Eric Vishria
speaker
163 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Eric Vishria’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And it's like the challenge with that career investor is they think like if a company has a plan and they miss the plan, that's because the company messed up. And if the company had a plan and they exceeded the plan, it's because the company did great. Or executed or management did great or management messed up. And it's just like, there's about 47 other ways that could go wrong.
The plan could just be gobbledygook from the beginning. It could be totally wrong and messed up. There could be external reasons for it. And the whole job that we have is to try to... figure out root cause on those things and help them figure out root cause on them and then like fix it. You're not helping your three-year-old like fall or not fall or teach them a lesson. Like that isn't the job.
It's quite a different actual mental model in terms of what the engagement with entrepreneur is.
I'm not a sector specialist and nobody at Benchmark is. And I think the fundamental idea with Benchmark is there's a small group of people, a small group of partners who are all equal. And right now it's five of us, but sometimes it's four, sometimes it's six, but it's basically four to six who cover technology.
And the challenge with that, if you kind of think about it, is we can't be sector specialists. The sectors that have the most disruption and things are changing the fastest are changing. That part's constantly changing. So you have to be, as a group of investors, you have to be moving. You have You have to be looking at new stuff because that's where the disruption is happening.
Then the question is, I can't be a sector specialist. I can't be a semiconductor specialist or I can't be an open source specialist. Of course, we each have preferences and things that we like and don't and lessons that you can apply, but it's not a specialty model. I think about this a lot and we should talk about it in the context of AI. So you can't have that.
So then the question is, well, what can you evaluate on? And I think this is it for me, which is you can say, hey, this is an extraordinary entrepreneur. That's an evaluation that you can try to make. There's a second thing, which is this entrepreneur has a very interesting and unique insight. Like that's a really important thing for me. And then you can say this market can sustain a big company.
Those are three things which I think even coming without sector specialist, without being a sector specialist, you can try to come to a belief or a probability distribution for each of those things. And I think if you have those things and then you add on top of all of it, I have chemistry or want to work with this company or want to work on submission or whatever.
Then I think you have like the basis for an investment. And I think one of the maybe contrarian things around that is I think that a lot of venture capital in the SaaS era and certainly a lot of growth venture capital got to be like a very spreadsheet-y investor bankery type of approach, which is like it's kind of the model's figured out.
We plug these things in and we kind of know we figured it out that way. And I think... that doesn't work. I think there was a period of time where it might have worked for a bit, but I think it largely doesn't work. I think the AI stuff is going to wipe out that breed of venture capitalists. It's going to be really challenging because you really have to make these other fundamental assessments.
Could be. That's possible. But I would tell you this, we were talking about a company yesterday and it has every possibility that you just said. The entrepreneur in that case is, you know, one of the challenges with these platform shifts is, you know, some form, some variant of the innovator's dilemma. It's not quite the innovator's dilemma, it's
as Christensen articulated it, but it's some form of the innovator's dilemma, which is like you have to make the platform shift. And in order to make the platform shift for a company like what you're articulating, you have to kind of be willing to burn down the existing business, at least in short order. There's a whole bunch of entrepreneurs who don't do that.
And so this is what I just go back to. If you have a learning entrepreneur who is constantly rethinking how they're navigating the ship, then that makes a really, really big difference in the probability of outcome as you're working through a platform shift.
You know, there are levels to it. Like, yeah, you can say like, hey, we're going to cloud and we're doing this. But normally there's an insight. I would say like if you look at most of the successful companies, there's an insight. Like there can be an insight underneath that, right? Which is like, yeah, it's going to cloud and this is the right way to attack it.
Or it's going to cloud and, you know, and the like core differentiation is going to be like here, not here. Like normally there's an insight there. I think there's a couple of cases where, you know, and you really have to think about it. There's a couple of cases where just like violent execution by a determined team in a hyper-competitive market where like nobody has an insight has worked.
Yeah. I mean, I think you could say that's a good case of violent execution by a determined team. And so I think there are insights there, as you said. There's little execution detail insights in your point. And so it's not like... It doesn't have to be some pie-in-the-sky insight that's like, oh my God, AGI is coming in Q3 of 2025. That's not the kind of insight that we're talking about.
We're talking about actual things that are nuances that help build a company. And so... Yeah, they think they come at different levels. I would also say, and this is a difference, and I've been fortunate to work with Pat on a board and work with the larger Sequoia team on a number of companies. And there is a difference also in stage, right?
They're growth investors, or at least Pat and his team are growth investors, and we're early stage. And so there's also a stage difference in terms of how we evaluate things.
I think you have to say, and this goes back to the insight thing, if this thing, whatever the product is, accomplished what it was supposed to and what the entrepreneur said it could do, would there be market creation there? You mentioned Uber. Uber is a good example of this.
And this goes back to the whole like that professor, the like taxi cab analysis that was done like in the early days of Uber where it was like, oh, the entire market's this big. And it's like, well, if you can imagine, everybody has a smartphone in their pocket.
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