Benchmark founder Andy Rachleff on why Don Valentine and John Doerr are the greatest VCs of all time

Don Valentine, who just passed away, who was, I think one of the two greatest venture capitalists of all time and the person from whom I really got the ideas behind Product Market Fit.

Why was Don so special?

Because he came up with a methodology that was spectacularly brilliant. It seems so easy in hindsight, but he had this philosophy that if a startup can screw something up, it will screw it up. So the only way that it can succeed is if the pull from the market is so great that it overcomes the ineptitude of the startup. Now it's not that the people are bad, it's that they're terribly under resourced and understaffed. And so he cared desperately about the likely demand for the product. He was the first to really get that market was what determined success, not execution. And his favorite question that was even in the obituary that Sequoia Capital published on their website was who cares? His question was who cares about this product? And that's what led to the incredible returns that he had and that his partners had after him.

Now you said he was one of the top two or three. Who else is up there?

You know, the only other person up there I would say would be John Doar, John Doerr. He was amazing. I think he was amazing at recognizing things that could be big and didn't let anything else get in the way.

So conviction?

Well, no, he didn't worry about price, he didn't worry about structure. For example, Netscape, the founder of Netscape, Jim Clark, had previously founded Silicon Graphics. He's one of two handfuls of entrepreneurs I know of who've created more than one company that have generated 100 million in revenue. And because Jim had been so successful at Silicon Graphics, which was the Google of its time in the 1980s, he was able to command a really high price. And so Jim had gone to his investors who had backed him at Silicon Graphics and they only wanted to pay 5 million or 6 million pre and he asked for 20, which at that time was outrageous. Today it's not at all. And door didn't even blink and said absolutely because he saw how big it could be and didn't. He didn't worry about how wacky someone was, he didn't worry about the price. He really focused on the opportunity.