![]() “a client would be willing to hear a pitch from Ramsey Beirne the next morning at 8:30, then Beirne would call back and ask that it be moved to 7:30, just to show that his blood was Type A.” We built the whole management team.’ The prospect probably never heard of Central Point, but it must have been an important client for Ramsey to lay claim to it the way that it did.” And if a client laughed at the audacity, Beirne and his colleagues would reply ‘we brought in the COO of Central Point. “’Hi we’re Ramsey Beirne, the leading retained executive search firm in high technology.’ If said with sufficient force, it would not be questioned. The phone was to be answered, promptly, by a human - even in the after hours.” “The founders held off installing voicemail. Finally, six months later they got their first retainer.” Beirne was barely able to keep his colleagues from abandoning the experiment as the months went by and their personal savings evaporated. It was not easy however to remain confident when Ramsey Beirne’s revenue dropped to zero - and remained there. To be a success, one must act the part, and a retainer fee was the way to communicate that one’s services were in demand. “In year two, Beirne convinced Ramsey and their first associate, Alan Seiler, to abandon the low rent contingency fee model and instead adopt a high rent retainer fee model, the one that the elite search firms used. “He also left out the way he and his colleagues had to project an aura of success for years before it actually existed, the way credit card debt and second mortgages had to tide the business over in the interim.” If we could find God’s phone number, we’d call him.” Benchmark’s investment was now worth 87 times the original sum.” Page xxii “Eighteen months after Benchmark invested and seven months after Critical Path’s IPO, its trading price gave it a market capitalization of $2.9 billion. One partner summed up the situation: ‘the good news is we won. “Obtaining the opportunity to invest in a cash burning company that had only just launched its service and had yet to sign a single significant customer was not an instant win at Benchmark. At the end of day two Benchmark and Mohr Davidow made an offer.” Page xxi “Two met with the entrepreneur that night the others met with him the next day. Benchmark partners had selected one another on the basis of perceived ability to subordinate individual ego to the larger interests of the collective.” Page xviii “John Doerr for example excelled at promoting the visibility of John Doerr, but he evinced no ability or wish to raise up his partners to the same prominence he enjoyed, (and after hearing so much about Doerr, what entrepreneur who approached his firm, Kleiner Perkins, wanted to be deflected to one of the other partners, an unknown not-Doerr?). 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.” Page xv “When Benchmark invested $6.7mm in eBay in 1997, the auction company’s valuation was put at $20 million. Below are some of the excerpts I found most valuable. It chronicles the early days of one of the finest venture funds ever: Benchmark. Learnings from the best VC ever – BenchmarkĮBoys by Randall Stross is a classic.
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