WSO Podcast | E155: Non-target School to West Coast Tech M&A at a BB and a top Venture Capital fund
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In this episode, member Benioff The Third shares his unlikely path from a non-target school on the east coast to one of the top VC funds on the west coast. We learn how he broke into investment banking at a middle-market shop, why he lateralled to a bulge bracket in tech M&A and eventually why he made the leap to VC. Listen to some great tips on how to position yourself to make a successful transition into venture capital as well as how he got comfortable starting his own business after only one year in VC.
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WSO Podcast (Episode 155) Transcript:
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:00:06] Hello and welcome. I'm Patrick Curtis, your host and chief monkey, and this is the Wall Street Oasis podcast. Join me! As I talked to some of the community's most successful and inspirational members to gain valuable insight into different career paths and life in general. Let's get to it. In this episode, member Benioff the third shares his unlikely path from a non target school on the East Coast To one of the top VC funds on the West Coast. We learn how he broke into investment banking at a middle market shop. Why he laterals it to a bulge bracket in tech M&A and eventually why he made the leap to B.S.. Listen to some great tips on how to position yourself to make a successful transition into venture capital, as well as how he got comfortable starting his own business after only one year in B.C.. Enjoy. All right, Benny, after third, thanks so much for joining the Wall Street Voices podcast.
Benioff: [00:01:08] Absolutely, thanks for thanks for having me.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:01:10] So it'd be great if you could just give the listeners a short summary of your bio.
Benioff: [00:01:15] Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up on the East Coast and did my undergrad at a non-poor school, also on the East Coast. And then after undergrad, I came out to the west Coast doing middle Market tech coverage at a at an investment bank in San Francisco. I lateral to after a couple of years to do tech M&A at a bulge bracket bank. Then I spent a little bit of time in venture capital and then this past year I I left D.C. to be the founder of a software company. Awesome. Thank you for that.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:02:00] So let's jump all the way back to undergrad. So was finance on the radar for you? Um, because it
Benioff: [00:02:08] Doesn't look like it.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:02:09] It looks like, yeah, it looks like you were more like STEM. Is that fair?
Benioff: Yes. So, so really tech was on the radar early on for me. I did. I did internships
at tech companies the first couple of summers and I got interested in the finance side of what was happening at those tech companies. One of them was raising a venture round at the time that I was there. One of them did a big M&A deal during the time that I was there and that was kind of what got me interested in, I guess, what I would call the intersection of tech and finance. And from there, I had conversations with some alumni who were working on Wall Street and tried to learn more about what finance was about. And that was what pushed me towards investment banking.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:03:04] Did you end up planning an internship in your junior summer?
Benioff: [00:03:08] I did. Yeah, I was.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:03:10] Did you get that through alum or why was it? Was it that the bank you ended up at in the West Coast?
Benioff: [00:03:17] Yeah, it was so my process for internship recruiting was that that that sophomore summer when I was in New York working at a tech company and I was exploring more finance related roles, I had a lot of networking chats, coffees, things like that with alumni from my school. And then this was back when junior internship recruiting was in the fall and even this spring of your junior year. Believe it or not. So yeah, so yeah, I went back up to school after my internship, and in the coming months I stayed in touch with a number of the alumni who I had met over the summer when their application processes opened up. I said, Hey, I'm applying. Would you be willing to support my application? And ultimately the internship that I accepted was from? It was. It was at a bank that I had met an alumni who was working at the firm at the time.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:04:35] Did you meet the alums through like just general emails you got from the career center? Or were you like on LinkedIn or using it?
Benioff: [00:04:42] It was. It was a little bit more proactive than that. It was. It was mostly through linkedin and then also through. One thing that was super helpful for me
was other students who were one to three years older than myself, who had also recruited for these types of finance positions. Turning to them and saying which alumni were receptive to your outreach? Which ones do you have existing relationships with? When you were recruiting who you introduced me to cool and did
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:05:19] You was this role for the summer? Was it in like a specific was like equity research M&A specific coverage group to.
Benioff: [00:05:28] Yes. So the summer internship at he middle market firm at which I interned. It was genetralist within the investment banking division. So I spent the summer doing health care and tech and industrials focused on mid-market M&A and capital raising. And then I got the return offer for full time. And when you accept that offer, what you're doing at the firm that I was working at is you're saying I'm going to come back next summer and go through a group selection process to figure out which group I'm going to be, which we're going to be in for full time.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:06:13] Got it. Ok. And so was it. Was it tough hours for that summer? Um, more reasonable than what you hear at some of the other places. 70, 80 hours a week,
Benioff: [00:06:25] It was it was in that range. Or worse? You know, I think that. It was. I was probably working longer hours than that, but it was probably my own fault or it was self-imposed. I think that, you know, in my mind, the way that I was approaching it was I can handle anything for 10 weeks, so I was that I was staying in the office super, super late, probably later than I needed to, definitely at a rate that wouldn't have been sustainable if that was pretty.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:07:05] It sounds like you're in the office for more like a hundred hours a week based on what you're saying.
Benioff: [00:07:10] Yeah, yeah, something like that. But I don't think it was. It probably wasn't because it was firmly imposed. It was more self-imposed.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:07:23] When you say self-imposed, were you like doing extra work for like on your own on the side? Or were you like asking for more work?
Benioff: [00:07:30] Yeah. You know, I'm more talking along the lines of the latter. If I Were to finish what I was working on it at midnight or 1:00 a.m., you know, it's that's probably good enough in terms of in terms of work ethic. But I would, you know, I would at 12:00 or 1:00 or whatever time I was about to leave the office, I would go around and say to everyone, Hey, is there anything that I can help with? And when you have a tired second or third year analyst who has a p offer and the intern comes around at one a.m. and says, like, hey, like, can I? Can I do anything to help you? Nine times out of 10, they're going to say, like, yeah, like here's all the things that you can help me with, so. So, you know, kind of learning how to, you know, how to be proactive in asking for work while also not burying myself with something that I learned over time and that I wasn't quite so polished at back when I was an intern.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:08:40] Yeah, it's almost like you don't know how to protect yourself or say no initially, and so you want to be your eager to impress, Sometimes your quality can go down if you're not sleeping enough, right?
Benioff: [00:08:50] Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's actually a little bit of a funny anecdote is that I know we had as part of the internship program we had like we went to an industry conference and we had some law firms that specialized in in various parts of the M&A process, come in and do lunch and learns and things like that. And I remember that relatively early on, I was super exhausted from being in the office really late the night before and these lawyers came in for a lunch and learn and I fall asleep awake. And I was I was I was falling asleep and the intern staffer actually called me aside later that day and said, like, Oh, I saw you were falling asleep. Like, That's not a great look. And I thought to myself, this was like three or four weeks into the internship, and I thought to myself that like, there was no chance I was going to get a return offer or anything like that. I was super upset, but I think that was kind of a turning point where I realized that I needed to sleep, take care of myself better and ultimately was able to right the ship and get the return offer.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:10:22] Nice. Did you then when you were finishing your work at midnight or when did you actually go home and get like seven hours of sleep or something,
Benioff: [00:10:28] Something like that? Yeah. Good.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:10:30] So you're you kind of getting through this, you get the offer. You're super excited. Now you kind of enjoy your senior year.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:10:37] Or what do you like coming back
Benioff: [00:10:39] Your senior year? Yeah, yeah, I did do a pretty good job of not hustling too hard on my work, my senior year. You know, I it's kind of my personality that I wasn't going to totally let it lapse and coast. But I also definitely when presented with a Thursday or Friday evening, when I had the choice between studying or getting some quality time with them, with my friends, I think I did a pretty good job of taking advantage and taking advantage of the fact that I had the offer in hand and enjoying my senior year.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:11:19] That's great. So you started full time. Was it similar To the internship or did you did you know enough or like, what was that first kind of month, few months, like when you started full time, you had to make that you had to make a move to the West Coast? There was that.
Benioff: [00:11:32] Right, right. So, so I was out in San Francisco, like I said, we went through that group placement process.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:11:43] Any tips for that for the listeners and who have to go through something like that because I know that's creates a lot of stress because they're like, I want to be in this M&A group or whatever group, that's a top, you know?
Benioff: [00:11:52] Yeah.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:11:54] And did you have any were you like, did you know the groups that had the most deal flow and you wanted to be in those?
Benioff: [00:11:59] Yeah, I had some picture of it. I realized that it's easier to say now, but as opposed to what my thinking was at the time, but so far working with good people, meaning both people who are smart and who you respect, but also people who have a reputation for treating their colleagues well because you're going to be spending so much time with these people.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:12:37] How did you get that info?
Benioff: [00:12:39] Uh, how do you get the info talking to and talking to the current analysts that they were, at least in my case, pretty open about it?
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:12:51] Like, avoid this MD or whatever. Run fast, run far, far away, so did you end up getting the group you wanted and tell me about the process? You were there for a good number of years? Tell me about kind of the progression of life from first year to second year to third year. And if you're willing to share a kind of a range of pay, that would be helpful to.
Benioff: [00:13:10] Yeah, so I so I was I was at that, I was at that first I did three years of banking. I was at my first, the middle market firm for my full two year stint. And then it was after that that I lateral to the bulge bracket for a as a third year analyst. The in terms of kind of how the work changes over time and also how like the responsibility and compensation changes over time. I'd say that as a first year and really especially in like this first six months, most folks have a pretty good understanding of the fact that you are pretty much starting from zero, you know, even if you come from a business background or you did an internship. People are understanding of mistakes the first time that you make them and they expect them. And really the only expectation of you, at least in my experience, was having a positive attitude and working hard and wanting to learn really for those first six months. And then I'd say that from there, typically you've seen enough reps that bar for your quality of work reasonably starts to starts to increase. And you also at that point, hopefully are, you know, if you're a good performer, you're starting to be trusted with a little bit more meaningful work, kind of on the analytical side as opposed to maybe shifting logos around.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:15:03] So the transition?
Benioff: [00:15:06] Right, right. The PowerPoint to excel transition. Yeah, exactly. So that was kind of the, you know, the first year. And then in terms of what kind of looked like in the first year, I think that that my first year as an analyst was the first year that base had increased from 70, being straight to eighty five being straight. So base was eighty five and bonus. And remember, this is the middle market firm bonus was about seventy five percent of base in the top bucket ActionScript.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:15:53] So where you were your top buckets around 60k ish? So that's great. That's great. That's I mean, for middle market shop especially, that's a really good payday for one year out of school. Yeah, clearing, clearing one plus signing bonus. So you're almost clearing one fifty. Yep, that's right.
Benioff: [00:16:11] Yeah. So that was that was first year and then second year. You know, it's a lot like a continuation of the first year with the biggest difference being that if, the step up in responsibility from the first six months to the second six months was from PowerPoint to Excel, I think that from year one to year two, the biggest step up in responsibility is that if you're a good performer, you're going to spend more time doing real day to day execution, work with clients on the more on the more analytical parts of the transaction. So not just doing the work in Excel and then handing it off to your associate or the VP, but actually working directly with the client on things like responding to analytical requests
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:17:11] That you were you doing that?
Benioff: [00:17:13] Yes. So I started to get to get good experience working with clients more directly in that second year, really. And from the perspective of of your kind of your mid-level bankers, the way that they think about it, at least in my experience, is that they typically want to be do like your associate wants to be doing VP level work in a lot of cases you're VP, wants to be doing director and the level work and a lot of case is number one because it's more interesting, but number two, because it's good for their career progression. And in that sense, you know, in the perfect world for them, they want to give the junior person as much responsibility as they can reasonably trust them with. So that's kind of the at least from my perspective, how you think about when you're going to get new levels of responsibility. It's really when you've proven that you can handle it and then
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:18:18] The pay, I assume the base is like a normal step up 85 to 90 or 95. And then the bonus probably was closer to 100 percent or a little under probably seventy five percent.
Benioff: [00:18:26] Yeah, that's right. Base steps from eighty five to nine and then bonus was a little under. Yeah, yeah. And then so you know, what was your
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:18:35] Thought process at this point? It sounds like you're doing well at the middle market. What's your thought process of going to a larger platform, a bulge bracket tech m? And it was just because you wanted to get in tech M&A with that, that was still interesting. You or somebody in your
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:18:47] Ear telling you, Hey, you should really go to better, you know, better brand name for your resume. What kind of motivated that move and why not just go recruit for private equity? Yeah, like everybody, like everybody else.
Benioff: [00:19:03] So a couple of things, number one is that and I know this may be shocking to hear for some people, but I'm the kind of crazy person who who actually liked banking for the most part. You know, it's it has.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:19:22] I think I found the title for the episode. He actually liked banking. What was that the title of the episode should be? He liked banking. He actually liked banking.
Benioff: [00:19:31] Maybe that's great. But, but yeah, you know, I. I would say that there was some part of me that wasn't sure, but there was some part of me that was still considering being a career banker at that stage. It wasn't something that I was set on, but I was considering it. And, you know, in terms of my rationale for making the jump. Really, the two main things were number one, there was there was some turnover at my middle market firm where I was working amongst people who I was once people who I had been working directly with. And it was specifically some of the people who I really respected. So that led me to consider moving. And then the other thing that was compelling for me in terms of lateral end was that as I was thinking about potentially having a longer term career in banking, it felt to me like working on larger and more complex transactions. Whether, you know, whether in the long run, I wanted to be working on large cap deals or I wanted to be working on middle market deals at least early in my career, having that experience would be helpful either way, for sure.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:21:03] So tell me about that lateral process. What was it like? So you said, you said at the middle market, you kind of. What made you think about it was you basically some of the people you most respected were kind of moving out. There was some restructuring going on or whatever. So kind of pick your head up. How did you start the search? How did you even go, blizzard recruiters go back to your
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:21:24] Linkedin process of let's just talk to Islam. Let's talk to anybody.
Benioff: [00:21:27] What was it like? Yeah. So it's maybe a slightly atypical answer. I probably wouldn't recommend this.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:21:38] I like Atypical. I've done one hundred and sixty or hundred and seventy episodes, so I like atypical like whenever heard something before.
Benioff: [00:21:44] All right. So, so. I'm sure that if it had gone on, if my process had gone on much more than a couple of weeks than I, that I would have taken a more network focused approach. But actually like the first day, the first night that I said, maybe I'm going to start talking to some other banks. There was a LinkedIn posting. For a for experienced analyst job at one of the top bulge bracket banks right down the street from my current office, I applied online and like I, it was actually on my to do list to reach out to someone who I knew, but I tangentially knew someone in in that office. My plan was to, like, reach out to them and try to use them as a little bit of a backdoor in. Yeah, but I ended up being super busy at my current role and I didn't get a chance to, or I hadn't gotten the chance yet to reach out to that connection that I had thought. But the firm that I had applied to the bulge bracket bank, they reached out to me directly just based on the online application and said, Hey, do you want to interview and. On the one hand, that sounds very atypical, that you would apply online and get a response from a large boat from a large bulge bracket investment bank, but I actually think that. That at least at the time, and maybe it has something to do with not being in New York, where there are fewer bankers in other markets, but it's not like there are tons of qualified candidates.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:23:42] Oh no, you're not.
Benioff:: [00:23:44] I met at the senior analyst
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:23:47] That senior you are so like in demand. When you have two years of experience as an analyst, you're cheap labor. And then if they've lost a first year analyst and they've been struggling for like six months, they're at that point.
They're super motivated to bring anybody and they just they're like, we need bodies.
Benioff: [00:24:05] But yeah, no, that's exactly right. And it's hard to find. Yeah. And the other thing is that group that I was joining it was an M&A group that's that has a reputation for being highly analytical. And I think that sometimes these lateral analyst roles, they're more open to folks who came from an accounting background or a Fortune five hundred background. But in particular, this group was only going to hire someone banker at a couple of years of investment banking experience. So that's maybe a little bit of the of the underrated factor that made it more likely that someone who was applying online who really had the right background was actually going to get a callback for this opportunity.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:25:01] This is what I always say to people is like, you know, whatever school you go to, you ended up at a, you know, you were a non target East Coast. You went to, you know, Middle Market Bank and you ended up at one of the top banks because you use the right time to lateral. And like so many people don't realize this, but you're it's they don't what school you went to or what bank you're from. As long as you're getting some good deal reps and you can speak the talk, the talk and you're ready to work. So like, everyone's like both bracket like right out of school. I'm like, It doesn't matter. Like you can get, you can make that transition. A guy from my analyst class Rothschild went Rothschild Morgan Stanley pretty easily within a year.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:25:38] So if you want to trade up from banking to banking, it's actually not as difficult as a lot of people think, especially nowadays. There's first year analyst dropping like flies because of work from home. So I bet you there's going to be a massive market for lateral hires this this year, and they actually may start having to relax some of those constraints of, Hey, we're only going to take a banker to let's look at transaction advisory services or it may trickle down a lot of the middle markets
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:26:06] Or lower middle market banks may struggle retaining talent. But anyway, so your you make that jump, you know, you do all that. And then were the hours much worse at this bulge bracket? And then why only stay for looks like about a year from what I can see here?
Benioff: [00:26:23] Yeah, yeah. So. First question. Where the where the hours worse the hours were pretty intense, I would say it was it was a busy period. There was also there was also a lot of a lot of junior turnover at that time in the group, both in the M&A group where I was working as well as in the coverage group that we mostly partnered with. So, you know, it was the kind of thing where frankly, deals were coming in faster than junior resources were coming in. So the hours were intense. But I'm super glad that I got the experience, you know, as I alluded to. Part of the reason that I wanted to make the move was to get kind of more complex deal. Reps work on things that had more interesting structure work on large public company transactions. And you got that? Yeah, I did get that experience. So.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:27:37] So did you feel like did you feel like it was almost like when you peel back the curtain? It seemed more complex than it was when you got there, and it actually wasn't that different at the larger.
Benioff: [00:27:46] Or was it that? It is different, it is different doing like a private middle market sell side versus and for the avoidance of doubt, like a private five billion dollar sell side and a private two hundred million dollar sell side are pretty similar to each other. But in general, you know, comparing a private sell side, which is what a lot of my middle market experience was versus, you know, a public company spin off or a public company merger of equals. I think that definitely the group that I was in a fair bit of our a fair bit of our M&A work was more around things like separation alternatives for for large companies as opposed to kind of vanilla sale sides. And I do think that there was a fair bit more to it, to a lot of those transactions. Interesting.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:28:57] So why leave so soon from there? Yeah. So why V.C.?
Benioff: [00:29:06] Yeah. So, you know, if you if you're a call for the start of the podcast, I, my earliest career ambitions were really in tech and I over time what I realized was that both in middle market investment banking as well as bulge bracket investment banking, the companies that I was working with, they were largely incumbents or even the ones that were challengers within the tech industry. They were really kind of on the flattening side of the innovation curve. And I don't think there's anything wrong with enjoying working with those types of companies. But for me, part of why tech is so interesting is because of the way that it can add to, or they can increase the size of the total economic pie, if you will. So bringing net new solutions into the economy that change the way that the companies do work or that change the way that that consumers go about their lives. So the opportunity to work with those kinds of companies again as opposed to these kind of larger companies was really compelling to me.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:30:44] Can you tell me how you kind of approach that transition and whatever you're comfortable sharing in terms of, was it again, just another online application? I assume not at this stage. Yeah. What was your kind of how did you get that opportunity?
Benioff: [00:30:58] Yes. So my end there was actually through a board member who had been a client of mine in banking, who I had worked with him on two different transactions. And when they were when they were looking to hire a junior person onto their team, he approached me and said, Hey, we're we're looking to hire a junior person. Do you know anyone? And I said. Yeah, I do know someone can I interview for it? And, you know, I went through that process, I talked to a whole bunch of different folks on the team. And it worked out.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:31:47] Any advice in terms of how to prep for like a VC interview versus like a traditional banking interview?
Benioff: [00:31:54] Yeah. You know, an important and it depends on what stage of V.C. you're talking to. That's a very important distinction. But one thing to note is that especially if you're talking to kind of an early stage or an expansion stage VC, so really anything from seed out to Series B or even C is that unlike in P interviews where you're competing against a lot of people who look a lot like you in these early stage b c interviews, frankly, the banker has fallen out of fashion. You, most of the people who you're interviewing against are coming from product or end roles at tech companies. And the what that means in terms of how you have to prepare is that you need to, number one, cover up your weakness relative to those candidates. And also, number two, do a really good job of highlighting why your skill set is something valuable that those other candidates might not have.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:33:13] So don't they come back at you and they're like, Yeah, but the math cc the model and there's no modeling here. It's all about like strategic. So what do you say to that when they come at you, if you try to highlight some sort of financial modeling acumen? Yeah.
Benioff: [00:33:25] SoI would say that the part of the part of the banking skill set that's that is transferable and that I would try to play up is not as much the financial modeling as it is the means of thinking about what makes a good business and what makes a good market and what makes a good investment thesis and how companies position themselves relative to each other. So that is, you know, while it's not necessarily this skill set that a lot of people get into banking to develop, a lot of people get into banking to develop this broad financial analysis and financial model and skill set. I don't think it should be overlooked that you actually do get pretty good insight into company strategy and what makes a business generally attractive to investors that someone who's in more of an engineering individual contributor role at a Big Tech company or in a hot startup, they may not get that skill set. Yeah, that's fair.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:34:38] So tell me, in terms of your time there, I know you whatever you're willing to share in terms of like pay what it a pay cut coming from bulge bracket to to VC,
Benioff: [00:34:49] I assume it was. It was. So it was I was I was being paid less than I would have if I had stayed. I'm. But the it was pretty comparable to my to my third year analyst, Hey, where you fall in?
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:35:12] Ok. That's still really good. Were you thinking of staying or staying in B.C.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:35:15] Long term? I mean, you had thought banking is like potential banker for life here, then you're kind of making a little going more kind of early stage and principle side investing. Was that something you thought? This is something I might want to do long term, and then why, why make the decision to kind of break out on your own?
Benioff: [00:35:34] Um, so, you know, I think that. People who go into at least early stage venture, you know, I alluded to t the fact that most of the people who you're competing against are more from tech backgrounds. I think that that's true at the junior to mid levels, and it's probably 5x more true at the senior levels. So if you look at the partner level in a lot of these firms, there are. Functionally, it is functionally nobody who didn't do a stint as an operator, if not as a founder. So I am super interested in these see in the long term. It's hard to definitively say whether I'm ever going to go back or not. But just as someone who's interested in it at all. Having experience operating at a high growth startup is it's almost it's almost required. I would say. And then the other piece of that is that when you're working at a top tier of U.S. firm, you see a lot of founders and I'm half joking but half serious. When I say that every single founder who you look at, you have one of two reactions to them, you either say. Wow. They're super smart, and they're working on something super cool, and I want to do something like that, and it gives you this founder FOMO to go start a company or alternately, you say. That man or that woman is not so smart and. My firm, which is one of the top tier
Vcs, wrote them a check and like I could do that like I could do even better than that, and they're on paper worth a lot of money right now. It's super lucrative. So again, half kidding, half serious. But when you do see that many founders of that many companies,
you do get a fair bit of founder FOMO.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:38:03] How do you get comfortable somebody who's in
banking For a while? It tends to be considered one of the most risk averse places to earn a good living. You are earning a great, you're earning a great living. How do you get comfortable going from, you know, a top bulge
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:38:17] Bracket bank, a top VC fund and being like, I'm just going to go much my own business. I hear you that, like all the partners at the top, VCs have this experience, but why not ride it out a little longer and save up some more? Yeah, so that's a great
Benioff: [00:38:31] Question, and a lot of people in my network, when I told them that I was going to go start a cub, but they're like, wait on that. And I'd say that there are a couple of a couple of things that are maybe helpful as a framework. Number one is I was never somebody who wanted to get an MBA. Um, you know, I always. I'm someone who's pretty analytically inclined and just the financial equation of paying that much in tuition and living expenses and opportunity
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:39:14] Costs, you do seem very logical. You do seem very engineer.
Benioff: [00:39:17] Yeah. The MBA never made sense to me in that in that regard, too soft.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:39:24] It's too soft of a degree. It's too it's too much about like management
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:39:29] Rather than like hard analytical skills. And yeah,
Benioff: [00:39:33] I think that's a big part of it. And then and then what occurred to me as I was grappling with, you know, am I really ready to make this jump is like, Well, I've never wanted to get an MBA, but do people do things that are crazier than what I'm about to do at this stage in their life or their career? From a financial perspective? And from my perspective, it was like, yeah, like a lot of people who are in my cohort, they go get MBAs and what's an MBA and MBA is, you know, two hundred k give or take. And when you combine the tuition and the living expenses and the way that I thought about it was, you know, if I go start a company, if I burn through two hundred k of of my savings over the course of several years, gosh, like I'd really like to not burn through two hundred K. But in a scenario where we never get to any semblance of product market fit or never able to raise a seed round and kind of pay ourselves a at least a living wage of a salary. The worst case scenario is still. But not as bad financially as getting an MBA and tons of people go and get the MBA, so that was helpful for me. I'd say as one thing, and obviously there's nothing wrong like the MBA is right for some people. It was never right for me, and that was just a helpful thing in terms of programming. Do you feel
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:41:13] Like also with work from home and Kobe? It's also one of those things where the NBA has lost a lot of value. Even more like, you know, half, if not more of the value is not the pure, it's not the education is the connections you make. And throughout the industry, it's very valuable for career changers. You were already in kind of the space you wanted to be. The sense of like you're already at a top VC fund y or a top investment bank. Before that, you're not getting a ton of value. Go and getting top Mba and then just getting back into that same place you already were. So it's almost like the high risk, high reward it was now as a time. Do you have a
family now like
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:41:50] A wife and kids or anything?
Benioff: [00:41:52] No, I'm still single in my mid-twenties trying to figure out how to date in a pandemic.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:42:00] Let's talk about that. Have you been able to go on dates at all? Kind of so
Benioff: [00:42:09] San Francisco's been pretty it's been pretty conservative with respect to Cove in the whole time, things have been mostly locked down. But, you know, a couple of I've been able to go on a couple of dates just through mutual friends, outdoor dining, stuff like that. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about, well, whatever you can.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:42:33] You got comfortable with this kind of OK, if I lose $200000, it's still do you feel like the education of actually running with this and managing a team? And how did you think about building your number one? Let me let me rewind. How did first did you find your idea that you say this is what we're
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:42:49] Going after? Like you talked about product market fit? Tell me a little bit about just how you analyze the idea and how you said, OK, now I'm ready because it seems like you jump pretty fast.
Benioff: [00:43:00] Yeah, that's a great question, so. And it actually is related to a little bit of a question that you asked earlier around how as a risk averse person, you get comfort doing something like this, you know, without getting too much into specifics that the general problem space that that we're building in is it's something that I it's a problem that I had encountered. I had a pretty lightweight fashion back when I was a banker and then when I was a b c. Similarly, I saw a lot of our portfolio companies dealing with this problem. And actually a lot of them experiencing it in very similar ways, in a very narrow time frame to each other. So, you know, I am building in the enterprise space. I'm not building a consumer product where I'm trying to capture lightning in a bottle and make a guess as to what some new, undiscovered consumer behavior is. This is it is a problem that I've been able to talk to a lot of potential buyers about how they experience it today, what's working about their current solutions, what's not working about their current solutions. And I was able to have a lot of those conversations. While I was still employed, that that helped me get the courage or the conviction, if you will, to actually make the jump. Very cool. So, well, we appreciate
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:44:58] You sharing kind of your journey so far,
Obviously TBD on your startup and see how it goes, and it's still kind of early days,
Right? So congrats on making that leap and best of luck to you. If I can be helpful at all, please let me know. It's interesting you talk about that because I was super risk averse, probably even more than you in the sense of I was working in private equity for about the Wall Street. Oasis was going for a good three four years and then on top of that, I went and got my MBA as another insurance policy. So. So it was a good five years for four and a half years of running before it was my full time job, right? Yeah, that's interesting. But anyways. Anything else you want to share before we call it for the listeners, anything that we left out or I forgot to ask.
Benioff: [00:45:49] I think that. The. You know, in terms of in terms of advice from an elder, not that I'm old, but, you know, maybe the one thing that a lot of junior folks who are still in banking or who are considering. Going into backing, ask me about IS. They say they say, like, how do I make the most out of banking or they say how they say, should I even do your bank? And, you know, a lot of people are trying to. Regardless of what they want to do after bank and they're trying to skip the bank and step these days because some of those employers are more receptive to it and. I will say that. Banking was extremely formative for me. I think that. Even though the space that I'm working in right now might feel very different from banking, it may be hard to hard to equate how the banking skill set would be relevant. I think that having put in my time in banking and having learned. How to pay really close attention to the small things having learned how to handle that killer work ethic from people who have been doing it for a long time. I think that that it shouldn't be understated as one of the benefits of banking, regardless of what you want to do after. I think that's something that maybe gotten a little bit lost in the discourse, whereas six years ago, when I was recruiting for banking, everyone was, you know, it was it was almost a cookie cutter answer to the point where I felt awkward saying it. But people are saying, I want to go into banking to learn how to work super hard, and I don't hear that that much anymore. It made me feel that tangible, but that was like the best thing that I got out of banking, and it's something that I'm definitely going to be able to. It's something that I employ regularly, you know, my early customers in my new company. You know, this is going to sound. It's not going to sound great, but they love it when they email me at two a.m.. And I still sleep with my email alerts on and I reply to them right away. You know, not everyone does that and that level of responsiveness to asks. And that level of when someone gives you a deadline, just dropping everything and being able to do it. I think it's an undersold part of being part of banking for sure.
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:49:07] Develops that kind of. That work ethic that's just hard to I mean, any other job you typically go to will feel like a breeze. Anyways, thank you so much for spending the time and sharing your story with myself and the listeners.
Benioff: [00:49:24] Absolutely. Thanks so much, Patrick,
Patrick (CEO of WSO): [00:49:26] And thanks to you, my listeners at Wall Street, Oasis, if you have any suggestions whatsoever, please don't hesitate to send them my way. Patrick at Wall Street Oasis. And till next time.
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