Benchmark Capital

eBoys
by Randall E. Stross
Published 30 Oct 2008

It did not have much visibility in the public at large, however, and the growth potential of its business—what seemed to be nothing more than a flea market online—was unproven. There was risk that the best that could ever be said about it would be that it was a good little business, with the emphasis on little. The venture capital firm that in the end backed eBay was Benchmark Capital, itself a start-up, then only two years old. When Benchmark invested $6.7 million in eBay in 1997, the auction company’s valuation was put at $20 million. EBay grew, prospered, went public. In September 1998, after the first day of public trading, eBay’s market capitalization was $2 billion, and Benchmark’s original $6.7 million stake was now worth $400 million.

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By the next spring, the company was valued at more than $21 billion; the value of Benchmark’s stake had grown 100,000 percent in less than two years’ time, making it the Valley’s best-performing venture investment ever. The eBay story happened to unfold right in front of my eyes—and my tape recorder; I must confess I was as surprised as anyone. A year before eBay knocked on Benchmark Capital’s door, I had knocked there, interested in writing a book about a corner of the financial world whose inner workings remained shrouded, even to those in other precincts of professional money management. Yet venture capitalists, who were concentrated in Silicon Valley, were entrusted with ever increasing amounts of capital by institutions, such as university endowments and charitable foundations, to invest in newly formed companies.

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The offices of venture capitalists are concentrated in my hometown of Menlo Park, California, and I sought an inside vantage point so that I could observe at close range the financial alchemy at the heart of venture capital and determine which parts should be credited to human agency and which to impersonal forces at work in the larger financial environment—that is, sort out skill from luck. I resolved to arrange for access over an extended period while retaining unencumbered editorial control; I also wanted to work with the youngest renegades I could find, and those happened to be at Benchmark Capital. It took me a year of entreaties before I was able to gain entry. Ultimately, our agreement was sealed with a handshake—no written NDA (nondisclosure agreement), no attorneys. There was no precedent within the venture business for providing an outsider such access. I suspect that the Benchmark partners thought that something ballsy like this, which was sure to make the graybeards of the guild squirm, must, ipso facto, be a good thing.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups
by Ali Tamaseb
Published 14 Sep 2021

Mary Azevedo, “Why the CEOs of These Once Bootstrapped (but Still) Profitable Companies Took VC Money,” Crunchbase News, November 25, 2019, https://news.crunchbase.com/news/why-the-ceos-of-these-once-bootstrapped-but-still-profitable-companies-took-vc-money/. CHAPTER 14: BULL MARKET VERSUS BEAR MARKET 1. “R.I.P. Good Times,” Sequoia Capital, accessed July 28, 2020, www.sequoiacap.com/article/rip-good-times. 2. Michael Arrington, “Benchmark Capital Advises Startups to Conserve Capital, Look for Opportunities,” TechCrunch, October 9, 2008, https://techcrunch.com/2008/10/09/benchmark-capital-advises-startups-to-conserve-capital/. 3. Don Butler, “Pre-Money Valuation” (chart), Forbes, March 17, 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/donbutler/2020/03/17/this-downturn-will-be-different-what-we-expect-in-a-recession-marred-by-coronavirus/#201610ad2cd7. 4.

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Katrina Lake was an associate at Leader Ventures before starting Stitch Fix, a clothing retailer. David Vélez was a partner at Sequoia Capital looking into Latin American investment opportunities before venturing out to start Nubank, the Brazilian online bank unicorn, and Andy Rachleff co-founded Benchmark Capital before starting Wealthfront, a consumer financial advisory company. Abe Othman, head of data science at AngelList—a website enabling angel investors to invest in early-stage startups and to diversify through index investments—told me, “One of the most significant characteristics we’ve observed among successful startups is when a founder had experience as an investor or angel investor.”

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In the next chapter, we will look into the role that market size and dynamics played in the success of billion-dollar startups. 9 MARKET When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens. —ANDY RACHLEFF, FOUNDER OF BENCHMARK CAPITAL AND WEALTHFRONT When Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam founded Coinbase in 2012, “cryptocurrency” had yet to enter the popular lexicon. Bitcoin, the first modern cryptocurrency, had been invented just four years earlier; it was still trading for less than five dollars per coin. Already, though, Armstrong and Ehrsam could see a new kind of market emerging.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
by Mike Isaac
Published 2 Sep 2019

v=dBaYsK_62EY. 65 fund returned $250 million: John Markoff, “Internet Analyst Joins Venture Capital Firm,” New York Times, July 14, 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/14/business/internet-analyst-joins-venture-capital-firm.html. 66 worked at the Johnson Space Center: Marissa Barnett, “Former Resident Donates $1M to Dickinson,” Galveston County Daily News, September 6, 2017, http://www.galvnews.com/news/article_7c163944-63ee-5499-8964-fec7ef7e0540.html. 66 Lucia spent her spare time: Bill Gurley, “Thinking of Home: Dickinson, Texas,” Above the Crowd (blog), September 6, 2017, http://abovethecrowd.com/2017/09/06/thinking-of-home-dickinson-texas/. 66 one of the first relatively inexpensive: “Commodore VIC-20,” Steve’s Old Computer Museum, http://oldcomputers.net. 66 he mostly rode the bench: Eric Johnson, “Full Transcript: Benchmark General Partner Bill Gurley on Recode Decode,” Recode, September 28, 2016, https://www.recode.net/2016/9/28/13095682/bill-gurley-benchmark-bubble-uber-recode-decode-podcast-transcript. 66 He played for one minute: “Bill Gurley,” Sports Reference, College Basketball (CBB), https://www.sports-reference.com/cbb/players/bill-gurley-1.html and “Bill Gurley Season Game Log,” Sports Reference, College Basketball (CBB), https://www.sports-reference.com/cbb/players/bill-gurley-1/gamelog/1988/. 67 he was infatuated: Gabrielle Saveri, “Bill Gurley Venture Capitalist, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners,” Bloomberg, August 25, 1997, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/1997-08-24/bill-gurley-venture-capitalist-hummer-winblad-venture-partners. 70 “He’s kind of an animal”: Stross, Randall E., EBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work (Crown Publishers, 2000). 71 Gurley wrote: Bill Gurley, “Benchmark Capital: Open for Business,” Above the Crowd (blog), December 1, 2008, https://abovethecrowd.com/2008/12/01/benchmark-capital-open-for-business/. Chapter 8: PAS DE DEUX 72 Roughly one third: Artturi Tarjanne, “Why VC’s Seek 10x Returns,” Activist VC Blog (blog), Nexit Adventures, January 12, 2018, http://www.nexitventures.com/blog/vcs-seek-10x-returns/. 74 Kalanick frequently compared: Amir Efrati, “Uber Group’s Visit to Seoul Escort Bar Sparked HR Complaint,” The Information, March 24, 2017, https://www.theinformation.com/articles/uber-groups-visit-to-seoul-escort-bar-sparked-hr-complaint. 75 “Software is eating the world”: Andreessen Horowitz, Software Is Eating the World, https://a16z.com/. 75 deals increased by 73 percent: Richard Florida and Ian Hathaway, “How the Geography of Startups and Innovation Is Changing,” Harvard Business Review, November 27, 2018, https://hbr.org/2018/11/how-the-geography-of-startups-and-innovation-is-changing. 75 billions invested post-2010: Center for American Entrepreneurship, “Rise of the Global Startup City,” Startup Revolution, http://startupsusa.org/global-startup-cities/. 75 emerged as the world’s epicenter: Center for American Entrepreneurship, “Rise of the Global Startup City.” 76 “to organize the world’s information”: “From the Garage to the Googleplex,” About, Google, https://www.google.com/about/our-story/. 76 controversial financial instrument: “The Effects of Dual-Class Ownership on Ordinary Shareholders,” Knowledge@Wharton, June 30, 2004, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-effects-of-dual-class-ownership-on-ordinary-shareholders/. 77 “An Owner’s Manual For Google Investors”: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, “2004 Founders’ IPO Letter,” Alphabet Investor Relations, https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004/ipo-letter.html. 77 $3.5-billion acquisition: “Snapchat Spurned $3 Billion Acquisition Offer from Facebook,” Digits (blog), Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2013, https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/11/13/snapchat-spurned-3-billion-acquisition-offer-from-facebook/.

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.** Despite his success, Gurley told Quattrone he wanted to stop being just an analyst and start making actual investments. Quattrone made it happen. He helped get Gurley a job with a respected venture firm, Hummer Winblad, but he was soon headed to the big leagues. After just eighteen months, he was recruited by a top-tier firm called Benchmark Capital. The courtship between Gurley and the firm was long, but necessarily so. Benchmark operated as a small, tight-knit unit, with each partner involved in the decision-making and advising for all the companies in the portfolio. Any new partner would have to be in sync with the others. Kevin Harvey, a founding partner at Benchmark, took Gurley hunting.

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“He’s kind of an animal,” Harvey told his partners. As the two sat in the bush, Harvey watched Gurley spring to his feet, jump over a steep cliff, and scramble down a hill after a wild boar they were tracking, something that Harvey wasn’t willing to do. “He thought I was kind of lazy ’cause I didn’t want to.” In 1999, Benchmark Capital had five venture partners. Gurley became the sixth. Each was exceptionally tall. They looked remarkably like the starting lineup of a college basketball team. Over time, partners would cycle in and out, but Gurley remained a constant. Bill Gurley would always remain the tallest. Even now, nearly twenty years into a phenomenal career in venture capital, the first thing anyone notices upon meeting Bill Gurley is that he is enormous.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination
by Adam Lashinsky
Published 31 Mar 2017

“You can’t do a seed round without having a CEO,” says Kalanick, who was involved only part time in Uber. “Graves was in it full time, so we’re like, ‘Graves, you’re CEO.’” The two tag-teamed investor pitches, which initially didn’t go well. August Capital’s David Hornik didn’t like the idea, he says, because he didn’t think the livery business was big enough. Bill Gurley at Benchmark Capital had similar reservations. Ram Shriram, who’d made money with Camp on StumbleUpon, felt UberCab didn’t have the right attributes for a technology company. “I told them, ‘I don’t invest in capital-intensive businesses, and I don’t want to end up with fifteen Lincoln Town Cars in my driveway.’” Numerous investors saw a red flag in Camp and Kalanick’s reluctance to join UberCab full time.

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(Uber cars didn’t conform at the time to one make or model, but all were driven by licensed livery drivers. So the vast majority were Lincoln Town Cars and similar models that catered to business executives and other privileged types.) Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist with the venerable Menlo Park firm Benchmark Capital, says his partnership had rejected Uber during its seed round in 2010, having judged Ryan Graves too inexperienced a CEO to back. Matt Cohler, one of Benchmark’s newer and younger partners, lived in San Francisco, and he became what Gurley calls a “power user” of Uber. “He started saying, ‘This is the most valuable app on my phone,’” says Gurley.

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What’s more, he wanted them to name their price rather than the other way around. “Travis is great at creating demand,” says Chris Sacca, the early Uber adviser and investor. “He says, ‘I don’t want to hear from you until this date. And on this date I’ll ask you for terms, and I want you to tell me your terms. Then I’ll come see you.’” Benchmark Capital was ready to give Kalanick its terms. The firm had successfully invested in Internet “marketplaces” like eBay and OpenTable, and it saw Uber as a potential successor. “We had an internal thesis that other industries might benefit from a network layer on top of them,” says Benchmark’s Gurley.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

A small subset of these deals, accounting for just 5 percent of the total capital deployed, generated fully 60 percent of all the Horsley Bridge returns during this period.[17] (To put that in context, in 2018 the top-performing 5 percent of subindustries in the S&P 500 accounted for only 9 percent of the index’s total performance.)[18] Other venture investors report even more skewed returns: Y Combinator, which backs fledgling tech startups, calculated in 2012 that three-quarters of its gains came from just 2 of the 280 outfits it had bet on.[19] “The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund,” the venture capitalist Peter Thiel has written.[20] “Venture capital is not even a home-run business,” Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital once remarked. “It’s a grand-slam business.”[21] What this means is that venture capitalists need to be ambitious. The celebrated hedge-fund stock picker Julian Robertson used to say that he looked for shares that might plausibly double in three years, an outcome he would view as “fabulous.”[22] But if venture capitalists embarked on the same quest, they would almost guarantee failure, because the power law generates relatively few startups that merely double in value.

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There was nothing apart from a mattress on Parker’s floor, but he managed to hold on to a white BMW from richer times, which the Facebook guys now shared with him. They began to work together, too. Parker hired his Plaxo lawyer to help incorporate Facebook. He found an operations manager for the company. He managed relations with investors. Google wanted to buy shares. Benchmark Capital came calling. By September 2004, Zuckerberg was referring to Parker as Facebook’s president, and Parker was steering Zuckerberg away from conventional venture capitalists. He told Benchmark and Google to back off, preferring to take a leaf out of Google’s own book; he wanted to raise capital from angels.

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78 A spokesman for Kalanick denied the allegations in the suit, saying, “The lawsuit is completely without merit and riddled with lies and false allegations.” Mike Isaac, “Uber Investor Sues Travis Kalanick for Fraud,” New York Times, August 10, 2017. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79 Benchmark Capital Partners VII, L.P., v. Travis Kalanick and Uber Technologies, Inc. (2017), online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/BenchmarkUberComplaint08102017.PDF. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80 Press reports portray Khosrowshahi and Goldman Sachs as the lead architects of this reshuffle.

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos
by Sarah Lacy
Published 6 Jan 2011

Hertz hasn’t raised venture funding for his person-search engine Pipl.com, because he doesn’t want to be part of it al . In a crowded scene, he feels alone. “Comverse, AmDocs, Checkpoint,” he says, rattling off some of the biggest Israeli hits of the late 1990s. “Those guys are al 40. They’re not my age.” Michael Eisenberg is a partner with the Israeli office of Benchmark Capital, one of the top Silicon Val ey venture firms. Eisenberg is an Orthodox Jew with eight kids. He shuttles back and forth between Jerusalem and Benchmark’s Silicon Val ey office several times per month advocating for Israeli entrepreneurs and justifying why Benchmark stil needs an Israeli fund.

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There’s something poetic about Israel creating the next wave of innovation that could erode its enemies’ revenues. As these examples show, audacious ideas aren’t dead in Israel; they’re just out of fashion. One huge hit could do a lot to revive the nation’s entrepreneurial focus and acumen. Benchmark Capital’s Eisenberg argues that while the last decade of results for Israeli startups has been weak, past performance is not an indication of future results. The best run-up in Israeli entrepreneurship came when no one was expecting it; the worst period was when everyone was expecting even more. There’s something freeing about those expectations being down again.

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Brown investments Alibaba Group Almeida, Alberto Amazon.com: Jeff Bezos Kindle powerhouse Zappos purchase AmDocs Animation Lab AOL Apple: as competitor as innovator as technology icon vis-à-vis Tencent ARPA Asian financial crisis Asian Godfathers (Studwel ) Assis, Rogerio Assis, Zica Atlantic Monthly, The AT&T Baidu Bakshi, Naren Bakuramutsa, Nkubito Manzi Barnes & Noble, in China BBC Beleza Natural Bel Labs Benchmark Capital Better Place Bezos, Jeff Blonde 2.0 Boo-box Borgos dos Santos, Eliane Borgos dos Santos, Sidnei Brain Platinum Brazil: business opportunities crime and safety issues culture and economics entrepreneurship in exemplars of innovation Marco Gomes story Breslin, Abigail BRIC countries Brin, Sergey BS Construtora Buffett, Warren Bug Bureau of Labor Statistics BuscaPe Bush, George W.

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle
by Dan Senor and Saul Singer
Published 3 Nov 2009

But he’d promised to give twenty minutes to a kid who claimed to have a solution to the problem of online payment scams, credit card fraud, and electronic identity theft. Shvat Shaked did not have the brashness of an entrepreneur, which was just as well, since most start-ups, Thompson knew, didn’t go anywhere. He did not look like he had the moxie of even a typical PayPal junior engineer. But Thompson wasn’t going to say no to this meeting, not when Benchmark Capital had requested it. Benchmark had made a seed investment in eBay, back when it was being run out of the founders’ apartment as a quirky exchange site for collectible Pez dispensers. Today, eBay is an $18 billion public company with sixteen thousand employees around the world. It’s also PayPal’s parent company.

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What Thompson did not know, however, was that the Fraud Sciences founders—Shaked and Saar Wilf, who served together in Israel’s elite army intelligence unit, called 8200—were not interested in selling their company to PayPal. They just wanted Thompson’s blessing as they proceeded down a checklist of due diligence requirements for Benchmark Capital. Thompson went back to Meg: “We need to make a decision. They’re here.” She gave him the go-ahead: “Let’s buy it.” After some valuation work, they offered $79 million. Shaked declined. The Fraud Sciences board, which included the Israeli venture firm BRM Capital, believed the company was worth at least $200 million.

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Dotan, Yuval (fictitious name), fighter pilot, Israeli Air Force; May 2008. Edelstein, Yuli, former minister of absorption; member of Knesset; May 2008. Eden, Shmuel (Mooly), vice president and general manager, Mobile Platforms Group, Intel; November 2008. Edry, Illy, founder and chief strategist, Poptok; May 2008. Eisenberg, Michael, partner, Benchmark Capital; May 2009. Elias, Asher, Tech Careers; March 2009. Epstein, Asher, director, Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, University of Maryland; May 2008. Erlich, Yigal, founder, chairman, and managing partner, Yozma Group; May 2008. Farhi, Major Gilad, commander in the Kfir infantry unit, IDF; November 2008.

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment
by David F. Swensen
Published 8 Aug 2005

The Glamorous Appeal of Venture Capital In September 1995, Pierre Omidyar, a French-born Iranian immigrant, started an online auction site, ostensibly to help his girlfriend sell her collection of Pez dispensers. Even though by late 1996 the business expanded nicely and produced solid profits, the company’s founder decided to seek outside assistance. Two years after the humble beginnings of the company now named eBay, Omidyar invited venture capital provider Benchmark Capital to make an investment and join the board. The recently formed Silicon Valley venture firm made a $6.7 million investment in Omidyar’s eBay, valuing the company at $20 million. After Benchmark’s investment, eBay’s growth continued apace, fueled by the engagement of a new management team headed by the impressive Meg Whitman.

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Benchmark’s $6.7 million investment exploded to more than $400 million, a breathtaking sixty-fold increase in a little more than a year. The eBay rocketship had barely begun its journey. In April 1999, with the stock trading at $175 per share, the company’s market value totaled in excess of $21 billion. Looking to lock in a portion of the firm’s extraordinary gains, Benchmark Capital distributed a portion of its position to the firm’s limited partners. With Benchmark’s $6.7 million investment worth $6.7 billion, the investment multiple of 1,000 times qualified eBay as “the Valley’s best-performing venture investment ever.”24 Far from a flash in the pan, eBay continued to mature, becoming a standard-bearer among Internet companies.

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On July 22, 2002, boasting a market capitalization of $15.7 billion, eBay joined the ranks of the S&P 500, taking the 104th place, just ahead of the venerable BB&T Corporation, a North Carolina–based financial services concern with a storied past that dated to the Civil War. On the last day of trading in December 2003, eBay’s valuation reached an all-time high of more than $41 billion, representing more than a 2,000 multiple of the valuation assigned to the firm by Benchmark Capital’s original investment. Everyone made money. Pierre Omidyar, eBay’s founder, created wealth beyond imagination. Meg Whitman, along with the rest of eBay’s management and employees, received a huge payday. Venture capitalists and their financial backers posted staggering investment gains. Even public shareholders generated significant holding-period returns.

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business
by Mikkel Svane and Carlye Adler
Published 13 Nov 2014

Airsafe.com, http://www.airsafe.com/issues/fear .htm 2. http://www.seatguru.com/ Chapter 6 1. The Midas List: Tech’s Top Investors: Peter Fenton #4. Forbes, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/lists/midas/2011/profile/peter-fenton.html 2. Michael Arrington, “Benchmark Capital’s Big Day.” TechCrunch, August 10, 2009, http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/benchmark-capitals-bigday/; Erick Schonfeld, “Zendesk Raises $6 Million In B Round, Benchmark’s Peter Fenton Joins Board.” TechCrunch, August 17, 2009, http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/17/zendesk-raises-6-million-in-b-round -benchmarks-peter-fenton-joins-board/ 3. “Sexiest Enterprise Startup Zendesk | Crunchies Awards 2013.”

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley
by Emily Chang
Published 6 Feb 2018

These firms were all-male—with many partners who were former employees of chip companies such as Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor—but as women became full participants in the post-1970s workforce, they started seeking a place for themselves at this rich table. Few of them found one. By 1999, women accounted for just 10 percent of partners at venture capital firms, and that number actually declined over the next fifteen years, to 6 percent in 2014. VCs have had little incentive to change. Two of the top firms in Silicon Valley, Sequoia and Benchmark Capital, made billions of dollars before hiring any women partners at all. Why mess with a good thing? In other words, while investors expect the start-ups they fund to take extreme risks, VCs themselves have chosen to take very few chances in how they run their own firms. Unfortunately, one company that did make changes became something of a cautionary tale.

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“There is a focus on entertaining as they wanted to be able to throw parties in the space.” Caldbeck and Teo were well known among entrepreneurs and investors as the “party VCs” who made frequent trips to Las Vegas. In fact, the pair met in Vegas while Caldbeck was dancing with Teo’s executive assistant from Benchmark Capital, where Teo worked at the time. It was a match made in Sin City heaven. Someone close to the firm told me the partners had an informal rule that Caldbeck wasn’t allowed to meet female entrepreneurs at a bar after 5:30 p.m., because he simply couldn’t be trusted not to cross the line (Caldbeck denies this).

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Uber’s board adopted: “Uber Report: Eric Holder’s Recommendations for Change,” New York Times, June 13, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/technology/uber-report-eric-holders-recommendations-for-change.html. his own “selfish ends”: Mike Isaac, “Uber Investor Sues Travis Kalanick for Fraud,” New York Times, Aug. 10, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/10/technology/travis-kalanick-uber-lawsuit-benchmark-capital.html. A Kalanick spokesperson: Ibid. sued Uber (while she was still employed): Heather Somerville, “Three Women Sue Uber in San Francisco Claiming Unequal Pay, Benefits,” Reuters, Oct. 25, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-lawsuit/three-women-sue-uber-in-san-francisco-claiming-unequal-pay-benefits-idUSKBN1CU2Z1.

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
by Brad Stone
Published 30 Jan 2017

“No technology could solve for the fact that there was resistance among taxi companies and drivers for this very basic change to the way they ran their business,” Tom DePasquale says. He is not particularly proud of what happened next. In the summer of 2009, Taxi Magic was the object of a prolonged courtship by the Silicon Valley investor Bill Gurley, a partner at the premier venture capital firm Benchmark Capital. An original backer of the online reservation company OpenTable, Gurley, who stands six feet nine inches tall, had been looking for a similar car service that could impose simplicity and efficiency on the archaic world of ground transportation. George Arison recalls Gurley sitting in their Virginia office many times over the course of several weeks, poring over spreadsheets, talking to Partee about the taxi industry, and negotiating with DePasquale about investment terms.

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Fresh off his disappointment with Taxi Magic and still searching for a prime seat in the coming transportation revolution, venture capitalist Bill Gurley had heard Cabulous was raising money and asked how much room was left in the round. Wolpert was surprised to get the call and gave an honest answer—the round was basically full. He mentioned a small number. Gurley said that wasn’t enough to interest Benchmark Capital. Gurley then offered some free advice about focusing, suggesting launching first in specific neighborhoods rather than an entire city, before hanging up. Wolpert probably should have taken Gurley’s offer, he mused years later, but it would have required ditching the investors that had already committed.

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The IRS rejected the 501(c)(3) application on the basis of, well, common sense: the company was saving users money on travel lodgings, not necessarily facilitating an exchange in cultural values or making the world a better place. Couchsurfing suddenly had to raise capital to finance the expensive shift to for-profit status and to pay its back taxes. It raised $7.6 million from a group of investors led by—who else?—Benchmark Capital, which thought it saw an opportunity to compete with Airbnb in the suddenly fashionable home-sharing category. Benchmark’s partner on the deal, former Facebook executive Matt Cohler, must have realized that he had placed a bad bet. After the conversion to for-profit status was complete, he fired Hoffer, Fenton, most of the employees, and all of the volunteers.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You
by Sangeet Paul Choudary , Marshall W. van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker
Published 27 Mar 2016

He estimated the size of the global taxi market, Uber’s prospective market share, and the revenues this was likely to yield. Then he used risk-adjusted cash flows to come up with a company valuation of $5.9 billion. With admirable forthrightness, he even posted his spreadsheet online so others could examine and test his assumptions. Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark Capital and one of Uber’s Silicon Valley investors, took up the challenge. A venture capitalist famous for having been among the first to spot such technology skyrockets as OpenTable, Zillow, and eBay, Gurley argued that the $17 billion valuation was likely an underestimate, and that Damodaran’s figure could be short by a factor of 25.2 Gurley questioned Damodaran’s assumptions about both the total market size and Uber’s potential market share, basing his calculations on economist W.

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When the dot-com boom turned to bust in 2000, two of the authors of this book (Geoff Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne) were recent PhD graduates from MIT. We watched the cycle with fascination, observing as smart investment firms like Benchmark and Sequoia made both lucrative hits and expensive misses. (Benchmark Capital, the venture capital firm that is now getting it right in the case of Uber, invested in Webvan, which was listed by CNET as one of the biggest dot-com disasters in history,9 as did Sequoia Capital, which nonetheless got it right with Apple, Google, and PayPal.) Curious about what separated the successful companies from those that failed, we examined dozens of cases and found that the failures mostly relied on price or brand effects.

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Brian, 18 Asia, 66, 72, 276 auctions, 60, 84, 161–62, 169–70, 196n audits, 220, 259 Australia, 70–71 auto industry, 19, 50, 62, 183–84, 200, 206, 225, 254, 262–63, 273, 277, 282, 284 automated price signals, 69–70 Axiom Law, 279 babysitters, 47, 122, 142 backwards compatibility, 53 Baidu, 215, 216 Baldwin, Carliss Young, 54–55, 57 Ballmer, Steven, 52–53 bandwidth, 88, 223 BankAmericard, 137 banking industry, 77, 81–82, 83, 137, 139–40, 170, 175, 243–44, 263, 264, 274–78 Bank of America, 137 Barrow Hematite Steel Co., 19 bars and pubs, 21, 113, 123 batteries, 69, 162, 273, 284 behavior: actions based on, 145–46, 168 codes of, 164–70, 182 design for, 168–69, 181 negative, 175, 182, 257 Bell Telephone, 29 Benchmark Capital, 16–18, 23 Betamax, 138–39 Bezos, Jeff, 176 bidding, 96–97 big-bang strategy, 97–98, 105 Bill of Rights, 255 Billpoint, 83 Bitcoin, 37, 80, 171 Bitter (Bruce Livingstone), 167 Blackberry, viii, 20, 64, 131 Blecharczyk, Nathan, 2 bloatware, 52–53 blockchain protocol, 171–73 blogs, 66, 88, 90, 96, 101–2, 120 Blu-ray, 139 bookmarks, 95–96 Boston University Platform Strategy Research Symposium, xi bots (automated software), 83, 85, 93, 215 Boudreaux, Don, 236 BranchOut, 184–86 brand effects, 22, 23, 34, 74, 84–85, 295, 299 Brandeis, Louis, 255 brand value, 198–99, 205, 250 broadcasters, 11, 204 broker system, 206 browsers, 95–96, 110, 211, 213–14 Buildingeye, 282 Bungie, 94, 240 bureaucracy, 235–37, 257, 281 Burnham, Brad, 159, 173 business development (BD), 81–82 business-to-business (B2B) platforms, 59, 89, 96–97, 102–3, 106, 155, 219, 285 business-to-consumer (B2C) platforms, 69, 106 Businessweek, 114, 205 buy-it-now option, 169–70, 218 BuzzFeed, 104 Caesar, Julius, 183 California, 70–71, 112–13, 274, 281–83 cameras, 6, 66, 178, 244 Carbon NYC, 123 CareerBuilder, 137 Carfax, 262–63, 282 Carnegie Mellon, 267 cartels, 208–9 cash economy, 276–77 cash flow, 11, 16, 33, 102, 184, 186, 188 CDs, 63, 111 cell phones, 6–7, 42–44, 48, 64, 72, 80, 147, 162, 197, 225–26, 245, 277, 283 central processing units (CPUs), 56–58 Chapin, Andrew, 50 charities, 173–74, 244 Chatroulette, 28 check-cashing services, 277 Chesky, Brian, 1–2 Chicago School, 234–35, 237 chicken-or-egg dilemma, 45, 79–81, 86, 89–99, 105, 179 China, 2, 4, 124–25, 140, 159, 198, 204–7, 215, 222, 240 “Chinese wall,” 180 Choudary, Sangeet Paul, 42–44, 122, 170 Cisco, x, 200, 284 Cisco Application Extension Platform (Cisco AXP), 200 Clarity, 96, 117–18, 194 Clark, K.

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram
by Sarah Frier
Published 13 Apr 2020

In his estimation, Snoop put Instagram on step three, just a few months after its launch. * * * Systrom had no trouble recovering from the Andreessen Horowitz ordeal. By early 2011, Instagram had far surpassed PicPlz in users, and his angel investors, Jack Dorsey and Adam D’Angelo, had talked him up to another respected venture capitalist. Matt Cohler was a partner at Benchmark Capital, known for backing eBay in the 1990s, now with money in Twitter and Uber. Cohler, an early Facebook employee before becoming an investor, thought Instagram was the first app he’d ever seen that looked like it was designed exclusively for a mobile phone, not a desktop computer. Systrom told Cohler he admired Facebook and wanted to learn more about how to build a company whose product was so ubiquitous.

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Little, 241 Atlantic, 68 Automattic, 17 Axente, Vanessa, 156 Bach, King, 110 @backpackdiariez, 240 Bailey, Christopher, 145–47 Bailey, Will, 199 Bain, Adam, 194 Bali, 242 Barbie doll, 136 Barbour, 167 BarkBox, 142 Barnett, John, 187–88, 190, 192, 193, 199, 202 Barnieh, Edward, 167, 168–69, 246 Baseline Ventures, 11, 15 Beast (Hungarian sheepdog), 60, 61–62, 67 Beck, Glenn, 208 Beco do Batman (Batman’s Alley, São Paulo), xv–xvi Ben & Jerry’s, 119 Benchmark Capital, 36–37, 46, 55, 56 #benoteworthy, 82 beta-testing, 22, 24, 219 #betterworld, 82 Beyoncé, 230 Bezos, Jeff, 22, 105 Bickert, Monika, 225 Bieber, Justin, 44, 48, 51, 98, 131, 174 as early IG user, 38–39 Bikini Blast, 10 bikini shots, 170 Bilton, Nick, 14, 98, 99 #binghazi, 181 Birdman (film), 158 Black Eyed Peas, 128 @blackstagram, 251 Black Tap, xviii #blessed, 230 Blink-182, 238 Blogger, 6 blogs, bloggers, 136, 143, 155, 237, 246, 265 Bloomberg Businessweek, 175 Bloomberg News, 213 Blue Bottle Coffee, 108, 205 Bono, 127 #bookstagram, 171 Bosstick, Lauryn Evarts, 237 Bosworth, Andrew “Boz,” 94–95, 105, 107, 164 Botha, Roelof, 55 Botox injections, 243 bots, 173–75, 245–46, 259 Bourgeois, Liz, 154–55 brand advertising, by IG users, xvii, xviii, 82–83, 104, 118–21, 139, 153, 155, 219, 229–30, 235–37, 245, 246–47 failure to disclose income from, 35–36, 138, 235–37 influencers and, 138–39, 167, 235–36 see also advertising brands, branding, 35 of FB, 94, 100, 209, 216, 222, 266 of IG, 27, 41, 89, 94, 100, 104, 111, 119, 132, 160, 162, 164, 177, 209, 216, 217–18, 254 personal, xvi–xvii, xx, 113, 140, 189, 237 Branson, Rick, 79, 80 Braun, Scooter, 39, 48 Brazil, 12, 184, 203 Brazilian butt lift, 244–45 Breitbart, 208 Brenner, Kevin, 243–45 Brexit, 220 BroBible, 113 Brown, Reggie, 113 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 3 Bublé, Michael, 129 Budweiser, 232 bugs, bug fixes, 38, 110 bulimia, 41 Bull, Janelle, 172, 173 bullying, 40, 41, 135, 161, 163, 218–19, 248, 271 Burberry, 145–47 Burbn, 10–11, 18, 101 early investment in, 11, 15, 16 iPhone app version of, 17 square photo format of, 19 Systrom’s doubts about, 16–17 see also Instagram Bureau of Consumer Protection, 235 Burstn, 33 Business Insider, 68 BuzzFeed News, 261 California Department of Corporations, 99 IG acquisition “fairness hearing” of, 84–86, 98 Calvin Klein, xix Camarena, Meghan, 171 Cambridge Analytica, 258, 259 Camera+, 21, 76 Camera Awesome, 76 Campbell, Edie, 156 Campbell, Naomi, 236 #campvibes, 229 Captiv8, 238 Carey, Eileen, 261–62, 278 Carlson, Tucker, 208 #catband, 155 Catholic Church, 196, 204 celebrity, celebrities, 138, 184, 254, 275 brand advertising on IG by, 155, 232, 236 FB and, 126–28, 130, 149–50, 156, 216 IG-created, xvii–xviii, xix, 130, 139, 152, 171 IG partnerships with, 25, 128, 160–61, 218–19, 230, 235, 250, 264, 279 IG Stories and, 203–4 IG use by, 35–36, 40, 46–48, 83, 128, 134, 140, 147, 149–50, 184, 231 Snapchat use by, 192, 204 Twitter use by, 7, 38–39, 46, 130, 156 wooed by IG, 128–29, 131–36, 139, 148, 153, 155, 171, 264 YouTube use by, 130 cell phones, see mobile phones Cerny, Amanda, 112 Chafkin, Max, 175 Chan, Priscilla, 221 Charlie (photography teacher), 5, 8, 19, 21 Chen, Pamela, 153, 204 child pornography, 41, 42 Choi, Christine, 190, 193 Christensen, Clayton, 267–68 Chrysler, 47 Ciara, 236 Cicilline, David, 69 Clinton, Hillary, 181, 210, 212, 251 FB and, 212–13 Systrom and, 207–8 CNET, 99 CNN, 54, 127, 148, 224 IG account of, 35, 44 Coca-Cola, 118 #cocaine, 262 Codename, 20–21, 23, 24 see also Instagram Coffee Bar, 12 Cognizant, 260 Cohler, Matt, 36–37, 38 at Facebook, 37, 64 on IG board, 37, 56, 60, 64 Colao, J.

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., 113 #trashcangate, 181–82, 204 travel, IG’s influence on, 169, 241, 242 Trigger, Kaitlyn, 79 trolls, internet, 41, 219, 251 Trump, Donald, 207, 208, 210, 211, 224, 258 FB leveraged by, 212–13 Trump, Ivanka, 70 Trump International Hotel, 70 Tumblr, 19, 103, 170 Tuna (dog), 141–42, 153 Tuna Melts My Heart (Dasher), 142 24 Hour Photo, 117 Twitter, xviii, xxi, 9, 17, 19, 31, 39, 130, 137, 151, 160, 170, 192, 225, 232, 239, 248 Academy Awards and, 151, 204 in attempt to buy IG, 25, 46, 48–49, 55–56, 86, 109 Benchmark Capital investment in, 36 chronological order of posts on, 19, 117 content policing and, 43 Dorsey at, 14, 25–26, 46–47 early investors in, 23 fake news on, 225 as follower-based network, 20 founders’ discord at, 14 free speech ethos at, 37, 156–57 growth rate of, 216 IG blocked from access to, 84, 99 IG photo sharing to, 37 IPO of, 98, 148, 149, 150–51 Niche acquired by, 165 Obama’s account on, 126 140–character limit of, 110, 128 Periscope acquired by, 64 retweet button of, 20, 44, 152, 157, 234 status updates at, 15 #tweetups and, 34 as unwilling to edit content, 220 user anonymity on, 41 verification on, 132 Vine acquired by, 64, 109, 157 Williams at, 14, 46 Zuckerberg’s attempted purchase of, 57 Twttr, 7 Tycho (Scott Hansen), 34 Tyga, 238 U2, 126 Uber, 36, 45, 222 UberCab, 23 Underwood, Teddy, 120–21 “unicorns,” 61 Van Damme, Tim, 51–54, 73 Vanity Fair, 158, 192 #vanlife, 229 venture capitalists, 2–3, 11, 15, 24, 36–37, 55, 56, 109, 116, 191 Vergara, Sofia, 236 Verge, 216 verification, 231–32, 279 as status symbol, 132–33 Verrilli, Jessica, 46 VidCon, 219 Viddy, 109 Vine, 64, 109–10, 111–12, 122, 124, 157, 165, 171, 265 violence, violent content, 40, 41–42, 97, 223, 249, 261 virality: of fake news, 225 on FB, 162, 209, 211, 215, 251, 260 re-sharing and, 20, 43–44, 140, 152, 210 risky behavior and, 240, 243–45 sharing and, 140, 152 social networking and, 44 on Twitter, 151, 239 Vogue, 118, 195, 231 IG-related cover of, 156, 157 VPN (virtual private network), 122 Wall Street, 74, 102, 150, 151, 164, 266, 267 Wall Street Journal, 102, 118, 122 Warner Bros.

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win
by Chris Kuenne and John Danner
Published 5 Jun 2017

With that background, let’s see how your Builder Personality might best match with prospective investors. Fueling the Driver: Finding Capital with the Right Octane The best sponsor for a Driver is focused on product–market fit. Some investors see that fit as the magical ingredient and don’t particularly care which kind of builder can show it to them. Andy Rachleff, cofounder of Benchmark Capital, a famous Silicon Valley venture firm, puts it this way: “In technology, I believe success is almost exclusively a function of whether or not the company finds product–market fit. And it’s not at all an issue of perseverance, or hard work, or personality. If you have the right product–market fit, you could be the world’s worst executive and still succeed in a very big way.

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Index Accenture, 193 accountability, 184 affinity marketing, 46–47 Airbnb, 155, 171 Akamai, 62 Alba, Jessica, 88–90 Alibaba, 128–129, 159 Alphabet, 19 Amazon, 5 Amazon Web Services, 15, 73–74, 80, 133 American Specialty Foods, 131 Amicus, 125, 139, 212 APCO Worldwide, 118–120, 138, 139 Apple, 17, 154 AppNexus, 58–60, 65–66, 74, 220–221 ARC Document Solutions, 129–130 Arnold & Porter, 118 Arvai, Peter, 127 asset-light businesses, 94–95 autocratic behavior, 80 Bai Brands, 4–5, 32, 41–42, 48, 52 customer dynamic at, 39 Bain Capital, 104 Bank of America, 47 Benchmark Capital, 190–191 Ben & Jerry’s, 6, 93, 97, 99, 222–223 Berners-Lee, Tim, 62 Berta, Norbert, 15, 64, 77–78, 195–196 Bezos, Jeff, 5, 73 Bischof, Chris, 137 Black, Benjamin, 73 Blakely, Sara, 5, 62 Blecharczyk, Nathan, 171 Blumberg, Matt, 45, 52 Bonfigli, Mark, 69–70, 71, 80, 222 Box, 113 Bradley, Bill, 41 Breitman, Steve, 15, 35 Briggs, Katharine, 22, 236 Brin, Sergey, 18 Bristol-Myers Squibb, 20 Brulant, 40–41 buffers, delegating to, 84–85 Builder Personalities, 3–7.

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit
by Marina Krakovsky
Published 14 Sep 2015

Marc Andreessen, perhaps the best-known VC working today, plots start-ups on a two-by-two matrix in which VCs should aim for the quadrant corresponding to nonconsensus and successful.28 It should go without saying that you cannot know for sure which ones will be successful, and even the best VCs are often wrong, but you do know which are nonconsensus. Andreessen and partner Ben Horowitz picked up much of their investment philosophy, probably including this idea, from investment advisor Andy Rachleff, a former partner at Benchmark Capital and founder of Wealthfront, a firm that uses technology to transform the investment advisory business.29 Rachleff, in turn, credits his “investment idol,” Howard Marks, with this framework.30 When the entrepreneur-turned-VC Peter Thiel asks, “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

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INDEX 60 Minutes (TV series), 173, 182 Accel, 125 Adams, Jenna, 105–9 AIG, 111–12 Airbnb, 5, 36, 38, 80, 84, 89–92, 203 Akerlof, George, 65 Amazon, 135, 152 American Bar Association, 89 American Pickers (TV series), 47–8 Anderson, Chris, 39, 134–5 Andreessen, Marc, 127 Andreessen Horowitz, 125 Angel, Jim, 33–4, 45 art gallerists, 10, 111, 116, 198 Association of Retail Travel Agents, 145 attitudes toward middlemen admiration, 9, 13 contempt, 9–11 pity, 9, 13 resentment, 9, 12 see also middlemen AuctionDrop, 3, 59 Autor, David, 152–3 “badass-agent effect,” 185 see also Insulators Barret, Victoria, 27 Bartling, Björn, 181 Benchmark Capital, 127 Best Buy, 196 Bestor, Theodore, 118 Bidwell, Matthew, 98–100 Biglaiser, Gary, 57–8 Black Swan, The (Taleb), 128 Bleacher Report, 179 Bliss Elevated, 94 Blockbusters (Elberse), 135 Boero, Riccardo, 101–5 Boland, Robert, 186, 191 Bor, Mike, 165–8, 170 Boras, Scott, 186 Borax, Hugh, 159–63 Bridges becoming a Bridge, 36–7 example, 15–18 explained, 7 networking and, 27–30 role, 15 social distance and, 18–27 two-sided markets and, 38–46 value and, 30–6 buffers see Insulators Burt, Ron, 25–30, 41 C.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh
Published 14 Apr 2018

Since most venture capital investments either lose money or barely break even, the only realistic way that venture capitalists can achieve these aggressive goals is to rely on a small number of incredibly successful investments. For example, Benchmark Capital invested $6.7 million in eBay in 1997. Less than two years later, eBay went public, and Benchmark’s stake was worth $5 billion, which is a 745 times return. The specific fund that made that investment, Benchmark Capital Partners I, took $85 million from investors and returned $7.8 billion, for a 92 times return. (The initial investors in Facebook did even better, but were individuals rather than firms.)

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution
by Fred Vogelstein
Published 12 Nov 2013

So many high-tech workers now live in San Francisco that some of the newest technology companies have followed them. A decade ago companies such as Zynga and Twitter would have automatically located in Silicon Valley. When they started more than six years ago, they located in San Francisco. Benchmark Capital, a top venture capital firm, just opened its first office in their neighborhood too. All this has made Google a rigorous yet chaotic place to work. Especially back in 2005 there were often dozens of engineering projects going at the same time. Many of them had conflicting ambitions. And some were so secret that only a handful of top executives knew about them.

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Amazon.com; Kindle; 1-Click buying method of AMC cable network Amelio, Gil America Online (AOL) Andreessen, Marc Android phones; advantages over iPhone; Apple’s lawsuits against makers of; Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung over; app store for; Brin’s suggestion for; demo video of; design update for; development of; Dream prototype of; Droid; flexibility of; given to Google employees; Google applications on; Google’s acquisition of; and Google’s making of consumer electronics from scratch; Internet and; iPhone unveiling and; iTunes and; Java and; Jobs and; Jobs’s attacks against; Jobs’s demand of removal of features from; Jobs’s meeting with Google executives on; keyboard on; launch of; Motorola and; Nexus; number of models of; number of people on team for; Page and Schmidt’s differing visions on; Page’s suggestion for; profitability of; rise in popularity of; rumors about development of; secrecy surrounding development of; separateness and tension between Google and; software for; Sooner prototype of; switching from iPhone to; and syncing to computer; and syncing to servers; T-Mobile and; T-Mobile G1; touchscreen on; unlocking feature on; unveiling of; Verizon and; ways to download content on; wireless carriers and; YouTube on Angry Birds Antennagate Apple; in ad sales business; Advanced Technology Group at; advertising of; Android phone makers sued by; antitrust case against; AT&T’s contract with; boards of directors and advisers intertwined with Google; Cingular’s deal with; closed-platform approach of; Facebook and; Fadell’s joining of; Google’s battle with; Google’s partnership with; growth of; iAd; iBooks; iChat; iMac; Internet radio service of; iOS platform of; iPad, see iPad; iPhone, see iPhone; iPod, see iPod; iTunes, see iTunes; Jobs-less era at; Jobs’s return to; Macintosh; Maps; Microsoft as enemy of; Microsoft sued by; Motorola and; Newton handheld computer; Open Handset Alliance and; platform of; politics at; profits of; Quattro Wireless acquired by; Samsung sued by; Schmidt on board of directors of; SEC and; size of computing platform compared with Microsoft; slide-to-unlock feature of; speculation about tablet development at; stock price of; sweatshop labor criticisms of; T-Mobile and; TV; as wireless carrier Apple OS X; iPhone and apps; for Android devices; iTunes store; makers of Arrested Development Artpop Ashton-Tate AT&T; Apple’s contract with; connection problems of; customer dissatisfaction with; GO Corp. and; iPhone and; Microsoft and; Open Handset Alliance and Atavist Atkinson, Bill Atom Films Auletta, Ken aviation Ballmer, Steve; and Google’s hiring of engineers away from Microsoft baseball players Bashful Beard, Ethan Bell, Alexander Graham Bell, Mike Bell Atlantic Benchmark Capital Benton, Dan Bessen, James Best Buy Beust, Cedric Bing BlackBerry; Storm Bloomberg Businessweek magazine Bluetooth BMW books; digitization of; downloadable; see also e-books and -readers Borchers, Bob; iPhone development and; in iPhone instructional video; iPhone unveiling and; iPod and; Jobs and Borland Bowen, Gordon Branch, John Brightline Brin, Sergey; at Android launch; Android suggestion of; car of; iPhone of; Jobs and; telephones and broadband Bronfman, Edgar Brooks, James L.

Mobile First
by Luke Wroblewski
Published 4 Oct 2011

Headlines and cover are set in Titling Gothic by David Berlow, code excerpts in FF Fago by Ole Schäfer. About the author Luke was Co-founder and Chief Product Officer (CPO) of Bagcheck (http://bagcheck.com/) which was acquired by Twitter, Inc., just nine months after being launched publicly. Prior to this, Luke was an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital and the Chief Design Architect (VP) at Yahoo! Inc. where he worked on product alignment and forward-thinking integrated customer experiences on the web, mobile, TV, and beyond. Luke is the author of two popular web design books—Web Form Design (Rosenfeld Media, 2008) and Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability (Wiley, 2002)—and many articles about digital product design and strategy.

The Power of Passive Investing: More Wealth With Less Work
by Richard A. Ferri
Published 4 Nov 2010

See Beta, firm size, and value (BtM); Book-to-market (BtM) Bucket approach Buffett, Warren Bull market Busse, Jeffrey Buy, hold, and rebalance Buy-and-hold investor Buy-high sell-low mentality Buy side of business Canadian mutual funds Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) Capital gains distributions Capital Ideas (Bernstein) Capital Ideas Evolving (Bernstein) Capitalization weighted benchmarks Capitalization weighted index Capital markets line (CML) CAPM. See Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) Carhart, Mark Cash/cash equivalents Cash flow analysis Category styles Certificate in Investment Performance Measurement (CIPM) CFA Institute/charter Changing investor behavior: helping people go passive investing as serious business naysayers to passive investing procrastinators and uninformed about passive investing Charitable trusts.

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See also Market risk actively-managed funds and asset allocation, rebalancing and diversification and fees and individual investors and market vs. non-market momentum as factor in rebalancing portfolio and return and studying, estimating returns tolerance level for two portfolio approach to Risk-adjustment models Risk questionnaires Roaring 60s Roth, Allan Russell 1000 large cap index Russell 2000 index S&P. See Standard & Poor’s (S&P) S&P 1500 index S&P 500: as benchmark capitalization weighted index funds and S&P 500 index fund S&P MidCap 400 index S&P Persistence Score Card “S&P Persistence Scorecard, The” Sales loads Samuelson, Paul SAT scores Savings: goals, examples of investments and Scams Schultheis, John Scudder, Stevens & Clark SEC. See U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Sector bond funds Sector rotation strategies Securities selection Security Analysis (Graham and Dodd) Self-directed retirement plan(s): misguided fund selection as special entities Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) turn-key plans Walmart case Selling of investment products Sell side of business Separation theorum Serious Money (Ferri) Sharpe, William F.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime
by Julian Guthrie
Published 15 Nov 2019

Sonja saw Eve as a new category leader. She had attended the road show for Amazon’s IPO, held in 1997 at the Stanford Barn. She didn’t buy into the IPO but thought books were a good market, given that consumers didn’t need to handle a book before buying it. She watched another online store, eBay, raise $5 million from Benchmark Capital that same year. When eBay went public in 1998, Benchmark’s shares were worth $417 million. Sonja was also impressed with the credentials of Rao and Naficy. Rao had matriculated through public schools outside Boston, earned undergraduate degrees in math and economics from the University of Pennsylvania, worked for two years at Wasserstein Perella, an investment bank in New York, and gone to work for McKinsey & Co. after graduating from Harvard Business School.

…

Like Theresia, who had founded a women’s engineering group at Brown, Sheryl had started a student organization, Women in Economics and Government, to inspire more women to major in those subjects. Sheryl and Dave had a one-year-old son, Nate. Theresia’s daughter, Sarah, was now five. Both of their husbands were entrepreneurs, and both were between jobs. Goldberg had built and sold his company, Launch, a music site, to Yahoo! He was now an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital, looking for his next start-up. Tim was not working, having closed his company. Theresia immediately liked Sheryl, who she thought was smart and a lot of fun. Sheryl looked at Theresia the same way: whip smart and a genuine geek with a thing for the latest Manolo Blahnik pumps and sandals and Jimmy Choo boots.

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
by Michael Lewis
Published 29 Sep 1999

In the Valley equivalent of noblesse oblige, Clark offered smaller stakes in myCFO to the captains who had served him well, Jim Barksdale and Mike Long. Long bought 2.5 percent of the company; Barksdale called and asked to see "the business plan." "I don't have a business plan," Clark said. Barskdale, too, said he wanted a stake. Page 256 In early June, Clark drove up Sand Hill Road to Benchmark Capital, the venture capitalists who'd just made a name for themselves by backing eBay. A few more glamorous deals like that, and Benchmark could offer the same sort of imprimatur as Kleiner Perkinswhich was perhaps the biggest reason that people like Clark sought Kleiner Perkins' money. The Kleiner halo, as it was called.

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In short, Kleiner Perkins was already feeling a bit of the pressure on capitalists that Clark, with myCFO, wanted to create a lot more of. He did not seriously think he'd allow Benchmark to invest in his new company. He hoped only that word of his trip to Benchmark would reach John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins. A week or so after he visited Benchmark Capital, Clark drove back up Sand Hill Road to Kleiner Perkins. John Doerr had gathered his partners in the conference room. Outside of Jim Clark's soul, the Kleiner conference room was the closest thing to ground zero of the Internet boom. Sitting in their conference room, Kleiner partners had backed half a dozen of the most sensational new enterprises: Netscape, Amazon.com, Excite, @Home, Healtheon.

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups
by Randall Stross
Published 4 Sep 2013

A tour bus disgorging gawking tourists would not be welcomed at YC, but perhaps an author would be permitted to take up residency and observe quietly. More than ten years earlier, I had written eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work, which was somewhat similar to the book I had in mind here. For eBoys, I’d observed a then young venture capital firm, Benchmark Capital, and the startups it was investing in. I was resident at Benchmark two years, which happened to coincide with the dot-com boom. The resulting book appeared in March 2000, just as NASDAQ crashed and the boom suddenly approached an unhappy end. A book about Y Combinator involves far more companies, working at a much faster tempo.

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Abbott, Ryan, 46, 171, 174, 177, 180, 181 Adidas, 234 Adpop Media, 46–47, 122–23, 129 AeroFS, 231 Airbnb, 4, 43, 88, 95 AirTV, 103–4 circumvention, 177–78 investors seeking next, 207 Kutcher, Ashton, 265n1 marketplace, 179 Sift Science, 210 Vidyard, 103–5, 120 Aisle50, 51–52, 191, 208–9, 223, 233 Akamai, 101 Albertsons, 209 Allen, Paul, 16 AlphaLab, 41 Altair BASIC, 11, 68 AltaVista, 204 Altman, Sam, 220 on buzzwords, 18–19 CampusCred, 111–14 interviewing finalists, 11, 21 Rap Genius, 196–202 Science Exchange, 173 Sift Science, 75–76 speaking style, 114, 115, 196 YC partner, 63, 150 Amarasiriwardena, Thushan, 127–28 Amazon, 126 Interview Street, 213 Mechanical Turk, 89, 90 movie rentals, 106 web services, 32, 101, 131, 132 Andreessen Horowitz, 4, 66, 230 Andreessen, Marc, 1–2, 4, 215, 239 Android, 17, 122, 147, 212 NFC, 157, 158 speech recognition, 210 Andrzejewski, Alexa, 54 angel investors, 28, 86–87, 189–90 AnyAsq, 166–67 Anybots, 12, 27, 40, 63 AOL, 124, 126 AppJet, 64, 204 Apple, 69 App Store, 100, 127 cofounders, 161 headquarters, 251n1 iOS devices, 122, 127–28, 142, 147, 172, 187, 209, 212 Sequoia Capital, 3 Snapjoy, 187 Arrington, Michael, 48–49 The Art of Ass-Kicking blog (Shen), 9 Artix, 25, 27, 29 Ask Me Anything, 166 Auburn University, 29 Auctomatic, 64, 66, 159, 204 Austin, TX, 42 Australia, 17, 238 Ballinger, Brandon, 70–76, 121, 134–38, 209–10 Barbie, 53 Bard College at Simon’s Rock, 52 Beatles, 200 Bechtolsheim, Andy, 86 Bellingham, WA, 101 Benchmark Capital, 5 Berkeley (UC) CampusCred, 20, 111 graduates of, 9, 68, 135, 164 Information, School of, 89, 90 newspaper, 136 students, 20, 52–53, 135 Venture Lab Competition, 53 women in computer science, 53 Bernstam, Tikhon, 122, 166, 185–86, 212, 228, 230–31 Bernstein, Mikael, 213–14 Betaspring, 42 Bible, 127, 197, 199, 200 Bill of Rights, 197 Bing Nursery School, 52 Birmingham, AL, 29, 33, 51, 203, 223 BizPress, 125, 147–48, 192 BlackBerry, 157, 184 Blackwell, Trevor Anybots, 27 interviewing finalists, 10, 11–12, 32–33 Kiko, 16 Viaweb, 25 YC partner, 27, 40, 57, 63 Blank, Steve, 77 Blogger, 57 Blomfield, Tom, 191 Bloomberg, Michael, 227 Bloomberg TV, 55 Blurb.com, 12 BMW, 165 Books On Campus, 164 BoomStartup, 42 Boso, 57–58, 60 Boston, MA, 56 Boston University, 112 Boucher, Ross, 64 Boulder, CO, 41, 43, 53, 130 Box, 54 Boyd, E.

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money
by Nathaniel Popper
Published 18 May 2015

Wences paused, a bit chagrined. “I wish you’d told me that the last time we talked,” he said. “You told me you weren’t interested in venture investing,” Hoffman shot back. Wences explained that things had changed since they last talked, and that he had decided to take on investors and had struck a deal with Benchmark Capital. “I just don’t think I can include you in that,” Wences said. “It wouldn’t be the honorable thing to do.” Hoffman was not so easily deterred. He told Wences he was going home to figure out a way they could make it work. Wences said he would do the same. Hoffman’s newfound enthusiasm was part of a broader passion sweeping Silicon Valley in early 2014.

…

Gox collapse, 309 2014 Bitcoin Pacifica (Lake Tahoe), 346–348 Anoncoin (digital currency), 270–271 Anti-state.org (website), 29 Argentina, 153–161, 182, 240–242, 259, 277–280, 286, 349–353 ASIC (computer chip), 189–190, 259, 329–330 Assange, Julian, 56–57 Athey, Susan, 345 Atlantis, 245 Australia, 44–45, 117, 168, 171 Automated Clearing House (ACH), 133 Avalon (ASIC), 190, 206 Back, Adam, 17–22, 339, 348 Baidu (Chinese search engine), 261–262 bank bailout of 2008, 32, 111 Bank of America, 272 Bates, Richard, 75–77, 115–116 bee-te-bee (Chinese Bitcoin), 255–256 Beijing Summer Olympics (2008), 145 Benchmark Capital, 282, 293, 305 Bernanke, Ben, 266 Bezos, Jeff, 353 Bharara, Preet, 299–300 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 353–355 Bitcoin arrival of Gavin Andresen, 44–47 arrival of Martti Malmi, 29–30 building trust, 24–25, 33, 48, 61–62, 69, 99–100, 279, 315, 339 buying/selling with, 43–44, 82, 119–120, 129–130 changing business model, 236–239 characterization as “cryptocurrency,” 36 comparison to gold, 157–158, 165, 182 comparison to paper money, 219, 286–287 creation and operation of original code, 4–6, 20–24 disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto, x–xiii hacking and scandals, 91–99 increasing price/value, 38, 66–69, 79, 81–85, 89–91, 131, 175, 180, 184, 193–196, 204–206, 210–211, 250–253, 262–264, 267, 271–275, 284–285 legality/government regulation, 196–198, 251 limitations based upon computers, 347 Mt.

The Facebook Effect
by David Kirkpatrick
Published 19 Nov 2010

It also started to have public relations troubles—it engaged in a very public battle with so-called “fakesters,” users who were deliberately creating Friendster profiles using phony names and identities, including cartoon characters and dogs. Abrams was resolute that people on Friendster should use their real names, and he kicked lots of the fakesters off. Aiming in part to solve its expensive technical challenges, the company took a big infusion of money in fall 2003 from two eminent venture capital funds—$13 million from Benchmark Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. A recent visit to the San Francisco office of Friendster founder Abrams, now operating an online invitations business called Socializr, finds him scruffy-bearded, contrite, and still eager to party. The first thing he does when I walk in is offer me a tequila.

…

Within a year Van Natta became CEO of MySpace (though he lasted there less than a year). As Sandberg settled in and refocused Facebook on its fundamental opportunity in advertising, Zuckerberg’s founding team—the young posse who had helped him create Facebook—also began to disperse. Matt Cohler, his “consigliere” since early 2005, left to join prestigious Benchmark Capital and become a venture capitalist, something he says he’d always wanted to do. He remains close to Zuckerberg. Adam D’Angelo, Zuckerberg’s Exeter chum who has come and gone from Facebook several times, left again to start a new company called Quora, and took top engineer Charlie Cheever with him.

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
Published 14 Feb 2012

LinkedIn continues to invest in features that appeal to professionals and skips features like photo sharing or games that don’t contribute to its competitive advantage. LinkedIn competes in the event where it can win the gold medal; it leads the space it has defined. You can carve out a similar professional niche in the job market by making choices that make you different from the smart people around you. Matt Cohler, now a partner at Benchmark Capital, spent six years in his late twenties and early thirties being a lieutenant to CEOs at LinkedIn (me) and Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg). Most supertalented people want to be the front man; few play the consigliere role well. In other words, there’s less competition and significant opportunity to be an all-star right-hand man.

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance
by Matthew Brennan
Published 9 Oct 2020

Joan is, without a doubt, the most important investor in ByteDance’s history. 35 Although she could have hardly known so at the time, her meeting in the café that day with Yiming was a career-defining moment, the kind of deal that every venture capitalist dreams of. When ByteDance eventually goes public, SIG stands to make multiple billion-dollar returns, exceeding even those of Benchmark Capital’s legendary early investment in Uber, which was worth a whopping $6.8 billion upon IPO. In 2013 SIG owned roughly 12% of the company and is reported to have remained the largest institutional investor. 36 As of writing, ByteDance, including TikTok, is valued at over $100 billion. Above: what Yiming sketched on the napkin as remembered by Joan Wang. 37 SIG In its home market, American financial services firm Susquehanna International Group (SIG) is essentially a hedge fund with investment banks and a research business focused on the public markets.

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
by Blake J. Harris
Published 19 Feb 2019

And as for what Iribe would be doing there, that was best summed up by a recent 2012 article in The Verge: “He’s here to help build an SDK [software development kit] that not only lets TV, tablet and set-top box manufacturers integrate with Gaikai’s network, but game developers too.”3 Several things attracted Iribe to Gaikai—innovative technology, a disruptive strategy, and the backing of top-tier VCs like NEA and Benchmark Capital—but what most sold him was the man whose vision it had originally been: David Perry, the prodigious game developer best known for 16-bit games like Cool Spot, Earthworm Jim, and Disney’s Aladdin. Growing up, Iribe had worshipped Perry; and now heading into this new phase of his career, inspiration from one of his childhood heroes was exactly what Iribe needed.

…

That was the perfect end to a magical month, which Iribe and Mitchell celebrated that evening at a party thrown by the Hawken guys, sneaking off to not so subtly check their phones—refreshing, refreshing for last-minute Kickstarter pledges—until finally, with a 5–4–3–2–1 countdown to midnight, the guys clinked together their champagne glasses: $2,437,429. That was the final tally, nearly ten times their fund-raising goal. And into September the momentum kept building until Iribe set up his first VC meeting—with Mitch Lasky at Benchmark Capital—and after what seemed like a good pitch found out that Benchmark wouldn’t be making an investment; largely because they were concerned about “motion sickness.” Because as it turned out, several of the partners who Iribe had given demos to wound up getting sick later that day. To educate his colleagues, Luckey put together an overview of what they were dealing with.

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy
by Tom Slee
Published 18 Nov 2015

And Zipcar did grow: from its beginnings in Boston (2001) to New York (2003), and then to San Francisco in 2005, Toronto in 2006, and London later that same year, reaching about a quarter of a million members by 2008. Zipcar continued to expand. It provided an iPhone app to help you book a car, it took investments from Benchmark Capital and General Electric’s Commercial Finance Fleet Services, it merged with competitor Flexcar, it created a partnership with Spanish car rental company Avancar, it acquired UK service Streetcar. The appeal of the company was economic, social, and environmental: it provided affordable driving options (access over ownership), it fostered an alternative, community feel (you are a member, rather than a customer), and it promoted a green image (a more efficient use of resources than individual ownership).

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
by Nicole Perlroth
Published 9 Feb 2021

If they could manage the back-end logistics and the payments and offer a trusted platform through which hackers might engage with companies across industries, they could make a far greater dent in the exploit stockpiles than they could working from their respective siloes. In April 2014 Rice and the Dutchmen walked down San Francisco’s Market Avenue, took an elevator up to the gilded open-space offices of Benchmark Capital, a renovated building above the city’s historic theater, the Warfield, and pitched five of the most competitive venture capitalists in the Valley. Unlike buzzy firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Accel Partners, which larded up their payrolls with marketers, PR handlers, and in-house designers, Benchmark was known for its focus.

…

Bowman Dam, here Ashcroft, John, here Auriemma, Luigi, here, here, here, here Aurora (China), here, here, here, here, here, here Avast (Czech), here, here Azimuth, here BAE Systems, here Baidu (China), here Ball, James, here, here Ballmer, Steve, here banking industry, here, here, here, here Bannon, Steve, here, here Baquet, Dean, here Barboza, David, here Barr, William, here, here Beer, Ian, here Bekrar, Chaouki (Wolf of Vuln Street), here, here, here, here, here Benchmark Capital, here Berger, Joseph, here Bezos, Jeff, here, here Biden, Hunter, here Biden, Joseph R., Jr., here, here, here, here, here Bina, Eric, here bin Laden, Osama, here bin Salman, Mohammed (MBS), here bin Zayed, Mohammed (MbZ), here BlackBerry, here, here Black Energy malware (Russia), here, here BlueKeep, here Blumenthal, Sidney, here Boeing, here Bogacheva, Anna V., here Bolton, John, here, here Bonesaw, here Borenstein, Nathaniel, here Bossert, Tom, here, here, here Bowman, Tom, here Bowman Avenue Dam, here, here Brazil, here Brennan, John, here, here, here Brin, Sergey, here, here, here, here Broad, William, here Broderick, Matthew, here Buehler, Hans, here bug bounty programs.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away
by Doug Henwood
Published 9 May 2005

It should be pointed out that most individual investors didn't get in at the offering price; offerings are reserved for brokers' favorite customers, Uke big institutions and the occasional politician. Most small-time punters probably got in around $70 or higher. This history is further proof of the maxim that it's generally a bad idea to buy what rich, sophisticated investors are selling. Other deals were even richer for VCs; Benchmark Capital's $5 miUion early investment in eBay, one of the few dot.coms that managed to make a profit, sold its stake for $4.2 billion around the turn of the millennium—an 83,800% return (Ip et al. 2000). After the New Economy Those were the fat years for the VCs, who raise money from institutional investors and rich individuals and invest the proceeds in lots of risky startups, hoping that a few will win big and oSset the inevitably larger population of failures.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
by Ben Horowitz
Published 4 Mar 2014

—GLORIA GAYNOR, “I WILL SURVIVE” Coming off the success of Netscape, Marc knew all the top venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, so we needed no introductions. Unfortunately for us, Kleiner Perkins, the firm that backed Netscape, had already funded a potentially competitive company. We spoke to all the other top-tier firms and decided to go with Andy Rachleff of Benchmark Capital. If I had to describe Andy with one word, it would be gentleman. Smart, refined, and gracious, Andy was a brilliant abstract thinker who could encapsulate complex strategies into pithy sentences with ease. Benchmark would invest $15 million at a pre-money valuation (the value of the company before the cash goes into the company treasury) of $45 million.

Designing Search: UX Strategies for Ecommerce Success
by Greg Nudelman and Pabini Gabriel-Petit
Published 8 May 2011

Daniel holds degrees in math and computer science from MIT and a PhD in computer science from CMU, where he worked on information visualization. He blogs at The Noisy Channel (http://thenoisychannel.com/) about information science and retrieval. Luke Wroblewski is currently Chief Design Officer and co-founder of a stealth start-up. He is also an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital. Prior to this, Luke was the Chief Design Architect (VP) at Yahoo! Inc. where he worked on product alignment and forward-looking integrated customer experiences on the Web, mobile, TV, and beyond. Luke is the author of two popular Web design books (Web Form Design (Rosenfeld Media, 2008) and Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability (Wiley, 2002)) and many articles about digital product design and strategy.

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global
by Rebecca Fannin
Published 2 Sep 2019

Table 7-2 Comparing Didi and Uber Start Date and Headquarters Didi: 2012 in Beijing Uber: 2009 in San Francisco Venture Capital Raised Didi: $21 billion Uber: $20 billion Number of Users Didi: 40 million monthly users Uber: 40 million monthly users Locations Didi: 400 cities Uber: 400 cities Market Share in Home Market Didi: 80 percent Uber: 73 percent Backers Didi: Tencent, Alibaba, SoftBank, Apple, and Singapore government investment fund Temasek Uber: SoftBank, Baidu, Google Ventures, private equity firm TPG, and Silicon Valley VC firm Benchmark Capital Market Valuation Didi: $4 billion financing in late 2017 from SoftBank and an Abu Dhabi state fund with $56 billion valuation, ranked third among global unicorns Uber: investment in early 2018 from SoftBank consortium with $72 billion valuation, ranked second among global unicorns Public Listing Plans Didi: plans to go public have been delayed and company is restructuring Uber: went public in 2019 Didi Buys Out Uber in China Contrasts between Uber and Didi take on a whole new meaning when you consider what happened to Uber in China.

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
by Eric Ries
Published 13 Sep 2011

Let’s take a look at this process in action in a dramatic pivot done by a company called Wealthfront. That company was founded in 2007 by Dan Carroll and added Andy Rachleff as CEO shortly thereafter. Andy is a well-known figure in Silicon Valley: he is a cofounder and former general partner of the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital and is on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches a variety of courses on technology entrepreneurship. I first met Andy when he commissioned a case study on IMVU to teach his students about the process we had used to build the company. Wealthfront’s mission is to disrupt the mutual fund industry by bringing greater transparency, access, and value to retail investors.

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff
by Clara Shih
Published 30 Apr 2009

My undergraduate and graduate advisors and professors at Stanford who with their passion, brilliance, and tireless mentorship helped me understand that the most interesting and worthwhile aspect of technology is how it can positively affect human lives—Armando Fox (now at UC Berkeley), Tina Seelig, Tom Byers, Randy Komisar (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), Tom Fountain (Mayfield Fund), Eric Roberts, Terry Winograd, Peter Fenton (Benchmark Capital), Rob McGinn, and Michele Tertilt. Jonathan Zittrain and Chris Davies at Oxford, and the Marshall Scholarship. Alberto Savoia, Shona Brown, Ming Wang, Jae Yu, and Magda Escobar for the inspiration and opportunity to work for them at Agitar, Google, the University of Illinois, Fermilab, and PluggedIn, respectively.

Investment Banking: Valuation, Leveraged Buyouts, and Mergers and Acquisitions
by Joshua Rosenbaum , Joshua Pearl and Joseph R. Perella
Published 18 May 2009

Franky Lee, Deutsche Bank Eric Leicht, White & Case LLP Jay Lurie, Macquarie Capital David Mayhew, Deutsche Bank Coley McMenamin, Banc of America Securities Joseph Meisner, UBS Investment Bank Steve Momper, University of Virginia, Darden Business Publishing Kirk Murphy, Benchmark Capital Joshua Neren Paul Pai, Deutsche Bank James Paris Dan Park, Deutsche Bank Gregory Pryor, White & Case LLP David Ross, Deutsche Bank Ashish Rughwani, Dominus Capital David Sanford, UBS Investment Bank Arnold Schneider, Georgia Tech College of Management Mustafa Singaporewalla Steven Sherman, Shearman & Sterling LLP Andrew Shogan Emma Smith, Deutsche Bank David Spalding, Dartmouth College Andrew Steinerman, JP Morgan Matthew Thomson Robb Tretter, Bracewell & Giuliani LLP John Tripodoro, Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP Ante Vucic, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz Jack Whalen, Kensico Capital Supplemental Materials VALUATION MODELS The model templates (and completed versions) for the valuation methodologies discussed in this book are available in Microsoft Excel format at www.wiley.com/go/investmentbanking —password:wiley09.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism
by Bhu Srinivasan
Published 25 Sep 2017

Silicon Valley venture capitalists, sensing the speed with which private illiquid investments turned into publicly tradable securities, dramatically turned up their rate of funding start-ups. The compressed time frame from funding to IPO reduced risk. In addition, investors who had made fortunes in earlier Internet start-ups now added to the investable capital available for the next wave. Kleiner Perkins invested $8 million in Amazon.com. An IPO followed. Benchmark Capital invested in eBay, the online auctioneer. eBay was notable in that there was no similar real-world corollary—a real-time nationwide auction for Aunt Mae’s dining chairs was not possible without the Internet. Hundreds of start-ups in e-commerce of every conceivable category were funded: Pets.com in pet goods, CDNow and Music Boulevard in music CDs, Buy.com in electronics, and so on.

…

., 427–28, 430–31, 465 Atlantic & Pacific, 191 Austria-Hungary, 296, 297 automobiles, 279–91 assembly line manufacturing and, 289–90 building of factories, in 1980s, 489–90 Durant and, 281, 286–87 Ford and, 281–83, 284–86, 287–91 government regulation of roads and, 283–84 internal combustion versus steam power, 279–80 Japanese competition in 1970s and, 438 Model T and, 286, 288–89, 291 production of, during Great Depression, 329, 335 production of, during World War II, 364 references in rap music, 451–53 B-24 Liberator (bomber), 361–62 Baldwin Locomotive, 362 Ball, Lucille, 381, 383–84 Ballmer, Steve, 487 Bank of America (Italian-American Bank), 310, 344, 345 Bank of United States, 325–26 banks/banking bank holidays, 331–34 failures, during Great Depression, 324–28 Barksdale, Jim, 472 Barnes & Noble, 442 baseball, 391 BASIC programming language, 430 Bavarian Motor Works (BMW), 354, 489 beaver fur trade, 14–15, 17 Beaver (ship), 39 Beckert, Sven, 145 Beecher, Catharine, 198–99 Beecher, Henry Ward, 136 beer, 178–80, 183–84 Bellona (steamboat), 64, 65, 67 Benchmark Capital, 474 Ben-Hur (film), 337–38 Berkman, Alexander, 222 Berkshire Hathaway, 436–37, 442–43 Berlin Wall, fall of, 484 Berners-Lee, Time, 466–68, 480 Bessemer, Henry, 168 Bessemer Steel Association, 172 Best Friend (locomotive), 82 Beveridge, Albert, 274 Bezos, Jeff, 470–71 Billings, John Shaw, 412 Bissell, George, 150 Bloomingdale’s, 207 Blue Ribbon Sports, 458 Boeing, 490 Bond, Joseph, 130 bonds/bond market for canal financing, 76, 77, 78, 79, 83 Chrysler and, 440 for Civil War financing, 146–47 formation of US Steel and, 248 Jay Cooke & Co., 169 junk bonds, 439–42 U.S. government bond yields in 1981, 440 World War I and, 299 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 449 bootlegging, 315–19 B&O Railroad Company, 81–82 Boston tea party, 39–40 bottling, 179 Bowerman, Bill, 458 boxing, 304 boycott, colonial of British goods, 37–38 Bradford, William, 3, 4, 11, 12–13, 16, 17 Brewster, William, 10 Brinkley, Alan, 473 British East India Company, 38–39 Broderick, Joseph, 326 Brooklyn Bridge, 194 Brooks, Preston, 121 Brown, John, 135–36 Brown, Kay, 337 Brush, Charles, 185 Bryan, Joseph, 123 Bryan, William Jennings, 233–37, 241, 246–47, 298 bubbles in Internet stocks, 472–78 in slave prices (Negro Fever), 126, 130–31 Buchanan, James, 121 Budweiser, 180 buffalo, 177 Buffett, Warren, 423, 437 Buick, David, 280 Buick Manufacturing Company, 280–81, 286–87 Busch, Adolphus, 178–79 Bush, George H.

Americana
by Bhu Srinivasan

Silicon Valley venture capitalists, sensing the speed with which private illiquid investments turned into publicly tradable securities, dramatically turned up their rate of funding start-ups. The compressed time frame from funding to IPO reduced risk. In addition, investors who had made fortunes in earlier Internet start-ups now added to the investable capital available for the next wave. Kleiner Perkins invested $8 million in Amazon.com. An IPO followed. Benchmark Capital invested in eBay, the online auctioneer. eBay was notable in that there was no similar real-world corollary—a real-time nationwide auction for Aunt Mae’s dining chairs was not possible without the Internet. Hundreds of start-ups in e-commerce of every conceivable category were funded: Pets.com in pet goods, CDNow and Music Boulevard in music CDs, Buy.com in electronics, and so on.

…

., 427–28, 430–31, 465 Atlantic & Pacific, 191 Austria-Hungary, 296, 297 automobiles, 279–91 assembly line manufacturing and, 289–90 building of factories, in 1980s, 489–90 Durant and, 281, 286–87 Ford and, 281–83, 284–86, 287–91 government regulation of roads and, 283–84 internal combustion versus steam power, 279–80 Japanese competition in 1970s and, 438 Model T and, 286, 288–89, 291 production of, during Great Depression, 329, 335 production of, during World War II, 364 references in rap music, 451–53 B-24 Liberator (bomber), 361–62 Baldwin Locomotive, 362 Ball, Lucille, 381, 383–84 Ballmer, Steve, 487 Bank of America (Italian-American Bank), 310, 344, 345 Bank of United States, 325–26 banks/banking bank holidays, 331–34 failures, during Great Depression, 324–28 Barksdale, Jim, 472 Barnes & Noble, 442 baseball, 391 BASIC programming language, 430 Bavarian Motor Works (BMW), 354, 489 beaver fur trade, 14–15, 17 Beaver (ship), 39 Beckert, Sven, 145 Beecher, Catharine, 198–99 Beecher, Henry Ward, 136 beer, 178–80, 183–84 Bellona (steamboat), 64, 65, 67 Benchmark Capital, 474 Ben-Hur (film), 337–38 Berkman, Alexander, 222 Berkshire Hathaway, 436–37, 442–43 Berlin Wall, fall of, 484 Berners-Lee, Time, 466–68, 480 Bessemer, Henry, 168 Bessemer Steel Association, 172 Best Friend (locomotive), 82 Beveridge, Albert, 274 Bezos, Jeff, 470–71 Billings, John Shaw, 412 Bissell, George, 150 Bloomingdale’s, 207 Blue Ribbon Sports, 458 Boeing, 490 Bond, Joseph, 130 bonds/bond market for canal financing, 76, 77, 78, 79, 83 Chrysler and, 440 for Civil War financing, 146–47 formation of US Steel and, 248 Jay Cooke & Co., 169 junk bonds, 439–42 U.S. government bond yields in 1981, 440 World War I and, 299 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 449 bootlegging, 315–19 B&O Railroad Company, 81–82 Boston tea party, 39–40 bottling, 179 Bowerman, Bill, 458 boxing, 304 boycott, colonial of British goods, 37–38 Bradford, William, 3, 4, 11, 12–13, 16, 17 Brewster, William, 10 Brinkley, Alan, 473 British East India Company, 38–39 Broderick, Joseph, 326 Brooklyn Bridge, 194 Brooks, Preston, 121 Brown, John, 135–36 Brown, Kay, 337 Brush, Charles, 185 Bryan, Joseph, 123 Bryan, William Jennings, 233–37, 241, 246–47, 298 bubbles in Internet stocks, 472–78 in slave prices (Negro Fever), 126, 130–31 Buchanan, James, 121 Budweiser, 180 buffalo, 177 Buffett, Warren, 423, 437 Buick, David, 280 Buick Manufacturing Company, 280–81, 286–87 Busch, Adolphus, 178–79 Bush, George H.

Hatching Twitter
by Nick Bilton
Published 5 Nov 2013

It took about ten minutes for Fenton to realize there were no presents under the tree and something was seriously amiss at Twitter. He had been obsessing about the company for months. In January 2009 he caught wind that Twitter was about to raise its third round of financing. But the investment company Fenton worked for, Benchmark Capital, wasn’t going to be part of this funding. Fenton was thirty-six years old at the time and already worth tens of millions of dollars. He looked like a marine, with short light hair and a rigidly straight posture. As was the case for most venture capitalists in the Valley, it wasn’t about the money for him; it was about winning.

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It
by Scott Kupor
Published 3 Jun 2019

Success against a small market just won’t get a VC the type of returns she needs to generate to stay in business. Thus, VCs often think of market size as the “so what?” question in evaluating a startup’s potential success. It’s all well and good that the team is great and the product is great, but so what, if the market size isn’t sufficient to sustain a large business. Andy Rachleff, a founder of Benchmark Capital, has said that companies can succeed in great markets even with mediocre teams but that great teams will always lose to a bad market. Why is market size so challenging to get right? Because often it’s unknowable at the time of investment how big a market actually is. Thus, VCs can fool themselves in multiple ways when evaluating markets.

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum
by Camila Russo
Published 13 Jul 2020

The San Jose conference in May 2013, simply called Bitcoin 2013, was a coming-out party for the cryptocurrency world. Past conferences had drawn crowds of a couple hundred, but this time a thousand people filled the room. In past conferences, only the Bitcoin-famous were on the speaker list. In San Jose, the Winklevoss twins gave a keynote speech and venture funds like Draper Associates and Benchmark Capital descended from Silicon Valley. Everyone was happy. Bitcoin had just crossed the $100 milestone from around $15 at the beginning of the year1. Most of the Bitcoin-famous were in attendance, too. Cofounder of crypto exchange BitInstant Charlie Shrem, who in December 2014 would be sentenced to two years in prison for aiding and abetting the operation of an unlicensed money-transmitting business related to the Silk Road, was one of the speakers.

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
by Steve Coll
Published 30 Apr 2012

John Watson, the chief executive of rival Chevron, slipped the knife in: “We saw valuations for unconventionals that were a bit out of line with our view of value,” he told Wall Street analysts. “So our view wasn’t so much that shale gas wasn’t a good place to be. It was just the valuations at the time [of ExxonMobil’s purchase of XTO] were strong, so we waited.”21 Mark Gilman, the oil industry analyst at Benchmark Capital, regarded the XTO purchase as a sign that ExxonMobil’s long-term failure to build upstream reserves—which Gilman laid mainly at Lee Raymond’s door—was at last coming home to roost. Tillerson had little choice but to buy new reserves in a high-price environment because otherwise, he would be presiding over a shrinking corporation, which could reduce ExxonMobil’s share price, which could further limit its ability to buy its way out of its dilemma.

…

., 387–88, 393 Baltimore Sun, 384 Bandar Bin Sultan, Prince of Saudi Arabia, 202 Bank of New York, 427, 429–30, 431 Barbour, Haley, 91 Barbour Griffith & Rogers, 291–92 Barclays Capital, 588, 589, 591, 597 Barnett Shale, 577–78, 584 Baron, Valerie, 490 Barron’s, 577 Barrymore, Drew, 208 Barton, Joe, xiv, 487–94, 496 Barzani, Masoud, 570 Bashir, Omar Al-, 242, 356–57, 358 Batts, Deborah, 433–34 BearingPoint, Inc., 565 Beautiful Vision, Inc., 526 Bechtel Corporation, 96, 97 Beggar of Hope, The (Le Mendiant de l’Espoir) (Haggar), 171 Bellachey, Brenda, 130 Benchmark Capital, 591 Bennett, Jack, 62 Bennett, John, 139, 146 Benson, Sally, 444 benzene, 381, 386 Berezovsky, Boris, 271 Berlin Wall, 17, 19 Bingaman, Jeff, 321 Bingel, Kelly, 551 Bin Laden, Osama, 172, 400 Bin Nayef, Mohammed, 207 Black, Hugo, 401 Black, Ronnie, 43 Blair, Tony, 106, 220, 224, 240, 285, 290, 523, 611 Blankfein, Lloyd, 554 Bodkin, Jim, 130 Bodman, Samuel, 143, 248, 323, 545, 560, 563 Boeing Corporation, 153 Booth, John Wilkes, 542 Borico, Miguel, 292 Bowdoin College, 132 Bowen, Russell, xiii, 375–76, 378 Boxer, Barbara, 320, 486 Boyce, Ralph “Skip,” 113, 117 Boy Scouts of America, 333, 335, 541 Brazil, 18, 446, 448 Breakingviews, 591 Breast Cancer Fund, 483, 485–86, 491 Bremer, Paul, 231, 232, 236 Bridgeland, John, 90 Brill, Ken, 91–92 Bristol-Myers, 80, 91 British Petroleum (BP), 2–3, 10, 16–17, 31, 36–37, 40, 51, 52, 57, 62, 64, 70, 85, 107, 161, 198, 218, 255, 259, 261, 264, 274, 320, 322, 326, 340, 342, 414, 415, 418, 421, 423, 425, 457, 546, 549, 550, 568, 575, 578, 595, 608, 609, 613, 615, 616 Browne’s tenure at, 610–12 climate change issue and, 224–26 ExxonMobil’s rivalry with, 224 liquefied natural gas industry and, 581 logo of, 224 political neutrality of, 226 poor safety culture of, 612, 614 proposed Mobil merger with, 58–59 proposed XTO merger and, 581–82 solar investment of, 224–25 Texas City disaster and, 612 Voluntary Principles and, 404–5 see also Deepwater Horizon disaster Brookings Institution, 344, 537, 553 Brooklyn, 3 Brooks, Karen, 113 Browne, John, 16–17, 57, 59–61, 64, 224–25, 226, 259, 264–65, 340, 610–12 Browner, Carol, 539–40, 542–43 Buchan, Graeme, 451–52, 459 Buchholtz, Walter, 86, 340, 493 Buffett, Warren, 577 Bundy, Darcie A., 215 Burma, 244 Burt, Richard, 292 Bush, Barbara, 235 Bush, George H.

The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the Americas Cup, Twice
by Julian Guthrie
Published 31 Mar 2014

Pets.com began in February 1999 and closed in November 2000, after buying a $1.2 million Super Bowl ad and burning through $300 million in investment capital. Webvan, the Foster City–based grocery home-delivery service created by executives who had no experience in supermarkets—yet attracted funding from companies including Goldman Sachs, Benchmark Capital, Sequioa Capital, and Yahoo—filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after burning through hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a fleet of trucks, build automated warehouses, and expand aggressively nationwide. “The bubble went on and on and my confidence was beginning to waver,” Larry said. He had begun to think perhaps he was wrong: Maybe profits didn’t mean a thing.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

In Europe in March 2020, large corporates like VW were unabashed in their lobbying for support from the ECB.53 The Bank of Japan went even further. It bought shares, taking the risk of equity ownership. Between 2010 and the end of 2020, it built a $434 billion holding in the Japanese equity market.54 That was impressive, but America is the world’s benchmark capital market. And none of the other central banks had ever done anything on the scale that Powell was now contemplating. What the Fed really needed from Congress was political cover for its adventurous policy. The unspoken premise of the Fed’s announcement was that a new partnership would be forthcoming with the Treasury and Congress.

Facebook: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy
Published 25 Feb 2020

When pop singer Justin Bieber posted a candid shot, Instagram quickly became an important promotional tool for celebrities—drawing attention away from the previous go-to vanity amplifier, Twitter. This didn’t bother Jack Dorsey, who kept Instagramming away. Eventually, Instagram became the go-to branding engine of a generation of pop stars, fashion models, and reality-TV insta-figures. Barely six months old in February 2011, Instagram did its “A” funding round, led by Benchmark Capital. The partner doing the deal was Matt Cohler. Smaller participants included Dorsey and Adam D’Angelo. They invested at a valuation of $20 million. * * * • • • EARLY ON, MARK Zuckerberg noticed that Instagram was sharing photos in a new way. Since photo sharing was the most popular feature on Facebook, he realized that this tiny start-up was doing something that Facebook wasn’t.

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation
by Jono Bacon
Published 1 Aug 2009

Doing what you love to do—and being able to live a comfortable lifestyle while doing it—is a great gig. Mårten Mickos, MySQL and Eucalyptus Mårten Mickos was the CEO of MySQL AB, was senior vice president of the database group at Sun Microsystems, is a member of the board of Mozilla Messaging and RightScale, and Entrepreneur In Residence at Benchmark Capital. Currently he is CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, the company behind the Eucalyptus open source cloud infrastructure. Mårten has been at the forefront of the open source business world and has been faced with the responsibility of balancing the corporate interests of an organization with the participatory interests of a community.