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

“There sure are a lot of signs,” Rachleff repeated. He wasn’t concerned about Benchmark’s overall reputation being badly damaged. “The amazing thing about our business is, everyone forgets the losers—they remember the winners.”

Ramsey Beirne pitch to take on a search assignment, say he would consider it, then disappear for a few days before returning with an answer. The CEO’s of these small companies were consulting someone else, and that someone else, upon investigation, turned out to be the venture capitalist who sat on the company’s board of directors.

group of three young venture capitalists in Menlo Park—Bruce Dunlevie, Bob Kagle, and Andy Rachleff—decided to step free of their old firms, and with software entrepreneur Kevin Harvey they set up Benchmark Capital.

“This is not a rocketship,” Kevin Harvey said, interjecting a characteristically cooler tone. “This isn’t something that’s going to move a boatload of sales in its first year.” “Here’s my question,” said Kagle. “This is central to the beast here. Bruce said it earlier—as a result of the advent of Amazon, he’s increased his book gift-giving by a fac

Benchmark’s self-proclaimed “fundamentally better architecture” was based on a bedrock tenet: equal partners, without hierarchical separation, with equal votes and equal compensation. They had used it brilliantly from the beginning to differentiate themselves from the rest of the firms on Sand Hill Road.

A good business will attract good competitors. This eBay’s executives knew in the abstract, but like the abstract concept of war, the theory necessarily bore a limited relationship to the thing itself.

Our biggest competition, Walker explained, was cars and couches; Priceline’s system “collected demand” from people who would not otherwise be flying. And by promising to get back with an answer within one hour—why one hour? Glasses in an hour, photos in an hour; consumers already understand the unit—Walker was deliberately creating in the consumers

no company looks better than the one that professes it does not need your money.