eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work

The cultural fit had to be just right, too. It was this issue that the partners would spend the most time agonizing over. The five Benchmark partners felt keenly the closeness of a basketball team; in moments of private vanity they liked to think of themselves as the Chicago Bulls in the early nineties, but it wasn’t apt—this was a team that was kn

Entrepreneurs who sought venture funding usually did not need to invest any more personal money into the venture than they had already spent to bring it to life. But some venture capitalists did demand more. Arthur Rock, the senior dean of American venture capitalists and an early investor in Intel, always insisted whenever his venture firm put mon

“Don Valentine Interview,” Upside, May 1990.

Bill doesn’t know what hiring people is all about. He wants to learn it all. He’s a total learn-it-all guy. He was asking me questions: ‘How do you spend your time? How do you recruit? What do you look for? What do you ask people? What do you do?’ ” “He’s pretty humble,” said Rachleff. Beirne agreed, and added, “He does a very good job at the shows

On the day after eBay’s IPO, when Pierre Omidyar, just back from New York, stood on Benchmark’s terrace, he observed that the world had imputed strategic savvy to the company that it did not really have. “Our system didn’t scale,” he said, “so we didn’t grow big enough to attract competition. Everybody thought we were flying below the radar screen

By temperament, Skoll could not help but pour himself into the work in a scarily total fashion—once he started at eBay, he worked hundred-hour weeks for the next two and a half years. But he wasn’t driven by materialist hungers, and he thought of himself not as a businessperson but as a writer.

Gurley cast cold water on the proposal to go public, however, by asking, “Is it built to win?” He explained, “GM is built to last, but it’s got so much bureaucracy, it’s not going anywhere.” Maybe “built to last” was not the right criterion to optimize on.

EBay was an anomaly: a profitable company that was able to self-fund its growth and that turned to venture capital solely for contacts and counsel. No larger lesson can be drawn. When Benchmark wired the first millions to eBay’s bank account, the figurative check was tossed into the vault—and there it would sit, unneeded and undisturbed.

Beirne added his own high praise, which was that the attention Gurley received as a sought-after speaker at industry gatherings had secured for Gurley “a lot of mindshare.”

The gamble paid off. Despite Stanford’s success in persuading two institutions to withdraw their oral commitments to Benchmark’s fund, other investors stepped forward and the partners secured the $85 million in institutional capital that they had announced they would raise. At Bob Kagle’s urging, the partners started business by giving their secret