This week, we’re excited to release a special live episode recorded during the community event portion of our 2023 annual meeting. Madrona Managing Director Matt McIlwain talks with the hosts of the Acquired Podcast and Madrona Alumni Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal. The three reflect on Acquired Podcast episode No. 28, which dove into the Amazon IPO with the late Madrona Co-founder and original Amazon Board Member Tom Alberg, and the early days getting the show off the ground from the Madrona offices.
You can watch the live video here.
This transcript was automatically generated and edited for clarity.
Matt: I’m Matt McIlwain, I’m one of the partners at Madrona and we’ve had a very action-packed day, and some of you are here for the day and many of you have been investors and partners and friends. At the beginning of the day, we reflected back on one of our co-founders, Tom Alberg. Tom was a co-founder of Madrona. He built, helped build Perkins Coie Law Firm, sold McCaw to AT&T. He started Madrona, led the first investment in Amazon and a bunch of other exciting things over the years. And he always had this incredible ability to be curious, to be impact-oriented, and to think long-term.
As we were thinking about how to celebrate this community, this amazing ecosystem, he even wrote a book on flywheels. Actually, we were talking about the University of Washington and how Tom had helped raise the money for the first standalone computer science building 20 years ago. You think about how Madrona’s invested in well over 20 companies out of that computer science school and now, increasingly, places like the Institute of Protein Design and the intersections of those. So, we wanted to have another fun engaging way for the whole community to both share on Tom and then through that really Tom’s legacy. We thought what better way to do that than hang out with Dave and Ben.
I think for very few of the people in this room, David and Ben need an introduction. But they are the co-founders of the Acquired Podcast and Madrona alumni. A consistently top 10 in the world technology podcasts.
David: And it all began after hours in Madrona conference rooms.
Matt: There you go.
David: And maybe a few partners’ offices that we commandeered without them knowing.
Ben: Thanks, Tim and Scott.
David: And Soma a few times!
Matt: I think that’s a part of the fun aspect of this story is that David and Ben were at one point working at Madrona. But let’s even take a little bit of a small step back from that. They’re both accomplished venture capitalists, incredibly community-oriented people. But I think our good friend Greg Gottesman was the person that gets credit for bringing you two together, and I think it might have even been at a Seder dinner at his house. Tell us about that story.
Ben: Yeah, I’m originally from Ohio.
David: I’m going to cut you off even before we start.
Matt: See, they’re not used to being the ones that get interviewed.
David: We’re like an old married couple at this point. So, there were ulterior motives for both of us at that Seder, I believe. And the irony is we ended up getting together.
Ben: No. I didn’t have an ulterior, I was from Ohio. I did not know people in Seattle. Greg wanted generously invited me to his home for Passover…
David: Because he wanted to recruit you to Madrona…
Ben: It worked.
Matt: Well. Was that the whole story?
David: The other half of it was that I was just about to come back to Madrona from business school and was working on trying to close what I thought would be my first deal and court an entrepreneur. And Greg was helping me and said, “Okay, why don’t you invite him to Passover Seder?” And so, I was trying to work on a deal at this Passover…
Ben: David’s like reading the Haggadah trying to sell.
David: And there was this Ben guy there.
Matt: That eventually did lead to both of you working together at Madrona. And so maybe share a little bit about how that started to shape your friendship long before there was a gleam in your eye about doing some podcast together.
Ben: It’s interesting. I was fortunate to work at what we call then Madrona Labs now Madrona Venture Labs. And I didn’t know anything about venture capital, and so I had this sort of immense respect and looked up to everyone who was an actual investor at the firm. And I always, I have this sort of mental framework that in any business, you want to work in the core competency of the thing that the business does. I was looking around the thing here is investing and like David’s a guy that I had this relationship from a Passover Seder with, and I just want to absorb everything in his brain. And Acquired really was me attempting to find a way to get to spend more time with David.
Matt: Now the true story, now the true story.
David: The feeling is definitely mutual because of course, as a venture capitalist, you realize that it’s the entrepreneurs and the builders who create all the value. So, I just wanted to extract everything from Ben’s brain as like, ” Hey, as a Microsoft product manager who” — Ben chronically undersells himself. He was on the cover of the Seattle Times as the future of Microsoft.
Ben: The day before I joined Greg.
Matt: Hey. Timing, timing.
Ben: And it was super unintentional. I thought the story wasn’t going to run because it was like a long lead piece that I had done the interview like three months before. And I assumed because it didn’t come out yet that the story was dead. And so, I signed the offer letter with Greg to come to Madrona Labs and then I got the email from the Seattle Times, “Hey, watch the paper tomorrow morning”.
And it was only on a morning run. I was mentally preparing to go and give notice. “Hey, I signed an offer last night.” And I run past one of those newspaper bins with my face on the cover. Like a hundred percent. True story. No exaggeration.
Matt: There’s been some newspaper bins that my face has been on the cover. But that’s a different topic though. But I don’t think I’d ever heard that story. That’s really cool. And is that why you’ve never gotten to interview Satya?
David: It might be… despite repeated attempts.
Matt: Maybe we can all figure that out someday here together. Podcasts were not quite what they are today, back when you all started the Acquired Podcast. So how did this idea even come about? How did you first get started on it?
Ben: I actually do mean it when it was, I was trying to spend more time with David. So, we were at drinks and I was pitching him on two ideas. I was like there’s two podcasts that I think would be good podcasts. I was a really big into podcasts. I was like loading podcasts over FireWire onto my iPod in 2009.
Matt: You were an early adopter, an early adopter.
David: Back when podcasts were cast that you put on your iPod. You were doing that?
Ben: Yes. And so the two concepts were acquisitions that actually went well. Because I have always felt like the media narrative is around look how terrible of a deal this was. And incinerating billions of dollars and three quarters later there’s a write-down. And if what we’re doing in the world is creating companies that we want to one day go public or what the vast majority of companies do get acquired, we should understand how to work backward from when those go well. That was topic one, and topic two was let’s dive into businesses that have had multiple billion-dollar insights. Because the working hypothesis that I had at the time was most businesses that get to scale forever draft on the core insight they had when they started the business. And can never transform and come up with a second one. Occasionally you get an iPhone or an AWS, but very rarely. And David, I remember your comment to me was like, “I will 100% do the first one with you. And for the second one, I think we’ll run out after five episodes.”
David: And the first one only got us about 20 episodes or so before we ran out of that. But I think, like to me, the magic of how we started is both of those ideas were small ideas. And starting a podcast was a small idea. It really was, the feeling genuinely was mutual. It was an excuse for us to spend time together and build our friendship. We never could have imagined that podcasts would grow as big as they have, that we would grow as big as we have. We were talking with Nick from Rec Room earlier about when he started a VR company. However, many years ago. That was about the same time.
Matt: By the way, Nick, we got grilled on VR companies today. They were like, “What were you guys thinking?” We’re like, “Wait, we invested in Rec Room.”
Ben: Rec Room is an open world multi-platform experience. I don’t know…
Matt: Because Nick listened to the market.
David: Sometimes you just get really lucky in life and magic happens with the right set of people and things change and you figure them out along the way. And that’s what we’ve done since the days in the Madrona offices.
Matt: And I think you all were recording in the offices if I remember correctly.
Ben: Yeah. We’ve got a picture, I think in what is now Soma’s office, of us sharing a headphone because we didn’t buy multiple sets of good headphones. (See photo above)
Matt: It’s a good frugal startup. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s perfect. Since you did go down the Acquired Podcast path, tell us about those first few episodes. And then, I want to get to this one that was, I think, your second break from actually the Acquired story. But you did a few before that, maybe 20, 25 before you went up in a different direction on IPOs.
Ben: Yeah. The early ones, it was interesting. We, if you look at our analytics now, what you will see is, every time we break our record and achieve the greatest episode that we’ve done to date, which is cool that happens every couple months.
Matt: Especially because they’re so freaking long. But that’s just my opinion.
Ben: Totally. It is an episode that is just David and I and the canonical wisdom for when you start a podcast is 30 to 40 minutes release weekly to set a listener habit. And have guests because then the guests can promote the show. And zero times in our entire, at least the last five years, has a guest episode been the highest ever.
And that’s forced a lot of introspection. And I think at least one of our big takeaways is to always focus on the thing that you do that is unique and differentiated. And almost everyone who’s a good podcast guest goes on multiple podcasts. And so, it’s less…
Matt: Concentrated.
Ben: Exactly. The thing that we can do that’s different than everybody else is the format that we have developed. That is just the rare thing that’s David and I doing that format.
David: And I think that is the core of the magic that was there in those first days that I think carries through to today was, it is about our friendship and about us learning together. And that’s what we were doing in the Madrona offices for, Matt, you were referring to, I think it was until the Facebook IPO episode we did. Where every episode we did, it was so tightly constrained to this has to be an acquisition of a technology company that went well. That we are going to analyze. And then whenever, this must have been 2016 when we were like, well, the Facebook story is so important. Maybe we can expand to do IPOs as well.
Ben: And the thing that we thought was true was people want to listen to this because they like us grading acquisitions and we were super wrong about the job to be done of acquired in the mind of a listener. The thing that they were actually there for is great storytelling, structured analytical thinking, and Ben and David. And over time we learned that we can apply that to like anything. There doesn’t have to be a liquidity event. It could be Taylor Swift’s music career.
Matt: When’s the food show coming out?
Ben: We should LVMH — Dave and I talked about handbags for four hours.
Matt: So eventually, and actually I’m thinking specifically of episode 28. You not only went to a second IPO, but you had a guest on to help tell the story, and that was of course the story of Amazon’s IPO and Tom Alberg was the guest. So, take us back to that episode. I’ve re-listened to it now multiple times. And just tell us a little bit about how that an idea even came about. And how you prepared for that particular moment?
Ben: First of all, I was super nervous because I didn’t really have a relationship with Tom, and he’s so unbelievably accomplished. And so, David, you were the one to like swing in his office and be like, “Hey Tom, do you think you might be willing to come on our pathetic little podcast as a guest?”
David: And Tom, of course, said, “Yes.” As anybody who knows Tom, would’ve known that immediately he would. I was also a little nervous in part because he was one of my bosses. I guess one of your bosses, too. In a sense. But Tom was just so you know, it’s funny, Ben said that guests go on multiple podcasts. Tom probably did some others, but he was just quiet and unassuming and so humble and like genuinely. And I was coming from, before Madrona, I had worked at News Corp where not my direct boss, but like my…
Ben: Little bit of a different culture.
David: The culture of the founder was a little different.
Matt: I think we’re picking up what you’re putting down.
David: Yeah, a little different than Tom was. I re-listened to the episode on the flight up here, and one of the things I didn’t even pick up on at the time, while we’re interviewing, he just casually says the line of, “Oh yeah, I was involved with Vizio, too”. Like Vizio was a multi-billion-dollar outcome. And he was just like oh yeah. Oh yeah. I think it was when Ben was introducing him.
Ben: And there were moments where we would ask a question and Tom would say, ” I don’t know. That’s a good question.” And most other people would’ve conjured some sort of answer to try to sound smart. That was of no interest to Tom.
Matt: I think the Vizio connection, if I remember correctly, was that Doug Mackenzie from Kleiner was on the board.
David: That’s how it came up. We were talking about what happened about John Doerr and Amazon. Yes. And that’s how the Vizio connection came up.
Matt: Re-tell that story. That’s a great story.
David: The John Doerr. Oh, this is so great. Re-listening to the episode, I Tweeted about it from the plane. It is so cringey. Cringeworthy to me and to Ben, too, to re-listen to it because we listen to ourselves. We’re like, we were talking too much.
We just we had this amazing person, like we were so young and green in what we were doing, and if we had the chance to redo it, we would do it differently. But Tom is amazing and one of the stories he told that we almost didn’t let him tell was when the second venture round for Amazon came together.
Ben: And Tom was on the advisory board for Amazon.
Matt: It wasn’t quite an official board yet.
Ben: Because I think Amazon had raised maybe like $1 million on a five pre. Tom was one of the angel investors. And so, he was Jeff’s maybe only advisory board member at that point.
David: I think he said there were a few.
Matt: Yeah, it was a small group, and I think Tom was the only one with substantial business experience.
David: And now putting it together because of the Vizio connection is probably how this came together. But Tom says, ” I came home from work one day and we and Jeff were starting to think about raising some more money. And my wife said, do you know some guy named John Doerr?” And Tom was like, “Well yes. I know who John is”. And she said, “You need to call him back because he’s been calling here every 15 minutes, for the last several hours. He on your home phone number and saying he needs to talk to you.” And it was all about trying to get an angle to leave the round.
Matt: And he beat out General Atlantic, which is, was in the news the last two weeks for different topics we probably won’t get into right now. But yeah, that was pretty interesting time.
David: And not only beat out General Atlantic but beat out at half the price. Yep. That was how powerful John was.
Matt: But almost lost the deal because…
David: He tried to hand off the board seat.
Matt: Ah, there you go. There you go. What else do you remember from that episode or things that stood out to you two as you looked back and listened to it, other than, ” Hey, we’ve come a long way”.
I thought you guys did a great job on that interview.
Ben: Tom did a great job at helping under, helping David and I understand when certain things got introduced into the Amazon dogma that today we just assume have been there forever. Like he set the record straight that the famous flywheel diagram and we all talk about the Amazon flywheel and everybody tries to graph their own business onto Amazon’s flywheel. But no one’s flywheel as strong as Amazon’s flywheel. That was a two years post-IPO conversation that sort of came up. And I think a lot of us try to attribute, “oh, Amazon, from the very moment that Jeff conceived of it was exactly this way.” And Tom just very graciously was both very respectful of the genius of Amazon from the very start, but also helping to unpack when did certain components of the Amazon lore actually get layered on.
David: Yeah. There was a moment, I think, Ben, when you asked him, ” When you met Jeff in that first fundraising round. Oh. Was he like something special? Was it clear to you that this was one of the most amazing entrepreneurs in history that was sitting before you.” And Tom again so graciously was like, “No.”
Ben: I think he said. ” He was very good. Definitely in the top 10 or 20% of the entrepreneurs that I meet with. But, you know, we work with a lot of great entrepreneurs.”
Matt: We do work with a lot of great entrepreneurs for on record.
David: And I think he, he just made the point so well. Yes, of course Jeff was incredibly smart, incredibly driven, had a great idea, was operating in a great market. But nobody, and I think Tom even said this, not even Jeff and his wildest dreams at that moment, as ambitious as he was, could imagine what Amazon was going to become. And I think the conversation with him was great because, and this just so reflected his style that I absorbed from working with him, of, you can’t have delusions of grandeur. You need to work every day along the way and respond to the market as it develops. And that is the story of Amazon. And Tom is such a big part of it.
Matt: And then there’s this whole thing about, as a CEO, you’re always busy, there’s always a lot of work, but there’s really just a handful of consequential decisions. I remember the Barnes & Noble story, that’s another one that really stood out from that episode to me. And he unpacked that whole, the Barnes & Noble folks. You guys know this knows better than me, but that to me, or maybe there’s another one that stood out to you about how the CEO’s job is to be super thoughtful about being the kind of the, ” aligner in chief,” but then also be there to lead those couple of decisions that are the key decisions every year to be made. And that felt like one of them.
David: It absolutely was. The Barnes & Noble, the quick story is the Riggio Brothers who were these rough and tumble, like Brooklyn, New York guys. Not Tom’s style. And at that point in time, not Jeff’s style. Jeff then was very different than Jeff today. And they basically came and said, “We’re going to kill you,” at dinner with Tom and Jeff and said we’re coming for you.
Ben: “You can either partner with us, or we can buy you on terrible terms, or we can leave dinner and we will kill you,” was effectively the message.
David: And Tom and Jeff together, decided to fight. It was Jeff’s decision, but I think Tom helped him get to the decision to fight.
My favorite non-Amazon Tom story is my last day. I will never forget this, my last day at Madrona, before I went to business school. I spent two years as an associate. I was locked with Tim and Tom, in a Wilson Sonsini boardroom, negotiating a recap of a company that had raised too much money and fallen on some challenges and other people on the cap table were unhappy. I remember the whole time thinking like, this is my last day before my summer, before business school, and I’m locked in this boardroom. What are we doing here? Ventures about focusing on your winners. What are we doing? And that was just not Tom’s style. And that company today is Impinj, which is a three-and-a-half billion-dollar public company.
Matt: Yeah, that’s that long-term mindset.
David: That is that long-term mindset.
Matt: One of the things that really impresses me and leads me to listen to your podcasts on my jogs. It’s multiple jogs for me to get through one of the episodes. Just to be clear, I don’t run that far these days. But you are so good at research and preparing. How do you process having this external research with what you want to ask and what you want to do your own analysis around on episodes? So that one may be particularly, but more, maybe more generally, too.
Ben: If there’s any metric that we watch the most carefully, this is the one that we care about the most. Which is, is it possible for us to have no inside information but for insiders to have to think we did because we understood it that well. And it’s not like it shows up in a graph, so it’s a hard thing to track over time. This has been like a superpower of David’s and a thing that sets us apart from other podcasts or Substacks. There is an immense amount of public information available on a company. And if you’re just willing to take a month and use the internet the very best way that you can, you find so much. If you scope with date operators, so you’re only looking at New York Times articles on Nintendo from 1989 to 1990, like I was last week. The public sentiment and the journalist sentiment changes so much from year to year, that five years from now, the way people talk about companies will completely overwrite how they’re talked about in the era today.
Another great example is people go to conferences all the time. Lots of times, the talks are recorded on YouTube. A lot of times, they’re like boring industry conferences that don’t get a lot of fanfare and coverage. But David will go find a talk that some mid-level executive at SpaceX gave that got like 2000 views on YouTube at an aerospace conference and have this insight on SpaceX that is super overlooked by the media and a key part of their story.
Matt: So I wasn’t planning to ask this, but can’t help but asking, have you tried using ChatGPT yet
David: Yes. And it’s wrong. Sometimes very wrong. I can’t remember what the example was, but I…
Ben: Oh, when we were doing the NFL episode, I was what was the most recent stadium that was built that didn’t have a dome on it, and it gave me the wrong answer. And I was like, that’s not true. Give me the one before that and it gave me a wrong answer again. This is, it’s like fun to talk about, right? In rooms like this and on Twitter, these things get a lot of like pickup of GPT is so wrong, it hallucinates. But do you remember talking to your friends in 2004 and being like, you can’t trust anything on the internet.
Matt: Or as Mikhail pointed out at lunch today. Can you trust your friend? Is it a hallucination or an insight? So that was really powerful moment we had earlier in the day.
What about, you’ve done a couple of more recent episodes on the history of Amazon and then the history of AWS. I enjoyed them immensely. Maybe just an extra thought or two on what you all have learned, what we all have learned in this ecosystem. We spent a lot of time talking about some of the amazing things that Microsoft’s doing and less so this year and today on Amazon. Any thoughts, big picture takeaways from all the research and the podcasts you’ve done on Amazon over the years?
David: Yeah. It’s interesting. My view on Amazon has evolved quite a bit, even up until our most recent episode that we recorded that is not out yet. We did another episode with Hamilton Helmer, who wrote the great book, “7 Powers.”
Ben: Best business strategy book out there.
David: Absolutely. Up there with Porter’s “5 Forces” and “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” Anyway, this episode that we did with him was specifically about transforming as he calls it, which is ironically Ben’s second idea for a podcast of companies that have had a second act.
And the amazing thing about Amazon and the AWS story within it, and as we talked about on the episode, there are many origin stories of AWS, all of which have some element of truth.
Ben: Except for the fact that they had excess servers, that is patently false.
David: That is false.
It seems so far afield from what Amazon retail was. But what Hamilton and his research has done on this. Is it’s actually, if you think about a two-by-two matrix for companies of your existing customer base, it’s your existing customer base on one access and your existing capabilities within the company. AWS is a completely 100% different customer base than the Amazon retail customer base. But the capabilities within the company that Amazon had to build to serve retail were the same to build AWS. They had, at the time, the world’s best internet architects, backend servers, etc. Everything that goes into building AWS, they had to build in-house. So, it actually was a very natural thing. And in Hamilton’s research companies that have done this, almost always, that is the case. Different customer set, same set of capabilities within the company to serve their customer base. I always used to think about Amazon as this like just incredible wild idea factory. And I’ve come to appreciate, at least in the AWS case, and I think in some of their other successful forays, too, there is a little more science to it than that.
Ben: Hamilton’s sort of advice to founders who are looking to figure out what’s the next S-curve to stack on top of your S-curve is what are your capabilities uniquely enable you to do versus your competitors? Or all the other companies out there, even if you’re not competing with them right now, what can you uniquely do, even if it’s serving a different need in the world?
Matt: I think back, 16 years ago, we hosted an event up on Capitol Hill with Andy and couple of startups. I think Eric Brown, who’s in the room, presented how Smartsheet was using AWS at that event. And that was the launch of AWS. And it was clearly focused on startups and developers, but it was that developer orientation. And then they were able to build a platform strategy, too. And you think about companies over time built on top of that platform, Snowflake, our portfolio companies, and many others. And that kind of platform capability is a core competency of Amazon and other areas. Of course, Prime being a prime example.
David: The other amazing piece of the AWS story that I didn’t appreciate until we did our episode. Hearing from, in that case, we did get to talk to some folks within the company. The go-to market organization around AWS that was not an existing capability within Amazon. And the story of AWS and Andy Jassy building that is one of the most incredible entrepreneurial journeys. There’s this trope in venture: in enterprise, like at the end of the day, whatever percentage, 50%, 70% of enterprise software gets sold through the four or five big enterprise software sales giants, whether it’s Microsoft or Oracle or Salesforce, or what have you. Amazon built another one of those giants from scratch, which is amazing, with a lot of Microsoft DNA.
Ben: And then retained first place. They had a five-year lead on cloud. And then they retained first place 15 years later.
Matt: And they’re always continuing to learn, which I think is, I think both Amazon and Microsoft have now built or rebuilt that muscle of continuous learning. And I think that is possibly why they’ve become both, such major forces in the technology-driven ecosystem. Speaking of ecosystems, you both, and particularly David, have exposure to the Seattle ecosystem and Silicon Valley. You and your wife, Jenny, moved down to Silicon Valley many years ago. This was long before we opened up a Silicon Valley office. How do you compare and contrast the ecosystems both from a startup perspective and a venture perspective? You’ve seen both, you’ve certainly got plenty of experience with companies you’ve worked with and built and co-invested with others, too.
David: This is just my perspective, and I’m not sure that it’s right, but it’s the lens that I think about this. Even when I was at Madrona now many years ago, I thought that this was starting to happen and now I think it’s really progressed on this journey. I don’t think of them as actually different. I think of them as the same ecosystem. And now I think with the number of people that I know that I’ve met and become close with over the past few years in the Bay Area ecosystem that have moved up to Seattle during Covid is enormous. And all of those companies are, maybe they’re Seattle companies, maybe Bay Area companies — I don’t even know how to classify them. It’s the same thing. They’re cross-border, so to speak. And so, for me, I never thought them about them as totally separate. Now, I do think, on the margins, technology workers in the Bay Area historically are more likely to start startups and on the margins, Seattle technology workers have been more likely to stay at Amazon and Microsoft. A large part of that was the Amazon share price. It was a good incentive to do that. In my investing and working with founders and getting to know folks through the podcast I, I think that’s changed as well. I don’t see the appetites as being different now. What do you think, Ben??
Ben: I’ve had to redefine my lens. For PSL Ventures, I’m a Seattle, Pacific Northwest-focused venture capitalist. What does that mean? That used to mean we invest in butts and seats here, but that’s stupid. What I care about and the reason that this is our fund’s thesis, and part of Madrona’s thesis, is the talent pools that get trained at these institutions. The University of Washington that come out of Amazon, that come out of Microsoft. I don’t care what physical location people are in when they’re starting companies. I care that they have unfair access to the talent networks that are coming out of these institutions. That is where there’s alpha generation.
David: One thing that’s interesting, we’ve gotten to know a bunch of Stripe folks over the past couple of years through the Acquired Podcast. A huge percentage of those people are now in Seattle for various reasons.
Matt: Yeah. I was with a bunch of Stripe senior execs the weekend of SVB, and a lot of them live here, to your point. That is an interesting point, was one, we didn’t explore as much today at our annual meeting this notion of what’s the hybrid. We still think that having a nucleus of the team close by, especially at the early stage, matters a lot. But a lot of these teams are increasingly hybrid, increasingly distributed teams, and you want to have the best talent in the best roles in the world. So, it is evolving and yeah, I’d like to think that Seattle’s got a little bit of a different culture than the Valley based on my experiences. I don’t know if you guys would agree with that or not.
Ben: Totally. I think we are for better or for worse, and the answer is both, insulated from height. You’re not going to see as many companies go raise four consecutive funding rounds with very little revenue growth or product development advancement, but also when the market falls apart and you’re like, “Oh no, where’s the intrinsic value,” the companies that are in the portfolio of Seattle venture funds tend to be correctly valued. I don’t know. It’s a double, double-edged sword.
David: I do think, though, there is a tremendous demand among Silicon Valley venture capitalists to invest in Seattle companies. I’m sure you both see this every day. Still, I haven’t lived here since 2016, but I get asked all the time, what are the best companies in Seattle?
Matt: And I’m sure you just point them our way.
David: Exactly. I say, have a great venture firm, two great venture firms I can introduce you to.
Matt: That’s awesome. Coming back, building on this ecosystem. Of course, Tom’s book about flywheels, thinking about that episode and Tom’s impact on really all of our lives. We sat next to each other for 20 years and he was a total amazing human being and friend, mentor. Is there anyone last thought you might share about how you think about him and maybe his legacy and something that might leave as a thought around inspiration or legacy for the rest of the group?
Ben: Every conversation I ever had with Tom — he was a very curious person. And I hope that if I have a fraction of the success that Tom had in life, that I stay as curious as he did.
Matt: Love it.
David: I completely agree that. I was chatting with someone earlier about our interactions with Tom, and just how he approached things and I was reminded he was so much older than us. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, but just like a factual way. But from talking to him, you would never think that. He had a young mind always. And I hope that I can be that same way when I’m further up there in years.
Matt: Guys, you’ve been really kind to let me turn the tables a little bit on you and do this interview and have this discussion.
You’re great people, great friends of the firm. We wish you all the continued successes as investors and ecosystem builders and, of course, with the Acquired Podcast. So, thanks so much for being here today.
Ben: Thanks, Matt.
Thanks again for listening to this week’s live episode of Founded & Funded. Tune in in a couple of weeks for our next episode of Founded & Funded with the CEO of Credo AI.
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