Derrick Li
3 followers · 7 following · 355 views
on the atlas — 31
- Datacurve5 savers
- Notes on Benchmark Capital • ALE1 savers
- Lessons from Five Companies (Part II) | Keith Rabois & David Weiden - YouTube1 savers
- 2,851 Miles // Bill Gurley (Transcript + Slides) – Kinetic Energy Ventures1 savers
- Nick Saban: The Greatest College Coach of All Time | A Football Life | NFL+ - YouTube1 savers
- AI Food Fights in the Enterprise with Databricks' Ali Ghodsi - YouTube1 savers
- All-In Summit: Bill Gurley presents 2,851 Miles - YouTube1 savers
- Mike Maples & Ann Miura-Ko (FLOODGATE) at Startup Grind 2014 - YouTube1 savers
- The Improbable Story of Twitter's First Investor | Inc.com1 savers
- Microsoft Word - Dennis final.doc1 savers
- Reid Dennis - CHM1 savers
- How Carl Thoma and Orlando Bravo Built the Largest Tech Buyout Firm1 savers
- A forty-year career. | Irrational Exuberance3 savers
- 'I’m sorry to have to announce that my cancer situation has developed not necessarily to my advantage' - Jersey Evening Post2 savers
- Venture Capital Gravitational Physics (with Ravi Mhatre) - YouTube3 savers
- Repeat After Me: Transformers are Better than State Space Models at Copying - Kempner Institute1 savers
- The Right Idea at the Right Time: Pure Storage | TechCrunch1 savers
- Elad Gil & the Early-Stage Startup Squiggle - YouTube1 savers
- How to Win in the Startup World — Mike Maples and Andy Rachleff | The Tim Ferriss Show - YouTube1 savers
- Paul Buchheit: Angel investing, my first three years1 savers
- (PDF) A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs_Booktree.ng | Arthur Peace - Academia.edu1 savers
- Quora Session with Peter Fenton2 savers
- The Boys of Benchmark Talk About S.F.'s Tenderloin, Diversity and Artisanal Venture Capitalism (Part One) - Vox1 savers
- Taste is a guide for what is worthwhile49 savers
- 📚☕Investment Library: The Money Game1 savers
- cdixon | Six strategies for overcoming “chicken and egg” problems1 savers
- Life Is Not Short44 savers
- Kevin G. on X: "Ted Weschler on reading to a variant perception I think one of the great mistakes of investing is that people do end up reading the same thing. And the only way you're going to have success in the stock market is if you've got what's referred to as a variant perception,…" / X1 savers
- Safeway emphasis on preventive care a model for nation | The Hill1 savers
- Heat Death: Venture Capital in the 1980s | Reaction Wheel4 savers
- Curius / Onboarding2621 savers
highlights — 122
defined by shoe-leather, hustle, energy and intensity
Notes on Benchmark Capital • ALEThat energy and motivation to be outbound is something that success can work against because your calendar is filled with people who want to meet you rather than people you should be trying to find.
Notes on Benchmark Capital • ALEcost of capital has been meaningfully lower for “late-stage private” companies than for equivalent public companies
Notes on Benchmark Capital • ALEEntrepreneurs and investors should always be thinking about this round of funding in terms of the next round of funding
Notes on Benchmark Capital • ALESeries A valuations and team salaries go up and down cyclically but only to a small degree.
Notes on Benchmark Capital • ALEan idea or an MVP product turns into a true company and starts to incur people costs
Notes on Benchmark Capital • ALEIn most firms, you can get one of those things — there’s a lot of admiration, but no respect, or respect, but you never want to get in the same room as the person. Nine out of 10 partnerships I see are set up so the internal competition makes it hard to view your partner as a true peer because you always want to know: Am I doing better or worse?
Notes on Benchmark Capital • ALEYeah, yeah. It was—it was—the success ratio was very, very high. And we weren’t—later on, this business became one where you sort of expect the— [brief interruption]. Anyhow, later on pe ople would say, “Well, all you need is one or two really good hits out of ten investments.” I don’t think so. I think that the thing that really made the venture capital business highly successful was having a hit ratio of about 65 to 70 percent were successful investments and your real duds were only about 15 percent.
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docWe helped one another, but no—it was a great learning experience for all of us. During that probably ten- or twelve-year period, from the middle-fifties to middle-sixties, we invested I think in maybe twenty-five little companies down the peninsula here. Of those twenty-f ive, I’d say eighte en of them were wildly successful; it was a very high percentage. And a couple of them we got our money back. I think we only had big losses on maybe three.
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docSure, sure, everything, yeah. Everyt hing was lower—but that’s all you needed to get up to the point where you could get going and prove things would work. So we’d go out and we’d tell the en trepreneur, “Well, we like your deal. We’ve got $80,000 raised around the table fr om the five of us. Give us ten days and we’ll raise the rest of the money and we’re going to do your deal.” So all five of us would go back to our offices that afternoon and we’d call various hangers-on and camp-followers that worked in these brokerage firms.
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docWe’d call the entrepreneur in and we’d have lunch with him. He would tell us his story and after lunch was over—a nd it was always a he—he didn’t get much to eat, but nevertheless, he’d ge t the story out. We’d excuse him and say, “Go stand outside on the sidewalk for ten minutes and let us talk about this and we’ll come out and tell you wh at our decision is.” And we’d talk around the table—“Do you lik e it? Who has questions?” And so forth and so on. “Who’s going to be on his board?” We ’d assign one of The Group to be the leader and then we would go out and—both John Bryan and Bill Edwards …
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docIt consisted of Bill Bowes, who was then at Blyth & Company, and John Bryan was at Blyth & Company. Bill Bowes later went on to form U.S. Venture Partners. J ohn Bryan became a partner with Bill Edwards in a company called Bryan a nd Edwards, but Bryan and Edwards was primarily investing their own mone y and their own financial resources. Bill Bowes went out to U.S. Venture Part ners and raised a lot of money from the outside.
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docYoung punk out here in the investme nt department who’s doing so well, and yet he took a great deal of pleasure in it and said, “You know, I’d rather have a successful investor running my investment department—
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docLook—there was a lot of opportunity at the time and there were not a lot of people in this business. There was not a lot of competition in this business. There was not a lot of competition in terms of people funding small little privately held companies. And my arra ngement with Fred Merrill was pretty interesting because he knew that I liked to invest in these little dinky things, but he said, “Reid,”—at that time I ha d gotten to the point where I could invest maybe $25,000, maybe even $50,000 at a crack at that time because of my success with Ampex, and he said, “we ’re not going to look at…
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docHe was more interested in growing sales than he was in building a profitable company.
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docI think that it’s one of the reasons why I think it ’s important for young people who want to go into the venture bu siness to not be in a hurry. I think the venture business is a better business to enter after you’ve been doing something else for ten years, working at what I call an honest job somewhere else and learning something about management of an enterprise, and learning a specialty, whether it be marketing or finance or something else—or manufacturing. But at any rate that’s—
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docPretty impressive. Were you maki ng decisions all along? You were watching what was happening to the stock—was it mainly on the basis of share price? Or were you looking at the company in greater depth than that? 02-00:03:03 Dennis: Well, it was interesti ng, because I actually went on the board. The investment became so important to Fireman’s Fund th at I actually went on the board of directors of Recognition Equipment, so I was very well informed as to what was going on.
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docOh no. No, no, no. I was close enough to the company that they wanted me to go on the board.
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docI sold the 10 percent, got the money back, and then at the next meeting of th e committee I reported that I had moved ahead and had gotten our money back out of Recognition Equipment.
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docRecognition Equipment went public and the stock went up to the point where we had doubled our money.
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docbecause here was this fancy investment committee and none of them knew anything about it other than what they got from the junior an alysts who were sitting around the table.
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docit by definition became what was called “a special situation.” And special situations were things that nobody knew anything about except maybe some of us at the lower level. And that is what eventually became known as venture capital
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docIn those days it wa s called special situations,
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docWhat we did was—and I went to wo rk there in 1952—it was 1960 before I finally got—eight years later—that I fi nally got Fireman’s Fund to make its first, what you would now call, a ventur e capital investment
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docBut I had—twenty-six—by that time I guess I had three kids or four kids. I can’t remember which!
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.doc“Well, I think in ninety days I can come up with another $2,000, so I’d like to take 15 out of this $25,000 unit. Well, that $15,000, in a period of about three-and-a- half years turned into something between $800,000 and $900,000
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.doc“We’re doing a little financing and maybe you’d be—.” Well, actually, he thought the man I worked for at the time might be interested in putting some money into it, and as a result of that conversation, I ended up putting the amount that I could afford at the time—it turned out to be $13,000, and I said, “Oh, I recognize that number—$13,000. That was an opportunity missed once befo re and I’m not going to let it happen this time.”
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docAnd that’s what got Ampex star ted, was Bing Crosby wanted to play golf on Sunday afternoon rather than ha ving to go on the radio, and he had a very popular Sunday afternoon radio program.
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docour appraisals of the management of these companies and whether we thought they were doing a good job as well as, of course, the markets for their products
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docRight. Well, my older brother was a little bit more of a loose cannon and he did go to Stanford. I think he may be the only person in history that’s been kicked out of Stanford three times in a row! [chuckling] He either bowled his way out twice and skied his way out once or else he skied his way out twice and bowled his way out once.
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.docHarvey Firestone talks about the fa ct that the New York bankers thought that the autom obile was a fad that came over from Europe—that the automobile was really not going to survive in the United States—that the horse and buggy was a much more reliable proposition
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.doc“You know, Reid, if I’d done that we would have had to live in Akron and instead we came to California and I’ve had a w onderful life out here and just have loved California. So he and Harvey Firestone remained very, very close friends as long as they were both alive. But I remember that $13,000 number because it’s sort of critical.
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.doclength of ventur e capital fund maturation: seven years typically
Microsoft Word - Dennis final.doc"Would I put my own money behind this situation?"
How Carl Thoma and Orlando Bravo Built the Largest Tech Buyout FirmIt was really inspiring for me one day after you had taught me this when I was taking a red eye to Boston to meet a CEO on something we were working on. That night I called you and you said, "That's the difference between a great venture capitalist and an average venture capitalist," and I was like, "Wow, I think I'm doing something special with this. All this wear and tear, it makes sense and it's for something."
How Carl Thoma and Orlando Bravo Built the Largest Tech Buyout FirmMistakes are meant to be stepping stones to success, not stepping stones to ultimate failure.
How Carl Thoma and Orlando Bravo Built the Largest Tech Buyout Firm"Mistakes early on make great investors, but you got to make sure they haven't made so many mistakes that they have lost their confidence."
How Carl Thoma and Orlando Bravo Built the Largest Tech Buyout FirmJeff Rhodes and I wrote a paper titled “Six Strategies for Overcoming the ‘Chicken and Egg’ Problem in Complement-Based Network Effects Markets.”
cdixon | Six strategies for overcoming “chicken and egg” problemsSome critics think venture capitalists already have too much money - one reason they argued against lowering the capital gains tax recently. Critics say the huge amount of money and pressure from institutional investors have made venture capitalists less venturesome and more short-term oriented, much like publicly traded companies that answer to Wall Street every quarter. Rather than invest small chunks of money to start companies, many put larger chunks in more mature companies, which are less risky and closer to going public, and in leveraged buyouts, which provide quicker, and often bigger,…
Venture Capital Loses Its Vigor - The New York TimesBut looks can be deceiving. The venture capital business is anything but serene these days. Profits for venture capitalists have dropped sharply and a shakeout is now gathering momentum. And fundamental changes in the business raise questions about whether venture capital, the pilot light of America's high-technology world, can continue to ignite innovation.
Venture Capital Loses Its Vigor - The New York Timesthe ability to raise money, generate great deal flow, make smart investment decisions, build solid companies, and exit them profitably
A history lesson with Tom McMurray · Collab FundThey were looking for someone with communications experience and I got the job as an apprentice working for each of the partners over the first two years. All the senior guys were great teachers; helpful, demanding. The younger associates were very close and every deal was a team effort. It was a small firm then - 4 partners and 4 associates.
A history lesson with Tom McMurray · Collab FundNed Heizer. And David Morgenthaler
102792223-05-01-acc.pdfBut with everybody having a lot more pressure to put more money to work, most of the partnerships ended up, not because really you wanted or needed a partner to fill out a deal, but because somebody else had discovered the company as well and the company wanted the other firm as well as us
102792223-05-01-acc.pdfAt Fidelity that was almost always Greylock, and vice versa
102792223-05-01-acc.pdfThe culture here was never one of friendship, or social interaction. Very little social interaction outside the office among the partners. It was work hard, be aggressive, be competitive, and focus on getting the job done
102792223-05-01-acc.pdfhose that are really doing the work need to have the interest
102792223-05-01-acc.pdfMike was an associate, and Doug came in as an associate. And there were three or four ladies that were admins. The back office was run by Capital Group, which had raised the initial fund for Don. Sequoia Capital I was a $5 million fund that Capital raised from some of its clients. So by the time I got here, I guess we were— Don was on Sequoia Capital II, just transitioning to III, and had raised this growth fund.
102792223-05-01-acc.pdfI'd offered him a summer internship at Fidelity and I thought he had accepted it, and then he changed his mind and went somewhere else. Not here at that point, but he was talking to Sequoia. And I think he was a little worried that I might blackball him when I came on, having not appreciated the way he'd dealt with the interview or the situation at Fidelity, but not the case
102792223-05-01-acc.pdfGordon Gordon Russell, Tom Stevenson, Pierre LeMond, Don Valentine and there was another partner. Brandon: His name is David. Brandon: I forgot his last name, but he was a venture partner.
How Venture Capital Works with Tom McMurray from Sequoia Capital