Name: EBoys
ISBN: 9780812930955

EBoys

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.

What Hacker News says

prostoalexDec 2012

For those curious about eBay financing, check out the book "eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work" http://www.amazon.com/eBoys-Inside-Account-Venture-Capitalis... (the book is 10 years old, likely to be available at your local library).

It was definitely not a slam-dunk idea, and even Benchmark partners felt uneasy about financing an online classifieds site that would be easy to replicate and invite large players to compete in case there was a valid market (Yahoo! indeed made a move at eBay with Yahoo! Actions priced at $0 listing fees, since Yahoo! had other sources of revenue).

While Meg Whitman was being recruited for the CEO role, she browsed the dinky classifieds site and was not super-impressed - Benchmark guys basically bought her and her family air+hotel to at least sell her on California prospects, if not eBay's future.

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gojomoDec 2009

How do venture funds not do better technical due diligence(or any at all)?

They trust people and credentials -- it's not about the technical details. There's a great chapter in Randall Stross's "EBoys" about TriStrata -- which raised millions based on essentially nonsense claims of an "unbreakable" encryption technology.

(The chapter is excerpted at the bottom of this message: http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/april00/0460.html )

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mattrpJul 2019

Two things I remember from the webvan era- 1) how benchmark navigated / debated their investment (chronicled in https://www.amazon.com/eBoys-Inside-Account-Venture-Capitali...), 2) at the precise time that webvan was failing, fresh direct was succeeding but no one outside of NYC heard about their success because webvan failed so spectacularly.

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