EP 90: Eric Vishria (General Partner, Benchmark Capital) Behind The Scenes of Benchmark’s Boldest Bets

Eric Vishria and I both got into venture in 2014 and both focus on enterprise software. In episode 90, we discuss Eric’s unique approach to investments and what he looks for in founders and companies. We go back and forth on his model versus mine, as well as Eric's background, having grown up in Memphis and graduating from Stanford at 19 years old before joining LoudCloud, which became Opsware with Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen. (0:00) Intro (1:20) The role of venture capitalists (5:52) Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs (12:00) commonalities in investments that you haven't done (14:05) The best CEOs (17:40) The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Business (21:16) The role of market trends in investment decisions (27:46) Reflecting on investment successes (39:41) Benefits as an investor vs board member (42:17) From Memphis to Stanford (44:29) The early days at LoudCloud (46:49) The Aspiration to be a Great CEO (49:33) The Journey to Joining Benchmark (53:20) Bringing new people to Benchmark (1:01:26) The Evolution of Early Stage Investing (1:14:07) What career advice would you give? (1:19:56) The value of Benchmark’s Dinners Produced: Rashad Assir & Leah Clapper Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Executive Producer: Josh Machiz 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-logan-bartlett-show/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show. On this episode, what you're going to hear is a conversation I have with Eric Vishria. Eric is a general partner at Benchmark, where we've been fortunate enough to share two investments together over the years. Eric and I both got into venture in 2014 and both focused on enterprise software. And so, we have a discussion about how he views investments and what he looks for in founders, as well as companies, which is vastly different than the way I think about the world. And so, a fun conversation, kind of going back and forth on his model versus mine, as well as Eric's background, having grown up in Memphis and graduating Stanford at 19 years old, before joining LoudCloud, which became Opsware with Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen. Really fun conversation with one of the more thoughtful investors

• 0:48Logan Bartlett?

  in venture capital that I've really enjoyed getting to know over the last couple of years. You'll hear that conversation with Eric here now. All right, Eric, thanks for doing this.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Thanks, Rob.

• 0:57Logan Bartlett?

  Right above your office. We've never recorded here in our woodside office.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I appreciate you coming down to do that.

• 1:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah. So, you and I are both venture capitalists. I think we got into the industry around the same time. When did you start at Benchmark?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  2014.

• 1:10Logan Bartlett?

  2014, okay. That was 2014 as well. We invest broadly in similar stuff. We had two shared investments at Amplitude and Acuity. I think they would be remiss if we didn't shout it out. But I think how we think about things is vastly different, and I've enjoyed picking your brain. Part of that's probably a function of stage. You're earlier, definitely a little later. But I always enjoy asking, like, how you think about things. And so, one of the, I guess, just to start with, what are you looking for when you're taking meetings with entrepreneurs or meeting with businesses?

• 1:42Speaker 01

  That's the right question. I don't know if I have the right answer.

• 1:46Logan Bartlett?

  You told me a couple of months ago that, like, within the first five minutes, you met a CEO and you were like, we're gonna, I'm gonna make this investment.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  That happens to me a lot.

• 1:54Logan Bartlett?

  I don't really know what that, you know.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  That happens to me a lot. I would say that, like, if I look at the investments that I've made over the course of my time at Benchmark over the last nine years or nine and a half years, I think all of them actually have that element, where it was like, you had this feeling very, very quickly, that this is the kind of person you want to work with, that it's an idea that...

• 2:22Speaker 01

  is really special and it could be something big. I think those are all, those are characteristics. Those are the three things that I would like say. And I think part of what manifests for me is when the entrepreneur makes you see the world differently. Like they say something typically very early on that like you haven't heard before. You haven't read about before, like no one else has articulated, like it's just a unique view of the market. You're like, huh, that's plausible.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  And then they go on to explain the intricacies of it and you're like, wait a minute, maybe there's something there. You know, and then the question becomes like, well, okay, let's say everything they said was true. Like if it worked, could it be a big valuable business? That's, that's like a very, very important question. You know, and then like, do they have an angle of attack on the market, not just the insight, but also an angle that is defensible and not replicable and blah, blah, blah. And so like, I, I think those are kind of the things that they put out there, which is like, it is unique. It relates to this whole, do venture capitalists have a thesis or not? Actually is a, is a very interesting question. You're preempting some of my questions. So you are a non thesis guy.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think part of it, what I realized on it and then maybe a better articulation of saying, whether it's thesis or not, thesis is made as false categories. It's like, who comes up with the thesis? And it's, it's, I think it's my view that entrepreneurs have the thesis. It's our job to assess whether we believe the thesis or not, right? And so like they have the thesis and, and because if we have a thesis, then like a lot of people have it. If an investor has it, then like a lot of people have it. And, um, and if a lot of people have it, like that probably is not going to be that big an outcome. Like it's just, you know, that's the thing. No, I think like, to be fair, you know, one of the things that's weird about our business in venture capital is

• 4:29Speaker 01

  there's a lot of models of success. There's not one model. There's not one path. There's many paths. And there are probably venture capitalists out there who are smart enough to have a thesis and be futurists and like see the world and see where it's going and everything else. I'm not one of those people. And so. I love it when I'm like sitting in a meeting and someone's like, wait a minute. Like, this is how this is gonna go. And everybody thinks this, but it's really gonna be this way. And you're like, huh. And it makes you think. And then you're like, well, one, I've never heard that before. Two, like, it's cogent, right?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  And three, if that happens, it could actually be really, really big. And then they have a path to kind of get there. And then that gets, then that gets you really excited. And, and so I think that, that tends to happen to me on investments.

• 5:30Logan Bartlett?

  You mentioned person, idea, and big was what I took down. And so I wanted to construct each of those. But so on the person's side, obviously, there's the articulation. There's the viewpoint, the thesis that the person's able to articulate. And then you mentioned cogent, so that's also kind of tying into that. But are there characteristics of, I mean, you've backed very young people. I don't know, how old was I when you invested, 23, 24?

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, something like that, young.

• 5:55Logan Bartlett?

  You backed older people, you backed experienced people. So there's not one heuristic across that type. But is there a personality characteristic or?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  They're all learners. They just learn. And so like, I, just one of my big conclusions is it just doesn't matter where you start. The only thing that matters is the slope. And so you have these people who are just like, they're just learning. And you're like, you know what? Like, our business is long-term, right? We're gonna work on these companies. I've been working on Confluent, been working with Amplitude and Confluent teams for 10 years now, almost 10 years. Nine and a half years since I got there. And it took a long, long time. So you have a lot of time for that, for that rate of learning to compound. And you have to have luck and you have to have the right market and like all those other things have to line up, but if someone's learning at those rates, you're just like,

• 6:49Speaker 01

  wow. I had this, uh, the, the, my first meeting with Saji eventually, it, it felt like he hooked a hose up to my head and just like sucked out everything he could. Um, and now that's, that's the only real series B that I've done, um, that I've led for us. And I knew nothing about the market. It's, it's vertical SaaS for biotech. So I knew nothing about the market, you know, vertical SaaS is very in vogue now. You and I are one's the other, but, but at the time it wasn't like, nobody thought of it. It was just like, eh, it's kind of whatever. And then, so it was kind of vertical SaaS in a market I didn't really understand and like

• 7:33Speaker 01

  everything else. But I think two things occurred to me in that meeting. One is like, wow, that is a special individual. Um, and then two, it's a SaaS business. Like I, I kind of know SaaS a little bit. So like, I can kind of work with it. So like, those were like, I mean, two takeaways. And then the second meeting, um, I met his co-founder, Afu, and we met together at their office, the three of us. And I had some questions and everything else. I was like, hey, they, they made a claim that they had never seen a customer churn. You know, at the time it had 50 or 60 customers, which is pretty unusual. Like, you know, we look at SaaS companies all the time to get to 50 or 60 and never have a churn like is very rare, very rare. And so you're like, huh,

• 8:16Speaker 01

  that's interesting. Like that's worth it. And so I was like, I want to go through every customer. So they pulled up a spreadsheet because it wasn't, no CRM at the time. And I remember very distinctly the floor was sloped in the office. So you like had to hold on to the table so that your chair wouldn't drift, which is also a good sign that they had shitty office. And we just like went line by line through the spreadsheet and like one or the other of them would talk about every account and what was happening at every account. And then, you know, we would ask, I would ask questions about different things and they'd ask questions back to me. And like, why are you asking that question?

• 8:50Speaker 01

  And then I realized, I was like, shit, there's not one of them. There's two of them. There are two of them at the company like this? Um, so that was, uh, that was, that was pretty special.

• 8:59Logan Bartlett?

  And you can't bullshit that level of like, understanding, like when you're

• 9:02Speaker 01

  And that level of curiosity and you just can't. And, you know, we work with Spencer at Amplitude and, uh, Mike at Acuity and, and obviously Jay at Confluent and, and the whole bunch of them, and they're all like, all, all the ones I work with are like that.

• 9:18Logan Bartlett?

  Do you have like a single thing that to figure out that learning slope? Uh, or is it just a feeling when you sort of drill in and the questions they ask?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  I think it's a feeling. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are trained to sell. And like, we all have to sell. Like at the end of the day, you and I are glorified salespeople.

• 9:38Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, fucking podcast.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And so like, we're all selling all the time and, and like a CEO has to sell a lot. Like that's part of their job. It's a huge part of their job, whether it's to investors or customers or employees. And, um, as part of that process in a fundraise, you want to feel like they're engaging authentically, like they're, they're selling, but they're also listening, like they're, they're hearing, they're engaging. Um, and, and maybe a good, a good way to say that, uh, which, which my partner Sarah uses is like they're truth seeking. Like they're seeking truth, like they're trying to get to fundamental ground of like, what is it? And what the right way to build a company is. And the reality is if you mess with entrepreneurs, it's just like,

• 10:26Speaker 01

  none of us are investing in your idea, your million in ARR, your three million in ARR. Like, you know, sometimes you get these decks and it's like a company's at a million ARR and they're showing their NRR and all these metrics. And you're like, who cares? Like maybe, like none of that is extrapolatable, uh, or most of the time it isn't extrapolatable. And so you're, you're investing in what could be and what the potential could be. And the reality is because the future is unknown, you are going to encounter as an entrepreneur and as someone who's building and leading a company, you're going to encounter all kinds of things that you can't imagine, you can't foresee. And so what you're really betting

• 11:09Speaker 01

  on is someone's ability to navigate that obstacle course and those unknown obstacles in the future. And so I think that's why it like it shows up. And you can, and I think you can tell through the interactions, a lot of times you can tell it's not perfect, but I think you can tell a lot of times in the interactions, just like how they think about things and are they, are they truth seeking in that way? And are they trying to like learning it better?

• 11:37Logan Bartlett?

  Are there any commonalities in investments that you haven't done that you wished you would have?

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, actually, I think, uh, the, the mistake is underestimating the trend because you have questions about the person.

• 11:57Logan Bartlett?

  Got it.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  So the trend just overwhelmed.

• 12:02Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  It just worked out itself. And then, you know, maybe the person underest, you underestimated the person too, but like.

• 12:08Logan Bartlett?

  It, that's a hard one because ultimately, especially when you're investing, you don't know the other companies that are to come down that are identified the same trend. And so we were a battery, we were invested in Blue Jeans and then Zoom came in or in Vision and then Figma came in, right? And there's these trends that are very true. And if you look, you can get false precision about like, oh, well, it's the best company out there, right? Which is true. Both those companies were the best companies until they were.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Until they weren't. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think it's just like one of these dynamics where, you know, like I, we saw the stuff like Series C, right? Which was this, I think it was the Series C.

• 12:52Logan Bartlett?

  The all-tenor.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think he's out.

• 12:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  And do.

• 12:56Logan Bartlett?

  Everyone saw that. No one wanted to do it.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  No one wanted to do it, right? It was like 2 million a year or something.

• 12:59Logan Bartlett?

  For like small customers.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Small customers.

• 13:02Logan Bartlett?

  Burning a lot. And I was like, okay, so the, the bet is like they're going to out AWS on AWS. It's so funny. That was the exact thing I said internally at Battery. I was like, come on, they're going to, this is AWS, and this was AWS at its like.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  P, P pound. And, uh,

• 13:23Speaker 01

  You know, it's like.

• 13:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  That that that really, uh, that was a bad, bad read.

• 13:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Um, you know, on it and and maybe not understanding or believing enough the technological advantage or whatever else, um, that ended up being very real and durable.

• 13:43Logan Bartlett?

  I don't think I've said this here, uh, before, but one of the analogies I've started to use more and more is like the best CEOs see a flame and they're like, that looks hot. And then they see a stove and they're like, that looks hot. And then they see a bonfire and they're like, that looks hot. And they ask for help before they touch any of them.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:01Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, the very good CEOs touch the flame and they're like, oh gosh, that was fucking hot. And then they see the bonfire and they're like, that reminds me of that stove there, that flame thing. And it's like, that's very good. The best ones like notice that there's smoke emanating from it and touching it probably isn't a good thing, but it is nice when there's that iterative learning loop.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  So my encapsulation of that very same idea, which I said is like, the best CEOs are making all new mistakes.

• 14:32Logan Bartlett?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  You're always making mistakes.

• 14:35Logan Bartlett?

  Totally, of course.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  But they're all new.

• 14:37Logan Bartlett?

  That's funny. As you think about something being big, there's kind of the moats and the defensibility. There's the the size of the market as what it could be versus the rate of growth versus what it is today. How do you sort of think about, uh, what the big element of it is?

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of different ways and this is one that we can get wrong. And because like a lot of companies that start out nichey end up being really, really big.

• 15:04Logan Bartlett?

  That was a knock on Benchling.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a knock on Benchling and and like in a lot of the vertical companies. Um, but it's a it's been a knock on a bunch of things.

• 15:12Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  It was a knock on Shopify really early and which is.

• 15:15Logan Bartlett?

  A knock on Viva.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And so like, there's so many where it's just like, well, okay, so like, what is what is big mean? And and actually, just one other point about this is like, it you actually want to be kind of tight to start because like then you have a chance to like dominate and build value and get the word out and so forth. You know, the big thing that I kind of think about is, is there something changing in the world that the company has nothing to do with?

• 15:45Speaker 01

  But such that the future state of the world would yield a bigger outcome for that company, if that makes sense. That's poorly articulated, so let me try it in a different way, which is, I use this analogy sometimes, which is, there's the boat. So every entrepreneur comes in and they pitch their boat. And they're like, hey, we have a better hull design, and we have a better reading system, and we have a better crew, and like so forth, new materials, whatever it is. And the most important thing isn't actually the boat, it's the wind. Now, the boat designer has nothing to do with the wind, the wind is a wind, at least at first. But

• 16:31Speaker 01

  in a strong wind, like even the shittiest dinghy will fly. And if there's no wind, an America's Cup boat is gonna sit there. And so like the wind is like what is changing in the world or in the market that is enabling this new thing to be and can allow it a chance to exist. And so I think that is like a really important question of like what, you know, what can be big. And so I think if you kind of go back, and you kind of like take a look at a Shopify or you look at something like that, it's just like, well, like, is e-commerce going to be enormous? And like, is that going to be the way of the future? Then you can, you might, you might come to a different conclusion than you would have initially.

• 17:14Logan Bartlett?

  What's your perspective on our official incumbents right now?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Um, I look, I think it's a, it's an incredibly important technology. I think that the, how it is going to impact things and, you know, what benefit is going to go to incumbents versus not, like all these are all things that are out there. Like, what's my original thought on it? I don't know. I don't think I have an original thought on it, on where it's gonna go, or what it could be. But I do have conviction that there's a lot of value to be built.

• 17:46Logan Bartlett?

  Kind of like a GDP layer.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Add a GDP layer.

• 17:50Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Add a GDP, add a GDP layer. And, you know, figuring out like where it's going to go and how it's going to be attributed is really hard. I think, you know, my partner Sarah had had this post about like, basically you can sell the work now. Like, you know, we used to sell software. Now you can sell the work, like you can sell the work that the AI is doing, which is potentially a much, much larger market.

• 18:14Logan Bartlett?

  Like the output.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  The output. Yeah, exactly. Like one of the the recent investments that we've led, which is is not even announced, but it's basically, they're like, yeah, everyone's going after these like software tools dollars. But like the labor dollars are 10 times that that are being that are being spent there. And like, that's what the AI can do.

• 18:34Logan Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  And that's such a very powerful idea and and very expanding in terms of what it can be.

• 18:41Logan Bartlett?

  You guys haven't done any like model layer.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Any foundational.

• 18:45Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Foundation model, which is a little different. I mean, the funding and the the structure is a little different than I think you guys are typically playing.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Typically do, yeah.

• 18:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Thanks to what we've inherited and and the success of the founders and prior partners and everything else. We have a lot of flexibility in terms of what we can do. And so we try not to be religious about, you know, hey, it's like people will ask you, what check size are you in? Or sometimes entrepreneurs ask you, I'm sure they ask me, like, where are you in your fund cycle? And I'm like, don't worry about that.

• 19:19Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Um, you know, that's not like an important question.

• 19:23Logan Bartlett?

  If any entrepreneur wants to know, I think they're fairly evergreen. I know you have different fund structures, but I think your LPs are.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  We're going to be fine. And so we try not to be constrained about that. So I think if if there's an opportunity, um, you know, that we really believe in, we'll do something weird. Like, we're not, we're not unwilling to do that. Um, but the core of the model is partnering with early stage companies in a high engagement way.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  And, you know, which is typically less than 10 people, often no, no revenue. You know, sometimes a million or two like it's, and that's what partnering with. And we're partnering with them on a journey that hopefully lasts a really long time.

• 20:05Logan Bartlett?

  Do you have any views, you said, said no, no specific insights on the artificial intelligence? But there's, it's hard not to sort of think about the implications of it for software where we both spend a fair amount of time. And the dislocation that could occur, I, I, I think probably the vast majority goes to some of the incumbents. Much in the same way, mobile Salesforce was Salesforce, right?

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure, sure.

• 20:31Logan Bartlett?

  Probably, you know, AI Salesforce is probably Salesforce.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 20:34Logan Bartlett?

  But like, maybe not, maybe Salesforce trips up and some of that execution. Anything that you're thinking about with regard to new attack vectors or dislocation or opportunity sets? That the outcome one is interesting or the output one.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  But yeah, I think, I think, you know, if I kind of say this, call it three categories of stuff right now. So there's the foundational model stuff, which is, I think it's very expensive. It's very quickly depreciating. It's maybe the fastest depreciating thing in human history. And so like, that's the foundational models game. But obviously if you have one and it ends up being really defensible, you're in a very powerful position. You know, we can argue about whether it will be defensible or not, you know, it doesn't, doesn't matter.

• 21:19Logan Bartlett?

  They seem to get commoditized barely.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  They get commoditized very quick. That's what I mean by the fastest depreciating thing in human history. Like just, it's just like, you spend, you know, $250 million building one and six months later, people build them for two and a half million. Like, that's just like, we have never seen that ever.

• 21:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Like buying a Bentley is a better investment.

• 21:39Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And like driving off the lot.

• 21:42Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  And so, you know, two, you have.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  There's a lot of like ML infrastructure like kind of companies and you know that are basically making it easier to manage the stuff, making it easier, whatever. And you know, there's been fits and starts in that area and there have been things that are working and not working there. I think, you know, there's a question on those is really like, hey, how much of it do the cloud providers take? How much of it is there room for an individual new provider? You know, are you just like bundling and unbundling maybe, but maybe that's all business. So, you know, that's kind of that piece. And the third one is vertical stuff, which is like, okay, it's like an application, like we're going after it and you're kind of delivering some value to the customers. And I think that's where

• 22:31Speaker 01

  we see tremendous revenue traction, right? Like all of these companies, like if you look at the Jaspers of the world and, you know, Copia AI and, and Writer and, you know, those types of companies have just even up, like they've had tremendous revenue traction, like amazing. And they're growing. And I think the question for them is just like, well, what's defensible? Like there's also, they've had many, many copycats also and, and the wrappers have been thin. And so like each one of these areas has a different set of questions that you have to kind of have a point of view or conviction on. And, you

• 23:13Speaker 01

  know, it's been, it's been interesting for us to kind of go through that.

• 23:17Logan Bartlett?

  Those are kind of the B2B ones. The ones that I don't even know how to think about are the, the net new sort of weird AI stuff.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 23:26Logan Bartlett?

  And the character AIs and the journeys or the runways or the ones that are just like, this is different. It's more consumer, prosumer or whatever. But like, I don't even, that's the one where you could end up being really wrong to not participate in them, right? Some of those other ones, like we know what the foundation model, I don't know, but the infrastructure tooling stuff, we sort of know what those businesses look like. We know what Mongo looks like and Confluent looks like. And, and we sort of know what vertical software companies look like, right? These other ones, people talking to bots all day. I don't, yeah.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have no idea. You know, what do you do? You keep looking at them.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  And probably where you believe.

• 24:07Logan Bartlett?

  Where does price fit? You guys are almost entirely series A, some series B with some exceptions, I guess. But how does price fit into that?

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Like price of the company?

• 24:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, like valuation you're willing to pay versus not.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  It's funny. It matters, but it doesn't.

• 24:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, totally. I mean, everything you just said would lead me to be like, I mean, if we want to do it, we'll do it.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  I think that's the reality. There's a problem on it, which is price isn't the right indicator of it. So like price doesn't matter. Ownership matters. And like, you know, we're kind of traditionalist and you could poo poo us for being traditionalist in that way. But but we're traditionalist in that sense. And the reason is, is because of the level of engagement, right? We work on boards for a decade plus. That means that you're kind of constrained by the number of opportunities you can have that you can work on.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  And and we're high engagement with those CEOs like today. Before this, what's one o'clock in the afternoon, 1:30, I've talked to four CEOs that I work with today. So like if you're in that kind of place and you're having that level of engagement with people, then you're time constrained. And so you just have to get return on that in order for our business model to work. And so our business model is kind of dependent on ownership in that way. You know, Peter said this to me like very early on, right after I joined and I was like looking at a company. And I was like, oh, well, maybe I would do it here, but I wouldn't do it here. And he was like, that's like sloppy venture capital thinking, like stop. At the round, he was like, look, either like you think it can be like a multi-billion dollar company and you believe that,

• 25:47Speaker 01

  or you don't. And if you do, it doesn't matter. And if you don't, it doesn't matter. And so like, it kind of doesn't matter. And so like, there's an element of that, which is true. But of course, like the complexity is you do have to believe you can generate enough return on it, you know, to make the business model work and the opportunity cost justified, basically.

• 26:09Logan Bartlett?

  And so then when you're thinking about that, is there an underwriting, like are you thinking, hey, can this position be worth a billion dollars when you dream the dream? Or is it, is there anything, or is it just a feeling?

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Well, I, um, every, every one, I would say every one of us, especially probably a little bit different in this regard in terms of how we think about it. People say things like we underwrite it to a certain return, or we construct this probability curve, or like whatever. I don't do any of that. I mean, I think the reality is, like, you know, if it's successful, it's going to be successful beyond our wildest dreams.

• 26:43Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  And like, so it just doesn't matter. And I want to be part of companies, and I think we want to work with companies and we aspire to work with companies that have that, that have that, like, you could have never imagined.

• 26:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  And, you know, they won't all be that way, and like, not everything works, and like, and, and that's okay. Like, I'm fine. I'm fine with trying and it not working. Like, it sucks, but like, I'm fine with that. But you want them to have that kind of special feeling where it's like, it could be, you know, enormous, and any probability curve I construct is just BS.

• 27:23Logan Bartlett?

  So you've had a fairly serendipitous run in 10 years. Your first investment was Confluent, which is now a, whatever, five, six, eight, 10, but whatever the, given the day.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Whatever it is today.

• 27:33Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, billion dollar valuation. Uh, we talked about Amplitude Public Company. So your first two were public, right? Uh, also Benchling, we mentioned, uh, Contentful's doing quite well. Kind of your first cohort of businesses, Cerebrus, we talked about Acuity and AMD, a bunch of, uh, interesting companies along the way. How much of, of this success do you think was guided by the, the structure of Benchmark and some of the ventureship you got from Peter and, uh, Gurley and whoever, whoever else in the early days of you joining up, um, versus?

• 28:12Logan Bartlett?

  Your own kind of instincts on some of these, some of these things.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  I think a tremendous amount was just the structure and the model. And a tremendous amount was just luck, like right time, right place, like, you know, it turns out it was like good to be an enterprise SaaS investor, infrastructure investor.

• 28:30Logan Bartlett?

  You've gotten lucky, you're more than most, I will say.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, joining in 2014, it's like, it's pretty helpful.

• 28:36Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Multiple appreciations and all that.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:39Logan Bartlett?

  What would you attribute to Bill, like a learning from Bill that was helpful versus Peter, maybe? They're very different.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  They're very different. They're all very different. And Mitch and Matt were all, all like, those were the four.

• 28:51Logan Bartlett?

  That was the four.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Those were the four I joined was, was, you know, Mitch, who, you know, had Riot and Snap and Discord. And, and, and many others as, as his big companies. And then, you know, Matt Kohler, who's had a just unbelievable track record, both as an operator or not, and then Peter and Bill. Each of them is actually like different in, in terms of like what they, they view. And I, you know, if you kind of, and it just goes to this whole idea that there's no one model of success in venture capital, right? You know, Bill thinks a lot about like markets and value, where value is going to be attributed, how it could trade.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  You know, if it, if it were to grow up, he thinks a lot about like what the future state of the world is. He does think, he does think more about theses, like, like what's the thesis for this ahead of time? And, you know, I think that's, that's been talked about a lot. So like, he, he thinks forward a lot and kind of tries to imagine future states and like, and then goes and looks for all the companies in the category and stuff like that. You know, I think Peter's more founder driven and like he's more oriented around his, who's the individual and what makes that person tick and, and so forth. Yeah, exactly. You know, I, I think Matt is very trend driven in, in terms of how he is and Mitch, Mitch and Matt,

• 30:17Speaker 01

  but Mitch in particular has an artistic view of things that is impossible to replicate. Like, you just can't. It's like taste, you know, which is like impossible to describe and, and everything else. But in some ways, that's really unfair to all of them because they're all, they're all extraordinary. And You know, it's not that Peter doesn't think about markets because he obviously does. Not like Bill doesn't think about people. He obviously does and like and so forth. So it's kind of like. That's where the spike. That's where the spike is maybe is a way to think about it or where they kind of retreat in terms of their consideration.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Hey guys, I'm Jacob Efron, a partner of Logan's at Redpoint. Wanted to take a quick break from the episode to let you know that Redpoint's AI podcast, Unsupervised Learning, now has its own YouTube channel. We have an incredible set of guests really at the forefront of the AI revolution. So if you're interested in what's happening in AI, what it means for businesses in the world, definitely subscribe. Now back to the show.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  One of the beauties of the model is like you, you know, for, for a few years, it was five of us and so, and like all four of them are obviously incredibly accomplished. And so you're sitting in there and, and you're looking at every company and I would just, I would go to lots and lots of meetings with them, like initial pitches. You'll, we'll have two or three partners in initial pitches all the time. And, and you're like looking at it and you're seeing what questions they ask and you're like learning what they learn and, and, and you're kind of trying to debrief from them afterwards, like quickly in that. And like it's just, you're just absorbing as much as you possibly can in terms of how do you evaluate these things and, and everything else.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  And some of it does actually like sector actually does matter and it impacts these things, right? One of the reasons like, you know, software companies, SaaS companies, they kind of at the end of the day, at some level of scale, they all kind of look the same, right? Right? In terms of like what their P and L's look like and everything else. And so to some extent, like Peter doesn't have to think about how, as much about like how they would trade or what it would be worth because of like, yeah, it's a software company and like, and so like that piece is, is there. And obviously I'm talking about his enterprise portfolio, not his, not the Twitters and Yelps and. Amazing consumer successes. Exactly. And then, you know, it's just for Bill, like, but if you think about like marketplaces and other things, they actually trade radically differently.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  And they like can be valued very, very differently. So he does have to think about some of those elements as you're, as you're kind of going through it. And so it does matter like in those cases. The way our process works. To the extent we have a process is like, you know, you haven't a you meet someone and you get excited about it and then you pass the ball like I, you know, you you get another partner to engage on it to take a look while you're going off and doing your work and diligence on idea and opportunity and so forth. And you're spending time with entrepreneur, but you're having your other partners look at it and raise questions and you want them to raise questions and like ask questions and push back on you and and get excited and and like and so forth.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  And so it's an advocacy model. And then ultimately, you know, as as most venture capital firms, you you get them in front of everybody and then we like look at it and and then when you get feedback, you're kind of calibrating on this and and there's like lots of really good examples of of this for me. The cerebrus one really stands out because I think it was and who knows what will happen with the company, right? It's it's there've been periods of time where it was like, holy shit. And then there are periods of time where it's like, holy shit. And so I don't know, but it's been a really fun one for me to work on. But I think the story of how we came to invest most typifies the benchmark approach.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  And and I think it's one of the reasons that a whole bunch of other firms wouldn't have done it. So I meet Andrew on a Wednesday and I'm walking into the meeting. I tell my assistant, I'm like, why the fuck did I take this meeting? Like, I'm looking at a hardware company. This is 2016. Okay, this is before Nvidia ran. It's before Google launched the tensor, tensor processing unit, TPU. It's before any of it. So it's just like.

• 34:36Logan Bartlett?

  We we looked at this round at Fattery. Yeah, I think you might be I forget where it ended up landing, but I remember everyone being like, hang on, we have this software thing going on and we want to go to a chip thing. A lot of people got fired trying to do this.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, a lot of people like it. And so I go into the meeting and I'm like, why, why did I take this meeting? Right? And I didn't know Andrew before or the team. And so slide one's cover slide. Slide two is the team. I was like, wow, that's a really credible team. Like they built they built semiconductors, they built systems, they've done them at startups, which actually turns out to matter a lot and and really successful. And then slide three is is the GPU sucks for deep learning. It just happens to be 100 times better than the CPU.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  And it was one of those like,

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Fucking of course, like, but to the whole insight point that we were talking about earlier, it was just like, like, nobody said that before, like, nobody had said that before that I heard at that point in time, you know, and then he goes on and then the details matter goes on to articulate like, well, why, like, well, this is why it's better than a CPU, but this is why it's less suboptimal, like, and he had like four or five things that that were like very specific, like, you start to get very specific. And he's like, so what we propose to do is like, build something that is like, that is for deep learning. And, um, and then like the rest of the deck didn't understand, didn't understand. Like, I probably got to slide four and a half before I had no

• 36:12Speaker 01

  competency on it. So I come out in the meeting and I was like, wow, this is like really interesting. It's a really interesting idea. It's a really credible team. And like, if it worked, it could be like really big. And so I go out and I talked to, um, I talked to Mitch and Bill, I think about it. And, um, and they're like, yeah, just like this. And, and Bill, Bill gave me the really good advice. He was like, hey, we need the founders for this. We need the founders for this one. Benchmark founders. The benchmark founders. Yeah. We need it because, because none of, none of the group had done hardware. Like, we had no idea. So I called Bruce, um, and Bruce joined us. And so we met again on Thursday with, I don't know who all Mitch, Bruce, Bill, me, whoever else. And he goes

• 36:56Speaker 01

  through it. And I'm, I remember debriefing with Bruce afterwards, right? And he's like, look, he's like, as far as teams go, and like, the approach totally makes sense. He's like, but there's no market for this. And I was like, well, the one thing that I have a lot of confidence in is there's a market for this. Like deep learning, there will be a market for this, right? And so this, and, and, you know, and we kind of continued on and so forth. And Peter, in the end, actually, like, really, I think I wanted to do it. I had the hardware concern and Peter really encouraged me, um, after actually spending the night before, before he met it, trying to talk me out of it.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Um, but after they pitched, he, you know, and I think he'd say like, our job is to help enhance each other's instincts and your instinct was to go do it. So, so, but I think my, my point on it was, you know, it was a whole bunch of people coming together. With different views of the market and it was the collective whole that gave us the conviction to invest.

• 38:00Logan Bartlett?

  How do you think you've changed most as an investor since you joined Benchmark? I know you had, I've read, I don't know where this was from, but after your first year, you said, I've seen about 180 companies. The first few weeks I was like, oh my God, these are all.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Everyone, yeah.

• 38:14Logan Bartlett?

  So clearly not that anymore, but if you look back to 2014 versus now, what do you think?

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Lots of changes. I'd say I project forward a lot more. Like I think about the possibilities of what each company could be. Not next year or the year after, but I try to project forward three or five or seven years, like much, much more than I did before and try to think about like what those possibilities are, which both closes me off from some opportunities that I probably would have previously pursued and opens me up for new possibilities that I didn't. So it's kind of both good and bad, maybe. In terms of what I'm like looking for.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  I have a, I really even more than before prioritize and think about like the learning aspect of the entrepreneur. It's not, I think I, it took me a while to figure out that that's what I gravitate towards. Like that is the characteristic that I gravitate towards.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  You had a feeling initially, but it wasn't taken away. Now it turns out it matters. And part of the reason is because if you then project forward a bunch of years, you're like, what? Like there's all going to be a bazillion challenges. And you need someone who is going to be able to navigate them. And so like that, that's also been a big, big change.

• 39:38Logan Bartlett?

  Do you think being a founder and an executive at a, you know, big sized business benefits you more as an investor or a board member?

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Definitely as a board member.

• 39:50Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  No, not, not as an investor. The career investors are all better. Like they're, they're better.

• 39:56Logan Bartlett?

  How do you think the RockMelts experience did benefit you as an investor?

• 40:00Speaker 01

  I mean, I think I really learned the value and power of storytelling.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  And a narrative in that, you know, and just like what the the pieces are. And I think I also actually learned a lot about the fleet, you know, how ephemeral success can be. Because with Rockwell, like, we came out of the gates so hot and it was just like the list. And we like flew to 100,000 daily actives, which at that time was like a pretty good sized number in like six weeks. Watch like it was, it was like insane.

• 40:36Logan Bartlett?

  What year is this?

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Um, this would have been 2010.

• 40:39Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Um, and it was like zero to 100,000, like six daily actives with insane engagement. You know, and then we got stuck and we really got stuck at like 200, 250,000 DAUs. And it just got stuck, like stuck in the mud, like couldn't go anywhere on it. And it just, it all happened so fast, like the, the, the, both the success of it and the failure of it.

• 41:05Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Um, so that's what I would say is.

• 41:08Logan Bartlett?

  What about, um, I mean, the fleeting of success could apply to being a founder as well. But having gone through the journey of being a founder, do you, do you, do you think at point of investment about anything from that experience?

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Not normally. I mean, I think you're empathetic towards the founder journey. And you're just like, you just like, I empathize, like, I understand how hard it is. I understand, like, I understand the improbability of it. I also understand there's a whole bunch of stuff that's in your control. There's a whole bunch of stuff that isn't in your control. And so I think that, you know, I think there's this, like, we tend to portray, we as in the collective, we portray the successes as like, based on that individual and the failures based on that individual or that team. Um, but I'm much more fluid in my like view of it.

• 41:54Logan Bartlett?

  I understand.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Um, you know, I think a lot of the, the failed companies have remarkably fabulous people who had a totally reasonable thesis. And, you know, it, these are all whatever 5149 probabilities of any outcome. And it's just like, you know, the coin landed wrong.

• 42:14Logan Bartlett?

  So backing up, you grew up in Memphis.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  I did.

• 42:17Logan Bartlett?

  Your dad was a financial advisor?

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Financial planner, yeah.

• 42:20Logan Bartlett?

  Financial planner. Can you take me through the story arc of a kid from Memphis, Stanford's, Opsware? Like, how, how did that whole path happen?

• 42:28Speaker 01

  So.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Out of my junior year in high school, I left my junior year in high school and went to USC, University of Southern California. They had this program to take juniors out of high school and kind of combine your senior year in high school and your freshman year in college, so to speak. So I did that for a year and then I had driven down Palm Drive at Stanford and obviously I was like into math, computer science and whatever. And so it was, I knew Stanford from that, but driving down Palm Drive, I remember just seeing people, he's like, I want to go here. So I only applied to transfer to one place and applied to transfer to Stanford and transferred.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Coming out, I actually like didn't, I, you know, I studied mathematical and computational science and human biology. Like I wasn't a, I didn't know anything about business. Like I didn't study anything about business. And so I actually took a tech M and A banking job out of school at Broadview.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  And it's funny because you think you're going to learn about business and banking, but you're, you're obviously learning about banking, not business. And so I did that for six months. It was actually incredibly valuable experience because you learned how to model, you learned basic accounting, you learned like a whole bunch of stuff in six months that, you know, it's like years worth of stuff. And this is 1999. And you're, you graduated early. I graduated early. You 19 at the time? Yeah, I was 19. I was 19 when I graduated and then I turned 20, whatever that's where. So, and you're like, it's harder to describe because that time, so someone said, maybe this AI craze right now is similar to what it was like here in 99 because, you know, in the Bay Area and it was just like everything's happening and 101 was jam packed traffic

• 44:18Speaker 01

  like nonstop and there were tech companies everywhere. And so I was like, I gotta get in, fight, like I gotta get in there. And

• 44:30Speaker 01

  You know, there was this new company LoudCloud started by Mark Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Tim Howson and they, it was still in stealth. And my cousin was friends with a marketing guy there and, you know, whatever submitted my resume. Ben was looking for an assistant. And so I got an interview with Ben and Mark to be assistant to the CEO. And we hit it off. They hired me and I joined LoudCloud as Ben's assistant.

• 45:07Logan Bartlett?

  How big was the company at the time?

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Fifty, sixty, something, fifty or sixty. It was growing really fast. I was like three months old.

• 45:13Logan Bartlett?

  Did you know, like, did you have other options that you were going to go or you sort of single threaded through this one?

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Single threaded, actually USC, single threaded to Stanford, single threaded to LoudCloud. And then, you know, it was always meant to be like a kind of training position. I worked with Ben on a bunch of cool stuff and got exposure, you know, I'm 20, and I got exposure to them. I got exposure to all of the company running, fundraising, like lots of different pieces. And then became a product manager, product marketing, ran product management, ran product marketing, and then ultimately ran most of marketing over eight and a half years. LoudCloud went public, became Opsware, got bought by HP. So it was a long journey.

• 45:59Logan Bartlett?

  It got bought by HP in 2008? Seven?

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Seven. Yeah, 2007.

• 46:05Logan Bartlett?

  What was the unique, the business pivoted, it was worth X, then fell down, I mean, people can read hard things about hard things. Good job documenting it. But what was unique about the culture or the group of people?

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Grit.

• 46:22Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Did that come from Ben? Fucking grit, yeah. Just like

• 46:27Logan Bartlett?

  Chewing glass.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Determination to last, keep moving, keep pounding out. Some very loyal team.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Grindy, like willing to just keep going. And I think that I think it made a big difference.

• 46:46Logan Bartlett?

  Do you think you were going to be a founder after that?

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. I wanted to be, I always, like, I wanted to be a CEO, actually. And I think, and, and I didn't want to just be a CEO. I wanted to be a great CEO, which I obviously fell short of. But I, that was my aspiration. And so my mental model the whole time was like, learn as much as I can, see as much of the business as I can, so that when it is my shot, I have a shot.

• 47:14Logan Bartlett?

  Rockwell had, we talked about big run and then sort of the plateau and then ultimately sold Yahoo.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:21Logan Bartlett?

  All right. Did you think after that journey about running it back or going to be a CEO somewhere else?

• 47:29Speaker 01

  That's a great question. To be honest, I was tired.

• 47:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Like, I didn't have the energy to found another company. I definitely bore the, like, I failed piece. And so I just didn't, I just, I felt like I failed and, and I didn't have energy. We had, my wife and I had twins, like baby twins. And so I was just destroyed at that point in time. So I was like, and I did not like being a big company junior executive at all. So I didn't like that. I did, so I didn't know what I was going to do. It was a little crisis of confidence, to be honest with you. But a few years earlier in 2008, before, before founded Rockwell,

• 48:18Speaker 01

  you know, someone had planted, actually Jim Geth, planted this like seed in my head that I should be a venture capitalist. And, and so in 2013, when Rockwell got bought by Yahoo, Bill and Peter had emailed me and like, hey, you know, chat. And.

• 48:37Logan Bartlett?

  You never, you didn't have any money from Benchmark?

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Did not have any money from Benchmark. Through the course of the next year, I spent a bunch of time with Benchmark team and also spent a lot of time with early-stage companies and.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Really liked it.

• 48:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Like, I just spent time with early-stage companies trying to be helpful and evaluate. And I really liked it. It's fun.

• 49:01Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, so then I was like, hey, I think this can be cool.

• 49:04Logan Bartlett?

  I asked both Spencer and Mike for questions, and they both wondered why you aren't a CEO. Like, they both, that was both of their independent questions. They, they're like, I think you should be a CEO. And I was like, oh, that seems like he's happy doing what he's doing.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Never gonna happen.

• 49:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. They both asked the same question. What drew you, I mean, there's, there's, your former boss also started a firm as well that you had raised money from Andrew and Horowitz, too. What was the thing that drew you to Benchmark?

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Like, I think the model fits my personality very well. I think it's quiet, and we kind of do what we do. It's a, we operate at a certain scale, and, and you're just like striving for absolute excellence in that individual craft. I think the appeal of not managing anyone at that point in time and not like running just like, this is my job, I'm like, I'm an individual contributor.

• 50:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  And it's just like, was like incredibly appealing. You know, like, the Andrew Horowitz has done amazingly well. They've been really successful. At that point in time, their model was like very successful. CEOs were the, the people that they're recruiting, which I was not one. So, and we, we've honestly never talked about it. We never have talked about me joining them.

• 50:31Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, interesting.

• 50:33Logan Bartlett?

  I read something, I don't know where I dug this up from, that you find most management advice worthless, but there were a few things that spout from your time at Rockmelt.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh.

• 50:43Logan Bartlett?

  I want to ask you about each one. Start building your management team now and don't stop.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:47Logan Bartlett?

  Was that something that you wished you had done? Or that you did do?

• 50:51Speaker 01

  I wished I stretched more at different points in time, because it never ends in, in companies. And like, if you think about where we spend our time. You know, with founders, so much of it's around building the team around and the management team around. So I think that that part like is really, it matters a ton.

• 51:11Logan Bartlett?

  Get really clear on what you need and what you don't need in a role. Hire for world-class strength on the most important one through three areas.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think, I think one of the big things that people, we, we have a tendency to grade people like this person's great, this person's good, this person's not good, this person's like, whatever. And, and I guess that just really hasn't been my experience. My experience hasn't been that black and white. My experience is that like oftentimes, there are people who are just bad, but for a lot of good people, they can be great if the conditions are right and they can be good or great at certain things and not, and bad or okay or average at other things. And so I think one of the mistakes that CEOs make is especially early on, cause it's not

• 52:01Speaker 01

  having enough fidelity on what they're looking for in the role. What do they actually need out of that role and that job? And then testing candidates on that, on exactly what they need. And, and then understanding kind of what that like skill matrix or whatever of that individual is and like what they're going to be great at, where they spiked, where they're average, where they may be below average and so forth. And then putting that together. And so I think that's like a really important thing that, that CEOs and founders have to learn, like they have to learn how to, to kind of grade that. And it's really hard because you have to learn it in areas that you're not an expert.

• 52:43Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Well, that, that was the next one, actually. Find domain experts that help you hire.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that was one of my big lessons is just like, sometimes someone said this recently, it's just like, oh, they're way better than me. It's like, well, you suck. So.

• 52:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Especially when you're stepping outside of your competency as a CEO, everyone should be better than.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Everyone should be better than you, not a high bar.

• 53:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  So like you gotta find people who help you evaluate in those, in those places.

• 53:08Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. The last one was the best CEOs, every person they add to their management team raises the bar. The new hires should be better at their domain than anyone else's at theirs.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:15Logan Bartlett?

  Cause it sort of ties into the same points.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:16Logan Bartlett?

  How do you think about bringing new people into Benchmark? You've now, I guess since you've been there, Miles has come on board, Sarah, Shaita and now.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  And Victor, yeah.

• 53:26Logan Bartlett?

  How do you think about interject? It's so small, right? And every person, back to the points we were just talking about, like every incremental person changes the DNA.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it takes, um, we, we think of it as like a refounding moment. Like it's an opportunity to refound the firm and rethink things. And, um, you know, Bruce said this to me like really early on, I was like, wow, we have like really big shoes to fill and it feels, and he was like, I wouldn't think about that at all at your firm. Like, don't worry about it. Be great. And I, it was like so freeing to like hear that and, and, and see that. Um, and, and for what it's worth, it definitely didn't work in the sense that I wake up every morning with this like, yeah, paranoid and, and like, and thinking about like, I, you know, you don't want to be the beginning and the end. You want to be like, you want to have taken it to new heights.

• 54:15Logan Bartlett?

  But you have to be willing to burn it down.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 54:18Logan Bartlett?

  To get to where you're going.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Totally. You have to.

• 54:21Logan Bartlett?

  And it's a lot easier if you're the founder of the firm to have that confidence. It's like, well, I came from nothing. I could bring it back to nothing. Dust, dust, ash, ash, you know, when it's, when you're inheriting, I feel the same thing. When you're inheriting something that someone else started, you feel like a gravitas. You feel like John Sculley.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah, you feel that responsibility and, and, um, and I think that's why we think of it as a refounding moment, right? Because it's like every new partner is refounding the firm and like, and, and when they're refounding it, they have that freedom. They have the freedom to go do that. And I think it's really important. And it's, and the, the founders, by far, are very, very thoughtful about building it that way. You know, we, I mean, the, the answer is we spend a lot of time with everybody and, and we spend a lot of time with the, the people and so that we kind of know what it's going to feel like, um, when they come in. And, um, and we spend time as individuals, like one-on-ones, we do two-on-ones, we do four-on-ones. That's why the process takes forever. Um, like, like I said, I, I, my process took of like almost a full year.

• 55:20Logan Bartlett?

  And I mean, Vicker, I guess is different. He was a portfolio company.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Portfolio companies, you knew him, like, but like they were all like long, longish. And you're, you're spending a lot of time with them. And so that's part of why it has been helpful with, you know, Miles and Chathin as examples, where we had. Overlapping boards. So you got to see them over the course of years.

• 55:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  Working. And that's part of why that ended up being so fruitful.

• 55:46Logan Bartlett?

  Do you think about, I mean, there's obviously different domains or industries that you probably need to, oh, do we have someone that can do internet or consumer or whatever it is, right? Is what, do you think about the augmentation of, hey, we really need someone that's cynical about XYZ thing, or Bill was really our public markets sort of thinking through business model thing. And so we need someone to slide into that? Or is it?

• 56:10Speaker 01

  No, not really. It's not a, it's not a role team. Like it's not a, we don't have roles. You know, it's, it's much more fluid than that, I would say. You're kind of, you're looking for excellence.

• 56:24Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  And you're looking for the possibility of excellence. And you're looking for someone who's going to make it their life's work to be an excellent venture capitalist and, and he's going to raise the bar for all of us. And, and that can come in a lot of different forms. Like, of course, are you sensitive to like sector coverage or sectors, you know, sensitive to experienced investor versus, you know, an entrepreneur like Victor or, or whatever, like, sure, but like, but those are all like second and third order things.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  And, and I think you, I think we tend to justify those things like after the fact. The real thing is like excellence.

• 57:04Logan Bartlett?

  Here's a funny thing that I thought about recently where you mentioned the life's work thing, which has made me think of it is if, if I don't succeed as a venture capitalist, like that's sort of what my identity, my professional identity is tied to. I can't go do anything else. Like, I don't know, I'm my, last time I did real finance was 11 years ago. Maybe I could go do that. I don't know. But like, I need to succeed in this for my own fulfillment. And I thought about like people that are successful CEOs that then step into being a VC.

• 57:36Logan Bartlett?

  And their identity is probably pretty comfortable with their first act of being a successful CEO. And so that that yearning of like life's work and the desire to not mess something up. There's something to that pressure, I think, that I'm sure you feel as like, I know self proclaimed failed entrepreneur, but like, I'm sure you feel this chip on your shoulder desire to prove that out.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  Every day. Yeah, absolutely. And look, everyone's different. Like, people are motivated by different things and, you know, aspiration of greatness versus fear of failure and like all these other things. And like, lots of different things can work. There are people who like, you think about these CEOs who go from like, who do it over and over again. It's just like, it's made or the entrepreneurs who do it over and over again. It's amazing. And I stand in awe of them. But yeah, I think there is an element of the pressure and the responsibility that's really valuable. Because it's one of these jobs where it's a little bit like getting into a Stanford or something like that, which is like getting in is really

• 58:41Speaker 01

  hard. And if you want to be like a B plus student, not hard.

• 58:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Like, once you're there. Getting in really hard. B plus, not hard. A, A plus, fucking hard.

• 58:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  And, and so you're in this place where, and venture capital is like that, getting into venture capital and getting is like, is really hard. If you want to be a mediocre venture capitalist, not hard.

• 59:11Logan Bartlett?

  No.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  And you can do very little, like, very little work.

• 59:14Logan Bartlett?

  Feedback loops are very long. It's hard to know how hard you're working, right? Taking the incremental meeting, like, you know, whatever. I'm on vacation.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so like, it's easy, it can easy to coast. But being great, and finding people and working with people who want to be great, like truly great, that's really hard. And it takes everything. And, and I think the greats in the industry have been that.

• 59:41Logan Bartlett?

  Do you think we're getting long in the tooth in software investing?

• 59:44Speaker 01

  In what sense?

• 59:46Logan Bartlett?

  Do you think the trends that you and I both benefited from, from 2014, even we could go back to 2007, if we really, or whatever, 2099 Salesforce, do you think those are getting long in the tooth in terms of, hey, we saw vertical software, we're going to smaller and smaller markets. It's no longer construction or healthcare or whatever. We're seeing richer, more niche markets popping up. Or some of the things that we discussed are just similar-ish to the things we talked about 10 years ago. Like, open source business models seem figured out a little bit more.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 1:00:25Logan Bartlett?

  So are we at some, like, asymptote where it's the seventh or eighth inning of that?

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  I mean, sure. Like, you know, every, every kind of thesis has its, has its duration. But this is the, this is the best thing about the market, the industry that we work in. It's like, there's a new thesis.

• 1:00:42Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  And so, like, there's always something new, right? And, um, and, and so, like, yeah, I think for, like, SaaS or enterprise SaaS or whatever, like, yeah, it's kind of like, but now we have a new, like, AI thing. And we have some of the same questions that we had before, which is like, how's it going to monetize? And where's the value getting delivered? And like, how big is it going to be? And is it really impactful? Is it not really impactful? And so on and so forth. And so, like, I guess I feel like there's always something new. And it's just one of the amazing things about the industry that we work in. And people are always coming up with new ideas and they're just optimistic about it. And, um, and so I actually am really bullish and optimistic.

• 1:01:23Logan Bartlett?

  How has investing in early stage changed over time?

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  You know, it's always, it's, it's like, it's more expensive and there's more competition and, and there's more seed rounds and, um, and there's more people willing to write these checks. And like, all those things, like, okay, sure, like, all that stuff's changed.

• 1:01:41Logan Bartlett?

  People have been bitching about that for the last 10 years too, or, or 40.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  40.

• 1:01:44Logan Bartlett?

  10 since I've been in it.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, it's just like, everyone, like, always, right? Like, it's just like, it's just like, sure, like, great. On the other hand, like, you know, look, this magical, like, alchemy of a founder who, like, knows some market and has a compelling idea and a unique insight and the drive and ambition to go do something that on its surface is, is irrational.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  Like that's what we're looking for. Yeah. And, and like, has that changed? Not really. Like, you know, people keep coming up with stuff and, um, and and they are excited about it and they want to, they want to make it their life's work and it's important. And, and so I think in some ways, look at that, that really hasn't changed. And, and like, and in the end, the vehicle that is, is used is a company and you help building the company. And like, and building a company is hard. Um, and so like, I think none of that stuff has changed.

• 1:02:47Logan Bartlett?

  Do you have the element of FOMO of things that are going on that I'm sure you guys have pretty good fidelity into seeing early stage opportunities, but inevitably there's only, what, five of you now?

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Six of us.

• 1:02:59Logan Bartlett?

  Six of you. Uh, you don't have a team of associates. Uh, you don't, you don't have a CRM as we've joked about in the past. But, uh, uh, do you have a paranoid element of like, hey, there's a whole team of Andreessen or Sequoia?

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  All the time.

• 1:03:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  All the time. I mean, I like, you know, what the downside of our model is like, is it doesn't scale. Uh, coverage is really hard. Um, seeing everything is really, really difficult.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  And, you know, it's, it's six people, but six people who probably average, I don't know, eight boards.

• 1:03:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  Each. So it's like, it's eight boards too. And you're trying to be, you know, if we, if we're doing our job, we're setting the standard for what the board member engagement is. And so like, um, yeah, the coverage thing is hard. It's a challenge of the model. You know, but there's some advantages to it too, which is it makes you very focused on what are the important questions for evaluating every opportunity. But there's so much stuff that venture capitalists ask, investors ask, it's just, it's just a waste of time. Like it just doesn't matter in terms of the outcome. Um, and what could be like, and so it, you have to get really focused on that.

• 1:04:07Logan Bartlett?

  How do you view your role as a board member? Talk about like earning the first call or like that relationship, but.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  The thing is doing everything you can to help the company succeed. And what I mean by succeed is realize its maximal potential. Not every company's maximal potential is the same and we don't know. That's indeterminate at the beginning. But whatever its potential is, let's maximize that. Let's maximize that, that potential of that, of that company. And.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  That's super high level and like whatever. So what does it mean in practice? Well, like, you know, sometimes it means like helping lift the entrepreneur up when they're down. Sometimes it means bringing the entrepreneur down when they're too high. Sometimes it means,

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  you know, sometimes it means like asking a hard question. Sometimes it means being supportive through a tough time. Like it can mean all of those different things. And, you know, the job and the emotions and the heart rate of an entrepreneur are like, like this. It's manic. And so, and most people just aren't super productive. Like they can't think as clearly through those very highs and very lows. And so to the extent we can help like mediate that, then you're helping the entrepreneur think clearer through that process and ultimately

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  maximize their potential. I think the, you know, the downside case is the board members who amplify that, and we've all worked with them, who amplify that manicness. So you want to be really careful not to be that. But the form of, of, it's interesting. It's like the form of support that you offer is really varied through time. Like sometimes it's strategic, sometimes it's very tactical, sometimes it's emotional. You know, it's, it's all of it.

• 1:06:16Logan Bartlett?

  I heard you say the value of a partnership with an entrepreneur is only two to three times a year, helping with the consequential decisions, which is something I agree with. You need to earn the right to have the credibility to help at that point in time, which is a daily task.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. That's the part that gets lost in it. It's actually, there's another one of these that we could come back to, which is a power law thing with venture capital, which is like, it's people looking at the data. So it's like, yes, the two or three times a year, there's some inflection directional bending opportunity for a company like it's not.

• 1:06:55Logan Bartlett?

  You know, it's not every day, it's not every week, it's whatever, it's so many handful of times.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  If you can be an amazing sounding board for the entrepreneur in that moment to help them make a better decision that maximizes the probability of success and bends the trajectory of the company, that's everything. Like, all the value comes from that. Problem is, in order to be valuable in those two or three, you have to both have enough context on the company and enough space outside of the company to be useful, right? Like, these entrepreneurs we've talked about, and they're hyper learners, like, everybody's learning. So, they're consuming all the podcasts, they're consuming all the books, they're reading all the blog posts, like, they have all that stuff.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  The kind of things that they're ultimately grappling with are very close calls that reasonable people could disagree on. And so, it's trying to be a sounding board in that moment. And to be a sounding board in that moment, you kind of have to understand to some extent, like, what's the team they're working with? What's the nature of the business? Like, what are the customers saying? What are those people's motivations worth? And in order to do that, you have to do some day-to-day work. But if you're mired in that, and you're in the trench, then you don't have the value of the perspective. And so, it's kind of, it's a fine balance of combination of perspective and knowledge

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  of the detail that I think allows you to be most useful and help navigate those moments. But I think all the value comes from it.

• 1:08:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  So, that's interesting.

• 1:08:33Logan Bartlett?

  We've had discussions over the years at different points in times about constraints as benefits for companies. How do you, how do you think about that?

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  You know, I think every time we've seen a company that is unconstrained, whether it's like capital, or headcount, or growth even, or like, whatever.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  It's just like, on the one hand, it can be really good, but it also yields a lot of badness. Right. And I just think constraints are good. Like I've had, they force clarity of thinking. They force hard decision making. They force these kind of calls. And so you have to know when you want to have kind of an abundance mentality and just like do everything and be fruitful and like go, go forward. And when you want to be really like disciplined and controlled, most of the time you're in between, you know, and I think we've like learned a lot of hard ways. And I guess maybe one other learning on this is it's so much harder to reform after the fact.

• 1:09:39Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  Like it's so much harder. It's so much easier to, to kind of, you know, it's kind of the person who like, whatever, like packs on a lot of pounds and then has to like trim and, and cut, right? Like build and, and cut. It's like, you want to be on whatever six week cycles for that. You don't want to be on six year cycles for that.

• 1:10:00Logan Bartlett?

  There's a, I feel like we've talked about this before, but the two by two graph of equity value created by capital consumed. Have you seen that chart?

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:08Logan Bartlett?

  It's a fascinating one of just like, it's both, I think it's all software companies basically, but it sort of shows that with the exception of Snowflake, almost every company that has created a ton of value in the last 20 years in software, which is a little bit of a fool.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  Specific thing.

• 1:10:23Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Like sample bias thing, didn't consume a lot of capital to get there. If you look at Viva or ServiceNow or Atlassian or Salesforce or you just kind of go down the list. It's sort of, it's an interesting.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  And, and, and VMware would be in that category too. So like, but, but I would say that this is the problem with, with some of these analyses, which is like, true.

• 1:10:46Logan Bartlett?

  But capital wasn't available to the

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Well, and also like, was it, are we kind of like, is it kind of, they've created a lot of equity value and done so very efficiently, but like, those aren't unrelated concepts.

• 1:11:01Logan Bartlett?

  Very much so.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  Right? Like, there is just like, yes, because they were very efficient and grew very fast, they created a lot of equity value.

• 1:11:06Logan Bartlett?

  And, and the dollars that you were raising in 2004 is different than the dollars you were raising in 2020, and a company that's very big was more likely to have been started in 2004, just because time is a vector of, it definitely destroys it. But it's an interesting, it's interesting when you look at, especially the outlier ones like the Atlassians or the Mebras that like, really didn't take in outside capital.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  And you know, if you take, if you look at Atlassian as an example, like, it has grown very steadily between, what, 30 and 50% for 20 years, it's value compounded.

• 1:11:38Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Like, it's just like, and, and so, you know, it's a really amazing kind of story, but it actually didn't have these like 100%, 200% growths that we are, you know, we often see.

• 1:11:50Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  In the early stages. So, yeah, there's different dynamics on it. I kind of think of it, I, I, I mentioned this venture capital thing, which is, you know, you hear this, it's like, oh, venture capital is a grand slam business, and it's like, all about these, and like, it's like, yes, it is, but I think one of the things that's really interesting is if you look at all the greats in the business, they're remarkably consistent, remarkably consistent.

• 1:12:19Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  And they have lots of little wins in addition to a few big wins. And, and I think it just, again, it's kind of like a dumb thing to say, because it's like, well, it turns out, if you like, make contact with the ball a lot.

• 1:12:33Logan Bartlett?

  It's the best way to hit home runs.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  It's the best way to hit home runs. And, you know, and so, it's kind of like this other thing, but I think that type of retroactive analysis actually yields bad behavior, because it, it, it kind of like, says like, oh, wow, like, all that matters is getting these like, really, really big ones, which is like, yes, true, but like, what's the best way to get the really big ones?

• 1:12:58Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah. About incentives.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:03Logan Bartlett?

  I consider myself top 1% of understanding incentives, and I underestimate it every day. Why, why, why do you like that quote?

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  I think that

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  Founders don't think about it enough as it relates to both their customers, but also their team and how they think about their team and what their team's incentives are and how to handle it. And the reason is, is you tend to project yourself and think everyone works like things like you and has your mental model and your piece. And it just, it isn't,

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  that isn't true. Like they don't, most of the employees are employees or not. They're not founders. They don't have the same everything. They don't have the same desire. They don't have the same ambition and or they're motivated by different things. And so you just like really have to kind of think about that and then how to incentivize the behavior that you want on it. And it is, it just matters.

• 1:14:03Logan Bartlett?

  Sure, you peppered with questions like career advice or people that are asking, do you have anything that you go back to or that people trying to get break into venture, whatever, whatever version of this question you think is, is interesting?

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  I think there's no model of success. I think that that's, there's no one model of success. Like you look at Merit and he was a writer and like where writers need to ask questions.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  You know, you, you look at Dore and he's a career venture capitalist, but an Intel Inc. guy or whatever. And so

• 1:14:32Logan Bartlett?

  He was a salesperson. Pierre was the son of a VC.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And

• 1:14:36Logan Bartlett?

  He was a

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  Wall Street analyst. Yeah. And so like there are lots of models of success on it. But I think there is a common characteristic amongst, there are a couple of common characteristics amongst the venture capitalists, which is they're hyper curious and they're hyper competitive. Competitive with themselves, competitive with the industry, whatever, it doesn't really matter, but competitive driven and, and hyper curious. And so, you know, it's kind of like you're always like looking over, you're turning over, you're kicking over the next rock and you're trying to figure out what's going on and trying to understand it and trying to listen to what motivates that person. You're trying to figure that out. Why are all these great people going to this company? You got to figure that out. Like you just, you can't, it bothers you that there's something that you don't have a explanation for, a view of. And so I think that's a common characteristic

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  amongst, amongst the people who have been really, really successful in the business. And

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  And so maybe that's a view of what it is. But and I think I wouldn't, I think it's popular to say like it's an easy job or whatever. I have not found that to be true. I've not found that it's an easy job.

• 1:15:43Logan Bartlett?

  It can be.

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I think it can be, but I just, I think, but I've just not in general. I found it to be a very like, it is a all out challenging. You know, you're running every day kind of job.

• 1:15:58Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's humbling too.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's super humbling. It's full of regrets and everything else.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  So it's not, it's not easy in that way. It's an extraordinarily rewarding job.

• 1:16:11Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  In the sense that you're just, you get to meet these entrepreneurs every day who inspire and excite and are building new stuff and trying new things and are rethinking fundamentals and reasoning from first principles and whatever. And so you're just like, that part of it's just awesome. And you're perpetually learning. So I think it's very, very rewarding in that way, but to reap the benefits of that, to reap the benefits of that, you, it takes a lot of work.

• 1:16:42Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, one of the things I thought was interesting that you had said was

• 1:16:48Logan Bartlett?

  about, and I think it's reflective of, I mean, you're kind of talking your own book here, but a platform team being built, engineer team being built to help the GP scale more than helping the companies themselves. How do you think about that? And are there elements of the VC's job that you think can be well carved off and where you don't need to own the totality of the, the role?

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  I mean, I think, I just think the, the idea of platform teams is to help the firm scale.

• 1:17:17Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  And um, you do that in order to help the firm scale. And so the GPs can scale and they can take more board seats and they can, or not take more board seats, but make more investments and, and so forth. And that doesn't mean there's no value to that. There's value in that. And those models work great, like in, and, and it had a ton of success. So I think that, that part's there. Our model is, is different and our model is dependent on a relationship, a very tight relationship between the investor and entrepreneur.

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  And it's a partnership and that model

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  and we talked about incentives and incentives, it means, you know, it means high ownership. It means like these things. It means high commitment and high skin in the game. And so that's the model that like, I think more than anything is the model we like. Like that's the rewarding part of the job and that's the part that that we love. And so the, I guess that's how I think about it's going to be different than than prior framing. But it's just the rewarding part of the job is that engagement. And that's what we're dependent on.

• 1:18:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, there's kind of the predictable revenue ish side of of things that if I think about where we get benefit from having people that help talent, customer intros as well. And having someone that wakes up every day with that as their number one job, that everyone sort of funnels stuff through, there's like an accumulation of knowledge that and maybe it's, maybe your response would be, well, we get that from, you know, the integration of our partnership or something. And but I've sort of found that having one person that wakes up with it number one on their list rather than.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Matters.

• 1:19:19Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it matters.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  It matters. Yeah, like, like no question it matters. But I think my my thoughts were actually more go back to the two or three times a year.

• 1:19:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  If all you need is the content.

• 1:19:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  You need to have the content.

• 1:19:32Logan Bartlett?

  It's interesting.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  And so that's that would be my like my view of it.

• 1:19:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  Isn't that, you know, it isn't incrementally valuable. It's just, is it trajectory bending? And trajectory bending is kind of the name of the game and to some degree, to a large degree, in my view.

• 1:19:53Logan Bartlett?

  People have sort of become fascinated, I think, with your dinners. And you guys did the one with the acquired guys and on Invest Like the Best. I think Peter referenced one with Jeff Bezos you guys did recently. What would you find the biggest benefit from the dinners to be?

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  They're so fun. We get to do.

• 1:20:13Logan Bartlett?

  Do you do them here?

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  We do. We do them in Wilted and in San Francisco. We'll also travel for them. We travel. We went to New York for. For one recently with a CEO of a, you know, whatever, a public, I don't know, tenish billion dollar company that just, that we didn't invest in and didn't know, but just remarkable story and individual and like, you learn like, what did we miss? What did we get wrong? What didn't we think about at that point in time? What motivates them and how are they driving? There's, there's so many things to learn. We, we did another one with the CEO of a eighty billion dollar public company recently. And, you know, and he talked about, uh,

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  like how, this is a non-founder CEO and it's just like how he expanded the product portfolio and like how he drove that and whatever. And so everyone is just an opportunity to, to learn more. And, and obviously like build connections and network, just like you were talking about through your podcast. But everyone's just an opportunity to learn more and, and, and that, that part's really, really cool.

• 1:21:27Logan Bartlett?

  Do you outbound to these people?

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, we outbound all the time.

• 1:21:30Logan Bartlett?

  And what's, what's the pitch? Just like, hey, we'll come and pick your brain.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  Have, have great wine.

• 1:21:36Logan Bartlett?

  We'll pay for your dinner.

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  Some nice food.

• 1:21:38Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, we'll talk about what we're seeing in the markets and pepper you with questions.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  And, and just have fun.

• 1:21:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  And, and we're pretty high hit rate on it and it's like, it's a good.

• 1:21:49Logan Bartlett?

  Listen, if people are saying yes to this podcast or me, I assume they're saying yes to dinner with you, right?

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  So, and, and, and so like, that, that part of it's really special. I would also say like, it's good for our group, like it's good for the six of us to spend that time.

• 1:22:04Logan Bartlett?

  The social dynamic.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, the social dynamic and just like that, we spend all money together, we spend our dinners together. And, um, and just like having that, um, esprit de corps is, is valuable too. You get a lot of stories on that.

• 1:22:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  So it's, it's, it's a really special and fun part of the partnership.

• 1:22:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, this is fun. Thanks for doing it.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.