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- Benchmark founder Andy Rachleff on why Don Valentine and John Doerr are the greatest VCs of all time
Benchmark founder Andy Rachleff on why Don Valentine and John Doerr are the greatest VCs of all time
Andy on Don Valentine:
“He came up with a methodology that was spectacularly brilliant. It seems so easy in hindsight, but he had this philosophy that if a startup can screw something up, it will screw it up. So the only way that it can succeed is if the pull from the market is so great that it overcomes the ineptitude of the startup. Now that’s not because the people are bad - it’s that they’re terribly under-resourced and understaffed. And so he cared desperately about the likely demand for the product. He was the first to really get that market was what determines success, not execution. And his favorite question - that was even in the obituary that Sequoia capital published on their website - was, Who cares? Who cares about this product?”
Andy on John Doerr:
“I think he was amazing at recognizing things that could be big and didn’t let anything else get in the way… For example, Netscape. The founder of Netscape, Jim Clark, had previously founded Silicon Graphics… And because Jim had been so successful at Silicon Graphics - which was the Google of its time in the 1980s - he was able to command a really high prices. And so Jim had gone to his investors who backed him at Silicon Graphics, and they only wanted to pay $5 million or $6 million pre-money. And [Jim] asked for $20 million, which at that time was outrageous. Today it’s not at all. And Doerr didn’t even blink. He said ‘absolutely’ because he saw how big it could be. He didn’t worry about how wacky someone was. He didn’t worry about the price. He really focused on the opportunity.”