From Amazon
If you want to understand the 1990s, you have to understand venture capitalists. These are the people who listen to business pitches by the score, the financial-world equivalent of miners turning over tons of earth in search of precious metal. They're looking for the next Amazon.com, the next Yahoo!, the next eBay. Randall E. Stross, who teaches business history at San José State University, just happened to be there when a firm called Benchmark Capital discovered eBay. eBoys tells the story of how a group of not-quite-middle-aged men came to make an investment that returned a Silicon Valley record of 100,000 percent.
Stross is a gifted storyteller who weaves the personal histories of the Benchmark partners with stories of how the firm came to back such companies as Priceline.com and Webvan. We meet guys who weren't born to privilege, men who took unconventional routes into the venture capital business. Probably the most intriguing is Dave Beirne, a hyperaggressive executive recruiter who went into the business after realizing venture capitalists are the ones who really call the shots at high-tech start-ups. We also see the problems Silicon Valley guys have when they try to dot-com the bricks-and-mortar world. The short tale of an aborted partnership between Benchmark and Toys 'R' Us illustrates why the old economy is so mystified by the new.
Anyone interested in how business works should find something of interest in eBoys. From the organizational structure and corporate culture of Benchmark to the histories and personalities of its partners to its adventures in the world of Internet start-ups, it's a digital snapshot that reveals how successful businesses look, think, and mine gold in today's economy. --Lou Schuler --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"THE BEST GUIDE WE HAVE TO THE MYSTERIOUS WORLD OF VENTURE CAPITALISM."
--The Washington Post Book World
"A RING-SIDE SEAT AT A SINGULAR MOMENT IN BUSINESS HISTORY."
--The Wall Street Journal
--The Washington Post Book World
"A RING-SIDE SEAT AT A SINGULAR MOMENT IN BUSINESS HISTORY."
--The Wall Street Journal
Book Description
In eBOYS, Randall Stross takes us behind the scenes and inside the heads of the gutsy entrepreneurs who are financing the hottest businesses on the Web. The six tall men who started Benchmark, Silicon Valley's most exciting venture capital firm, put themselves at the cutting edge of the new economy by backing billion dollar start-ups like eBay and Webvan. The risks were enormous--but the rewards have proven to be staggering. Within two years, eBay's net worth grew from $20 million to more than $21 billion, while each Benchmark founding partner saw his own personal net worth soar by hundreds of millions of dollars.
For two roller-coaster years, Stross had total access not only to Benchmark's executives but to the companies they financed. He was a fly on the wall as fortunes were made in an instant, snap decisions got locked in, and new ventures took off--and sometimes crashed. Here are the testosterone-pumped conversations, round-the-clock meetings, and gutsy deals that launched the eBoys and their clients into the stratosphere of mega-wealth. Written like a novel but absolutely true, eBOYS brings to vivid life the glory days of the greatest business adventure of our time.
For two roller-coaster years, Stross had total access not only to Benchmark's executives but to the companies they financed. He was a fly on the wall as fortunes were made in an instant, snap decisions got locked in, and new ventures took off--and sometimes crashed. Here are the testosterone-pumped conversations, round-the-clock meetings, and gutsy deals that launched the eBoys and their clients into the stratosphere of mega-wealth. Written like a novel but absolutely true, eBOYS brings to vivid life the glory days of the greatest business adventure of our time.
From the Back Cover
"THE BEST GUIDE WE HAVE TO THE MYSTERIOUS WORLD OF VENTURE CAPITALISM."
--The Washington Post Book World
"A RING-SIDE SEAT AT A SINGULAR MOMENT IN BUSINESS HISTORY."
--The Wall Street Journal
--The Washington Post Book World
"A RING-SIDE SEAT AT A SINGULAR MOMENT IN BUSINESS HISTORY."
--The Wall Street Journal
About the Author
Randall E. Stross teaches business history at San Jose State University and is a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report. He is the author of four previous books, including The Microsoft Way and Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing. He lives in Menlo Park, California, and can be reached via his website, www.randallstross.com.
From the Hardcover edition.
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1. The Right Answer
The guy. No special emphasis on either the or guy, but no intervening pause, either. TheGuy.
That's the person needed to head a start-up once it has grown beyond a seed. To wit, a stud, ideally, a big honkin' stud or a total fuckin' stud. He (or, yes, she) will not lack for balls, at least in one sense, but in another will work his nuts off, or his ass off (these being valuable pieces of anatomical real estate; you never hear "works his index finger off"). A high-hustle guy. A total can-do guy. A winner. Smart. Someone with integrity-off-the-charts. Scrappy. A kick-ass dude, a nail-eatin', nut-crushin' (that trope again!) decision maker, a competitor with killer instincts. Someone who attracts and hires A's, unafraid to hire above himself. A player. A hitter.
Finding TheGuy--finding the Right Answer--for companies in need was Dave Beirne's world for ten years.
Thanks to happenstance, Beirne's career as a search guy had begun at the age of twenty-two in cold-call hell. Freshly graduated in 1985 from a small school, Bryant College, with a business degree, he had an appetite for work. During his last two years of college, he had taken a full course load, worked at IBM virtually full-time as a marketing assistant, captained the lacrosse team, and led buddies in sundry intramural sports--and in what in the 1980s was defined as the back half of work-hard/play-hard (the lock-and-load party, for example: the dorm door was locked, and a concoction of liquor and Kool-Aid that filled a giant garbage can in the room's center was drunk until every person was loaded).
He had his coterie of mates, to whom he was fiercely loyal. But outside that circle, he was not a gregarious person. In fact, he was unable to mix without putting many on the defensive. He walked with a chip on his shoulder that he took no pains to disguise. He had a particular aversion to anyone whose status derived from inherited privilege. A college friend would later liken his attitude to that of a ghetto-hardened tough: If it was given to ya, don't think you're better than me.
His own family had prospered from blue-collar roots, working for General Motors. His grandfather was a union leader who worked forty-two years on the assembly line at the Tarrytown, New York, plant, and his father, Gus, had followed, directly out of high school, hanging doors on the line. While Dave Beirne was growing up, his father worked the swing shift. But eventually, Gus was able to make the jump to line management, and when Dave was in high school his father moved into the upper reaches and eventually would oversee fifty thousand people at his career's peak before retiring. The ascendance of this high school graduate happened too late for his son Dave to think as ambitiously as he might have about where to take strong grades when applying to college, and too late for Dave to change his own sense of class status. At Bryant he all but shouted: Don't think anything was handed to my dad or to me.
Graduating from a small school without the national reputation of an Ivy, he was at a disadvantage for entree to the most promising career tracks in business. Resolved to gather the experience and money he would need in order to obtain a Harvard MBA, the instrument that would give him parity, he spoke with anyone he could think of about entry-level positions. He was introduced to Chuck Ramsey, an executive recruiter at Sales Consultants who worked with technology companies; Ramsey was willing to overlook the fact thatthe kid did not even know what a recruiter did and give him a try.
Hiring Dave Beirne was not an especially expensive risk; the only pay
was the commission earned when a candidate was successfully placed, and it was up to the "account executive," as Beirne was grandly titled, to obtain the recruiting assignment from an employer willing to pay a contingency fee when hiring a recommended candidate. Beirne was given a phone, a desk, Yellow Pages, and training that consisted of a simple injunction: Have at it.
It was not clear why either a prospective client or candidate would take Dave Beirne seriously. He was young, and looked even younger than he was; his job experience at that point--summer work on the assembly line and the IBM assistantship as essentially a gofer--had not provided a tour of the upper floors of power. He had no list of successful placements. Why would anyone look at him and sign on?
The answer: No one did look at him. The business of placing low-and midlevel sales people was conducted entirely on the phone. What prospective employers and employees heard was a baritone that conferred the authority of someone twice his age. He was a quick study, put in more hours than anyone else, talked his way into assignments, and found recruits.
Because debt was anathema to him, he had started with the in-tention of first saving up enough to pay for business school, and only then applying. But commissions rolled in, almost instantly. (After only six weeks on the job, the kid had suggested to Ramsey, twenty-one years his senior, that the two should leave their employer and start their own firm; Ramsey demurred.) Beirne did sensationally, and the savings were in place in months, not years. He had simply leaped over the stepping-stone of business school to the other shore.
The guy. No special emphasis on either the or guy, but no intervening pause, either. TheGuy.
That's the person needed to head a start-up once it has grown beyond a seed. To wit, a stud, ideally, a big honkin' stud or a total fuckin' stud. He (or, yes, she) will not lack for balls, at least in one sense, but in another will work his nuts off, or his ass off (these being valuable pieces of anatomical real estate; you never hear "works his index finger off"). A high-hustle guy. A total can-do guy. A winner. Smart. Someone with integrity-off-the-charts. Scrappy. A kick-ass dude, a nail-eatin', nut-crushin' (that trope again!) decision maker, a competitor with killer instincts. Someone who attracts and hires A's, unafraid to hire above himself. A player. A hitter.
Finding TheGuy--finding the Right Answer--for companies in need was Dave Beirne's world for ten years.
Thanks to happenstance, Beirne's career as a search guy had begun at the age of twenty-two in cold-call hell. Freshly graduated in 1985 from a small school, Bryant College, with a business degree, he had an appetite for work. During his last two years of college, he had taken a full course load, worked at IBM virtually full-time as a marketing assistant, captained the lacrosse team, and led buddies in sundry intramural sports--and in what in the 1980s was defined as the back half of work-hard/play-hard (the lock-and-load party, for example: the dorm door was locked, and a concoction of liquor and Kool-Aid that filled a giant garbage can in the room's center was drunk until every person was loaded).
He had his coterie of mates, to whom he was fiercely loyal. But outside that circle, he was not a gregarious person. In fact, he was unable to mix without putting many on the defensive. He walked with a chip on his shoulder that he took no pains to disguise. He had a particular aversion to anyone whose status derived from inherited privilege. A college friend would later liken his attitude to that of a ghetto-hardened tough: If it was given to ya, don't think you're better than me.
His own family had prospered from blue-collar roots, working for General Motors. His grandfather was a union leader who worked forty-two years on the assembly line at the Tarrytown, New York, plant, and his father, Gus, had followed, directly out of high school, hanging doors on the line. While Dave Beirne was growing up, his father worked the swing shift. But eventually, Gus was able to make the jump to line management, and when Dave was in high school his father moved into the upper reaches and eventually would oversee fifty thousand people at his career's peak before retiring. The ascendance of this high school graduate happened too late for his son Dave to think as ambitiously as he might have about where to take strong grades when applying to college, and too late for Dave to change his own sense of class status. At Bryant he all but shouted: Don't think anything was handed to my dad or to me.
Graduating from a small school without the national reputation of an Ivy, he was at a disadvantage for entree to the most promising career tracks in business. Resolved to gather the experience and money he would need in order to obtain a Harvard MBA, the instrument that would give him parity, he spoke with anyone he could think of about entry-level positions. He was introduced to Chuck Ramsey, an executive recruiter at Sales Consultants who worked with technology companies; Ramsey was willing to overlook the fact thatthe kid did not even know what a recruiter did and give him a try.
Hiring Dave Beirne was not an especially expensive risk; the only pay
was the commission earned when a candidate was successfully placed, and it was up to the "account executive," as Beirne was grandly titled, to obtain the recruiting assignment from an employer willing to pay a contingency fee when hiring a recommended candidate. Beirne was given a phone, a desk, Yellow Pages, and training that consisted of a simple injunction: Have at it.
It was not clear why either a prospective client or candidate would take Dave Beirne seriously. He was young, and looked even younger than he was; his job experience at that point--summer work on the assembly line and the IBM assistantship as essentially a gofer--had not provided a tour of the upper floors of power. He had no list of successful placements. Why would anyone look at him and sign on?
The answer: No one did look at him. The business of placing low-and midlevel sales people was conducted entirely on the phone. What prospective employers and employees heard was a baritone that conferred the authority of someone twice his age. He was a quick study, put in more hours than anyone else, talked his way into assignments, and found recruits.
Because debt was anathema to him, he had started with the in-tention of first saving up enough to pay for business school, and only then applying. But commissions rolled in, almost instantly. (After only six weeks on the job, the kid had suggested to Ramsey, twenty-one years his senior, that the two should leave their employer and start their own firm; Ramsey demurred.) Beirne did sensationally, and the savings were in place in months, not years. He had simply leaped over the stepping-stone of business school to the other shore.
