Benchmark Part I - Acquired ![rw-book-cover|200x400](https://wsrv.nl/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.transistor.fm%2Ffile%2Ftransistor%2Fimages%2Fshow%2F39109%2Ffull_1677599150-artwork.jpg&w=100&h=100) ## Metadata - Author: **Acquired** - Full Title: Benchmark Part I - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/ec83bda0-c4f5-4946-a1e1-00ab75972dbf ## Highlights - The Fifth Founder: Val Vaden Key takeaways: • Benchmark was founded in 1995 and had a very different trajectory during those early years compared to Amazon, Yahoo, and Jond. • Val Vaden, who came from the buyout industry, was a key part of Benchmark's success during those years. Transcript: Speaker 1 It's one of us Yeah, and um there were deals to be done during 95 and 96 That would have put the firm on a very different trajectory during those early years Those for the years when Amazon As we talked about got done That was the time when yahoo got done And like would benchmark have beaten jondor to do amazon And probably not you know, maybe but they weren't even really In the picture You know and certainly yahoo. I mean Mike marets is great like he's wonderful But a big part of what started to make mike marets mike marets was yahoo He wasn't mike marets before he did yahoo and benchmark wasn't in The picture then so there were some notable Misses during those years Yeah, and then the team Val came from this very different perspective. He was coming from the buyout industry the proto software buyout industry and Benchmark was all about doing formation stage investments in technology and internet companies There Speaker 2 Just kind of wasn't a fit in investment styles Yeah, I think that is probably the right thing to chalk it up to David and I stumbled upon this and we were like Val vaden How have we never heard This guy's name like I remember thinking like wait there was a fifth founder of benchmark They had people coming from a venture capital background. They had someone coming from an operational background They would have someone who we haven't talked about yet coming from an executive recruiting background who would be a slam dunk Fit But this person coming from more of a buyout background turned out not to have the same fit with the rest of the firm So ([Time 0:50:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7296eec3-d47d-4e08-84d5-0fdea4ce0a0d)) - The Crazy Story of eBay and Amazon Key takeaways: • EBay's market cap increased rapidly during its early years, but has since decreased. • Amazon's market cap is much larger than eBay's, and has continued to grow over the years. Transcript: Speaker 2 It's funny. I looked up eBay's market cap today And if you look at eBay's market cap when they went public it was A couple billion dollars then of course ran up real fast as we talked about to 25 billion Dollars stayed there through the dot-com crash the bottom of the trough I think was something around seven billion and then it would have another run up in 2004 up to 77 billion But after Going up and down and buying PayPal and divesting PayPal after all this Do you know where it is today David? I believe it's about 25 billion right 23 billion dollars right about the market cap However many years later. This is 22 years later right around the market cap where benchmark got liquid. Speaker 1 Wow Wow, that's so Crazy isn't that wild and right about what is that like 150th of Amazon's market cap something like that It's still astonishing to me that In the long run Amazon ended Speaker 2 Up beating eBay It makes sense. It's that base I was quote about in the long run there is zero misalignment between customer experience and shareholder value and customers get a much better experience from Amazon Holding inventory and Amazon doing all this really hard low margin Thread the needle stuff in order to create this great user experience, but that stuff compounds Well, that is the Speaker 1 Perfect transition to come back to I want to talk about ([Time 1:32:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d6c2c766-d140-4e4e-a75e-c66c7c9801ed))