20VC: Most Downloaded Episode of 2019 with Bill Gurley, General Partner @ Benchmark Capital

Now every year we celebrate the end of the year at the 20 Minute VC with our most downloaded episode of the year and this year our most downloaded episode was also my highlight of the entire year doing 20 VC. Ever since I started the show I really dreamed of having this guest on and so it's a huge honour and a privilege for me to say that our most downloaded episode of the year is with Bill Gurley, general partner at Benchmark, one of the most successful funds of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Uber, Twitter, Dropbox, WeWork, Snapchat, Stitch Fix, eBay and many more incredible companies. As for Bill, widely recognized as one of the greats of our time, having worked with the likes of Grubhub, Nextdoor, Uber, OpenTable, Stitch Fix, and Zillow.

And prior to Benchmark, Bill was a partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, and before entering venture, Bill spent four years on Wall Street as a top-ranked research analyst, including three years at CS First Boston, where his research coverage included such companies as Dell, Compaq, and Microsoft, and he was the lead analyst on the Amazon IPO. But, but before we dive into the show today, I'm sure you've heard me talk about it before, but my word, this is a product I love: Carta. Carta simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, track cap tables, and get valuations. Go to carta.com/20VC to get 10% off. And with more than 800,000 employees and shareholders using Carta to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity,

And Carta now offers fund admin, so you can see real-time data in the Carta platform and work with Carta's team of experienced fund accountants. Go to carta.com/20VC to get 10% off. And if Carta is the go-to there, what about product? Well, the team over at Pendo, the product cloud company, just launched a free product performance benchmarks microsite where you can see how your product stacks up against your peers. They gave me a sneak preview of it, and my reaction was, my word, I love it. I know so many founders who are desperate to compare their products to competitors, and that's what Pendo has done. They've analyzed more than 1,000 software products and created benchmarks for startups, scale-ups, and enterprises across five different categories.

It's all presented with some pretty slick visualizations, and you should check them out today at pendo.io/product-benchmarks. That's pendo.io/product-benchmarks. Finally, finding a quiet space for a phone call or a video conference, it's always a challenge. Conference rooms, well, they're always taken up by one person. That's why I was excited to discover Room. Room helps businesses build a better workplace with their mobile soundproof phone booths, helping you tune out the noise of the open office. It's soundproofed using recycled plastic bottles and fully ventilated to keep you cool. I've personally used the Room booth before in our office, and I love it. And with Room, you can create a quiet space for phone calls, video conferences, and focused work at a fraction of the cost of building a conference room.

That's why companies like Nike, Google, NASA, and Salesforce have already chosen Room to build a better workplace. And Room offers free shipping and the best price on the market. So go to room.com/20VC to learn more. That's room.com/20VC. However, that's quite enough from me. So now, I'm so excited to welcome our most downloaded episode of 2019 with Bill Gurley, general partner at Benchmark.

You have now arrived at your destination.

What many do not know, Bill, is that I started four years ago and I wrote a list of three names that I most wanted to have on the show. Yours was absolutely one of them, so I couldn't be more excited to have you on today. And thank you so much for joining me today, Bill. No worries. Thanks for having me. Not at all, but I would love to kick off with you. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of venture and come to be a GP at one of the world's most successful funds in the form of Benchmark?

It's actually an unusual story that I think exposes how much luck is involved in some of these things as well as just random opportunity. But when I was in business school, I started thinking about venture, and I reached out to a few people, and they said, 'Go work for 20 years. You can't just get into venture.' And so part of what drove me towards it: my sister was employee 63 at Compaq in Houston, certainly one of the first, maybe only huge venture-backed stars out of Houston. And Kleiner was actually in it. And so I got exposed to what it meant to have options and for a company to explode. And then I ended up working at Compaq for a while. I started trading stocks. I really liked investing.

And I started to realize that tech had all these interesting angles and complexities you could watch or predict as they unfolded. So when I ran into a dead end as a VC, the second best thing that looked interesting to me was to become a sell-side analyst. The team at Goldman at the time was quoted in every tech article I could read in the Journal, Forbes, or Fortune. And they were pontificating about valuation and investing around technology evolution. And so I was lucky enough to beg my way into a job at Credit Suisse First Boston and was handed coverage of the PC hardware and software industry, which was extremely fortunate and allowed me to build a network with a whole bunch of different people.

After three years of that, it turned out to be more successful than I had anticipated. I got a call one day from Frank Quattrone, the legendary Frank Quattrone, and he said, 'We're leaving Morgan Stanley and starting a new investment bank, and we'd like you to be a part of it.' And I, at the time, had already made a decision that I wanted to move on from the sell-side. And I sat down with Frank and he said, 'Bill, what do you want to do long term?' And I said, 'I want to be a venture capitalist.' And he said, 'I'll tell you what, you come to work for me. I'll move you to Silicon Valley and introduce you to every venture capitalist that I know,' which is what he did. And it only took 13 months of that before I got a VC offer.

I spent 18 months at Hummer Winblad, and then Benchmark approached me with an offer I just couldn't refuse. And that's how I ended up here.

I absolutely love that as an entrance in. I do have to ask, Bill, if there's one thing that I'm very cognizant of now, is I've never seen the boom-and-bust cycles from the macro perspective with me actually being in the workforce. Now, I asked Josh this at First Round. He said that seeing the boom and bust made him more conservative as an investor. So, you having seen multiple boom-and-busts, how do you think that impacted your investing mentality today?

Yeah, I have multiple views on this subject. So when I went to Wall Street before I went into venture, I read every book on the history of financial markets that I possibly could, including all of the famous ones that you've heard about. And so the notion going back to the tulip boom and bust, it's well recorded in the annals of financial history. So you get tons of exposure to it if you just look for it. Silicon Valley is, and being around a group of people where risk is forgotten so quickly. And that's one of the things I would say is, having watched two of these, it's like the period, you know, so we had a huge bust in '01, and the period from '01 to say maybe '07, '08, there was quite a bit of cognitive awareness of that, but then it can go away very quickly.

And what's interesting is each day that goes on as the market expands, people take on more and more risk, but they're losing their aversion to risk very slowly. And so, you know, it's like the boiled-frog thing, like over maybe a five-year period, your VC firm has taken on tremendous amounts of risk, but every day you just moved a little bit. So you never felt like you were making this massive leap in risk exposure. When markets bust, risk aversion comes on immediately, like overnight, boom. And so you have this very different principle. We take on more risk slowly, but we recognize risk quite quickly when markets bust. Now, here's why I said I have multiple views on this subject. I spent a ton of time in the past couple of years thinking about the cyclicality in venture markets.

And I was actually in this really interesting—I was fortunate enough to get to spend some time with Howard Marks, the famous bond investor. And he said, “Tell me, for 20 minutes or so, just tell me about your business.” And after I explained it for a while, he goes, “Wow, your business sucks.” I said, “Why is that?” And he said, “You can't avoid cyclicality.” He said, “I have a strategy for when I think yields are going to expand and when they're going to contract. I always have a game to play.” He goes, “You're going to have boom-bust cycles, always.” And I think he's actually right. I think it's inherent in the way that venture funds are structured, where you take on money, you invest, and then you return it over like a 10-year period.

And it's low barriers to entry, high barriers to exit. So as markets start to boom, the amount of capital that comes into the category is immense. But when the market breaks, the capital doesn't have a mechanism to go away quickly, because it's already been committed to these 10-year windows. And so I don't know when the next one's going to be. And I will tell you that the other thing I realized is that the vast majority of the average returns over a multi-decade window are right at the end of the cycle. And so if you get conservative and pull back and miss, like there were venture firms in '96 who said, “This is way too overheated. We're pulling back,” and they missed '97, '98, '99. And if you took a pension fund's venture returns and looked at them over time—this is my point—and took out those three years, it'd probably be a horrible category.

And so there's this saying, I can't remember who said it to me, but they said, “The best way to protect against the downside is to enjoy every last bit of the upside,” which unfortunately sounds like kind of a Thelma and Louise approach.

I mean, I absolutely love that. And oh my God, I'm already so enjoying this episode. I do have to ask you, because I often think, okay, as you said, the capital's committed for 10 years in fund structures, and we've never seen so much capital committed to the asset class. So from the founder and fundraising perspective, does the music really stop even with a market crash, I guess, is my question?

Well, I think what happens, which I already discussed, is the risk aversion of the principals happens very quickly. I've really only seen it twice, 2001 and 2009. But everybody gets hyper-conservative at the same time. The other thing that will be super interesting when and if it ever happens again, if you were to define risk, and I think it's arguable you could, as the burn rates that these companies have, the burn rates now are probably two orders of magnitude higher than they were in the '99–2000 timeframe for some of these companies. And if capital gets hard, that's going to be a really interesting issue. Now, we haven't seen capital get hard in a long time.

For sure. I mean, actually, it takes me to something that my partner Fred says the whole time. And he says that around pricing today, assets are priced as if risk is non-existent. I'm really interested. Peter Fenton, your wonderful partner, said on the show, “Never turn down a deal based on valuation. It's a mental trap.” I guess my question subsequently to you is, in potentially frosty times and more capital-available environments, how do you think about your own price sensitivity?

Yeah. Well, look, there's a reality in the venture market that you'll hear people talk about, which is there's asymmetric risk and reward. And so it's just using type one and type two errors, right? If I invest in a company that doesn't work, I lose one times my money. So I made an error, right? I thought this was going to work and it didn't. If I decide not to invest in Google, that error in decision-making costs you 10,000 X or whatever, a thousand X, whatever the number was. And so I think Peter's point of saying that, which I think is partially just to provoke our partnership as we make decisions, is tied to that reality. I think the real caveat to it is if this company we're talking about has optionality to be 100x or be a fundmaker kind of company, then certainly the entry price does not matter.

Yeah, I do agree there. One of the kind of big determinants of that 100x of fund return is the element of market size. And I chatted to your partner, Sarah Tavel, before the episode. And she said, if there's one thing I had to ask Bill, she said it was market sizing. So I am interested, how do you think about and approach market sizing today when assessing new opportunities that come through Benchmark's door?

Well, I developed my own tenet, maybe similar to Peter's on price sensitivity, which is—I think venture capitalists, and once again, both on the price comment and the TAM discussion we're having, keep in mind, Benchmark is committed to very early-stage investing. So we're frequently meeting with two people on a PowerPoint talking about an industry. So this isn't—I don't think price insensitivity in late-stage investing is a smart idea, for example. And so what Sarah and I have talked about is just that I've come to believe people get into more trouble by over-focusing on TAM analysis, especially in these super early-stage companies. And the example that's probably most profound at this point, that I wrote a long blog post about, was Uber, where this NYU professor had done an analysis and said this company should only be worth $5 billion.

But his baseline was that it's going to get some percentage of the black car and taxi market, which he went out and analyzed, right? And at the moment he wrote it, the size of Uber in San Francisco was already 10x the taxi and black car market. And my point is not to dwell on him. And in that post, I also mentioned this very famous story where AT&T hired McKinsey to predict the number of cell phones by the year 2000 in 1980, and they missed by 100x. And so all too often, what I've seen is if technology brings about an easier, simpler, cheaper solution, there's a good chance that the thing could expand the market by orders of magnitude. And I found this to especially be true in the vertical space.

OpenTable was one where every time we tried to raise money after we had invested, it was always a long TAM discussion. And so anyway, I've grown accustomed to saying to myself, "Hey, what could possibly be true that would cause those types of TAM analyses to be wrong?" And there's another phrase that my partner Bruce made up, which I love, which gets at the asymmetry thing, which is he likes to say, "What could go right?" which is an interesting play on words from the common phrase.

I love that. What could go right? I am really interested. You said there about the OpenTable element. In terms of signaling, definitely for me and I think probably for a lot of people, they see all the success that Benchmark has had. And in terms of portfolio companies and raises, does the signaling and positive signaling of Benchmark not lead to such brand power and brand validity that the subsequent raises are so much easier? Is that naive thinking?

Well, I mean, it also depends on the time frame. I certainly think in the last five years, that's true. I think the companies we invest in definitely benefit from a brand halo. And I think part of that, because I talk to both the angel community and the later-stage community, I think part of it's because they realize we won't invest without a board seat. It's a tenet that we have that a lot of other firms don't. And part of the reason is we take the responsibility of being a principled owner and being a contributor on the board very seriously. And if you're an angel or you're a later-stage investor and you know that there's someone there that takes the issue of fiduciary duty and helping that company to be worth more and more very seriously, well, that makes you feel a lot better about those assets.

And there are a handful of firms that enjoy doing what we do, but if you look at all the venture dollars that are out there, I think the number that really takes that role seriously is actually a small fraction of it.

No, I do have to say I do agree with you. I'm so pleased you said about the board there because, very transparently, I've just gained my first institutional board and it's a massive learning process and one that I'm trying to scale as fast as possible. According to my analysis, you spent over 3,200 hours on a board, Bill. So I did have to ask, how have you seen yourself evolve and develop as a board member over time?

Oh, it's a good question. My firm had this wonderful dinner with Pierre Lamond, who's still practicing venture at the age of 88 years old, famous Sequoia investor. And in the middle of the dinner, he said, actually, just in a kind of surprising way, he said, "I'm the best board member in Silicon Valley." And I was like, "Wow." And I said, "Why?" He goes, "I'm more prepared than anyone else at the table." I was going to mention two things, but Pierre really made me smile when he said that, because I do think showing up, having read everything, being intimately aware of everything you're supposed to be aware of is super important in the boardroom setting. The second thing that I think is interesting is that all board members learn over time.

I think it will just happen to anyone who's getting an early start. When you're young, you speak too much in the boardroom and you learn to change that behavior over time. And I'll tell you the best pattern or the best rule set that I've used to do that is anytime I have an idea that pops into my head during a board meeting, I'll write it down and then I'll ask myself, "Does this need to be discussed right now? Is there a benefit of this being discussed with the other board members right now? Or is that something I could put in a note to the CEO after the board meeting to follow up on?" And so I'll make a list of 20 things. I'll maybe mention five of them in the board meeting. The other 15, I'll write up and send a follow-up note.

With the element of speaking and kind of not being over-dominant in terms of speech, would that be your biggest advice to me in terms of my first board seat? What would you advise someone who's just gained their first?

Yeah, definitely that. And the other thing is, you know, know your circle of competence, right? And so if there is a point that is going to be super helpful and you're the right person to make it, then you certainly should. But if it's irrelevant or if it's something that someone else at the table knows a lot more than you, maybe ask them a question instead. Yeah.

I do agree. I do have to ask it because obviously board seats take a lot of time. In terms of time allocation, I've had many different views on the show that some say you've got to spend time with your winners—they return the fund. Others say, you know what, you can't afford to spend time with the losers because you're recovering cents on the dollar. How do you think about time allocation across the portfolio? And have there been some lessons from the incredible decade that you've had at Benchmark?

Yeah, look, it's a conundrum for the reason you said. I mean, there are companies in any venture portfolio that are going to be delivering 100x more return than another one that you might be working on. And so from a purely selfish point of view, and I would say short-term selfish, you would tell yourself only spend time here. And the other thing I would tell you is that the struggling ones, and I don't know what the exact stats are, but like half of venture-backed startups are zero or something like that. You're going to have some of those. They can be quite taxing from a mental standpoint. Seeing that entrepreneur's face going through things like layoffs, which the Valley hasn't seen much of in the past five years, having to do the rah-rah meeting with the 60% of the headcount that's left, those things are hard.

They are really hard and they're mentally taxing. And so that's even more of, I guess, a selfish short-term perspective to want to hang out on the winners. Here's the challenge. If you're going to be a successful venture capitalist for two or three decades, you're going to have a reputation and your reputation is going to be a part of what allows you to win or not win investment opportunities in the future. And so you'd be surprised how many founders, when they ask for references, say, "Hey, how did they work?" I think it's become a question that they've been told they're supposed to ask. And your reputation might be built on those, both positively and negatively.

Yeah, it's, as you said, a conundrum and one that I'm definitely struggling to get my head around. I do have to move slightly above yourself to Benchmark and the incredible partnership that you have around you, especially on the investment decision-making. We touched on certain elements, be it price sensitivity, their market sizing in terms of the analysis. In terms of the decision-making process... Josh Kopelman said, it's not about getting the deal through the partnership, but finding the truth together. What does the investment decision-making process look like for you at Benchmark? And how do you as a partnership look to find the truth together?

Yeah. So as I mentioned earlier, the vast majority of investments we make are very early stage. And as a result, it's not the type of situation where you're going to have 10 people dive into spreadsheets and present all these arguments. There's way more intuition at play. In many cases, 80% of the weight might just be group decision about the competency or capability of the founder. And in many cases, that's turned out to be the exact right bet. And so we have, the listeners may not know, but Benchmark's structured in a very unique way where our investment partners all have equal economics. And I think that does an amazing job of speaking to the newer members of our team that their voice matters.

And so it's very collaborative. And we will simply have a discussion. And sometimes a company might come from a particular sector where certain partners have more knowledge. And so you're going to allocate those inputs better. In her recent book, Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke had an interesting section where she said, one of the benefits of a partnership or a small group is that you come to know the weaknesses of everyone else. And I thought that was kind of interesting too. I bet that every one of the partners at Benchmark knows the type of opportunity that each of us might fall in love with for the wrong reasons. And so we can help each other in that way. I thought that was interesting the way she had phrased that.

And so we simply have a discussion. And if a majority of the partnership wants to move forward, we move forward.

I mean, I'm absolutely with you in terms of Annie Duke and I thought that was a fascinating piece. Can I ask a personal one? I hope it's okay. In terms of the deals that you fall in love with, maybe for the wrong reasons, if you self-analyze, can you see that in yourself and what type of deals are those?

It's a better question for the other four, but I suspect it has something to do with network effects or user-generated content or those types of concepts are like emotionally appealing to me. So if anyone walks in and uses those two phrases, I might have a problem.

That's very funny. I do have to ask, you mentioned the varying characters and incredible personalities you have within the partnership. In terms of partner selection, one guest on the show said before, I'd rather be known for being a good partner picker than investment picker. So I was very interested by that. But how do you think about the partners you look to add to Benchmark and really what you look for in them?

I don't know what guest said that to you, but it's a really interesting comment because it implies from my point of view that whoever said it takes very seriously the career of being a venture capitalist at a venture capital firm, as opposed to just the idea of being an investor on boards. Because one of the only things I think that a firm needs to do properly to be able to have very successful investments over a very long period of time is to have a way to do generational transition and have a way to bring people in and help them develop into being an incredible venture capitalist. And so it's something we spend a ton of time on every single week talking about it. I'm going to give you a list of five or six criteria, although I don't know that it's not 10.

Youth is something that I've spoken about quite a bit. I think venture capital bends towards youth. There's a hustle element. There's a curiosity element. There's a lot of these really big outcomes are started by people that are 19 to 21. So there's a, "If I'm in the right networks, I'm closer to these people." Some of the things that pop up like a Snapchat, if you're not down in that generational element, you're just going to miss it. And so I think there's a whole bunch of reasons why youth is important. Curiosity is super important. We talk a lot about business judgment. That one's always weird to me because I think we have an internal definition of it, but I don't know that the world does.

It's something we just kind of feel. I think you need an investor mindset. Not everyone either likes to or decides that they want to think like an investor. And I think it requires a combination of understanding the history of investing and a certain amount of skepticism. I don't think you can just be Pied Piper-optimistic and pull it off. And then the last thing I would tell you is you need to be passionate about being a venture capitalist. I think 20 years ago, there were a lot more people on the planet that were passionate about it as an industry career choice. I think there are less today. And frequently, there are people that we find that meet those first four criteria, but they're just not interested in the category.

That seems supremely strange. Can I ask, how does that reveal itself? They might just tell us. And that's changed over time. Like I said, I think 20 years ago, if anyone had an opportunity to join a top-tier firm, they'd jump at it. But I think today, there are people that just have other desires or passions. I will tell you, there's another piece to it that I should mention. I think people on the outside may not realize how much selling goes into venture capital. It's probably the one thing that I didn't realize when I joined that I know innately now. But I could argue you're spending 85% or 90% of your time selling. And so if you don't like selling, it's a bad career choice.

Can I ask, what do you find the most challenging element of the role for you today?

I would say for the past five years, the most challenging part for me has just been this abundance of capital. It's equally mystifying to Howard Marks and, just from reading the commentary, Munger and Buffett. If interest rates are negative, which they are in many countries around the globe, the DCF model just has an N/A or, like, error, like it doesn't work. And so there's just so much peculiarity that's happening right now because these massive amounts of capital that it raises, you know, strategic questions that have never been presented to boardrooms ever, like in the history of business.

No, I do agree with you. I mean, final one before we move into the quickfire, which is my favorite. Speaking of that, Hemant Taneja, actually, at General Catalyst said, 'Harry, it's actually a 30-year transformational shift to technology interrupting and embracing all parts of the economy. And actually, we won't see a macro stutter because of that embracing every single economy that we know with technology.' Do you agree with that kind of 30-year transformational macro shift? Or do you think actually nothing's invincible to macrocycles?

I have a whole bunch of reactions to that. My gut is what you just said, that there's no way it's avoidable, which was my opinion coming out of that wonderful conversation with Howard. I have two other thoughts though, right? One, anytime a venture capitalist opens their mouth, they're probably sending a message to the founder they haven't met yet. And saying that it's going to be 30 years of wonderful glory, all roses and no thorns, is certainly a better message than screaming 'the sky is falling.' And so I can understand why most venture capitalists would adopt the, 'I believe in technology, I believe it's all going to be great.' The second comment I would have is, as I already mentioned, the best way to protect against the downside is to enjoy every last bit of the upside.

I've got no incentive to change my operating principles or the way I go about doing the job just because I think one day the cycle might end. And so I'm going to be operating as if I believed what he said, even if I don't.

I do love that realization. I do want to move into my favorite element though, Bill, being the quickfire round. I say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts in about 60 seconds or less. Does that sound good?

Okay.

Okay. So, favorite book and why? What must we be reading?

Yeah. My favorite book is that it was actually written a long time ago. It's called Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop. And it's about the rise of the Santa Fe Institute, which I've very recently joined the board of, which I'm super excited about. It's also a board that Bill Miller and Mike Mauboussin sit on, who you may know of. The book was about complexity theory, and that's what Santa Fe is about. Another way of saying that is multivariable nonlinear systems. And I read it when I was 25, 26, and it just had such a profound impact on how I see different models and systems and economies and opportunities and investments, because most things in life are multivariable nonlinear systems. And it was so like shockingly impactful on my brain, like no other book ever has been.

And maybe it's because of youth—albums that people listen to in that same time frame tend to stick more. But I have a pile of that book in my office. I have ever since I read it and I give it out all the time.

I hope this one's not too personal, but you've achieved all that one could want to achieve in venture when you look at the career and the decades at Benchmark. What motivates you today, Bill?

I have a profound affection for the art of helping founders realize their dream and imagining with them a future that we then bet on and help make come true. I once said if we lived in a completely socialist society where all jobs had the exact same pay, I think I'd still choose to do this.

Yeah, it's a clear sign. What do you know now that you wish you'd known at the start of your career in VC, Bill?

That one's pretty easy. So I had a meeting or my firm, Benchmark, had a meeting with Larry and Sergey where they said, 'Will you invest at 100 pre?' And we should have said yes. I would tell myself that.

Yeah. No, I do agree. Question, and I struggled with this the other day. When is a stretch a stretch too far? When you're going for something that's 20 pre to start and it ends at 60 pre, you tell yourself, 'I'm going to stop at 40 pre,' and it goes to 45.

I think what happens in those situations, at least for us, is we start internally having as intense and as quick a discussion as we possibly can about how much upside is really in the situation. And it goes back to what we were saying earlier about, is this the kind of thing that could be a fund maker? And we've missed on that in the past. And I would say our biggest regrets, and this goes back to Peter's tenet about price, a lot of our biggest regrets are when we got too worried about price. Do you allow for regrets in venture? Because of the asymmetry situation that I talked about previously, we do dwell on the decision errors that led us to miss big winners. We don't dwell on the decision errors that led us to make a bad investment.

Absolutely. Penultimate one, when you look back at Benchmark in the decades, what are you most proud of? I think what I would say is the founding partners put together this crazy idea of this equal partnership. And also, we're structured in a very artisan way. We don't have analysts or associates running around. The partners do all the due diligence themselves. We don't have huge teams of PR people or marketing departments or anything like that because we just like to maximize the time we spend out on the field. And they put together this structure, this equal partnership, and I don't think any of them—I don't know if they knew at the time—it's amazingly helpful for generational change because it gives you the opportunity to go out and get the very best candidate you possibly can.

Because people, and this happened to me when they approached me, like the overwhelming sense of welcome you get when someone's willing to say, 'Hey, you deserve as much as we do,' is super powerful. And so I would say the thing I'm most proud of is that we're moving towards our third generation of partners and they're all wonderful. You've had several on your show. And I just love that the model endures. It's also one where team stands out way above the individual. And for the people that come on here, that's something that's super meaningful to them as well.

Well, you know how I feel about the new partners and the existing partnership. It's been such a pleasure to have them on the show. But the final one that I have to ask, Bill, most recently publicly announced investment that you made and why you got so excited?

Yeah, it's a little contrarian. We put some money in a company called Good Eggs. It's an online grocer. And there's really, I'll mention two fundamental things that got us excited. One, the CEO, Bentley Hall, is someone, if you spent an hour with, you would know exactly why we were so compelled. He's a perfect fit for the role. He's got great... great leadership skills, incredible external presenter and communicator. And then the second reason was, you know, having watched a bunch of different industries evolve. And as we're seeing the restructuring of retailing, we believe that if you're going to do some type of direct-to-consumer approach, you have to have the perfect supply chain, optimal supply chain for doing that, and we think that's a purpose-built distribution center designed for direct-to-consumer, perhaps as an alternative to something like an Instacart where you're picking things out of a store. But it's early. Like, we do things early, so it's early. We'll see. Bill, as I said, I've wanted to do this since the very first episode over four years ago. I can't thank you enough for joining me, and it's been such a pleasure. Oh, no worries. I really enjoyed it.

So there we have it, the most downloaded show of 2019. I want to say a huge thank you to Bill for giving up his time. If you want to see more from Bill, which is always a must on Twitter, you can find him at bgurley. Likewise, it'd be great to welcome you behind the scenes here. You can do so on Instagram at hstebbings1996 with two b's. It'd be great to see you there. But before we leave you today, I'm sure you've heard me talk about it before, but my word, this is a product I love: Carta. Carta simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, track cap tables, and get valuations. Go to carta.com forward slash 20VC to get 10% off. And with more than 800,000 employees and shareholders using Carta to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity.

And Carta now offers fund admin so you can see real-time data in the Carta platform and work with Carta's team of experienced fund accountants. Go to carta.com forward slash 20VC to get 10% off. And if Carta is the go-to there, what about product? Well, the team over at Pendo, the product cloud company, just launched a free product performance benchmarks microsite where you can see how your product stacks up against your peers. They gave me a sneak preview of it, and my reaction was, "My word, I love it." I know so many founders who are desperate to compare their products to competitors, and that's what Pendo has done. They've analyzed more than 1,000 software products and created benchmarks for startups, scale-ups, and enterprises across five different categories.

It's all presented with some pretty slick visualizations, and you should check them out today at pendo.io/product-benchmarks. That's pendo.io/product-benchmarks. Finally, finding a quiet space for a phone call or a video conference, it's always a challenge. Conference rooms, well, they're always taken up by one person. That's why I was excited to discover Room. Room helps businesses build a better workplace with their mobile soundproof phone booths, helping you tune out the noise of the open office. It's soundproofed using recycled plastic bottles and fully ventilated to keep you cool. I've personally used the Room booth before in our office, and I love it. And with Room, you can create a quiet space for phone calls, video conferences, and focused work at a fraction of the cost of building a conference room.

That's why companies like Nike, Google, NASA, and Salesforce have already chosen Room to build a better workplace. And Room offers free shipping and the best price on the market. So go to room.com/20VC to learn more. That's room.com/20VC. As always, I so appreciate all your support, and I can't wait to bring you another set of fantastic episodes moving into 2020.