Matt Cohler at Silicon Slopes Tech Summit 2017

It's true. If I try to call him and he's got a point, within 80 hours it ain't happening.

It's happening as long as I can sleep eight hours after.

First of all, I think you have companies like that, and you're going to have a lot more companies like that. I love coming out here. I think the community here and the energy here is really incredible. All those companies, they weren't... they are amazing, incredible, world-changing companies, but they weren't when they started. None of them were when they started. They were just these little things with these people kind of making it up as they went along and figuring it out as they went along, and making a bunch of mistakes. Extraordinary, exceptional entrepreneur, and I can talk a little bit more about that. Secondly, a product model or business model which can come into a market and somehow reshape and grow that market in a way that ultimately leaves the company in a position of real competitive strength in that market. And then lastly, some kind of sharp, angled attack into that market at the beginning. Because when you're a little startup, and I'm sure a lot of people in the room here can relate to this, you can't fight Goliath head-on. You just can't do it. You've got to find some way to sneak in from underneath or from the side. There are a lot of different ways you can do that. You can do that through product, through sales and marketing, and then grow up from there. To be more concrete, looking back historically, people all now know the story, but in the case of Facebook, that was starting with initially just Harvard undergrads, then initially just Ivy League colleges in the US, and colleges in the US, and ignoring the whole rest of the world, and just staying laser ruthlessly focused on that market until we won it, and then growing from there. In the case of Snapchat, you had this product which had this incredible innovation around the idea of ephemerality, which was kind of an initial angle of attack in the market. Of course, it's grown tremendously from there. In the case of Instagram, you had this really beautiful photo-sharing app combined with a really incredible distribution strategy of using Facebook as a means of distribution for this other product, which was a lot easier to do then than it is today. So you can do it through product, you can do it through sales and marketing, but you've got to find some kind of sharp wedge to drive into the market through some point of vulnerability, and then you can grow from there once you're in a position of strength. I think those things combined with a really exceptional entrepreneur are kind of the common patterns across all these different companies. I think it's true with SaaS companies too, by the way.

My partners and I are hopefully self-aware enough to know that I had in my head for a while an idea which came through actually initially the Sonos app on the iPhone. I remember when I got the Sonos app on the iPhone, at first I was like, 'Huh, this is literally turning my iPhone into a remote control,' because that's what the Sonos app did. And I thought about that, and it was like, these smartphones are actually kind of like remote controls for real life. You take this thing out of your pocket, you point it somewhere, you push a button, and something magical happens. I got the magic of a smartphone. So I started thinking about this idea of smartphones as being remote controls for real life, and I was kind of poking around looking for products and companies that were doing that. Actually, prior to Uber, it's interesting what happened to the taxi market since Uber, but that's a whole other conversation. There's an interesting stat: if you call a taxi in San Francisco, you can never flag one down. There's zero chance of that. Even more so when it's raining. No matter what you do, you can't flag down a taxi on a Friday night in San Francisco. If you called for a taxi cab, the chance that the cab would actually show up when you called and said, 'I'm at this location, here's my credit card,' was 20%. It's like, that's just a busted market. So the conditions were right in San Francisco for Uber to start. And I had this idea of being like a remote control for real life: you pick your phone up out of your pocket, you press a button, the car comes, picks you up, drops you off. It's kind of this magical thing. And it happened to be just right for San Francisco, and Travis happened to have exactly the right entrepreneur for that business. People talk a lot about this idea of product-market fit, which is one of these phrases that I've never totally understood. It's kind of like a tautology. It means it works, right? 'All you have to do is find product-market fit.' It's like, 'All I have to do is make something that works.' Great, that's helpful. But to the extent that there's any reality to this idea of product-market fit, I think there's also another element: it's magic that happens when you get the right person with the right personality, the right strengths, and the right abilities in a situation where that person's flaws and deficiencies don't matter very much. We've all got tons of flaws and deficiencies. If you find someone who's got the right strengths for the situation, that's where magic can really happen. You can capture lightning in a bottle. And I think Travis is very much that person for Uber. By the way, one of the many things that I've learned through making a lot of mistakes working with a lot of companies over the years is that you can apply that to team building too. I'm a really deep believer in doing reference checks on every single employee that joins a company. A lot of the greatest entrepreneurs wouldn't be successful working for anybody else, but in the environment that they're in, it's the right kind of product model, business model, culture, and dynamic in the situation and time for them to be really successful. I think that was absolutely true for Kevin and Mike at Instagram, and absolutely true for Evan at Snapchat, and Mark at Facebook, etc.

Sure, so you could ask their high school teacher or something. And yeah, they were punks because they usually were punks. But they often didn't have any references. And when they did, I can summarize the feedback with, 'Stay the hell away from that person.' It's like, 'All right, duly noted. I will not hire that person to be a senior director of sales operations.' But as an entrepreneur, it's a fundamentally different thing. They break some glass.

First of all, it's a great movie. Anybody who hasn't seen it should see it. For accuracy, I think that movie is a really good example of being incredibly precise and wildly inaccurate. If you look at the movie, every t-shirt that Mark wears in that movie, he has that t-shirt literally. Every single one. And there's a whole thing about one of the t-shirts being lost, too complicated to tell. They clearly took photographs from real life and studied them meticulously, and on the surface painted this meticulously precise picture of the people, though the office was way fancier than the actual offices. But that's to me the characters of the people involved and the arc and shape and development of those people. But that's okay because I don't think they were trying to create a work of history. I had the opportunity to talk to the folks who were making the movie when they got started because we were trying to figure out what this was going to be exactly. And they made it very clear that they weren't trying to create a work of history. Scott Rudin, the producer, talked about this movie 'The Queen.' I don't know if people have seen that movie. That's also a really incredible work of art, highly recommended. He said, 'We're not working with a piece of biography or history here. We're telling a story, and we're going to use these anchor points in time to help us craft and create a story.' Apparently, the thing they were really fascinated with, although I don't think this came through in the movie, was the idea of Harvard University and the idea that this thing in American culture which has this really important place had never really been told as a story on film. That was a lot of the initial motivation, although I don't think it came through very clearly in the movie. But highly recommend you see it if you haven't.

Uber was really fun. So when the Uber Series A was happening, Travis was going around in an Uber to different venture offices. Because early enough in the life of Uber, there just weren't a lot of Ubers available, particularly in Silicon Valley. Today, Benchmark's main office is in San Francisco, which is a topic in itself because there's been a real shift to the city. Back then, our main office was on Sand Hill Road. Travis came down in an Uber to do his meetings. He would go to a meeting, and his Uber ride would wait for him. He'd tell the driver, 'I'm going to be going around for a while, just wait for me. I'll start new rides all the time.' But he didn't keep that open; he just did new fares all the time. So he was going around, and we could see, 'This is the one Uber, this is Travis's Uber.' We could see where he was going. So he was going into each venture office: 'Oh yeah, now he's at Greylock. Oh yeah, now he's at Sequoia.' He was going around to all these different venture offices. And we had this idea: when he was at the meeting that he had booked right prior to us, we got to go on an Uber trip. So the driver abandoned Travis to pick up our fare. This was one of the craziest things because we got lucky. He could have been really pissed and said, 'I'm never going to work with Benchmark.' So we take Travis's Uber. He finishes his meeting at that venture firm, walks out of the office, and his Uber is gone. So literally, he shows up at our office ten minutes late, sweating profusely, his shoelace is untied, he's a mess. We look at him like, 'What happened?' He's like, 'Huh, it's good, everything's cool.' He was a little shaken. Probably the most fun and riskiest call ever in doing a Series A with an entrepreneur. It's an amazing, completely true story. You could ask him about it. After that, hopefully we've been entirely supportive and helpful to him and the company, rather than causing lots of panic. But you have to ask him and the team about that.

There's not a ton I can say about it, but Evan is just an incredible product mind and entrepreneur. I think he had a very specific and different vision of what needed to be done with a new product, and had a real sense of purpose tied to a specific point in time. Timing is really important for all these things. One of the big cliché questions that VCs ask entrepreneurs is, 'Why now?' But actually, I think it's a really important question. You may have some interesting idea, but being five years too early is the same thing as being wrong. I think that's absolutely right because you have to have the right angle of attack at the right moment. Early on with Snapchat, what people talked about was, 'People must be using this for sexting.' But actually, most of what was going on was teenage girls sending selfies to their friends who were other teenage girls, all day long. That was a totally different behavior that nobody else understood. It was a form of communication that couldn't really be done any other way with any other product. I remember one week when we did the investment, Evan and Bobby were still working out of Evan's dad's dining room. They were literally at his dining room table, 12 people sitting around with 12 computer screens. It was like you're physically present with the person, in the same space, and it brings a kind of presence and intimacy to technology which I've never experienced before. I think that was a really powerful emotional thing for a lot of users early on. And I resonated with him as well.

Absolutely. In any situation, when you're hiring somebody or trying to get hired, the venture-entrepreneur thing is a funny version of hiring and getting hired. You're trying to figure each other out and convince each other that you work well together and that it's a good mutual fit. So yeah, that's a big part of it. Can you get into the head of the way this person sees the world, and do you believe in it? I think there was a really specific initial thing that was almost invented there, which of course from there has grown tremendously into something really important. But that's where it started. And I think that's true for all of these things too. You start by unlocking this little problem. With Uber, it was this magic thing that came along in San Francisco, providing a new way to get around without a car or public transit.

I'm flat enough. Okay, so I was curious when you were talking about some of these deals. One of the things you've said, I remember my own experience raising money from you guys, and like you said, it's a mutual joint thing. Have you had some experiences where your expression of what you thought about the product, like you mentioned about Snapchat and how it really resonated with you, or something you did to try to connect with that entrepreneur and stand out?

I think about Pinterest every day. I think about Airbnb every day. I think about WhatsApp every day. Those were all companies... I hate it when venture capitalists say they passed. You don't get to pass as a venture investor. No entrepreneur has ever handed me a signed term sheet and said, 'Please sign here,' and I said no. It's not how it works. It's much more organic and biological than that. But you didn't decisively seek it out. So what VCs should say is, 'I didn't aggressively seek it out,' not 'I passed.' I met with Pinterest. I met with Airbnb. I met with WhatsApp.

With Pinterest, it was actually the flaw of falling into the trap of exactly what I talked about before. I was trying too much to be like a product person. I thought, 'This product is interesting, but I don't really get it. The engagement numbers are incredible, and the growth is pretty good, but I don't really get it.' After Pinterest, I thought about putting a poster up on the wall of my office that said, 'You are not a 37-year-old American woman,' because I wasn't, it turns out. So I didn't aggressively pursue it. With Snapchat, I looked at the product and thought, 'This is stupid. Who cares about a photo-sharing thing where pictures disappear?' That was my reaction initially. With Pinterest, it was, 'Who cares about these pin boards? I'm never going to use that.' That was obviously the wrong reaction. I still don't have that poster up on my wall, but I'm thinking about it.

Yeah, so we do have a lot of great companies that have been worth billions of dollars, but we haven't had one of those explosive, world-altering ones. One thing I think back on is Ancestry.com had a company called MyFamily. I don't know if you know it or not, but as a consumer, I had that experience. I knew the founders really well and a lot of the investors that were in it. They called me, 'What do you think about MyFamily?' I said, 'We used it. It's insane.' It was the first place my whole family, still today, we're not on Facebook, but we were on this because it was easier to make groups. But they had that, and there was nothing like it at the time. It dissipated and turned into nothing. They could have had it. They had photo sharing, which was the big lynchpin for Facebook beginning. How do those things, all the other things that could have been a Facebook, what is their commonality in the misses? There are so many things that can not go right, which is part of what makes it so hard. It's hard to speak to real commonality in the misses. We were right about Friendster. If Friendster had succeeded, I wouldn't be sitting here today because Facebook wouldn't have become what it has. If Friendster had been sitting there with a ton of market share... I think family is a tough thing to make really massive because on the one hand, it's super important and everybody cares about it. But they got too into just 'family.' They could have... I mean, it's hard. One of the things which is a common pattern of success is to start with something specific but not have it be so specifically hard-coded that you don't leave yourself someplace to go. Facebook could have called itself 'College Facebook' or something, and that probably would have... we would have had to change the name maybe. Most of the biggest non-SaaS companies have had some kind of network effect. I think family is a tough place to build a network effect because it's important to everybody on the planet, but there's no compelling reason why if my family is using one product, the family of somebody in Ohio or Pakistan needs to be using that same product just because my family uses it. Anything framed around those really small units without a lot of connection points... there is one bridge across families, which is in-laws. David Sachs, who's now a pretty well-known entrepreneur, had a company called Geni, which was about family. But it wasn't really enough to build a network effect. So in that case, I knew the company really well, but I think there were some inherent limitations to where the product could go.

I'll tell you a story about Mark. It was actually a really pivotal moment for me because it taught me a lot about him, which mattered a lot for me. One of the few things I did at the company before LinkedIn was to help with fundraising. When I came into the company, it was really close to raising a round from a non-traditional investor, a non-venture investor. When I joined the company, I'd been at LinkedIn prior and helped Reed raise money there, so I met a lot of the venture investors through that process. When I came into Facebook, every VC I knew started calling me off the hook: 'Hey, we've got to meet with this company. You've got to help us get into a meeting.' Mark was raging around to venture capital. Our first round of venture capital was from Accel. I was talking to Ryan backstage about this actually. I still remember when Art Patterson, one of the kind of founding figures in venture capital at Accel, a wonderful older guy, walked up the stairs into our office. With each step up the stairs, I could see his jaw dropping lower and lower. 'What is this? What is going on here?' We were assembling IKEA furniture. Dustin Moskovitz had misplaced a nail or something and cut his hand, so it was bleeding. There was chaos everywhere. Art walks up the stairs, and we're taking money from them. I remember when we went out with the partner at Accel, Jim Breyer, who ended up with the board seat. Mark, Sean Parker, and I were there at dinner with Jim to kind of celebrate, although we hadn't completed an investment. Mark left. This was at the Village Pub in Woodside. Mark got up, went into the bathroom. Five to ten minutes went by, and he still hadn't come back. I started thinking something's wrong. So I went into the bathroom just to make sure he was okay, and he was sitting on the floor of the bathroom crying. I was like, 'What's going on? What's wrong?' He said, 'I just got off the phone with someone who I really respect, and they told me I'm making a huge mistake taking venture capital. They said it's going to ruin the company.' The person was Don Graham from the Washington Post, who ended up on the board of the company actually. They did work it out. But it was a remarkable thing to see in anybody, particularly somebody who was doing this for the first time. It wasn't really a moment of tension, but it was a parent moment for me in understanding who this person's character was. One other story before we have to wrap up. People probably remember the News Feed fiasco that happened in 2006. We launched News Feed in 2006. It's now the core of the media aggregation strategy for Facebook, which is one of the things that made it such an important company. Mark had this idea of putting an interstitial modal dialog box on the homepage of the site. When you went onto the site, it said, 'Hey, great news! Now there's this thing called News Feed, which is going to aggregate all these stories from your friends.' The only way you could dismiss this dialog box was by clicking on a button that said 'Awesome.' It was like we were just sure you were going to love it. So we launched this thing, and we were all like, 'Yeah, this is going to be awesome.' And we were met with rage, just complete rage. We were stunned. First of all, it was the first moment where I was like, 'Holy cow, this company really matters.' I always like to say the opposite of love is indifference. People were furious because when they changed their relationship status on Facebook, they didn't want that broadcast out to everybody in their social network. We hadn't really thought that through. There was a lesson there in product design around not making users feel like they've been baited and switched. We certainly didn't do it on purpose, but a lot of people felt like they'd been brought in under one set of rules and then suddenly there was a new set of rules they hadn't expected. There was rage. We got a call from the Palo Alto Police Department literally saying, 'Listen, we don't know what this News Feed thing is that you people have done, but you need to make it stop now because there's a protest rally coming to University Avenue in Palo Alto.' I was in the office in the corner of the meeting room, talking on the phone, 'What are we going to do?' As I'm in the middle of the conversation, a camera arises up from the street, turns, and points at me. I just took the window and shut it. That was out of a movie. They should have put that in the freaking movie. There were a lot of people, including some of the company's investors and employees, emailing Mark, dealing with this 24/7, saying, 'You've got to get rid of it. This is going to kill the company. You've got to take it down.' His reaction to that has really stayed with me to this day. He just didn't even consider it. He had the engineering team work for almost 48 hours straight to change some of the logic and how it worked around this relationship issue in particular. The rest was history. There's always been a real clarity of purpose which I think defines all the great entrepreneurs. You have it too, and it's what in a lot of cases separates great from everything else.