The Exchanges

Q Can I ask a really hard one? When you think about the younger partners that scale incredibly successfully versus those that maybe don't end churn or don't scale as successfully, what's the difference between the two?

A Oh gosh, there's so many ways you can fail and so many ways you succeed in venture. I don't think there is one, but there are certain things. I mean, we've had folks fail because they didn't understand how to navigate the dialectic between team and individual. Usually more too individual in the sense of like running over people or not listening to feedback or not learning. That's something that I think is a very fast Failure mode, at least in our culture. I think another one for younger partners is learning how to ask questions and to listen, but also how to assert themselves and to take risks. I think one of the toughest things in this business is you never know. Everything looks so obvious in retrospect. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Nextdoor looked obvious. Discord looked obvious. All these things looked obvious. That is not the case. I mean, you can see that in some of these memos. It's kind of funny to look back at the memos that we post on our website and you've seen about these original investments and How quaint and early and odd LinkedIn was, the memo was, or Facebook the memo was, or Roblox the memo was. So there's so much uncertainty prospectively, and one of the most important things for a young partner is to have the ability to do the work, but then make the call, to put down some bets. And one of the other failures we've seen in a partner is they can be really analytical, bu…

AI assessment note: “they can be really analytical, but they just can't make the call.”

Q Final one. What's your favorite story of working with Roblox?

A I'll give two. One is, I think I've talked about before, and it's very fast, which is the perseverance of seeing Dave stick with it. There were seven to 10 years of carrying water through the desert where no one believed, and everyone told him he needed to do it differently, and he stayed focused, and if he'd done all the things, if he'd taken the thousands of pieces of advice and gotten all mixed up and twisted around, there's no way Roblox would have succeeded, and he had that. So I love that story. I love the underdog story. I love the seventeen-year success It counters the idea that this is all really easy and fast, and I love the founder that will always stick with the vision, but continue to evolve and grow with it. The other thing I love about Roblox is it's a wonderful story of team and of people, how so many people help in different ways. So Dave is this visionary. He sets the tone. He's always thinking about where do we end up 10 years out. Craig Donato, their chief business officer, he's the anchor. He's the one who's translating Dave and making sure the train stand track and helping things together. Jeff Marr came over from Kabam, And it was this jack of all trades, jumped into security when we needed that, jumped into social when we needed that, and each time made that area better when it was hanging on the edge of disaster. Ari Stamen, a lawyer by training in the …

AI assessment note: “I'll give two. One is, I think I've talked about before”

Q I mean, you can't give me a bone like that and not expect me to take it, but you know, working with Reed, Mark, David at Roblox, in terms of leadership and what makes great leadership, you've seen the best of the best. How do you think about that and what makes them so great?

A Yeah, this has been a real learning adventure for me in the sense I always came in with a belief having worked and operating that you needed to be founder friendly and you needed to support the founders, and I learned through some tough experience as well that, like, that is exactly right, but the ways in which you do that often can include tough love, Can often include pushing them in harder ways than maybe I initially thought, and so, you know, what was great about, for example, Reed, my partnership with Reed, was he was a wonderful thought partner. We would bang things back and forth. There was nothing that was out of bounds. We would push on edges. He would push me. I would push him, and in the end, we'd get to better results as a result of that, and I think that's a critical thing that I look for. With Mark Zuckerberg, I would say this was a person that was an incredible learner, always looked to different kinds of people That weren't just like him to learn from, and so if you think about a Jim Breyer or a Don Graham or Sean Parker, et cetera, et cetera, such different people, but Mark saw the value and knew how to extract learning from every single one of them in a way that was really powerful. With Dave, you saw someone that had incredible sense of purpose and this focus and this belief in himself. I remember when I first met him, he was doing the original physics Roblox…

AI assessment note: “With Mark Zuckerberg, I would say this was a person that was an incredible learner”

Q We've mentioned some incredible names of companies that you've worked with and invested in in the past. You know, I got one brilliant question. Me and Elisa loved it. And it was a question of, bluntly, we've heard about all the successes. From those that maybe didn't work out, and we don't need to name names, from those that didn't work out, what were the biggest learnings from those?

A Look, I think that one of those lessons I touched on earlier, which was a learning about how to help companies and how to help founders and what founder-friendly really means. I came in early on, like I said, believing that founder-friendly meant you backed the founder, whatever they said you did and whatever they said you backed. And what I learned is that's not always the case, that you need to help founders be better. You need to help the founders, encourage them on their instincts when they're good. You need to Challenge them to get them to think on their processes when maybe your experience says they might not be in the decision. You still at the end, I think, defer to the entrepreneur in most cases, but taking on that active role, active partnership, active education, active devil's advocate in a smart, but supportive way. That's something that I learned a lot in terms of what the definition for me, at least of being sort of founder friendly is, is it isn't always just backing blindly. And I think in the situation with Dig, Kevin Rose is a brilliant, brilliant founder and incredibly creative, incredibly smart. But I think, you know, look, he had success at an incredibly young age, and he got caught a little bit, I think, between the success of the company and the audience that he had been associated with through Dignation and his television shows, and also then that trans…

AI assessment note: “one of those lessons I touched on earlier, which was a learning about how to help companies”

Q And then how did the transition to venture come then from recognition of search being so critical? How did that transition to venture with Greylock?

A Yeah, so look, I joined Excite at the very beginning of the internet, and it was an incredible journey, wonderful people, but yet All over our skis in incredible ways as the world was changing around us, and we were trying to keep up, and so it was amazing sort of first phase of the internet to experience from a search engine. By sort of late 99, I'd gotten to the point where I was sort of ready for another challenge, and had sort of poked my head up and was thinking about what was next, and a good friend of mine from business school, an individual named Neil Bushry, who today is the CEO of Workday, saw that, and like any good VC, he had joined Greylock about nine months earlier to help build out the West West Coast, and he saw that I'd picked my head up and grabbed me, and like a good VC closed me hard, and gave me the pitch to say, look, Greylock's this great firm that has a long storied history, mostly in Boston, but there's been some great developments in the West Coast, and I've joined to come anchor the growth of the West Coast on the enterprise side. I believe that we should be doing a lot more in consumer. Come join arms with me, and let's go do that together. It'll be a lot of fun, and I'm a sucker for a good pitch, so I ended up joining in the early 2000, walked in the door January 2000, and then the world changed around me Quite quickly.

AI assessment note: “a good friend of mine... named Neil Bushry... had joined Greylock... and grabbed me”

Q We've mentioned some incredible names of companies that you've worked with and invested in in the past. You know, I got one brilliant question. Me and Elisa loved it. And it was a question of, bluntly, we've heard about all the successes. From those that maybe didn't work out, and we don't need to name names, from those that didn't work out, what were the biggest learnings from those?

A Look, I think that one of those lessons I touched on earlier, which was a learning about how to help companies and how to help founders and what founder-friendly really means. I came in early on, like I said, believing that founder-friendly meant you backed the founder, whatever they said you did and whatever they said you backed. And what I learned is that's not always the case, that you need to help founders be better. You need to help the founders, encourage them on their instincts when they're good. You need to Challenge them to get them to think on their processes when maybe your experience says they might not be in the decision. You still at the end, I think, defer to the entrepreneur in most cases, but taking on that active role, active partnership, active education, active devil's advocate in a smart, but supportive way. That's something that I learned a lot in terms of what the definition for me, at least of being sort of founder friendly is, is it isn't always just backing blindly. And I think in the situation with Dig, Kevin Rose is a brilliant, brilliant founder and incredibly creative, incredibly smart. But I think, you know, look, he had success at an incredibly young age, and he got caught a little bit, I think, between the success of the company and the audience that he had been associated with through Dignation and his television shows, and also then that trans…

AI assessment note: “what I learned is that's not always the case, that you need to help founders”

Q That's the invisible box. This is, this is why I'm always smiling, because that's my invisible box. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. But listen, I do want to dive into a quick fire answer. I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts, It'd be a little bit Roblox focused, but I do want that. So what was your pre-mortem when you did the Roblox deal?

A Yeah, I think the biggest thing we thought the reason to succeed was that it was providing a different model of what games could be and what community and social can be. That it had a flywheel that was an economic flywheel in Robux. It had a flywheel that was a creator flywheel, and that it had a flywheel and a user and social flywheel. The obvious downside can be you don't get those flywheels working in harmony. You mess up the economy. We've seen that happen in the past with Second Life and others. And of course, the challenge of aging up and continuing to grow with people. And so that was, by the way, also true Facebook. There was a lot of people that said, oh, Facebook, that's just for college kids. It'll never be used by anyone over 20. Forget 30. Forget 40. Forget 50. There's no way. And so, you know, one of the reasons that I, I was overcome some of the downside potential on, say, roadblocks around age, and I still believe this, is we underestimate that those kids that are nine, 10, 1112, and 13 today are the kids that are 1415, 1617, 18 of tomorrow. And Roblox is where they live and what they love, and that was true Facebook for college students.

AI assessment note: “The obvious downside can be you don't get those flywheels working in harmony.”

Q How do you think about, you know, trust is at the core of all of them. How do you think about building that relationship of trust with founders?

A Yeah, look, I think a lot of it comes down to your reputation. You know, we always encourage our founders, do the checking. It is always in our favor when they do their checking on Greylock, when they do checking on our partners. You know, take a young partner like Moik Dubow. Incredibly brilliant. You talk to anyone that knows him, and you do those checks, you're going to come away. You can't come away saying anything but, this is a guy I want to work with. This is a guy I want on my side. And on the flip side, I think if you do checking, you can often find in our business bad behavior by people, and I wish people would do more of that checking. To your point, Harry, because The marriages happen so fast in these things that, like, you don't realize. I always say, like, be really careful that you get too wrapped up on the wedding because it's a long-term marriage. I mean, the reality of these things is everyone looks back and say they were immediate successes, but LinkedIn was eight to 10 years to going public. Facebook was 10 to 12. You know, Roblox, 17 years. And so these are long-term relationships, and so much gets lost in the crazy mayhem of the wedding, of the deal, and of the match.

AI assessment note: “I think a lot of it comes down to your reputation.”

Q biggest challenges for a lot of venture firms is the generational transition question. I do a lot of references for funds from LPs, and I mean, it's on every single LP's question list is how do you think about generational transition? You know, having seen it and, bluntly, done it so successfully multiple times at Greylock, what are your thoughts on what it takes to do generational transition successfully today?

A Look, I think there's a couple rules of thumb, and Greylock are lucky enough to have had a lot of these Great calls made early on by our founders or the first couple generations, and we've only picked up those and adapted them to the times. One of those is, like I said, the senior partners need to get out of the way, and they also need to know that their voice can be dangerous because it can be overpowering to newer partners, and this was early on. One of our three founding partners, Bill Elfers, the original LP, said, we need a CEO if we're going to back Greylock, and they were like, the three partners were like, well, we're partners. We don't Want a CEO? We need a CEO. Ok. So I went away and threw a pretty arduous process for them because of the personal relationship, and they'd come in evenly. They elected one of our great founders, Bill Elfers, as the CEO. So he came in as the CEO, and he announced he was the CEO of the LPs, and they were happy, and Greylock was off from the running. The next year, 12 months later, he came to his partner to say, I'm stepping down. Who's the new CEO? And the other partners were like, Bill, it was hard to make the decision to make you the CEO. We just went through that. Like, we don't want to do that again. And he's like, I'm stepping down because I want people to understand we didn't want a CEO. And Greylock is not a place where there should…

AI assessment note: “senior partners need to get out of the way”

Q We chatted before about sleep. I have to ask this one. What's your sleep tooling kit?

A Oh, gosh. I, as we were saying earlier, I wish I'd invested in this earlier. So I advise everyone who is messing with their sleep in horrible ways to invest in these other tooling kits to help you. So I have a Oura Ring, which I use and look at. I use a product called Sleep Timer every night, and I use another product called AutoSleep. All three do different versions of checking your sleep, but I like to correlate across any, all of them, because I don't actually think one is exactly right, and sometimes I can see patterns among them, and other times I can, if I'm particularly stressed one day, I'll choose to pick and choose what I want to see and make myself feel better about the day.

AI assessment note: “I have a Oura Ring... Sleep Timer every night, and I use another product called AutoSleep.”

Q And then how did the transition to venture come then from recognition of search being so critical? How did that transition to venture with Greylock?

A Yeah, so look, I joined Excite at the very beginning of the internet, and it was an incredible journey, wonderful people, but yet All over our skis in incredible ways as the world was changing around us, and we were trying to keep up, and so it was amazing sort of first phase of the internet to experience from a search engine. By sort of late 99, I'd gotten to the point where I was sort of ready for another challenge, and had sort of poked my head up and was thinking about what was next, and a good friend of mine from business school, an individual named Neil Bushry, who today is the CEO of Workday, saw that, and like any good VC, he had joined Greylock about nine months earlier to help build out the West West Coast, and he saw that I'd picked my head up and grabbed me, and like a good VC closed me hard, and gave me the pitch to say, look, Greylock's this great firm that has a long storied history, mostly in Boston, but there's been some great developments in the West Coast, and I've joined to come anchor the growth of the West Coast on the enterprise side. I believe that we should be doing a lot more in consumer. Come join arms with me, and let's go do that together. It'll be a lot of fun, and I'm a sucker for a good pitch, so I ended up joining in the early 2000, walked in the door January 2000, and then the world changed around me Quite quickly.

AI assessment note: “a good friend of mine... Neil Bushry... joined Greylock... grabbed me, and like a good VC closed me hard”

Q Can I ask, speaking of that, how do you think about your own style of board membership, like, today, and I guess then, how's that changed over time? I'd be fascinated, given the experiences.

A Yeah, like, I think when I first started out, I probably was Trying too hard to control things, trying too hard to make things manifest themselves that I believe should be the case. And, you know, I've learned over time to have that separation to say, look, the most powerful thing I can do is to both empower, support, encourage, also help educate with perspectives, uh, my founders, rather than trying to make something happen myself and impose it. So I would say that's one thing. On the flip side, I'll say almost, again, in this dialectic kind of world, I've also learned Oh, there's certain cases and certain situations, which are a minority and less than when I started, where you really actually do need to be more aggressive and lean in and make your point, but in a way that they can hear, and so that's why building that relationship and building that trust is important, so that in both those cases, the cases when you're saying less and you're supporting more, and the few cases where you really need to lean in harder, that you're listened to and heard on the other side, and that's the really important dialectic, but it's also the important of the relationship.

AI assessment note: “I've learned over time to have that separation to say, look, the most powerful thing”

Q Can I ask a really hard one? When you think about the younger partners that scale incredibly successfully versus those that maybe don't end churn or don't scale as successfully, what's the difference between the two?

A Oh gosh, there's so many ways you can fail and so many ways you succeed in venture. I don't think there is one, but there are certain things. I mean, we've had folks fail because they didn't understand how to navigate the dialectic between team and individual. Usually more too individual in the sense of like running over people or not listening to feedback or not learning. That's something that I think is a very fast Failure mode, at least in our culture. I think another one for younger partners is learning how to ask questions and to listen, but also how to assert themselves and to take risks. I think one of the toughest things in this business is you never know. Everything looks so obvious in retrospect. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Nextdoor looked obvious. Discord looked obvious. All these things looked obvious. That is not the case. I mean, you can see that in some of these memos. It's kind of funny to look back at the memos that we post on our website and you've seen about these original investments and How quaint and early and odd LinkedIn was, the memo was, or Facebook the memo was, or Roblox the memo was. So there's so much uncertainty prospectively, and one of the most important things for a young partner is to have the ability to do the work, but then make the call, to put down some bets. And one of the other failures we've seen in a partner is they can be really analytical, bu…

AI assessment note: “one of the most important things for a young partner is to have the ability”

Q When I spoke to your partners, they said, especially when it came to like the Facebook and the LinkedIn ambassador, But it really challenged the firm's investment strategy at the time on several different fronts. How do you think they meant when they said that?

A Yeah, so ironically, with twenty-twenty hindsight, one of the benefits of struggling in venture and having the sector that I was in, including the whole domain, struggle, was that I had this perspective that, like, I looked at it from a fresh page, and when we came out of that, and when I was given the mandate to go back and look at consumer, I came to it with a completely fresh perspective, and my belief was, and I became an advocate for the fact that The world was changing. Before Consumer, you came in and you were a generalist. A partner like mine, Dave Strom, in his days, he invested in all kinds of areas with incredible success, but the business was becoming very specialized and much more focused, and so I was pushing to say, we need to have people that have expertise in a domain, and as a result, if you're going to narrow down your domain focus, we need to have to give them the freedom to invest up and down the stack within that domain. Otherwise, it would just be too narrow, and so you'd be stuck in this one box. And when I first joined, if a deal came in and it wasn't A classic kind of VC series A deal. I was told not to look at it. I was told you need to give that to these five firms that we let work with and partner with. If it was a later stage one, you need to give these folks that work on B stage. If it was an earlier one, you need to give this to the seed people a…

AI assessment note: “if a deal came in and it wasn't A classic kind of VC series A deal”

Q How do you think about, you know, trust is at the core of all of them. How do you think about building that relationship of trust with founders?

A Yeah, look, I think a lot of it comes down to your reputation. You know, we always encourage our founders, do the checking. It is always in our favor when they do their checking on Greylock, when they do checking on our partners. You know, take a young partner like Moik Dubow. Incredibly brilliant. You talk to anyone that knows him, and you do those checks, you're going to come away. You can't come away saying anything but, this is a guy I want to work with. This is a guy I want on my side. And on the flip side, I think if you do checking, you can often find in our business bad behavior by people, and I wish people would do more of that checking. To your point, Harry, because The marriages happen so fast in these things that, like, you don't realize. I always say, like, be really careful that you get too wrapped up on the wedding because it's a long-term marriage. I mean, the reality of these things is everyone looks back and say they were immediate successes, but LinkedIn was eight to 10 years to going public. Facebook was 10 to 12. You know, Roblox, 17 years. And so these are long-term relationships, and so much gets lost in the crazy mayhem of the wedding, of the deal, and of the match.

AI assessment note: “a lot of it comes down to your reputation. You know, we always encourage our founders, do the checking.”

Q depth of your relationship with founders is special. What concerns me is, bluntly, in the funding environments that we're in today, I don't often have enough time, and I don't think many in venture do, to build the depth of relationships and the trust with the founders that we used to. How do you think about your relationship building strategy today with founders, given the speed and velocity of rounds?

A Yeah, look, it's a real challenge, Harry. I mean, the industry, like you said, just by your statement of never having seen a downturn, we're in a business that the longer you never see a downturn, the more things get extreme on so many vectors, and so the time we have to do deals, the amount of relationship building we have, it is cut to the The core bone at this point, I think, and it is really hard, but at the end of the day, one of the things we believe in is if you bring sort of your operating background, if you bring that sort of connection and understanding of the journey and that sympathy, and you explain how you can help that relationship will transcend. And when we may have less time, we still can do important time together. And so the efficiency of that time can increase as you build those relationships.

AI assessment note: “if you bring sort of your operating background... that relationship will transcend”

Q When I spoke to your partners, they said, especially when it came to like the Facebook and the LinkedIn ambassador, But it really challenged the firm's investment strategy at the time on several different fronts. How do you think they meant when they said that?

A Yeah, so ironically, with twenty-twenty hindsight, one of the benefits of struggling in venture and having the sector that I was in, including the whole domain, struggle, was that I had this perspective that, like, I looked at it from a fresh page, and when we came out of that, and when I was given the mandate to go back and look at consumer, I came to it with a completely fresh perspective, and my belief was, and I became an advocate for the fact that The world was changing. Before Consumer, you came in and you were a generalist. A partner like mine, Dave Strom, in his days, he invested in all kinds of areas with incredible success, but the business was becoming very specialized and much more focused, and so I was pushing to say, we need to have people that have expertise in a domain, and as a result, if you're going to narrow down your domain focus, we need to have to give them the freedom to invest up and down the stack within that domain. Otherwise, it would just be too narrow, and so you'd be stuck in this one box. And when I first joined, if a deal came in and it wasn't A classic kind of VC series A deal. I was told not to look at it. I was told you need to give that to these five firms that we let work with and partner with. If it was a later stage one, you need to give these folks that work on B stage. If it was an earlier one, you need to give this to the seed people a…

AI assessment note: “give them the freedom to invest up and down the stack within that domain”

Q Who's been the board member that you've learned the most from, or been a supremely impactful board member for you, and what was the biggest takeaway?

A I would go back, and I think Peter Chernin was someone that I really learned a ton from in a very condensed period of time in some ups and downs. His perspective, his ability to cut to the core, to say less and be more effective, to challenge, but in a way that was supportive. You know, here's a guy that was an English major at Berkeley, That became the COO and launched Fox, a television network, which is an insane idea at the time. And, not to miss, partnered with Rupert Murdoch. So you have a very liberal Democrat, and you have an extremely conservative Republican, and he figured out how to make that partnership work. And so I learned so much from him. And, and now he does it again. He goes and starts chairing in entertainment. Everyone says he's done, and he's like one of the most successful companies out there. So I just admire him, and I've seen in the boardroom how he works. And the impact, including also his mentorship of young people and making them successful, has always been really inspiring to me. Continues to be.

AI assessment note: “Peter Chernin was someone that I really learned a ton from”

Q know, when you look at your Facebook deal there at 500, Yuri Milner's even in the multiple billions, both were, like, What is going on? I mean, I remember Yuri's Bundy more clearly, because it was a little bit more in my time, but like, Bundy, how do you think about your own relationship to price and price sensitivity, given the experiences that you have with the winners you have?

A Yeah, look, I think every situation, you bring your lessons from the past to it, but I also think every situation is somewhat bespoke, and you have to be careful about applying things too blindly, so I do think that you need to have price discipline, and so you need to think about, does this have the ability to run to a huge outcome? Does this Show the potential to be a winner takes most or winner takes all kind of business. If that's the case, and you think you have the right team in place as well, which is the other critical aspect of that, and we can talk about that in terms of what you look for in a leader of a team, because I think that's critical. You have those two things together, then I think you can be more flexible on those decisions along the way, and I think it's been proven, particularly in consumer, and now increasingly with SaaS and enterprise, that you can invest at different points along the stack than we used to think and have great returns.

AI assessment note: “You have those two things together, then I think you can be more flexible”

Q I think the biggest challenge, though, that the partnerships face is creating that culture of champion and challenge, where you have the freedom to explicitly say, David, I'm really concerned about monetization and how cash Scale over time here, or whatever that question may be, how do you think you've succeeded in terms of creating that culture and environment of champion and challenge so efficiently?

A We're a culture where one of our greatest successes is we've been one of the longest standing venture firms, and that means we've survived and thrived through ups and downs, and we've thrived through partner transitions. And so one of the most powerful things is embedded in our culture from the beginning is this idea of we're a team and the team's going to evolve and that the people that are most senior now Are not going to be the people that are most senior in the future. It's actually going to be the people that are newer or junior. And so as a result, yes, is it true that probably someone like me or we carry a little more weight when we say something because of our experience? Yeah. Is that unwarranted? Probably not. But I would say on average, on basis, someone who is new to the partnership on a relative basis has an incredible amount of power to say things. And so we really work as a team where we empower every partner to say what they mean, do what they say, and to own what they decide to do. And to work together as a team. And I think that sort of sense of saying, like, I remember one of the most successful partners took me aside early on to breakfast and was like, David, you're going to be one of the leaders of this firm in the next, you know, five to seven years. And I'm super excited for that. And I just remember being like, I'm like, whoa, I'm like barely a year in h…

AI assessment note: “we really work as a team where we empower every partner to say what they mean”

Q they could be segmented, like, consumer late stage, but we look at your deals, and it's like, we've got early stage with Facebook, LinkedIn, and many others, and we've got Roblox, which was a Series F. I'm really intrigued, how do you think about that in context of what you said, which is like, we can all make the numbers work, and how does that differ dependent on insertion points?

A Yeah. Again, I think it comes a little bit back to the rough way I entered this industry where, you know, I walked in and the world ended, and then I, three years later, was maybe going to get fired or leave or some convergence of the two. It kind of opened me up to have a very different view that was very flexible about where opportunity was and to not be locked into one simple model or one simple way of thinking. And so my function is really, I look at, is it a journey I want to go on? And is it folks that I want to go on that journey with? Whether that's early in the process, mid in the process, or late in the process, if I believe that that journey has the kind of legs, has the kind of opportunity to be a world-changing experience like Roblox has done to the game world and beyond, then that's what really gets me excited. That's what I've learned to really care about. And the truth is, like, they change so much. Take Discord. It was a game company, right, when it first started, and it pivoted, and it became this incredible communication tool that's changing the world. Take Nextdoor. It started out as a company called Fanbase that was going to do sort of like ESG SPN and data for amateur sports, and it pivoted. So like, if you don't have an ability to sort of see where it can be and trust that the entrepreneurs will work with you and have that kind of vision and flexibility t…

AI assessment note: “Whether that's early in the process, mid in the process, or late in the process”

Q I mean, it costs a lot to bribe Reed these days, but I managed to do it efficiently, clearly. But I do want to start, and before we dive into Roblox, I want to start with a little bit of context. You know, how did you make your way into the world of venture, and how did you come to be at Greylock?

A Yeah, so my background is, I was in startups for a number of years, originally actually in gaming, so I worked I worked for a couple video game companies, Electronic Arts, and Crystal Dynamics, and then this strange thing called the internet started to appear in sort of late, 94, 95, and it looked like a really fascinating development that could change the world, and so it was this opportunity for me to sort of hit the ground floor on a new technology revolution and ended up joining a search engine called Excite that was one of the early search engines competing with Yahoo and others in those days, and I looked around and said, what's going to be a fundamental Aspect of everyone's needs in this new world, with everyone's connected and information is flowing, and at that time, when most of the information was a content layer, and we can talk about how social became the next layer, but at those days it was mostly content being put up, a search engine seemed to me like a critical aspect of everyone's need on the internet as it grew.

AI assessment note: “my background is, I was in startups for a number of years”

Q biggest challenges for a lot of venture firms is the generational transition question. I do a lot of references for funds from LPs, and I mean, it's on every single LP's question list is how do you think about generational transition? You know, having seen it and, bluntly, done it so successfully multiple times at Greylock, what are your thoughts on what it takes to do generational transition successfully today?

A Look, I think there's a couple rules of thumb, and Greylock are lucky enough to have had a lot of these Great calls made early on by our founders or the first couple generations, and we've only picked up those and adapted them to the times. One of those is, like I said, the senior partners need to get out of the way, and they also need to know that their voice can be dangerous because it can be overpowering to newer partners, and this was early on. One of our three founding partners, Bill Elfers, the original LP, said, we need a CEO if we're going to back Greylock, and they were like, the three partners were like, well, we're partners. We don't Want a CEO? We need a CEO. Ok. So I went away and threw a pretty arduous process for them because of the personal relationship, and they'd come in evenly. They elected one of our great founders, Bill Elfers, as the CEO. So he came in as the CEO, and he announced he was the CEO of the LPs, and they were happy, and Greylock was off from the running. The next year, 12 months later, he came to his partner to say, I'm stepping down. Who's the new CEO? And the other partners were like, Bill, it was hard to make the decision to make you the CEO. We just went through that. Like, we don't want to do that again. And he's like, I'm stepping down because I want people to understand we didn't want a CEO. And Greylock is not a place where there should…

AI assessment note: “senior partners need to get out of the way”

Q Can I say of making the bet that the one that I just I often think about a lot is head versus heart. And there's always reasons why you shouldn't make an investment. As you said, it's a super competitive landscape. The price is ridiculous. They don't have a technical co-founder, whatever this could be. How do you think about head versus heart when it comes to placing the bet?

A Yeah, you know, it's funny. I'll harken back to another one of my now retired partners who asked me, how do you make decisions in my interview with Greylock when I was talking to them? And it was, you know, an interesting thought process, and it's similar to your question, which is, I tend to start with the heart, which is, I have to, like, sort of fall in love with the idea, or fall in love with the founder, or some combination of that, and what it could be. Then you go to the head, and you do all your work, and you crunch all the numbers, and you find all the data you can. But at the end of the day, if you've done a lot of work as an analyst in your history, or done a lot of the analysis, you know, at some point, you can make the numbers say whatever you want. If you twist that Excel spreadsheet, or you play with that Google Doc. So you have to go back to the heart again, After you've done those two steps, and unify it all, and make the call. That, for me, is my process. It's sort of heart, head, heart, back again to make the call. The other thing I say to new partners is, in VC, you think you control all kinds of things. There's this mythology from the outside that, like, oh, these all-powerful VCs, they make all these. Look, it is true on paper. You have some very blunt, big force objects that are like large hammers, but you never want to use those if you can do it. Like, y…

AI assessment note: “It's sort of heart, head, heart, back again to make the call.”

Q depth of your relationship with founders is special. What concerns me is, bluntly, in the funding environments that we're in today, I don't often have enough time, and I don't think many in venture do, to build the depth of relationships and the trust with the founders that we used to. How do you think about your relationship building strategy today with founders, given the speed and velocity of rounds?

A Yeah, look, it's a real challenge, Harry. I mean, the industry, like you said, just by your statement of never having seen a downturn, we're in a business that the longer you never see a downturn, the more things get extreme on so many vectors, and so the time we have to do deals, the amount of relationship building we have, it is cut to the The core bone at this point, I think, and it is really hard, but at the end of the day, one of the things we believe in is if you bring sort of your operating background, if you bring that sort of connection and understanding of the journey and that sympathy, and you explain how you can help that relationship will transcend. And when we may have less time, we still can do important time together. And so the efficiency of that time can increase as you build those relationships.

AI assessment note: “if you bring sort of your operating background... that relationship will transcend”

Q I think the biggest challenge, though, that the partnerships face is creating that culture of champion and challenge, where you have the freedom to explicitly say, David, I'm really concerned about monetization and how cash Scale over time here, or whatever that question may be, how do you think you've succeeded in terms of creating that culture and environment of champion and challenge so efficiently?

A We're a culture where one of our greatest successes is we've been one of the longest standing venture firms, and that means we've survived and thrived through ups and downs, and we've thrived through partner transitions. And so one of the most powerful things is embedded in our culture from the beginning is this idea of we're a team and the team's going to evolve and that the people that are most senior now Are not going to be the people that are most senior in the future. It's actually going to be the people that are newer or junior. And so as a result, yes, is it true that probably someone like me or we carry a little more weight when we say something because of our experience? Yeah. Is that unwarranted? Probably not. But I would say on average, on basis, someone who is new to the partnership on a relative basis has an incredible amount of power to say things. And so we really work as a team where we empower every partner to say what they mean, do what they say, and to own what they decide to do. And to work together as a team. And I think that sort of sense of saying, like, I remember one of the most successful partners took me aside early on to breakfast and was like, David, you're going to be one of the leaders of this firm in the next, you know, five to seven years. And I'm super excited for that. And I just remember being like, I'm like, whoa, I'm like barely a year in h…

AI assessment note: “we empower every partner to say what they mean, do what they say”

Q I mean, it costs a lot to bribe Reed these days, but I managed to do it efficiently, clearly. But I do want to start, and before we dive into Roblox, I want to start with a little bit of context. You know, how did you make your way into the world of venture, and how did you come to be at Greylock?

A Yeah, so my background is, I was in startups for a number of years, originally actually in gaming, so I worked I worked for a couple video game companies, Electronic Arts, and Crystal Dynamics, and then this strange thing called the internet started to appear in sort of late, 94, 95, and it looked like a really fascinating development that could change the world, and so it was this opportunity for me to sort of hit the ground floor on a new technology revolution and ended up joining a search engine called Excite that was one of the early search engines competing with Yahoo and others in those days, and I looked around and said, what's going to be a fundamental Aspect of everyone's needs in this new world, with everyone's connected and information is flowing, and at that time, when most of the information was a content layer, and we can talk about how social became the next layer, but at those days it was mostly content being put up, a search engine seemed to me like a critical aspect of everyone's need on the internet as it grew.

AI assessment note: “my background is, I was in startups for a number of years, originally actually in gaming”

Q round, and it's just, I actually asked, roll off this at Sequoia and Peter at Benchmark, and it's like, you know, you mentioned Kingmakers there, and there is a certain category of investor, very much front and center, where the hits are just enormous, and Buntley, the portfolios are incredible, and people look at you very much in the Kingmaker respect, Buntley. How do you think about your own vulnerability?

A I think to be good at this business, you need to be pretty humble, ironically, and you always need to be paranoid. It's always changing. I mean, I remember when I joined, someone was, Telling me how Dave Strom wasn't a success, and I looked at his record, and I was like, oh my god, if he's not a success, I have no chance. So, you know, there is so much schadenfreude in this business. If you don't stay humble, if you don't stay sort of paranoid that, you know, you're going to lose your edge, and if you aren't, have some level of insecurity, then I don't think you're going to be successful, because at the end of the day, we have to be honest and recognize that the chances that any investment we make will fail are much higher than the chances that they will actually succeed, and so when I see new partners, I sort of say, like, look, there's these funny things that go on that, you know, you talked about what are the things I learned, because Because I came in in this sort of strange time, I sort of looked at all these kind of base primitives that become the assumptions of this business, and sort of to tear them down and think about why would they be different. And so, for example, you know, there's this thing of, like, VCs are lemmings. They all go after the same thing, or they rule of thumb. And, like, I think there is some truth to that. There is some, like, reasonable and deserv…

AI assessment note: “If you don't stay sort of paranoid that, you know, you're going to lose your edge”