ANDY RACHLEFF COFOUNDED AND was a general partner of Benchmark from 1995 until 2004. Rachleff is one of the deepest thinkers in the venture capital business. The way he has created and articulated a cohesive philosophy of venture capital is unmatched. The more closely you examine his ideas, the more you realize how fundamentally sound and deep they are. His willingness to teach others both by example and in academic settings such as the Stanford Graduate School of Business is an inspiration. Prior to cofounding Benchmark, Rachleff was a general partner with Merrill, Pickard, Anderson & Eyre. He is a cofounder and the executive chair of Wealthfront. He earned a BS from the University of Pennsylvania in 1980 and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1984.
1. “When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.”
If you address a market that really wants your product, if the dogs are eating the dog food, you can screw up everything in the company and you will succeed. Conversely, if you’re really good at execution but the dogs don’t want to eat the dog food, you have no chance of winning.
A great product in a great market can make an executive look great, regardless of his or her skill. Similarly, when a talented executive tries to achieve success with a lousy offering or a lousy market, the result is inevitably lousy. Warren Buffett has expressed a similar thought: “When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.” Rachleff wants great management and a great market when he invests.
2. “A disruptive product addresses a market that previously couldn’t be served—a new-market disruption—or it offers a simpler, cheaper, or more convenient alternative to an existing product—a low-end disruption. Silicon Valley was built on a culture of designing products that are ‘better, cheaper, faster,’ but that does not mean they are disruptive.”
Anyone involved in a business, or a profession like medicine, can see the pace of innovation is increasing rather than decreasing. That people are no longer buying as much capital equipment (such as machine tools) is not evidence that innovation has slowed. That software is replacing capital goods is obvious to anyone paying attention to the real economy. Innovation is racing ahead, but not all innovation is profitable. A simple way to think about disruption is to say that it happens when one business creates an innovation that is able to harm or eliminate the competitive advantage of another business. Innovation both creates and destroys competitive advantage, and therefore also profit. Consumers always benefit from innovation. Producers only sometimes benefit from innovation, depending on whether the innovation creates or harms a moat.
3. “Instead of starting with the market and then finding the product, the really big winners start with a product and find a market.”
Discovering really big new markets can be especially profitable. This is more likely to happen if the product is improved by a nonlinear phenomenon, like Moore’s law. Google and eBay are often cited as examples of businesses that started with a product and then found a new market. Convincing customers, distributors, and other partners to see the world differently to create this new market is not easy, but it is often the source of a great business.
4. “It’s very difficult to manufacture innovation.”
Great entrepreneurs are far more missionaries than mercenaries. The missionaries are true to their insight, and the money is secondary to it. Mercenaries, whose primary goal is money, fall somewhere on the middle of the entrepreneur bell curve. They seldom have the desire to change the world that is required for a really big outcome, or the patience to see their idea through. I don’t begrudge them their early payouts. They’re just not the best entrepreneurs.
Since only a very small number of new grand slams created each year are what drive the bulk of venture capital returns, the odds are low that the same founder will get lighting in a bottle at that level multiple times. It is possible for a given person to hit more than one of those grand slams, but there is a top-down constraint on the total number of people who succeed at that level. People who flip the business early or midstream usually do not last long enough to do this. Experience has shown that it is very likely to be genuine passion and domain knowledge, and not what Rachleff calls “manufacturing innovation,” that produces grand slams.
5. “We never meet with companies that aren’t referred or where we don’t know the entrepreneurs.”
It’s sort of a test, if you can’t get an introduction to the venture capitalist you are unlikely to succeed in selling the other constituencies.
Being an entrepreneur requires effective selling in the broadest sense of the word. Entrepreneurs must sell ideas, products and services, partners, investors, prospective employees, the media, and so on. Above all, they must sell the idea behind the company to investors.
6. “Venture capital is a very cyclical business. So there was a cycle from 1980 to 1983 that looked a lot like 1996 to 1999. Only an order of magnitude smaller on every dimension.”
I don’t think a bubble is an environment where things are valued highly; I think it’s an environment where crappy companies are valued highly.
Rachleff and many other investors are fans of the famous investor Howard Marks. Marks is fond of pointing out that business cycles will always exist and that the best approach is to expect their inevitable and unpredictable changes. Marks cautions that you can prepare but not predict. Venture capital is more cyclical than many other markets. The timing of business cycles in different industries and sectors is often not synchronized, which makes life both interesting and challenging. Venture capitalists prepare for this by having committed capital so they have liquidity at all times but, more importantly, have cash during a downturn. Some of the best investments are made during a market correction since talent is easier to hire and other resources are more widely available.
7. “All our advice on Silicon Valley careers is based on a simple idea: that your choice of company trumps everything else. It’s more important than your job title, your pay, or your responsibilities.”
Feedback is what drives returns in today’s markets, and as Reid Hoffman has said, what company you work for and who you learn from matters more than ever. Networking “early and often” is an excellent approach to business, and life, especially in a digital world. Building a network is a skill. Learning to give to others first and to be trustworthy are invaluable life lessons. The more you give to others, the more you get, especially in a networked economy.
8. “Human beings want returns, but they don’t like risk.”
Most people talk a good game about risk and uncertainty but will typically back off when it comes time to actually do anything. This tendency of most people to be risk averse means that some people who are skillful and comfortable with risk can sometimes find a mispriced bet.
9. “It doesn’t matter how many losers you have, all that matters is how big your winners are.”
You can only lose one times your money as a venture capitalist. You make bets, and you have to be willing to be wrong a lot. It’s one of the few industries I know of where you can be wrong 70 percent of the time and be brilliant.
No one has made this point more simply than Michael Mauboussin: “The frequency of correctness does not matter; it is the magnitude of correctness that matters.” Much of what venture capitalists invest in are businesses that sell a product that is social in nature, and anything social will experience cumulative advantage and path dependence. That tends to produce a few huge winners and lots of startups that fail.
10. “When it comes to investing in venture capital, I would follow the old Groucho Marx dictum about ‘never joining a club that would have you as a member.’ ”
The very best venture capital firms do not need your money. The odds that you will get a chance to invest in a top-ten venture capital firm are low since such firms have longstanding limited partners who invest in every fund. The best venture capital firms can often raise far more money but do not since doing so would drag down financial returns. Venture capital is a business that does not scale well. For example, a venture capital firm might decide to raise $400 million even though they could raise $800 million, or in some cases far more. The more a firm takes on from limited partners, the harder it is to more than triple that money during the life of the fund.
The takeaway for founders is that they should find the very best investors they can. Obviously, not every startup can get funding from a venture firm in the top 10 percent.
11. “Investment can be explained with a two-by-two matrix. On one axis you can be right or wrong. And on the other axis you can be consensus or non-consensus. Now obviously if you’re wrong you don’t make money…. What most people don’t realize is if you’re right and consensus, you don’t make money. The returns get arbitraged away. The only way as an investor and as an entrepreneur to make outsized returns is by being right and nonconsensus.”
You cannot outperform a crowd unless you are sometimes contrarian, and right enough times when you decide to be contrarian. Ideally this means making investments with convex outcomes.
12. “Other than my wife, Bruce Dunlevie is the most influential person in my life. His advice was to always put the gun in the other person’s hand. In other words, if you are in negotiations with someone, you tell them to tell you what they think is fair, and then you do it. It’s a much better way to live to give trust first, rather than to make someone prove he is trustworthy.”
The venture capitalist Bruce Dunlevie is someone I have learned a lot from, especially about being a thoughtful, well-rounded, trustworthy human being. A colleague with these qualities is a fine thing to have in life. As a bonus, when you develop a network of high-quality people whom you can trust, you have what Charlie Munger calls a “seamless web of deserved trust”—which enables efficiency and better financial returns. But these benefits should not distract anyone from the fact that being a good person is its own reward.