20VC: Benchmark's Newest General Partner Ev Randle on Why Margins Matter Less in AI | Why Mega Funds Will Not Produce Good Returns | OpenAI vs Anthropic: What Happens and Who Wins Coding | Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel and Mamoon Hamid
Ev Randle is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the best funds in venture capital. In their latest fund, they have Mercor ($10BN valuation), Sierra ($10BN valuation), Firework ($4BN valuation), Legora ($2Bn valuation) and Langchain ($1.4Bn valuation). To put this in multiples on invested capital, that is a 60x, two 30x and two 20x. Before Benchmark, Ev was a Partner @ Kleiner Perkins and before Kleiner, Ev was an investor at Founders Fund and Bond.
AGENDA:
05:25 Biggest Investing Lessons from Peter Thiel, Mary Meeker and Mamoon Hamid
14:36 OpenAI Will Be a $TRN Company & OpenAI or Anthropic: Who Wins Coding?
22:27 Why We Should Not Focus on Margin But Gross Dollar Per Customer
30:25 Why AI Labs are the Biggest Threat to AI App Companies
44:26 Do Benchmark Fire Founders? If so… Truly the Best Partner?
54:38 People, Product, Market: Rank 1-3 and Why?
57:36 Why the Mega Funds Have Just Replaced Tiger
01:04:08 GC, Lightspeed and a16z Cannot Do 5x on Their Funds…
01:14:09 Single Biggest Threat to Benchmark
#210 CEO & Co-Founder Huntress Kyle Hanslovan w/ Ev Randle: Deep Roots
Guest: Kyle Hanslovan, CEO & co-founder of Huntress; and Ev Randle, partner at Kleiner Perkins
Talk is cheap, says Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan: “I learned real early on that integrity is like one of the very few things, if not the only thing, you can't buy.” En route to Huntress’ current status as a $1.5 billion firm with $100 million in ARR, he took a long time to hire new execs, or partner with VC firms.
Indeed, Kleiner Perkins partner Ev Randle recalls the deliberation Hanslovan underwent before signing KP’s term sheet. “It's pretty rare for a founder's diligence process on you to increase your conviction on them and the business that they're building,” he says. “You just saw that the effort extended across to so many different places and so many details that it's typically not.”
Chapters:
(01:03) - Learning how things work
(03:31) - Default trusting
(05:07) - Over-sharing
(10:50) - Kyle’s leadership style
(15:44) - Hiring for conflict
(19:24) - Scaling execs
(22:52) - Evaluating VCs
(28:55) - Pattern-matching
(32:13) - Why Huntress is worth $1.5 billion
(38:34) - Kyle’s childhood and early career
(42:00) - The 99 percent
(47:49) - Bootstrapping
(51:14) - Deep roots
(57:47) - Customer love
(01:01:14) - “Nothing will stop us”
(01:05:50) - Who Huntress is hiring
(01:07:22) - What “grit” means to Kyle
Mentioned in this episode: Sony, Sam Altman, Nike, Elad Gil and High Growth Handbook, Kim Scott and Radical Candor, JMI Equity, Vinod Khosla, Todd Park, Capterra, Reddit, FUBU, Rippling, the NSA, QuickBooks, Amazon AWS, and South Park.
Links:
Connect with Kyle
Twitter
LinkedIn
Connect with Ev
Twitter
LinkedIn
Connect with Joubin
Twitter
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm