Thread by @PinkPoloShorts

Thread on eBoys, which is probably the best book I've read since High Rise. (1/x)

(2/x) eBoys is an account of the first few years of Benchmark Capital, the venerable VC firm known for investments in eBay (part of the genesis for the name of the book), Uber, WeWork, and Snap. More info here: wsj.com/articles/bench… and here: forbes.com/sites/alexkonr…

(3/x) Benchmark is unique in that it only has partners, no associates or junior partners, and they all split the economics equally. The founding partners structured it like this to promote the "team" rather than any individual. They looked at firms like Kleiner Perkins...

(4/x) and saw that entrepreneurs who had only heard of John Doerr were disappointed when upon receiving funding from KP they dealt with anyone but Doerr. When you worked with Benchmark you got everyone. Partners wanted to make all the deals work due to their shared economics

(5/x) The book deals with the late 1990s, right before the tech bubble burst. You saw things like a $6.2M investment in eBay become worth several billion within 2-3 years. Kevin Harvey, one of the partners, cautioned everyone constantly: "it will not always be this way."

(6/x) There's a ton to take away but the two most interesting things to me are how these guys thought about investing and how they thought about culture, and what is clear is that the partners viewed those two things as being COMPLETELY intertwined

(7/x) They didn't use spreadsheets, and often made investments from their guts. They even say as much - "venture is more about guts than brains". They talk a lot about "Ready aim aim aim aim" syndrome, something that Boone Pickens harped on - had to have guts to pull the trigger

(8/x) At the start of the book they had just brought in their first non-founding partner, David Beirne, and over the course of the book they hired Bill Gurley. What's interesting is that Benchmark brought them because they were stronger than the existing group at certain things

(9/x) David Beirne had founded a wildly successful executive recruiting firm and was a great networker and recruiter in a way that the existing partners weren't. There's a great scene where they are at a conference and Beirne is the only one who networks.

(10/x) The Gurley hire was made because they all felt that he was smarter and more analytical than the existing group. They all comment on how in their initial conversations they had problems keeping up with him intellectually. They also felt that they could help him grow...

(11/x) by helping him learn to trust his gut and intuition. The best parts of the book are the transcripts of the weekly partners meetings - these guys really went after one another about different deals. They could do this because it didn't really matter economically...

(12/x) whether one partner's deals got funded or another - what really mattered was that the deals worked. eBay may have been the best venture return ever at that time, but the fact that Bob Kagle lead that investment didn't mean he got more profits.

(13/x) The incentive was to make sure that each investment was a good one. Finally, one thing that really stuck with me was something they told the founder of Webvan (which turned out to be an epic disaster) - their experience led them to believe that the startups that worked...

(14/14) were the ones that focused on one thing, and then expanded when they had the ability to do so. If you focused on doing two or three things you get killed.

There's so much more to talk about, so go read this thing.