Kagle said to Harvey, “Okay, make him the offer.” Harvey turned to Gurley. “First, I want to know if you’ll take it.” This was the way Harvey preferred to seal a deal with an entrepreneur: to secure the agreement before bringing out the term sheet with all of the details. Here Harvey feared that if he brought out the terms of the partnership offer,

Edward Chancellor’s history of financial manias, Devil Take the Hindmost, urging them to read it. Chancellor’s account of England’s railway mania of 1845 had made an especially deep impression on Kagle, who saw all of the similarities between the railroad, then hailed as a revolutionary advance without historical parallel, and the Internet. In both

“That’s the biggest risk in the whole thing,” Kagle said. “In fact I can argue with you guys very persuasively that keeping this low profile we’ve had in the company has been absolutely the healthiest thing to do. Absolutely the healthiest thing to do. We’ve already broken the systems a couple times, in spite of that. So we’ve been barely able to m

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

When the Benchmark partners got together, most days, most of the time, their conversations were interrupted by jokes, laughter, word play, self-confessed foibles, and still more laughter. They positively reveled in one another’s company.

By temperament, Skoll could not help but pour himself into the work in a scarily total fashion—once he started at eBay, he worked hundred-hour weeks for the next two and a half years. But he wasn’t driven by materialist hungers, and he thought of himself not as a businessperson but as a writer.

no company looks better than the one that professes it does not need your money.

“That’s my experience—three orders of magnitude,” Dunlevie quickly agreed. “Yeah,” Rachleff said, and then redid the ratio of intensity of pleasure versus pain. “One-X versus fifty-X.”

Kagle gently cautioned Beirne: “We all have our blind spots, right? Our greatest strength is our greatest weakness. And I think in this case, Dave, we’re all conscious of the fact that there’s a lot of marquee players around this thing. You’re all about marquee players. So we need to make sure that you’re not getting too colored by that relative to