The cultural fit had to be just right, too. It was this issue that the partners would spend the most time agonizing over. The five Benchmark partners felt keenly the closeness of a basketball team; in moments of private vanity they liked to think of themselves as the Chicago Bulls in the early nineties, but it wasn’t apt—this was a team that was kn

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The business hadn’t even really been Sam’s idea but Tara’s. Tara had been running the Centre for Effective Altruism, in Berkeley, and Sam, while at Jane Street, had become one of her biggest donors. Through the spring and summer of 2017, the two of them were on the phone constantly. At some point Sam revealed his romantic interest in her; at some o

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Over the next two weeks, he met with Omidyar outside of Benchmark’s office and discovered that he was an anomalous kind of engineer, one who was consumed by the idea of community—every other sentence, he spoke about the eBay community, building the community, learning from the community, protecting the community. It was a passion similar to what, i

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