Elon Musk: How Kleiner Perkins Lost Tesla

can we talk a little bit about across the companies your experience with venture capitalists because it's been pretty varied right yes so you've had good experiences you've had not so good experiences I've had a wide wide range yes what would you advise entrepreneurs watching this or in the audience to make sure they don't live through what you did in the bad experiences I can tell us about the bad experience um well I think I think one thing that's important is if you have a choice of a lower valuation with someone you really like or a higher valuation with someone you have a question walk about take the lower valuation it's better to have a higher quality bench capitalist who you think is it would be great to work with then to you know get a get a higher valuation with someone where there's even a question walk really you know I think that's that's important I sort of like getting married you know I don't know maybe I'm that good fat ten years okay did you do that wrong did you maximize for valuation I suppose in the case of boat Isla series sea I don't know I mean at some point I think I'll tell the full story but not tonight but not tonight um they did wait an hour right now I know well I'll tell part of the story so there were two with multiple competing bids but there were two competing bids one was from kleiner perkins the other one was from vantage point kleiner offered 50 a 50 million dollar free money vantage point offered seventy I actually said to John Durr that if John joins the board we'll do it at 50 but John felt that there was that that he had too many obligations and that there was another partner at Kleiner who who really wanted the deal and so he could not supplant that person and I thought well we could do I would be okayed if if John Doerr joined III mean there's a 40 percent different that difference is pretty significant I thought if John would be willing to join the board then we could do that but not if there was somebody else yeah that was probably a mistake mm-hmm and so then they did Fisker instead which and that was their mistake yeah

Channel: PandoDaily

Views: 53,420

Rating: 4.8541665 out of 5

Keywords: PandoMonthly, pandodaily, sarah lacy, elon musk, tesla, tesla motors, fisker, John Doerr, kleiner perkins, vantagepoint

Id: NIsYT1rqW5w

Length: 2min 44sec (164 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 16 2012