00:46:11 · Ev Randle, Molly O'Shea
[00:46:11] S0: Or in lab equity, but I think there's so many knock on effects in terms of like, what do those employees do? What do they invest in? What causes or companies do they then invest in? Do they start new companies? Do they stay at these labs? It's going to be a shock that's going to impact every single aspect of life, both practical life in Silicon Valley, but then also the lives of employees, investors, and founders in the ecosystem as well. [00:46:40] S1: Oh, absolutely, I've done now two episodes with Michel Del Buono, who to your point, Andreessen Horowitz has multi products. He runs their multifamily office of Mark and Ben and the principal's there. So it's the wealth management division for them. And each time I talk to him, I'm asking because there's gonna be huge wealth event, like the most amount of wealth creation probably ever because of all these things happening simultaneously. And so we've gone through a couple of the questions. I'm obviously not gonna reiterate them now, but like one of the biggest questions is what do you do when 90 of your net worth, probably more at this rate, is in one position? [00:47:19] S0: Right. [00:47:20] S1: And so he has some really great answers to that.
00:47:22 · Molly O'Shea
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00:49:08 · Molly O'Shea, Ev Randle
[00:49:08] S1: So as we wrap up, I have like a couple more questions, but one of the things when I was doing research on you all was super interesting was like how diverse your portfolio is, especially in the AI mix. Like you've Star Cloud, Yeah. Data centers in space, named in the SpaceX, S One. Then you have Cerebras, that just went public. Sierra, Langchaine, Legora, Fireworks, which we talked about a bit. [00:49:34] S0: Mercur. [00:49:34] S1: Vanus. [00:49:35] S0: Vanus. [00:49:35] S1: Mercur. Yeah. Mercur. Interesting. I just listened to his podcast with Harry Stebbings and I was really surprised about the positive things that are going on there after the data breach. [00:49:45] S0: He cleared a lot of air. [00:49:46] S1: Good for him, honestly. HeyGen, Gumloop that we talked about and Ekza. So because of this whole mix and like there has been, you know, you guys have a concentrated strategy, like how do you, how do you come up with a portfolio of this type? They're all very mature. They're all doing really well. Like what is, I guess like what is the magic between all of that
00:50:07 · Ev Randle
[00:50:07] S0: Yeah, the I think, so when I was coming in, I was kind of in the, like before I joined Benchmark, I was like, wow, they've done such an amazing job thematically. Like they have like the vertical AI winner in Legora, They have the horizontal AI winner in Sierra. They have a data infrastructure play in Legora. They have a developer play in LangChain. They have a prosumer play in Heijen, and you can kind of keep going and keep going know, over all the data centers in Star Cloud. And then I got in, then I joined, and I realized, oh wow, there was literally no thought of like, oh, this is the category that we're going into. It was truly kind of what we talked about before, it was all founder out. It was all based on the founder, and yes, they resonate with the idea that the founder was pitching? Yes, but there was zero thought to oh, this is going to be a big category. It was just this is an unbelievable entrepreneur that is going to put their energy to an idea that they've convinced us is really, really interesting, but even in some of those cases, some of these companies were pivots, and so there was no way that we were super smart to know that some of these companies were going to be in big categories because they weren't even the categories that we invested in. And again, think that's sort of the benefit of Benchmark is we don't invest in categories, we invest in people. When Chetan invested in Star Cloud, it was like weeks, like we closed the investment weeks before Elon started like, you know, professing his love and bullishness on Overworld Datacenter.
00:51:44 · Molly O'Shea, Ev Randle
[00:51:44] S1: You guys have the partner meeting, you're like, wow, look at that. [00:51:48] S0: We were definitely, I think Elon, I forget which platform he was on, but he did like a long interview with somebody, and know, like half the interview was on Orbital Data Centers, and we started sending it around our group chat. We're like, oh man, this about, this space is about to get really hot, and it was so ironic because it was like, again, there's so many things, it's such a heated debate of like, are orbital data centers the future, are they gonna be too hard to pull off? And that, we obviously discussed both sides when we were talking about the investment, but the investment was about the people. It was about Philip and the team that he had built, and it's like wow, are, one, they already had a GPU working in space, so they had proven out their metal and they were the only company that had a GPU in space, so there was already some things that we saw in their traction, but it was based on the people. I think when you focus and you have your strategy around that, like again, great entrepreneurs are always in style, and they always pull rabbits out of hats, and they end up being magnetized and drawn towards where are these really massive categories, and they often end up pioneering them. [00:52:54] S1: Wow. Okay, so as we close out, I have to ask our Brex question. [00:52:57] S0: Of course.
00:52:57 · Ev Randle, Molly O'Shea
[00:52:57] S0: Of course. [00:52:59] S1: Brex is all about performance. If you didn't know that, now you know. Spending smarter, moving faster. But an element of performance that I think is very valuable is who you surround yourself with. You've been at so many legendary funds at this point. You've been surrounded by the top investors over and over again, but I'm really curious from your standpoint, like, who has been kind of like a mentor to you? Like, who do you keep, like, as a guiding figure for you as you continue to, like, evolve and grow in your career?