- Benchmark / VC
- It is a wee bit eerie to see, in hindsight, how the Benchmark boys’ original notion of a partnership of equals turned out to have been echoed in impersonal performance statistics. Even the partners themselves would never have guessed in advance that four and a half years after Benchmark’s founding, of the five investments that were the firm’s all-time biggest hits to date, no two had been discovered and directed by the same partner: five hits, five partners.
- A group of three young venture capitalists in Menlo Park—Bruce Dunlevie, Bob Kagle, and Andy Rachleff—decided to step free of their old firms, and with software entrepreneur Kevin Harvey they set up Benchmark Capital.
- Entrepreneurs who sought venture funding usually did not need to invest any more personal money into the venture than they had already spent to bring it to life. But some venture capitalists did demand more. Arthur Rock, the senior dean of American venture capitalists and an early investor in Intel, always insisted whenever his venture firm put money into a start-up that the entrepreneur co-invest one third of his total net worth, whether it be large or small. If the entrepreneur was extremely wealthy, the venture firm had higher expectations about his co-investing. The venture guys didn’t want the high-net-worth entrepreneur to regard the start-up as a hobby. To prove commitment, he was asked to have skin in the game, and that was what Beirne asked of Borders,
- On the golf course the other day, he said, a friend had floated a theory that leaders, in business or anything else, are driven by demons. The best guys have them—implacable, subterranean demons that are the source of greatness.
- Daniel Webster: “There is always room at the top.”
- No company looks better than the one that professes it does not need your money.
- Kagle gently cautioned Beirne: “We all have our blind spots, right? Our greatest strength is our greatest weakness. And I think in this case, Dave, we’re all conscious of the fact that there’s a lot of marquee players around this thing. You’re all about marquee players. So we need to make sure that you’re not getting too colored by that relative to all the other stuff.” “Salesmen are more likely to be sold,” Rachleff added.
- What the partners were looking for were categories that were ripe for “disintermediation”—removing a middle layer in the distribution chain. In this case, that layer was the twelve thousand or so art galleries in the country
- “There sure are a lot of signs,” Rachleff repeated. He wasn’t concerned about Benchmark’s overall reputation being badly damaged. “The amazing thing about our business is, everyone forgets the losers—they remember the winners.”
- Rachleff pointed out that in a portfolio, the emotions that Beirne would experience would always be biased toward the end of the spectrum representing pain. “The amazing thing is it hurts more on the downside than the good feelings on the upside.”
- “That’s my experience—three orders of magnitude,” Dunlevie quickly agreed. “Yeah,” Rachleff said, and then redid the ratio of intensity of pleasure versus pain. “One-X versus fifty-X.”
- Bob Kagle could not take much pleasure in the event either, imagining, as he did, whispers that the eBay success was a fluke, akin to picking up a winning lottery ticket. He found himself working all the harder after eBay, to silence criticism that he had not actually heard but that he could imagine, beyond his hearing. One monkey don’t make no show, he’d say.
- When the Benchmark partners got together, most days, most of the time, their conversations were interrupted by jokes, laughter, word play, self-confessed foibles, and still more laughter. They positively reveled in one another’s company.
- Gurley
- The cultural fit had to be just right, too. It was this issue that the partners would spend the most time agonizing over. The five Benchmark partners felt keenly the closeness of a basketball team; in moments of private vanity they liked to think of themselves as the Chicago Bulls in the early nineties, but it wasn’t apt—this was a team that was knocking down wins but without a single dominating presence like Michael Jordan. So maintaining the chemistry that permitted all to feel that the others brought out their individual best was regarded as paramount, even if it meant Benchmark could not expand.
- Beirne added his own high praise, which was that the attention Gurley received as a sought-after speaker at industry gatherings had secured for Gurley “a lot of mindshare.”
- You think he’d be a good investor?” asked Bruce Dunlevie. “I do, but the reason I do is because he’s a rare combination of highly intellectually curious and humble. I think he really is open to questioning his own thought process and what’s really working, what’s not working.”
- Benchmark’s self-proclaimed “fundamentally better architecture” was based on a bedrock tenet: equal partners, without hierarchical separation, with equal votes and equal compensation. They had used it brilliantly from the beginning to differentiate themselves from the rest of the firms on Sand Hill Road.
- Bill doesn’t know what hiring people is all about. He wants to learn it all. He’s a total learn-it-all guy. He was asking me questions: ‘How do you spend your time? How do you recruit? What do you look for? What do you ask people? What do you do?’ ” “He’s pretty humble,” said Rachleff. Beirne agreed, and added, “He does a very good job at the shows. He doesn’t just stand in the back and not talk to anybody—he’s out talking to everybody.” “How old is he?” asked Kagle. “He’s thirty-two.” “He’s a mature thirty-two, too.”
- Harvey had also been impressed by his willingness to chase a wild boar down a steep cliff. “He is kind of an animal,” Harvey said with manifest respect. “I love that,” said Kagle.
- Kagle said to Harvey, “Okay, make him the offer.” Harvey turned to Gurley. “First, I want to know if you’ll take it.” This was the way Harvey preferred to seal a deal with an entrepreneur: to secure the agreement before bringing out the term sheet with all of the details. Here Harvey feared that if he brought out the terms of the partnership offer, Gurley’s analytical bent would lead him to say, “Okay, I’ll take this home and think about it.” Harvey wanted him to show trust that the partners had put together a generous package that accorded him fully equal status from day one. Gurley came through and, without asking to see the terms, accepted on the spot.
- Gurley cast cold water on the proposal to go public, however, by asking, “Is it built to win?” He explained, “GM is built to last, but it’s got so much bureaucracy, it’s not going anywhere.” Maybe “built to last” was not the right criterion to optimize on.
- eBay
- When eBay, a small Internet auction company based in San Jose, California, sought venture capital, it had to pass an informal test administered by the venture guys before they would consider making an investment: Was there a reasonably good likelihood that the investors could make ten times their money within three years?
- It was late 1996, and eBay’s online auction business had been solidly profitable since it was launched; the company did not need a cent. But Pierre Omidyar, twenty-nine, the original founder, and his new partner, Jeff Skoll, thirty-one, were the rare entrepreneurs who knew they needed to hire a CEO and other seasoned executives with skills they lacked. It appeared to them that the only way they would be able to attract people with deeper management experience than they had was by obtaining the imprimatur of a well-regarded venture capital firm. Selling a minority share of their equity to venture capitalists was the intermediate step they had to take to get the good people they sought.
- Over the next two weeks, he met with Omidyar outside of Benchmark’s office and discovered that he was an anomalous kind of engineer, one who was consumed by the idea of community—every other sentence, he spoke about the eBay community, building the community, learning from the community, protecting the community. It was a passion similar to what, in Bob-speak, Kagle had for deals that brought out the humanity; that’s what Kagle liked most of all, the humanity. The more Omidyar talked about his community vision, the more Kagle, as he put it, was “lovin’ him—this guy is good people.” And Omidyar felt the same way about Kagle.
- EBay was an anomaly: a profitable company that was able to self-fund its growth and that turned to venture capital solely for contacts and counsel. No larger lesson can be drawn. When Benchmark wired the first millions to eBay’s bank account, the figurative check was tossed into the vault—and there it would sit, unneeded and undisturbed.
- By temperament, Skoll could not help but pour himself into the work in a scarily total fashion—once he started at eBay, he worked hundred-hour weeks for the next two and a half years. But he wasn’t driven by materialist hungers, and he thought of himself not as a businessperson but as a writer.
- EBay had an enormous advantage over the competition that it only then, under challenge, was coming to appreciate: a nicely balanced critical mass of sellers and buyers in each of hundreds of categories. This delicate balance had been achieved through the natural evolution of the eBay ecosystem, without the intervention of any guiding hand. If in any given category there were too many sellers compared with buyers, the sellers would have been discouraged and quick to jump to eBay’s rivals to try their luck there. If there were too many buyers, and in order to win an auction one had to offer up a ludicrously high price, this too would have led to mass defections. Fortunately for eBay, the number of sellers and buyers, while growing exponentially, had remained well apportioned. EBay’s users remained loyal for another reason: feedback ratings. Buyers, after a transaction, could send in a report about their experience with the seller, which future prospective buyers could consult; sellers had an identical opportunity to evaluate their experience with the buyer. Over time, both sellers and buyers accumulated a number of positive-feedback ratings at eBay, a neatly quantifiable reputation, that they were loath to abandon. The eBay “community” stayed put.
- “That’s the biggest risk in the whole thing,” Kagle said. “In fact I can argue with you guys very persuasively that keeping this low profile we’ve had in the company has been absolutely the healthiest thing to do. Absolutely the healthiest thing to do. We’ve already broken the systems a couple times, in spite of that. So we’ve been barely able to manage the traffic operationally so far.” Kagle said there had been a second benefit. “This organic growth has led to this very nice set of community values; people are honest, people treat each other fairly, there’s not a lot of scamming going on in it. And if you turn up the volume way high, the woodwork gets filled with a lot of weird guys, and the whole tone of the thing could change. So that’s a risk.”
- On the day after eBay’s IPO, when Pierre Omidyar, just back from New York, stood on Benchmark’s terrace, he observed that the world had imputed strategic savvy to the company that it did not really have. “Our system didn’t scale,” he said, “so we didn’t grow big enough to attract competition. Everybody thought we were flying below the radar screen on purpose.” He gave a little laugh.
- Up until early summer 1998, eBay’s primary competition was Jerry Kaplan’s Onsale Exchange, which had launched in October 1997 and had failed to attract a critical mass. When Bob Kagle introduced eBay to Benchmark’s limited partners at the annual meeting in early June, eBay had an 89 percent market share. Kagle said that the company anticipated major entrants, but “we think they don’t get it. We think they don’t understand all the stuff about the community and what’s really special and unique about this.” He also noted that in addition to first-mover advantage, economies of scale, and definitive selection in the various categories, eBay also enjoyed another advantage: Users faced high switching costs. “After you get this reputation built up online,” Kagle explained, “you’ve got all these people who have dealt with you, you’ve got seventy-five people who’ve said good things about you. That’s a pretty fundamental thing.”
- A good business will attract good competitors. This eBay’s executives knew in the abstract, but like the abstract concept of war, the theory necessarily bore a limited relationship to the thing itself.
- But knowing that the CEO was personally fielding calls from angry customers when they could not find someone to speak with in his department would provide all the incentive he needed, and she knew it.
- Priceline
- Our biggest competition, Walker explained, was cars and couches; Priceline’s system “collected demand” from people who would not otherwise be flying. And by promising to get back with an answer within one hour—why one hour? Glasses in an hour, photos in an hour; consumers already understand the unit—Walker was deliberately creating in the consumers’ mind the idea that Priceline was a virtual gladiator fighting on their behalf: “It’s going to take us an hour to knock on everybody’s door, punch him in the jaw, give him your offer, and get back to you with an answer, but be assured we’re out there working for you!”
- Since we’re not actively shopping for capital, Walker summed up, this isn’t about the money per se. It’s really about two teams—your team, our team. We’ve got a multibillion-dollar asset here if played right. We’re not greedy; we’re not pigs. We’re players. Game theorists that we are, we understand the game trade. And we’re not afraid to make a trade for the right set of circumstances.
- Other
- The very reason that start-ups had an advantage over these incumbents—speed in execution—was the same reason that the old companies acted so slowly, even when the task was to organize a new entity that would be free to compete without organizational drag. “So they know they’re in a tough spot.” Still, the inertial drag in a big company was the most powerful factor in the equation.
- Edward Chancellor’s history of financial manias, Devil Take the Hindmost, urging them to read it. Chancellor’s account of England’s railway mania of 1845 had made an especially deep impression on Kagle, who saw all of the similarities between the railroad, then hailed as a revolutionary advance without historical parallel, and the Internet. In both cases the technological change was as fundamental as its champions claimed, but investors’ enthusiasm about imminent opportunities to reap fortunes moved beyond the reasonable. All businesses must earn a profit in order to be viable; Kagle refused to relinquish this simple truth.
- Kevin Harvey took the view that Red Hat could avoid a frontal challenge to Microsoft’s business model; he worked to reposition the company away from the business of selling packaged software in boxes (Harvey’s old business) and move it toward providing support services and a central website for the Linux community. The only way Microsoft could compete with Red Hat, he would say gleefully, “is by abandoning five billion dollars of annual revenue, which they can’t!”
- His firm, TVI, had funded Microsoft, Compaq, and other notable technology companies, but it was not these that McMurtry wished to talk about. Rather, he wanted to talk about the companies that did not succeed. He recalled that in the mid-1970s, having been in the business a number of years, he had become depressed because “out of ten start-ups, we would lose three or four—lose all our money. Maybe just get our money back in two deals. Then you’ve got two or three where you get one to five times your money. That leaves just one or two deals [out of ten] where you make more than five times your money.” The high payoffs for one or two never erased the pain of those that did not survive: “You feel so responsible for the disasters.”
- The claim was empty bluster, however. Mike Moritz, of Sequoia Capital, peeled back the truth with mordant detachment: “One of the dirty little secrets of the Valley is that all the jobs-creation we like to talk about is probably less than the Big Three automakers have laid off in the last decade. One of the best ways to have a nice Silicon Valley company is to keep your head count as low as possible for as long as possible.”
What I got out of it
- Really fun book that gives an inside look at VC investing - power law returns and their importance really stuck out to me, as did the culture at Benchmark and how they thought about their investments