Eric Vishria

“Basically there are three things that we know how to do to speed up deep learning in hardware. Still till this day. Increase the number of cores. Increase the communication between cores. Bring the memory closer to the compute. Those are the three things. That…”

“In software, if you have, like, that kind of, like, logical block diagram of, like, why it works and everything else, you're kind of 80% of the way there, and it's a matter of, like, go-to-market execution. In hardware you're, like, two percent of the way ther…”

“They never had a churn line. Never reported it. For the first of, like, six years that I worked with the company. So then they got seven years of churn in, like, 12 months.”

“Each of us invests in one to two companies a year. I think in my 12 years, I've invested in 18 companies total. Crazy. Which is a relatively small number So it's very high conviction and very high commitment.”

“Will the CSPs do well? Yes. Yes. Will some of these neoclouds do well? Yes. Will the fireworks of the world do well? Yes. Will NVIDIA do well? Yes. Will these, like, chip startups do well? Or, you know, some set of them? Yes. Like, Are we gonna have edge infer…”

“There's so much zero-sum thinking, which is just like, okay, how do we cut up this pie, and they're gonna eat this much, and like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, Anthropic or whomever is gonna eat, 98% of the value, and they're gonna do all the drug discovery, and I …”

“On that exact date, Benchmark's equal GP roster was Bill Gurley, Eric Vistria, Matt Kohler, Mitch Lasky, Peter Fenton, Sarah Tavel. Today, the partnership has changed dramatically. The only two that remain are Peter and Eric. And you have Chetan, Ev Randall, a…”

“Ben, it seems like that's the future of education. If expertise matters less and less, what matters more and more is taste and, Being in touch with yourself and this kind of self-knowledge.”

“But Eric Vistria from Benchmark, who you guys know well, was saying, like, even in the foundation models, a huge chunk of them aren't going to make it. Like, we are going to see companies that today have a hundred million dollars in revenue, like, just go away…”

“There were a couple times or two people and specifically that I think about where like what they wanted in comp and what I was like willing to give were separate. Like they were just off and they were so far out of market in terms of what their ask was. And I …”

“I am not a sector specialist and nobody at Benchmark is. And I think the fundamental idea with Benchmark is there's a small group of people, a small group of partners who are all equal. And right now it's five of us, but sometimes it's four, sometimes it's six…”

“And in order to make the platform shift for a company, like what you're articulating, You have to kind of be willing to burn down the existing business and at least in short order. And there's a whole bunch of entrepreneurs who don't do that.”

“There's a couple of cases where just like violent execution by a determined team in a hyper competitive market where like nobody has an insight has worked.”

“I've met several of these companies over the years and we haven't invested in any.”

“When you look at that, I ask myself that question. And if I answer is like, you know what, I think it's a cool business. It'll probably work, but I just don't understand how I can make that pitch. Then I don't do it. Like, that's my, like, I just, I don't do i…”

“I was talking to a team that had gone like this last week, I was talking to a team that had gone like zero to four million, a four person team, zero to four million in four months. Amazing. Like just amazing kind of revenue trajectory. But I put like almost no…”

“The quickness of the scale is, is, is unlike, it's like three, four, five years of what SAS company, like your traditional SAS companies were doing. We're seeing in under a year and we have a whole portfolio of companies that are like this.”

“And, like, it's not gonna be a 20 dollar a month subscription, that's not, like, the right way and it's not gonna be just, like, bundled API call, like, it's, there's gonna be much, much more sophistication and interesting models in that.”

“Through, through 30 years of performance, I think we have Unprecedented flexibility in what we do, and so if we want to write a fifty million dollar check, we can write a fifty million dollar check, and we have in cases.”

“You know, I think one of the things that we maybe think about almost not at all Is almost never think about like fun cycle or fun timing or anything else. And we almost never think about or talk about portfolio construction or anything else.”

“I've worked on five companies that have gone from zero to more than 200 and revenue, and like, in not a single case did the economics at the very early stage, like, extrapolate all the way. Like, it's just not a thing. Not, not even the economics from when the…”

“The very best entrepreneurs are always making mistakes. The really great ones are just making new mistakes each time, and I think there's a lot of truth to that, and so that slope and pace is is the most important.”

“The official relationship is they're LPs. Like, that's the official relationship. Like, they're LPs with us like other LPs.”

“I believe that the founders own more of their companies at exit at S one time, whatever it is, in this case, for those reasons.”

“His first deal was Confluent. Series A. Seven million at a 24 post. The company's trading at a 7.6 billion dollar market cap today.”

“The one that I've internalized the most from and that I just have infinite amounts of respect for is Eric Vishria from Benchmark. Eric and I worked together on the Amplitude board, and now we have a new company Acuity MD together. And Eric is just, A++ as a bo…”

“With entrepreneurs really favoring, seemingly favoring operators, even as an operator, I can say, I think the pendulum has swung too far in that direction.”

“We take the board seat, we aim and aspire to be the entrepreneur's first call. That's a standard we hold ourselves to.”

“I think the context switching in terms of like, if you think about how you evaluate seeds or how you evaluate growth or evaluate some of these other things? Or how do you evaluate making a kind of quote unquote active investment where you take a board seat ver…”

“These things are very cyclical, and again, this is overly simplistic, but I think we're in the midst of a infrastructure revolution. Maybe it's around ML, maybe it's around cloud, maybe it's some combination of these things that are coming together, and there …”

“I think constraints are generally good and yield really special things. You know, it's the story of the vines, the grapevines that kind of fight the hardest to produce the best grapes. And I think we, I like to see us go back to an environment that rewards ope…”

“Our investment process is one of advocacy of voting. So basically, there is an advocate. So one of the five of us falls in love with something, is probably the best way to describe it gets really excited about the entrepreneur and the opportunity All five of u…”

“It's a Berlin-based company at the time, but there wasn't a single employee in the US, and yet they had built this incredible enterprise customer base of US companies, and that's just something that doesn't happen very often at all. You don't see companies clo…”