Peter Fenton gave Ben Rubin a Benchmark credit card to explore ideas
Ben Rubin · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · Aug 21, 2020 · at 37:01
Ben Rubin is the co-founder of /talk and former CEO of Houseparty and Meerkat. He describes his unstructured entrepreneur-in-residence experience at Benchmark with partner Peter Fenton prior to launching /talk.
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“Basically, Peter Fenton was, hire who you need to hire, start hacking around, there is Benchmark credit card, and I trust you, and like, obviously, this sounds a little bit unfair, because it sounds super casual, but we had a plan of This is the space we're going to go after. This is the problems that we believe we see, and we're going to use this time to explore and understand what is the kind of action we can do in the market, and what are the motivations around that, and we actually had it pretty detailed out, but what was nice about it was almost like incubating for free, and it was great, because you get to enjoy smart people in Benchmark to give you feedback, and you also enjoy the fact that they have a great network, and they could put you in touch with Back then, this was before COVID, they put me with all the most successful remote companies, and I was able to interview a bunch of the engineers and ICs there and inform my hypothesis before starting this company.”
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