EBoys
by Randall E. Stross · first published 2000
3mentions
2recommended by
3HN commenters
2009–2019first – last mentioned
67% recommend33% neutral
In eBOYS, Randall Stross takes us behind the scenes and inside the heads of the gutsy entrepreneurs who are financing the hottest businesses on the Web. The six tall men who started Benchmark, Silicon Valley's most exciting venture capital firm, put themselves at the cutting edge of the new economy by backing billion dollar start-ups like eBay and Webvan. The risks were enormous--but the rewards have proven to be staggering. Within two years, eBay's net worth grew from $20 million to more than $21 billion, while each Benchmark founding partner saw his own personal net worth soar by hundreds of
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For those curious about eBay financing, check out the book "eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work" http://www.amazon.com/eBoys-Inside-Account-Venture-Capitalis... (the book is 10 years old, likely to be available at your local library). It…
on “Anti-Portfolio” ↗How do venture funds not do better technical due diligence(or any at all)? They trust people and credentials -- it's not about the technical details. There's a great chapter in Randall Stross's "EBoys" about TriStrata -- which raised millions based on essentially nonsense claims of an "unbreakable" encryption technology. (The chapter is excerpted at the bottom of this message: http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/april00/0460.html…
on “All 32mil RockYou accounts hacked. Passwords were stored in plaintext.” ↗Two things I remember from the webvan era- 1) how benchmark navigated / debated their investment (chronicled in https://www.amazon.com/eBoys-Inside-Account-Venture-Capitali...), 2) at the precise time that webvan was failing, fresh direct was succeeding but no one outside of NYC heard about their success because webvan failed so spectacularly.
on “Webvan” ↗