scale. They have zigged when others have zagged.”
03 / belief
“Matt had this saying back then that was partly formed by his experience with Uber I think, that, “The smartphone is going to become your remote control for the real world.”
04 / belief
“" I think basically what happened is, as more and more consumer startups started happening in the early- and mid-2000s, you basically had angel investors that were starting to come in and fill the randomness risk, the pre-launch, no traction, who knows.”
05 / belief
“I think you can probably trace most, if not all of that back to probably making the wrong architecture decisions.”
06 / belief
“I think the takeaway is overwhelmingly positive here, but let's continue to paint some of the trade-offs and some of their tougher moments.”
07 / belief
“I think Riot might have been fund six, but that was another great Mitch investment.”
08 / commitment
“The interesting thing is that it wasn't like, now we're all equal partners in one big pool. It was, you guys are a fund, you have your own equal partnership, and we will come to an economic agreement where you get to rent the brand from us.”
09 / uncertainty
“I don't know any other young VCs who studied European literature in college and somehow managed to weasel their way into the industry.”
10 / belief
“In March of 2015, which really was the apex, I think, of this era, ironically, after Eric joined, so there were five at this point, but Eric had just joined, Eric Vishria, who we'll talk about in a sec, but Forbes comes out with this article.”
11 / belief
“I think of the portion of the $6.7 million Benchmark investment that went to the company's balance sheet, I don't think any of it ever left the balance sheet.”
12 / belief
“I think there are a few things. The simple answer to that question is, the world and the financial markets woke up to the power of the Internet, and what heretofore was a secret hiding in plain sight right in front of everybody's faces that like, hey, the Internet is this incredible enabling technology, and you can build real businesses that make real money on the Internet, was not something that most people believed until then.”
13 / belief
“Of course, I think Bruce Dunlevie is still an active partner at this point, too.”
14 / belief
“I'm sure, Val retains some carry after he left. Famously, I think Bob pushed for this.”
15 / belief
“I think at that moment, they sold some to SoftBank in a transaction at that point in time.”
16 / belief
“I do think for Benchmark, I suspect they've done some bridge rounds here and there, or their participation in a round signals something to the next round investor.”
17 / belief
“Benchmark, I believe, has a meaningful part of that company, which is currently valued at $8.”
18 / observation
“The only way this works is if everyone truly brings the same amount of value to the partnership. Because otherwise, over time, you will have a situation where even if you're equal economically, you become unequal in everybody realizing, hey, that person is not bringing it the way that we're bringing it.”
19 / belief
“Mitch I think is really super under the radar and kind of unsung part of what comes to be the Fab Four era, and they truly are.”
20 / belief
“His family was also a General Motors family. He grows up pretty working class, I believe, in New York.”
21 / belief
“The bottom of the trough, I think, was something around $7 billion, and then it would have another run-up in 2004 up to $77 billion.”
22 / belief
“I think pretty unambiguously at this point, both in my opinion and just looking at what's happened in the intervening five years since then, the answer to does this meaningfully negatively impact Benchmark is directly, no.”
23 / belief
“Let's, at the risk of destroying everything, bet on this brand new big wave that we think could be the thing.”
24 / belief
“I suspect that the Benchmark partners thought that something ballsy like this, which was sure to make the greybeards of the guild squirm, must, ipso facto, be a good thing," which is funny.”
25 / belief
“I think what really happened, or at least what also happened, is Matt was showing it to the rest of the partnership in these early revisions and got a whole lot of feedback and a whole lot of opinions, and it ultimately ended in just saying, hey, actually, I think we shouldn't have a website at all because I don't want to deal with this.”
26 / belief
“I think Dave Beirne really brought this we are service providers mentality to it.”
27 / belief
“I think actually, the analogy holds here of a fund might bring home a championship, but if you're a large endowment, you don't care about one fund.”
28 / belief
“The Benchmark partnership as a whole, but I think especially the original four Benchmark partners were the ones really pushing David to push Louis.”
29 / uncertainty
“Until it becomes clear with machine learning, AR, or crypto that we have the next iPhone moment, maybe this fund is the time to be going more enterprise, and then we'll come back to the consumer. I don't know.”
30 / evaluation
“Especially open-source software, enterprise, and bottoms-up adoption, he did great there. But they all blend in too, like Mitch did Snap The point is it doesn't matter.”
31 / belief
“The tagline on the book, which I think was part of—the actual book ended up being different than I think what everybody thought—the first inside account of venture capitalists at work.”
32 / evaluation
“Sure. It's like how the new iPhone has a 2X better camera, but they don't tell you any units or what vector that is better on.”
33 / belief
“What do you think? It turns out that that conversation, I think, probably goes about the same as it went at TVI.”
34 / belief
“I think Bruce flies out to Westchester and convinces Dave to leave all this behind.”
35 / belief
“I think there are multiple threads to explore here. One, all the reasons we're wistful for or I'm wistful for 2011–2012 when things were just simpler and happier.”
36 / belief
“Of course, we have also heard that there was no secondary and that doesn't exist at all. I think there was at least something.”
37 / commitment
“Today, we are going to talk about a firm who built one of the top franchises in venture capital, Benchmark, that has incredibly managed to do both.”
38 / belief
“The sophistication of applying all the behavioral psychology and the machine learning that applies a lot of the models to just the ruthless execution of capitalism. I don’t think we realized it yet and it was just much more nascent.”
39 / uncertainty
“I don't know where this falls on this, but because of everything we talked about this whole episode and because of this all-star team dynamic of for this model to work, everybody has to be an all-star and has to bring it all the time and you have to be committed and capable of being the best on the field, it's also a barrier to entry to other firms starting and copying the model.”
40 / uncertainty
“I don't know how long they held, or I imagine there was a pretty rapid distribution to limited partners there, but that is a rare honor.”
41 / evaluation
“To bring it back now to this moment in time when they're bringing Bill on and also facing all of these other decisions and opportunities, now that Benchmark is Benchmark, it's interesting that that decision, the bringing Bill on, the evolving the partnership, that was the right decision.”
42 / uncertainty
“Now, if something did or didn't happen with a secondary and these loans, and if those were incremental to the actual equity investment, which we don't know for sure if they were or weren't, but if they were, if what is recorded in the Washington Post in that old article which is linked to in our sources is true, that's another $1 billion kicker on top of the $4 billion.”
43 / belief
“My view is that the CEO ultimately is responsible and accountable for everything.”
44 / belief
“I think part of the DNA or the culture of the firm is they're all learning machines.”
45 / belief
“Then, Matt Cohler joins the firm and says, hey, I think we really need to update our website.”
46 / belief
“I think we might have an opportunity to do some more Benchmark playbook discussions.”
47 / belief
“I think Microsoft had gone public. At least they were able to distribute that at this point.”
48 / belief
“I think that is correct. Perhaps not all of the $6.7 million went to the company's balance sheet.”
49 / uncertainty
“I don't know if he did others before. But if Webvan wasn't his first, it was certainly among the first right after he arrived.”
50 / belief
“Here's the other interesting thing about Sarah and why I think she's a great fit to everything we've talked about at Benchmark here.”
51 / commitment
“We are going to travel to China, and we're going to go find the right partners for us in China.”
52 / commitment
“Knowing the personalities involved, I can tell you exactly who said that, but we will protect their identity to protect the guilty here.”
53 / commitment
“I will say after talking to a lot of different people around the firm, the number one characteristic that just kept coming up over and over and over again is they do what they say they're going to do.”
54 / belief
“There are such great fund stories of that era that I think is just fun to think back on like a happier time in Silicon Valley and show the swashbuckling insanity of Benchmark at the moment.”
55 / belief
“I think Bruce and Bob are still active, at least in fund six. Maybe a little bit into fund seven, but fund six is the transition.”
56 / belief
“Boy, is Dave that. I couldn't 100% prove this, but I believe Dave's first deal is Webvan.”
57 / belief
“Back to Bob here, I think he really would have preferred to keep going at TVI and convert it to an equal partnership.”
58 / belief
“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.”
59 / belief
“I think what you're about to get into is how they signaled that in the form of the economics that they were asking for, but they certainly signaled it in the name.”
60 / belief
“Indirectly, yeah, very little doubt in my mind that this precipitates the end of the Fab Four era.”
61 / belief
“Even today, I think most people and a lot of entrepreneurs don't really know this.”
62 / belief
“Airtable where he met Peter and Benchling where he and Eric overlapped on the board. I think Miles was very, very early to Benchling.”
63 / belief
“Mitch joins next, and then the final member of the Fab Four gets rounded out. They recruit from Facebook, and this is still when Facebook is a private company, leaving Facebook as a private company, having been employee number five at Facebook, and before that, employee number I think less than five at LinkedIn, Matt Cohler.”
64 / belief
“I really believe in this equal partnership thing. The Internet I think is coming like Netscape.”
65 / preference
“He's like, they're the best. I went with them because they're the best. I didn't want to work with anybody else.”
66 / evaluation
“We should look for someone who has been in the industry long enough that they've burned through all the capital being a bad VC, because there are a lot of tropes about it takes seven years or it takes $50 million to make a VC, which I think are all quite reasonable, because your first several investments, it's like you're getting the crap out.”
67 / evaluation
“The third miss that is not directly related to international expansion, but I think is more symptomatic, perhaps, of taking your eye off the ball.”
68 / evaluation
“Even despite all that, the game just got way harder for them because they went from the people painting the targets on the back of John Doerr and other people to now, they're the ones with the targets on their backs.”
69 / evaluation
“Because of that and because the relationship with a Benchmark board member who is almost like a co-founder, and the entrepreneur is so tight, and the communication is so frequent—we talked to founders who said, I'd speak to my board member every week and we talked to other people who said, we're texting or calling every single day—this is really a tight knit relationship in how they think about the board role.”
70 / evaluation
“When nobody has any incentive to claim credit for anything because everyone already has the best job at the best firm, then it forces even the most competitive people of which they all were unbelievably competitive people to have a sense of teamwork, that just wouldn't have happened otherwise.”
71 / evaluation
“I don't know why everyone made it out to be this big deal because Silicon Valley runs on trust, love, sunshines.”
72 / evaluation
“It's hard to underwrite because any LP that you talk to will tell you that it's not just the track records that we're looking at, it's not just the meetings we're having, and it's not just the relationship we have with these individuals.”
73 / prediction
“I think before the IPO, but after eBay is clearly working and Meg Whitman is there, Benchmark had been doing for a while and would really embrace bringing in entrepreneurs and residents in doing the EIR strategy of company formation, bring somebody who wants to start a company in, house them at the firm, help them get started, bring the whole partnership together to help them, and incubate the company.”
74 / recommendation
“Hey, leave your lucrative successful executive search firm, because if you come here, you can make big bets.”