Accel, every mention
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tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 12Ben Gilbert 10Peter Fenton 2Jason Calacanis 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Accel comes up
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:33:23 David Rosenthal Excel comes in, leads a series A.
- ▶ 1:34:11 Ben Gilbert So, Kevin Afrusi, who ran down the deal and did the diligence at Excel, and Jim Breyer, who was the partner and took the board seat.
- ▶ 1:35:02 Ben Gilbert In fact, Excel had limited partners drop out of this fund, who were LPs previously, including your beloved Princeton, including Harvard.
- ▶ 1:35:13 Ben Gilbert and I think Stanford was one of the only ones that really stuck with them for this four hundred million dollar fund.
- ▶ 1:35:18 Ben Gilbert And they're kind of looking at this, realizing this might be one of the greatest companies of all time, and we are going to have to do the type of deal that everyone got raked over the coals for five years ago in the mania for doing, and…
- ▶ 1:35:37 Ben Gilbert I think the level of risk and reputation risk that they took on this cannot be underscored enough.
- ▶ 1:36:33 David Rosenthal So yeah, in the dot-com bubble that happened, but like that this would happen in 2005, Excel went way out on a limb for this.
- ▶ 1:37:01 Ben Gilbert So, Excel and their limited partners and Jim, for anyone who's still holding the shares after they distributed them, that is a 13,000 X return.
- ▶ 1:37:29 Ben Gilbert Excel comes in over the top, and in part of the negotiation to get it up to this ninety-eight million dollar deal, there was actually a secondary.
- ▶ 1:49:40 David Rosenthal I want this to be a lot bigger, and obviously that was what Excel was investing into at that valuation.
- ▶ 6:19:33 Ben Gilbert Jim Breyer, who led Excel's Series A investment in Facebook.
Benchmark Part II: The Dinner · Acquired
- ▶ 1:32:37 Peter Fenton I think I sent, like, typically I sent him a note saying, hey, I'm working at Excel just to see if I could catch his interest, and he said, good luck.
- ▶ 1:33:33 Peter Fenton around the time he presented Facebook to us at Excel, he knew immediately that he was going to be in the venture business.
ACQ Sessions: Jason Calacanis · Acquired
- ▶ 1:56:44 Ben Gilbert but yeah, maybe founders fund, maybe, I mean, Excel, I don't know, depending on.
- ▶ 1:56:50 Jason Calacanis Excel would be in the running, for sure.
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 2:25:54 David Rosenthal You know, Excel ends up doing it, and Excel is a great firm, and Jim Breyer does it, you know, like, not to take anything away from them, but like, absolutely, Benchmark should have been and was in the conversation.
- ▶ 2:28:06 David Rosenthal So finally, after all this, and I don't know if this was before or after Excel doing Facebook, but right around the same time, legend has it at one of the Menlo Park Monday partners meetings, I think it was Kevin Harvey who finally kind of…
- ▶ 2:34:17 Ben Gilbert And Peter joins from Excel.
- ▶ 2:34:19 David Rosenthal And Peter joins from Excel, which had just done Facebook.
- ▶ 2:35:17 David Rosenthal But he fits the bill, you know, just like Bill, when Bill joined, he was early thirties, he had an established track record, he was young, he was hungry, he was up and coming, he was a baby GP in Excel,
- ▶ 2:36:05 David Rosenthal At Excel, and he's clearly out there hustling.
- ▶ 2:36:51 David Rosenthal There's a massive question for Peter on the Excel side.
- ▶ 2:36:57 David Rosenthal Even, well, let's take off the table whether Excel made a counter offer for him to be a grown-up GP or not.
- ▶ 2:47:08 David Rosenthal Yep, because Peter had invested in Lucerne's previous company when he was at Excel.
Altimeter (with Brad Gerstner) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:12:19 David Rosenthal Feel free to argue with me on this, but you said in fundraising, I'm not competing with Sequoia, I'm not competing with Excel and the like, and you weren't.