NEWS

Benchmark's Cohler: Passion Key In Downturn

VentureWire
October 15, 2008
By Tomio Geron

New Benchmark Capital partner Matt Cohler is most well known for being an early employee and helping to build what are now two of the largest Internet start-ups, Facebook Inc. and LinkedIn Corp.

But Cohler also went through the dot-com crash in 2000. That experience gives him good perspective in the current economic downturn, he said at The Indus Entrepreneurs conference on Tuesday in Santa Clara, Calif.

Cohler worked at a China-based network infrastructure company, AsiaInfo Holdings Inc., which had a huge public offering in 2000 only to crash soon after with the rest of the dot-com wave.

"It was somewhat painful but interesting to live through that," Cohler said. "I was 21 or 22 thinking, 'What am I going to do with all this money,' and the next thing I knew it was all gone."

Cohler then went back to finish his degree at Yale University and moved to Silicon Valley in 2001 just in time for the depths of the Internet wreckage. After working at McKinsey and Co. he got a job working with angel investor Reid Hoffman. Hoffman had just co-founded LinkedIn around the end of 2002. The site launched in May 2003, and quickly grew well past their expectations. Cohler worked as a "jack of all trades" on product development, business development and analytics.

One thing Cohler learned from Hoffman was his focus and vision for the company. While a number of other start-ups, such as Zero Degrees, Spoke Software Inc. and Visible Path Corp., were doing similar things that combined enterprise and consumer products, Hoffman prioritized the individual.

"At that point in time, the idea that the consumer Internet was back wasn't there yet...Reid was very single-minded in doing this for the individual," Cohler said.

In September 2004, Cohler was also witness to a key meeting in Silicon Valley's development when Mark Zuckerberg pitched what was known as "The Facebook" to Peter Thiel of Founders Fund.

Cohler and Hoffman were in Thiel's office for a meeting beforehand and Thiel asked them to stay to listen to Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg came in with Sean Parker, another Founders Fund partner, and explained the astronomical growth Facebook was seeing.

"I couldn't believe what I was hearing," Cohler said to Jeff Clavier of SoftTechVC, who interviewed him at Tuesday's conference.

Cohler wanted to invest, but Thiel himself invested. "I left that meeting thinking how can I get stock in this company. Peter wasn't having that," he said.

Later, Cohler decided to move to Facebook, which had a handful of employees, to perform some of the same jobs he had at LinkedIn, which by that time had 40 or 50 employees.

"It was a total house on fire," Cohler said of Facebook's growth. The company was only allowing students to join but could barely keep up with that demand. "My vivid early memory was driving to Santa Clara to rack servers all night because things were going so well."

Now at Benchmark for two weeks, Cohler said comparing companies and entrepreneurs to Facebook and LinkedIn is a high bar. The kind of entrepreneur he is looking for is similar to Zuckerberg and Hoffman.

"Specific qualities...from Mark and Reid is an almost zealous belief in what you're doing," Cohler said. "It's almost religion when it's really done right. With Reid and Mark there were lots of instances where the outside world was telling them something, but their vision was telling them another. The ability to resist pressures is very rare and very important in entrepreneurs."

As for social networking, Cohler said Facebook's demographics are not just college students, and the company still has room to grow. He said he will not focus exclusively on Internet deals as a Benchmark partner, but he continues to be very interested and thinks the impact of the Internet is still in its very early stages.

"I'm a very big bull on the Internet in the long term," he said.